Culture under the Buyids

Under the Buyids, from 945 to 1055, Rey, Isfahan, Shiraz and Baghdad were home to one of the most open and productive intellectual cultures of the medieval Islamic world. Great viziers such as Ibn al-Amid and al-Sahib ibn Abbad gathered libraries and scholars, philosophers debated in salons, and Twelver Shi’a learning took the form it still has. Almost all of it was written in Arabic, even though the patrons were Iranians.

The vizier as patron

The Buyid amirs were soldiers from Daylam (see the Daylamites). They ruled through civilian ministers trained in the old Persian secretarial tradition, and these viziers set the tone of court culture. A vizier was expected to write brilliant Arabic letters, to hold literary gatherings and to collect books, and the best of them did all three.

Ibn al-Amid in Rey

Abu’l-Fadl ibn al-Amid served Rukn al-Dawla, the Buyid ruler of central Iran, as vizier for some thirty years until his death in 970. Contemporaries ranked his prose with that of the great Abbasid stylist al-Jahiz. His library in Rey was looked after by the young Miskawayh, who later wrote that when Khorasanian troops sacked the vizier’s house, the books were the one thing Ibn al-Amid asked about.

Al-Sahib ibn Abbad

Ismail ibn Abbad, born in 938 near Isfahan, was Ibn al-Amid’s pupil. He became the boyhood companion, sahib, of the prince Mu’ayyad al-Dawla, and the title stuck: he is known simply as al-Sahib. As vizier at Rey from 976 until his death in 995, under Mu’ayyad al-Dawla and then Fakhr al-Dawla, he ran the Buyid state of central Iran and its literary life together.

Al-Sahib wrote poetry, letters, theology and an Arabic dictionary, al-Muhit. He was a committed Mu’tazili, a rationalist school of theology, and brought the leading Mu’tazili scholar, Abd al-Jabbar, to Rey as chief judge. Poets and writers came to his court from across the east; the anthologist al-Tha’alibi gave his circle a large part of his survey of contemporary poets, the Yatimat al-dahr. His library became legendary. Later writers tell that he refused a post in Bukhara because moving his books would have needed four hundred camels, a story that grew in the retelling. When Mahmud of Ghazni took Rey in 1029, he had the theology section of the city’s library burned as heretical.

Philosophers and humanists

The historian Joel Kraemer called this period the “renaissance of Islam” and described its spirit as a form of humanism: Greek philosophy, Arabic literature and Persian wisdom were studied side by side, and Muslims, Christians, Jews and Sabians met in the same circles.

• Miskawayh (d. 1030), librarian and treasurer to Buyid ministers and to Adud al-Dawla, wrote Tajarib al-umam (Experiences of the Nations), a history that runs into his own time and is our main source for the early Buyids, and Tahdhib al-akhlaq (The Refinement of Character), a treatise on ethics that drew on Aristotle and remained a standard text for centuries.
• Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi (d. 1023), a gifted and bitter writer, worked as a copyist for al-Sahib, quarrelled with him and took revenge in a satire on him and Ibn al-Amid, The Vices of the Two Viziers. His Book of Enjoyment and Conviviality records a series of evening conversations with a Baghdad vizier on philosophy, language and manners, and gives a vivid picture of intellectual life in the city.
• The Baghdad philosophers around the Christian logician Yahya ibn Adi (d. 974) and his pupil Abu Sulayman al-Sijistani continued the Aristotelian tradition of al-Farabi.
• The Brethren of Purity (Ikhwan al-Safa), an anonymous group in Basra, produced an encyclopedia of fifty-two epistles on mathematics, natural science, philosophy and religion. Its exact date is debated, but al-Tawhidi names some of its supposed authors.

Twelver Shi’ism takes shape

The Buyids were Shi’a and allowed public Shi’a rituals in Baghdad, such as mourning on Ashura from 963 (see the Buyid dynasty). Their century was decisive for the Twelver school. With the twelfth Imam in occultation since the previous century, scholars had to build a body of law and doctrine without a living imam, and they did so under Buyid protection.

• Ibn Babawayh of Qom and Rey, known as al-Shaykh al-Saduq (d. 991), compiled Man la yahduruhu al-faqih, one of the Four Books of Shi’a hadith.
• Al-Shaykh al-Mufid (d. 1022) in Baghdad gave Shi’a theology a rational, systematic form, partly in dialogue with the Mu’tazila.
• Al-Sharif al-Radi (d. 1015) compiled the Nahj al-balagha, the collected sermons and letters attributed to Imam Ali, still one of the most read books in Iran. His brother al-Sharif al-Murtada (d. 1044) led the community after al-Mufid.
• Al-Shaykh al-Tusi (d. 1067), their pupil, wrote two more of the Four Books. When the Seljuks took Baghdad his library was burned, and he moved to Najaf, which became a centre of Shi’a learning.

Sunni learning did not stop. The Ash’ari theologian al-Baqillani worked in Baghdad and served Adud al-Dawla as an envoy to Byzantium. For the longer story, see Shi’a Islam in Iranian history.

Science at the Buyid courts

Astronomy and mathematics flourished alongside medicine; Adud al-Dawla’s patronage of al-Sufi and the Baghdad hospital is described on Adud al-Dawla. At Rey, the astronomer al-Khujandi built a huge mural sextant for Fakhr al-Dawla in 994 to measure the tilt of the earth’s axis. In Baghdad, Abu’l-Wafa al-Buzjani, from Khorasan, made observations for Sharaf al-Dawla and advanced trigonometry. Avicenna spent his most productive years in the service of Buyid and Kakuyid princes in Hamadan and Isfahan; see Avicenna.

Why so little Persian?

The contrast with the east is striking. At the same time that the Samanids were sponsoring poetry and prose in New Persian, the Buyid courts wrote almost entirely in Arabic. Their bureaucracy, their scholars and their audiences were part of the Arabic-speaking world of Iraq, and Baghdad was still its centre. The Buyids expressed their Iranian identity in other ways: they took the old title shahanshah, Adud al-Dawla had his name carved at Persepolis, and Zoroastrian priests in Fars were still copying and editing Middle Persian books such as the Denkard. Persian literature in western Iran would come later, under the Seljuks.