A literary history of Persia

312 THE GREAT PERSIAN HERESIARCHSextends even to minute details of terminology, and to thechoice of particular colours (especially red and white) asbadges. Thus the early Babis, like the Mubayyidaof theperiod now under discussion, wore white apparel,1while theyimitated the Muhammira in their fondness for red by theirchoice of ink of that colour in transcribing their books. Aninteresting question, for the finalsolution of which material isstillwanting, is the extent to which these ideas prevailed inother forms inpre-MuhammadanPersia. The various ultra-Shi'ite risings of which we shall have to speak are commonlyregarded, alike by the oldest and the most modern Muhammadanhistorians, as recrudescences of the doctrines of Mazdak,of whom we have already spoken in the chapter on theSasanians (pp. 168-172 supra). This isprobable enough, butunfortunately our knowledge of the principleson which thesystem of Mazdak reposed is too meagre to enable us to proveit. It is, however, the view of well-informed writers like theauthor of the Flhrist (pp. 342-345), who wrote in A.D. 987 ;Shahristani (pp. 193-194), who wrote in A.D. 1127; thecelebrated minister of the Seljuqs,Nidhamu'1-Mulk (Siyasatndma,ed. Schefer, pp. 182-183), who was assassinated inA.D. 1092 by an emissary of those very Isma'ilis whom he sofiercely denounced in his book as the renovators of the heresyof Mazdak, and others while the modern Babis have been;similarly affiliated both bythe historians Lhanul-Mulk andRidd-quli KMn in Persia, and by LadySheil 2 and ProfessorNoldeke 3 in Europe. In the Flhrist the section dealing withthe movements of which we are about to speakis entitled(p. 342) " the Sect of the Khurramiyya and Mazdakiyya,"these being regarded as identical with one another, and withthe Muhammira (" those who made red their badge "), the1See my translation of the New History of . . . the Bdb (Cambridge,1893), pp. 70, 283.*Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia (1856), p. 180.3 In an article entitled Oricntalischer Socialismus, in vol. xviii, pp. 284-291 of the Deutsche Rundschau (1879).