Classical Persian

Classical Persian, the literary form of New Persian, emerged in the ninth century in the eastern Iranian lands, where local courts revived Persian as a written language after two centuries of Arabic dominance following the Islamic conquest. Written now in the Perso-Arabic script and absorbing a large Arabic vocabulary, it stood in direct descent from the Middle Persian of the Sasanians and, behind that, the Old Persian of the Achaemenids.

Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, completed around 1010, fixed the language's prestige with sixty thousand couplets of epic, and a canon followed that ranks with any in world literature, Omar Khayyam, Nizami, Saadi, Rumi, Hafez, Jami. Persian became the great court and cultural language of the eastern Islamic world, used far beyond Iran by Turkic, Mongol and Indian dynasties.

Ottoman gentlemen read Hafez, and in South Asia Persian served as the administrative and literary language of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal empire for centuries, so that a single classical register connected Sarajevo to Bengal. The modern standard languages of Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan descend from it directly, and educated speakers still read the classical poets without translation, a continuity of a thousand years.

No language is more closely identified with Sufi devotion than Classical Persian. The mystical tradition adopted Persian verse as its principal vehicle, developing a symbolic vocabulary in which the beloved, the wine, the tavern and the nightingale speak simultaneously of human and divine love. Sanai and Attar established the mystical masnavi, the long rhyming couplet poem, and Attar's Conference of the Birds remains among the most read Sufi allegories. Rumi's Masnavi, six books of teaching poetry composed in thirteenth century Konya, earned from later admirers the extraordinary title of the Quran in the Persian tongue, and his lyric Divan-e Shams pours the same devotion into ghazals.

Hafez of Shiraz perfected the ghazal itself, and his divan is used for bibliomancy across the Persianate world, opened at random for guidance the way others open scripture. This poetry is not only read but performed. Persian verse supplies the texts of sama gatherings, of the Mevlevi ceremonies descended from Rumi's circle, and of qawwali in South Asia, where Persian couplets still open performances beside Urdu and Hindi ones. Sikh scripture too contains Persian lines, and the Zoroastrian and Baha'i communities of Iran produced devotional literature in the same classical register.