Iranian Influence on Moslem Literature, Part IInostrantzev, Konstantin Aleksandrovich
Religion
Iranian Influence on Moslem Literature, Part I
Inostrantzev, Konstantin Aleksandrovich
Arabic literature; Persian literature
Let us examine three points regarding the influence on Moslem morals and
general conduct. In the first place stand the moral writings of
ecclesiastical character. The morality is rooted in and based on the
moral of the Bible and then on the developed Moslem law and has absorbed
in itself some of the elements of the ethics of Christianity. In the
second place, there is a series of ethical documents of a most valued
nature in the shape of proverbs, dicta, maxims, fables, constituting a
kind of moral philosophy, often independent of each other, varied in
their character, and different as to time and the place of their
compositions. Here we may separate a certain stratum of Persian element,
and an analysis of them may reveal partly contemporary knowledge and
partly elements of foreign religious ethics. The third but not the last
place in importance is occupied by the Greek ethical tradition in which
latterly are discernible important Christian constituents. Recent
studies have yielded us as their result, this structure of Musalman
ethics. But it is to be noted that the theoretical deductions at first
sight do not find confirmation in facts. For we do not know which Greek
books on ethics were translated in the beginning of the period of the
scientific development of Islam, and for the support of our thesis we
have to point to the possibility of oral transmission of Hellenic
ethical tradition through Syriac scholars, although this circumstance
does not militate against our hypothesis. Besides a small amount of
translations from Greek ethical works, especially the books of
Aristotle, there are observed among the works embodied in this tradition
a series of pseudographs which, however, can have only an external
relation with the Greek sciences and which would rather lead to the
second group of the influences on Musalman ethical monuments namely, the
group of monuments of "Oriental wisdom." The most typical of the
pseudographical _wisaya_, or "Testaments" are ascribed to Aristotle,
Pythagoras, and others. To our mind, they are derived from Persian
tradition to the same extent, if not in a larger extent than from the
Christian. Actual studies demonstrate that the basal work for this epoch
was the book above-mentioned of Ibn Miskawaihi which as we saw above,
issued from Persian literary tradition. And the character of that
tradition can be explained from exterior circumstances without an
analysis of its contents. The fact is that Ibn Miskawaihi worked upon
that class of Persian material, for instance the _Pand Nameh_ or
_Andarz_, which had nothing to do with the province of the indefinite
gnomic literature but which had the character of a catechism and
therefore expresses a definite system of religious morals, the morals of
Parsism.[1] The appreciation of the influence of Parsism on Islam has
only just commenced. But we are already in a position to emphasise the
great influence, which Parsi ethics have exercised on Islam and this
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