A carpet from Balkh adorns our living room. It is a constant reminder old assignments with the UN in Afghanistan, of traveling long dusty roads lined with the relics of various wars, of bustling markets and lovely lilt of Dari language.
Dari is a variant of Persian widely spoken in the country. I had always imagined that the Persian influence on Afghanistan dated back to the reign of kings ranging from Cyrus to Nadir Shah. Today, while communing back home on the metro listening to an episode of the Empire podcast, I realised the extent of my naivety.
There was a time when the Persians ruled most of the territory that extends from today's Punjab to Turkey and North Africa. The mighty Achaemenid kings - Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes - ruled from Persepolis (559 - 330 BC), until the empire was destroyed by Alexander. Then came the Seleucids (312 - 62 BC) who were contemporaries of Chandragupta of the Maurya empire in India; the Parthians (247 - 224 BC) and the Sasanians (224 - 651 CE).
Then came a time when the conquerors got conquered. The endless wars between two great empires, the Romans and the Persians, exhausted both and enabled a new kid on the block, the Arabs driven by the zeal of a brand new religion, to colonise Persia. Over the next 200 years, Arabic took over as the official language, Persian language, culture and religion got subsumed. Amazingly some of the most prominent Vezirs appointed by the Arabs were the Barmakids, a clan of hereditary Buddhist priests ("Pramukh") from the Nawbahar monastry in Balkh who had converted to Islam!
One of the few holdouts was Khorasan, an area which is mostly the provinces o Herat and present-day Afghanistan.
It is under the patronage of the Saffarid kings of Khorasan that Persian language survived. The poet, Ferdowsi started writing the epic Shahname under their patronage. However, by the time he finished his magnum opus, the Saffarids had been defeated by the Ghaznavids, and the new king Mohammad of Ghazni was too busy plundering India and did not think much of Persian poetry.
It is Persia that owes much to Afghanistan - not the other day around!
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BUT-SHIKAN बुत-शिकनبت شکن
This word, meaning "iconoclast", is an honorific adopted by many Islamic rulers in India. Sikandar Shah Miri, a ruler of Kashmir was called Sikandar Butshikan for the zeal with which he destroyed many monasteries and temples.
So the question is - does 'but' refer to icons of the Buddha?
A friend who loves Urdu poetry insists that the word comes from Persian. So did the ancient Iranians also take delight in destroying temples? Turns out that they did - hundreds of years before Persia was overrun by conquering armies from Arabia under the banner of Islam, it was Zoroastrian rulers who destroyed buddhist monasteries and temples in the Khorasan region!
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REFERENCES & LINKS
- Empire Podcast - https://twitter.com/EmpirePodUK/status/1747563631653396807
- Buddhism in Iran - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_in_Iran
- https://en.unesco.org/silkroad/content/did-you-know-city-balkh-ancient-capital-bactria-and-centre-buddhism-and-zoroastrianism
- https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/buddhism-i
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Buddhists
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikandar_Shah_Miri
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