The political revolution brought about by the Arab conquest marks the
beginning of interaction between the Aryan and the Semitic, and we find
that the Persian, though he lets the surface of his life become largely
semitised, quietly converts Islām to his own Aryan habits of thought. In
the west the sober Hellenic intellect interpreted another Semitic
religion--Christianity; and the results of interpretation in both cases
are strikingly similar. In each case the aim of the interpreting
intellect is to soften the extreme rigidity of an absolute law imposed
on the individual from without; in one word it is an endeavour to
internalise the external. This process of transformation began with the
study of Greek thought which, though combined with other causes,
hindered the growth of native speculation, yet marked a transition from
the purely objective attitude of Pre-Islamic Persian Philosophy to the
subjective attitude of later thinkers. It is, I believe, largely due to
the influence of foreign thought that the old monistic tendency when it
reasserted itself about the end of the 8{th} century, assumed a much
more spiritual aspect; and, in its later development, revivified and
spiritualised the old Iranian dualism of Light and Darkness. The fact,
therefore, that Greek thought roused into fresh life the subtle Persian
intellect, and largely contributed to, and was finally assimilated by
the general course of intellectual evolution in Persia, justifies us in
briefly running over, even though at the risk of repetition, the systems
of the Persian Neo-Platonists who, as such, deserve very little
attention in a history of purely Persian thought.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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