Remarques sur le persan, seconde langue sacrée de l’islam

Abstract

The competition between Arabic and Persian is very ancient. Its origin seems to be the Arab conquests, the Arabic ‘racial’ policy of the first Omayyads and the resistance that policy aroused among the conquered peoples in particular the Iranians: resistance of the scholars against arabization of the national language and their tireless defense of the Iranian culture through the protection and the promotion of the Persian. It was a question of facing the arrival of the new religion and its language by trying to protect the Iranian heritage, on one hand by translating the literary works from Pahlavi into Arabic, and on the other hand by continuing to produce new works, as well in Arabic as in Persian, rooted in the past of the country but adapted to the new conditions. The method of these scholars seems to have been the following one: appropriate the new religion to have the legitimacy to evolve it from the inside.