Spirituality in the Land of the Noble: How Iran Shaped the World’s Religions

Hardback: UK £19.99, US $29.95

ne of the most important recent trends in studying multi-religious societies has been to point out not merely the presence of, but also the interactions among, various religious traditions in a civilisation. Contestations and accommodations between various Hindu, Islamic, and Buddhist legacies have long been noted in South Asia; interfaith relations in other civilisations are now coming under scrutiny. In the post-9/11 age, issues of pluralism and inter-civilisational exchange and/or clashes are not merely matters of academic interest, but also of public policy and world politics. One of the most significant analyses of such questions in recent years was Diana Eck’s A New Religious America.¹ A second valuable contribution was Maria Rosa Menocal’s astute work about al-Andalus (medieval Moorish Spain), Ornament of the World.² A similar undertaking, albeit at a more historical level, is Richard Foltz’s highly recommended new work, Spirituality in the Land of the Noble.

Chapter 2 considers the long-standing state religion of pre-Islamic Iran, Zoroastrianism. Today reduced to a following of a few hundred thousand in Iran and India, Zoroastrianism was once one of the world’s great religions. More important than its numerical significance today is the impact it has had on other religious traditions. Foltz convincingly demonstrates that many key concepts in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam can be traced to Zoroastrianism. Examples include the linear progression of time towards a great culminating event, posthumous judgement of the individual, and bodily resurrection. Remnants of Zoroastrian practices continue to feature in Persian culture, such as the spring equinoctial feast of Noruz.

In our age, the ongoing Palestinian–Israeli tragedy is the lens through which almost all Jewish–Middle Eastern interactions are viewed. Most readers will benefit from chapter 3, which traces the long and profoundly important history of Iranian Jewry. Foltz relates how the Persian king Cyrus is described as “anointed” in the book of Isaiah for having liberated the Israelites from their Babylonian captivity. The book of Esther is likewise set in the Iranian context. The tombs of figures such as Mordecai and Daniel have long been centres of Jewish (and Muslim) pilgrimage in Iran. Even more significant for the modern practice of Judaism, the Babylonian Talmud (completed around the year 600 ce) was largely compiled in the Iranian cultural sphere.

Chapter 4 deals with Buddhism. While most traces of Buddhism have long vanished from Iran, Foltz ably demonstrates that cities such as Balkh had over a hundred Buddhist monasteries in the seventh century ce. The Buddhist heritage of Persianate regions came to global attention with the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan statues in Afghanistan in 2001.

Chapter 5 focuses on the Iranian Christian heritage. Iran served as the gateway through which Christianity was introduced to much of Asia: the Chinese referred to Christianity as “the Persian religion”. Initially the target of Zoroastrian polemics, Christians in Iran came to be accepted (or at least tolerated) as a key component of Sassanian Iranian society. As in many other places in the Nile-to-Oxus region, in Iran Christians (along with Jews) came to dominate professions such as medicine, which granted them access to courtly culture and all the power that comes with such access.

Chapter 6 deals with Gnostic traditions in Iran, particularly persecuted traditions such as Mandaeism and Manichaeism. Manichaeism, in many ways the archetypal pre-modern heresy for both Christians and Muslims, has proven profoundly significant by serving as the foil against which other traditions defined themselves. Other oppositional movements such as Mazdakism would follow suit, mixing in an Iranian nationalist element by rejecting Arab rule.

The great story of Iran for the past fourteen hundred years is, of course, Islam, the religion that today defines the allegiance of over 99 per cent of Iranians. It is to Foltz’s credit that Islam does not dominate this book, but occupies only one chapter (7). The focus here is on the plurality of expressions of Islam in Iran, such as Sunnism, Shi’ism, and Sufi mysticism. One of Foltz’s more controversial assertions is that by the classical age of Islam, “Iranians would come to play a larger role” in Islam than Arabs (p. 123). While this reviewer would tend to agree, some readers might desire greater evidence for that claim. Part of its shock-value, of course, derives from the Arab-centred view of Islam that is mainstream and traditional. Foltz does point to a wide array of influential Iranian Muslims, ranging from the philosopher–theologians al-Ghazali and Avicenna to the grammarian Sibawayh and the mathematician Khwarazmi. Just as intriguing as individual thinkers and scholars are wholesale institutional pre-Islamic Iranian practices which were carried over into Islamic Abbasid times.

Chapter 8 focuses on the rise of the Babi and the Baha’i faith in Iran. Here we are presented with the complex and highly contested history of an entirely modern religious movement which emerged out of messianic Shi’ism and came to be seen both by its adherents and its antagonists as a new religion. Foltz’s chapter is significant in being one of the first treatments of Baha’ism that is not written by a practising Baha’i.

Chapter 9 offers a summary of the current state of religious minorities in Iran. Three non-Islamic traditions (Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism) are officially recognised, with another (Baha’ism) acknowledged but not recognised. The official government stance on Baha’ism is that it was a British conspiracy to divide Muslims against one another, and was subsequently supported by Zionism. Foltz ends his book by offering a brief account of the interest of modern Iranians in what we may call comparative religion.

