A literary history of Persia

346 DECLINE OF THE CALIPHATEIt was during this turbulent epoch that Persian indepen-the remarkableachievements of Ya'qub the son of Layth" thedence may be said to have been revived byPersian indepen- Coppersmith" (as-Saffdr\ who, notwithstandinghis humble origin, succeeded in founding a dynastywhich, though short-lived, made itspower felt not merely inSfstan, the place of itsorigin, but throughout the greater partof Persia and almost to the walls of Baghdad. The Tahiridsare, it is true, generally reckoned an earlier Persian dynasty,and in a certain sense they were so. Their ancestor, Tdhir" the Ambidexter" (Dhul-Yaminayri), was rewarded byal-Ma'mun forhis signal services in the field with the governmentof Khurasan (A.D. 820), and the continuance of thisdignity to his heirs unto the third generation gaveto thefamily a local authority and position which previous governors,appointed only for a term of years and removable at theCaliph's pleasure, had never enjoyed. It is a matter ofcommon observation that settlers in a country, often after acomparatively brief residence, outdo those native to the soil inpatriotic feeling, a fact of which the history of Ireland inparticular affords plentiful examples for what; proportion ofthe foremost leaders of Irish struggles against English authoritythe Fitzgeralds, Emmetts, Wolfe Tones, and NapperTandys of the '98 could claim- to be of purely Irish extraction? And so it would not be a surprising phenomenonif the Tahirids, notwithstanding their Arab extraction, hadbecome wholly Persianised. But though the earliest Persianpoet, whose verses have been preservedto us Handhala ofBadghfs appears to have lived more or less under theirpatronage, it is doubtful whether they really sought, as didtheir successors, the Saffarids and Samanids, to foster therenaissance of the Persian language and literature. Dawlatshah, 1discussing the origins of Persian poetry,relates that on oneoccasion a man came to the Court of 'Abdu'lldh b. Tahir1See p. 30 of my edition of Dawlatshah.