Book Description

Excerpt from World's Great Classics The times in which Firdusi lived were marked by strange revolutions. The Arabs, filled with the daring which Mo hammed had breathed into them, had indeed conquered Per sia. In a.d. 657, when Merv fell, and the last Sassanian king, Yezdegird III, met his end, these Arabs became nominally supreme. Persia had been conquered - but not the Persian spirit. Even though Turkish speech reigned supreme at court and the Arabic script became universal, the temper of the old Arsacides and Sassanians still lived on. It is true that Or muzd was replaced by Allah, and Ahriman by Satan. But the Persian had a glorious past of his own; and in this, the con quered was far above the conqueror. This past was kept alive in the myth-loving mind of this Aryan people; in the songs of its poets and in the lays of its minstrels. In this way there was, in a measure, a continuous opposition of Persian to Arab, despite the mingling of the two in Islam and the opposition of Persian Shiites to the Sunnites of the rest of the Moham medan world at this very day is a curious survival of racial antipathy. The fall of the only real Arab Mohammedan dynasty - that of the Umayyid caliphs at Damascus - the rise of the separate and often opposing dynasties in Spain, Sicily, Egypt, and Tunis, served to strengthen the Persians in their desire to keep alive their historical individuality and their an cient traditions. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.