In general, the value of Spirituality in the Land of the Noble is not in undertaking new and original excavation of primary sources, but rather in bringing together many different bodies of scholarship which have rarely been placed side by side. Foltz does this meticulously, and in almost every case by engaging the most recent and important contemporary scholarship. His modus operandi is to document fruitful exchanges and creative moments of syncretism, while not overlooking instances of tragic persecution and fanaticism. His treatment of such complex interactions is remarkably balanced and even-handed—no easy task given the large number of people one could offend.

Besides its specific insights, Foltz’s book provides readers with the opportunity to reflect upon the current state of scholarship on global religious interrelations. Western scholarship has moved beyond Europe and North America in documenting the civilisational significance, contribution, and influence of cultures such as China and South Asia. For example, we now realise that prior to the Industrial Revolution, the story of great world civilisations (measured in terms of political and economic power) must include China. Foltz’s book is an important reminder that in the theatre of connections among great world civilisations, Iran was an important cast member. Historically, Iran has been significant both for its own contribution to religious traditions such as Islam and Judaism, and also for serving as the middle ground on which many cultural, economic, artistic, and philosophical ideas from as far away as China and ancient Rome have met, interacted, and been exchanged.

A great value of such an approach is in moving beyond the notion of “bounded” and contained civilisations, and towards a more fluid model of networks of exchange and reciprocity. Any model which represents civilisation as a self-contained and rigid entity is certain to prove profoundly problematic. Despite his loud protestations, this is one of the greatest weaknesses of Samuel Huntington’s theory of the “clash of civilisations”. While Huntington maintains that his model of civilisation is not static, in actuality he adopts a highly rigid paradigm. For Huntington, the most important types of interaction among civilisations are arms exchanges and migration (particularly of peoples of different skin-colours and languages from those of the receiving culture). Missing from Huntington’s model are all the ways—described by Foltz—in which civilisations are permeable: for example, Jews adopting Zoroastrian notions of a messiah, Muslim mystics adopting Gnostic concepts of the realm of light and angels, Iranian Nestorians carrying goods and Christianity along the Silk Road to China.

In our own day, when the “clash of civilisations” has been embraced by American neo-conservatives as a prophecy to be fulfilled, books such as Foltz’s are of paramount importance. They provide us with an opportunity to question the very notion of civilisation itself, allowing us to realise that the great civilisations of the world have almost invariably contained multiple strands of ethnicity, language, religion, and thought, and that these multiple strands have interpenetrated one another. Multiplicity is not only the mantra of a distinctly modern “multicultural” ethic; it is also a historical fact. The late Edward Said was surely right: we are all hybrid, heterodox, and impure.

Spirituality in the Land of the Noble also raises questions and concerns for the academic study of Islamic societies. The paradigm for Islamic studies in the United States is still recovering from its textual/philological bias of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As such, the study of Arabic and Arabic texts (the Qur’an, Qur’anic commentaries, legal tracts, etc.) still dominates many Islamic studies curricula. While non-Arab Muslims also contributed to the number of such texts by writing in Arabic, it is clear now that to study the at least 80 per cent of Muslims who are not Arab one needs to work in more than one Islamic language. Thus, to document the history of multilingual societies such as the Ottoman Empire or Moghul India, one needs to work in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish (in the case of the Ottoman Empire) or Arabic, Persian, and Urdu (in the case of Moghul India). It is these empires, along with the Safavids in Iran, that are the centres of Islamic civilisation in the 1500–1800 period.

In other words, one cannot begin to tell the story of Islamic civilisation by relying only—or even primarily—on Arabic. It is not only historical records for the India-to-Egypt region which are often in Persian, but also a great deal of that which we associate with “high culture”: poetry, ethical disquisitions, musical treatises, etc. The terms “Arab” and “Muslim” can no longer be regarded as synonymous, if they ever could. To the extent that one can speak of an Islamic civilisation, one must talk about a multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic civilisation. Any discourse which focuses on the Arab Middle East as the “real” homeland of Islam is bound to prove extremely problematic, indeed flawed.

In light of all these recognitions, which are supported by a new wave of scholarship (including Foltz’s book), the current state of preparation for Islamic studies in the United States is woefully inadequate. To the extent that language-training is still essential for studying Islam, very few graduate programmes are adequately prepared to train students in more than one Islamic language. Where resources have to be allotted, Arabic takes precedence, much to the neglect of Persian and Turkish. As a result, there is a whole generation of scholars and teachers of Islam whose research focuses on the Arab Muslim lands (with a small minority who work on South Asia). Drastic cutting of funds in federal grants in the post-9/11 era has resulted in the elimination of many Persian instruction courses. Federal programmes such as Fulbright do not support research projects undertaken in Iran. Iran is absent from the thinking of many scholars working on Islam and global culture, and consequently we are left with a historically inaccurate depiction of the faith.

Spirituality in the Land of the Noble is highly recommended to all libraries and researchers. It should be on the shelves of anyone interested in Iran, Islam, multiculturalism, and comparative religion. It is eminently suitable for the general reader, and would also make an ideal undergraduate-level text.

Endnotes

1. Diana Eck, A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002).

2. Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (New York: Little, Brown, 2002).