History Is The Record Of Unintended Consequences

The underground springs of one of the oldest and most profound intellectual, spiritual, and poetic traditions ever produced by humankind in the last 5,000 years or so are to be found in Central Asia, many of them concentrated in the Iranian plateau. This is the point of origin, so far as we know, of the Indo-European languages. Whoever the Aryan (Iranian) peoples were, they began to fan out from their mountainous pasturelands some 4,000 years ago. Those who went south into Mother India settled and produced the Rig Veda which would later be meditated and commented upon to produce the Upanishads and the philosophical-devotional religions of that region.

Perhaps 3,000 years ago a radical Vedic priest somewhere in Iran began to sing of his visionary experiences with divine beings, broke with the priesthood, and with the patronage and (as it turned out, temporary) protection of a local prince, laid the foundations of what would become ethical monotheism. His name was Zarathustra. When Judean exiles in Mesopotamia began to study his teachings in, roughly, the 6th century BCE, they married their native traditions of admonitory Near Eastern prophecy with his ecstatic visions of alternative realms and worlds and what would become Biblical literature was born.

Half a millennium later in Palestine and under the yoke of Roman imperialism, an apocalyptic sect of these Judeans (now “Jews”) under the leadership of an itinerant preacher named Yeshua, proclaimed the overthrow of the Empire and the end of the world. In the short term, the world did not come to an end but the Romans made certain that Yeshua (and others like him) did. Some of Yeshua’s followers refused to accept defeat and proclaimed their executed master was not only alive but returning immanently to settle accounts.

After four centuries of recruitment among Hellenized Jews and (most especially) their gentile neighbors, this anti-imperial movement would become, ironically, the imperial religion of Christianity. The political genius responsible for co-opting an anti-imperial movement for imperialist ends, Constantine, seized power in Rome and then transferred the seat of his power from Italy to the Bosphorus. There he built what was to become, in time, a magnificent cosmopolis which he named, with exemplary Christian humility, after himself.

While the Romans were fashioning Christianity for their imperial ends, the Iranians had not been idle; they, too, had developed absolutist political traditions but made the "mistake" (as Rome saw it) of adapting the teachings of Zarathustra to them. Unwilling to countenance a rival empire with an alternative ideology, Constantine's successors built a powerful military machine that persecuted dissenters within its domains and waged holy war against Iran.

The struggle between the two regional superpowers waxed and waned over the course of several centuries; then, in the 7th century CE, an Arab prophet emerged from their southern periphery--an area that had managed to avoid complete subjugation by either imperial power. His message forged a “middle way” (cp. Qur'an 2:143) that incorporated elements of Arab Judaism, Arab Christianity, and Iranian gnosis and ecstasy and appealed to many who had become disenchanted with (and disenfranchised by) endless inter-imperial warfare.

When this prophet's followers overran the failing Iranian empire a couple of decades after his death (on their way to creating an empire of their own), a great transformation began to unfold. By the 10th century CE, the rich amalgam of Arab, Jewish, Christian, and Iranian genius had produced a civilization of depth and beauty unrivaled anywhere in the world outside of China. Its political and cultural center was Baghdad, but the subterranean springs of Central Asia mixed with the ancient waters of the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile, the Indus, and even the Aegean.

Into that world, in the 14th century, the poet Hafez was born.