Why Iran doesn't speak Arabic | How Iran Stayed Iran Part 1

History Onion · Part 1 The Clerk · 2:58

In the 630s the tribes of Arabia were united for the first time. Their neighbours, Rome and Persia, were ancient empires — great cities, written law, professional armies — worn down by twenty-six years of war with each other. Within a lifetime the new army took what is today Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Iran and North Africa. In time all of them but Iran changed their language to Arabic. Over three centuries most Iranians became Muslim — and still spoke Persian. Persia had books: scripture, history, and learning its kings had gathered from India and Rome. Ibn Khaldun, writing in 1377, says they went into the water or into the fire. For fifty years the caliphate ran Persia in Persian, through Persian scribes. Then, around the year 700, the governor al-Hajjaj ordered the tax registers of Iraq kept in Arabic, so the treasury would no longer depend on them. The man who did it was Salih ibn Abd al-Rahman — a Persian captive's son, raised Muslim, the protégé of the Zoroastrian chief scribe Zādān Farrukh. Zādān Farrukh's son offered him a hundred thousand dirhams to say it couldn't be done. He refused. SOURCES • al-Baladhuri, Futuh al-Buldan (9th c.), on al-Mada'ini's authority — Hitti & Murgotten trans., vol. 2, pp. 465–66: Zādān Farrukh's words, the bribe, Mardānshāh's curse • Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah (1377), trans. F. Rosenthal (1958), vol. III, pp. 113–14: the story of Umar and the books of Persia, "into the water or into the fire" • Dēnkard, Book IV (Zoroastrian compilation, 9th–10th c.): the Sasanian kings' collection of writings on medicine and astronomy from India and Rome