The king who wanted poems in Persian | How Iran Stayed Iran Part 2

History Onion · Part 2 The Coppersmith · 2:58

Around the year 700, a governor's order took Persian out of the caliphate's tax books and pushed it down to the home and the street. Bringing it back to court took two centuries, three roads, and a coppersmith. Khwarazm shows what could have happened. In 712 the general Qutayba conquered it; a scholar born there, Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, later wrote that he killed its learned men and burned their books. Its language lived on at home for five more centuries, but no ruler brought it back to court, and it died out. The first road ran through Arabic: a scribe born Rozbih, writing as Ibn al-Muqaffa, carried the books of Persia's court — Kalila and Dimna and the Book of Lords — into Arabic, until the caliph al-Mansur's governor had him killed. The stories were saved, but not the language. The second road was revolt: for eighty years rebels across Iran rose against the caliphs, and every revolt was crushed. The third road was a ruler of their own: Ya'qub, a coppersmith from Sistan, built a kingdom that answered to no caliph — his dynasty, the Saffarids, is still named for his trade — and, a local chronicle says, asked why his poets praised him in a language he could not understand. His secretary wrote him the first court poem in Persian recorded since the conquest. In the next century, at the Samanid court in Bukhara, Persian was back — and a landowner in Tus named Ferdowsi began the Shahnameh from the same stories Ibn al-Muqaffa had carried into Arabic. SOURCES • al-Biruni, al-Athar al-Baqiya (c. 1000), trans. E. Sachau, The Chronology of Ancient Nations (1879), pp. 42, 58: Qutayba in Khwarazm