28. Rodini Mohammad Amin & Nezhadali Abolfazl

Abstract 29. Rodini Mohammad Amin & Nezhadali Abolfazl

Persian Literature as a real mirror of Iranian Culture

The formation and development of Islamic civilization during the seventh to ninth centuries, was really due to Persian component, encompassing religious thought, political theory and practice, administrative models, literature, the sciences, and morals and manners. I shall attempt to present here in this paper, a real assessment of Persian literature as a bed for Iranian culture. The Islamic Caliphate, particularly in Baghdad, was really established based on Sassanian model of government, where they employed many Iranian administrative models, including Iranian festivals, such as Now Rouz and Mehragan, their court protocols, like bureaucracy etc. These models were provided through the translation and imitation of works of the" mirror of princes" type, manuals of statecraft which had formed an important genre of Sassanian prose literature.

With the development of neo-Persian literature at the courts of local Iranian princes from the late tenth century, onward, Persian literature under took a new task for carrying the main part of Persian Iranian culture . As Lazard reminds us, the development of Persian literature, was neither a pure and simple resurgence of the ancient culture nor the expression of entirely fresh culture of Arab-Islamic origin. The links with pre-Islamic culture had been established, partly by such of the Middle Persian works as were steel being read, but surely much more by what still remained, in the living oral tradition.(contd)