A literary history of Persia

THE PERSIAN RENAISSANCE 341Tahirid (A.D 820-872) and Saffarid (A.D. 868-903) dynasties,and then copiously under the dynasty, at once more nationalthan the former and more noble than the latter, of theSdmanids (A.D. 874-999), while in the Ghaznawf epoch,which immediately follows that which we are about to discuss,itmay be said to have attained its full development,if not itszenith.To this subjectwe shall return in another chapter, but itwill be well first of all to treat more broadly of the generalhistory of this period of the Caliphate, alike in its political, itsreligious, and its literary aspects. We shall therefore dividethis Book, like the preceding ones, into three chapters, inthe first of which we shall endeavour to present the readerwith a conspectus of the whole period with which weare now dealing, while in the second we shall discuss morefully certain aspects of the religious and philosophical movementsof the time, reserving for the last an account of theearliest period of Persian literature. And should the reader betempted to complain of so much spacestillbeing devotedto phenomena which centre round Baghdad and appear moreclosely connected with Arabic than with Persian literature, hemust remember that this is an essential part of the scheme onwhich this history is constructed, it being the author's profoundconviction that the study of Persian, to prove fruitful,cannot be divorced from that of Arabic, even in its purelyliterary aspects, still less in the domains of religion andphilosophy into which anything beyond the most superficialreading of the belles lettres of Persia must inevitablylead us.To those whose horizon of Persian literature is bounded by theGulistan, the Bustdn^ the Anwar-i-Suhayli^ the Diwan ofHafidh, and the Quatrains of 'Umar Khayyam,this book isnot addressed.Our period opens with the comparatively long and whollydeplorable reign of the Caliph al-Mutawakkil (A.D. 847-861),which is characterised politically by the ascendancy of the