Original subtitles

This is a land known by two names.

The first is Persia.

TRADITIONAL MIDDLE EASTERN SINGING

Ancient.

Mysterious.

A place of adventure...

..of mighty temples and palaces built by powerful kings.

A land of unimaginable beauty.

The other is Iran.

Isolated.

Proud.

Defiant...

..especially of foreign interference.

But behind these names

lies the extraordinary story

of a complex history and culture.

The Persians can seem like a mystery at the edge

of the Western imagination,

in the Old Testament or battling Alexander and the Romans

in classical history,

but the ripples of Persia's art and language

have travel outward, throughout the world,

transforming culture across Europe and Asia.

If you think you know the Persians, think again.

Since Iran became an Islamic republic in 1979,

Western documentary teams are seldom given access.

But I'm a British journalist and I've been given

a rare opportunity to travel across this vast country

and discover its art and literature for myself.

In this episode, I'm going back to when the Arabs conquered Persia,

a conquest that was more than a confrontation

between two mighty armies.

It was a clash between two powerful civilisations.

The Arabs brought with them a new culture, new language,

and a new religion.

But, despite subjugation,

the Persians fought back.

This is the remarkable story of why Iran isn't Arab

and how it has proudly held on to its Persian identity

and language to this day.

At the beginning of the 7th century,

far away in the Arabian Peninsula,

a trader named Muhammad was said

to have received a series of revelations from God.

They formed the basis of the Koran

and a small but radical movement

rose to change the world.

Islam was born.

Soon, all of Arabia united under Muslim rule.

Through conquest and conversion,

so began the battle to forge a new Islamic empire.

First, the Arab armies took the Levant and Egypt.

Then they set their sights on Persia.

The King of Persia at the time was just a boy.

He was called Yazdegerd.

It was a ten-year-old who led the Persian army into battle

against the Arab armies of Islam.

The Persians fought bravely,

but, in the end, they were annihilated.

Yazdegerd, and what was left of his army, fled east

over the Zagros Mountains.

But this formidable barrier proved no defence.

By the year 637 AD,

the Arabs were at the gates of Persia's capital city, Istakhr.

But Yazdegerd and his family escaped.

This is the village of Chak Chak, hidden in the mountains

of Iran's southern desert.

According to legend, it was across this unforgiving landscape

the royal family fled with the Arab armies in hot pursuit,

a legend that's connected to one of

Iran's most sacred religious sites,

a Zoroastrian fire temple...

..the religion of Persia before Islam.

It's tradition that as soon as they catch sight of the temple,

pilgrims are supposed to complete the rest of their journey on foot.

The temple doors bear the reliefs of Persia's ancient kings.

Pilgrims flock here from all over the world,

but it's also a place where ordinary Iranians come to touch their past.

This is an actual fire pot and...

Farinaz is a practising Zoroastrian

and my guide to the connection between this sacred place

and the tragic fate of the Persian royal family.

Can you tell me why this site

is so sacred to Zoroastrians?

But one of the Persian princesses did escape.

The legend goes

that when she prayed to the Zoroastrian god,

the mountain miraculously opened up

and hid her from the Arab soldiers.

The waters of this spring are said to be tears of grief

in memory of the princess and the end of the Persian Empire

and its religion.

These three bull or ox heads with the tiny calves

underneath are made of brass and once formed the head of a mace

kept by a Zoroastrian priest.

You can see where the staff would have joined

and it has a real weight to it.

And they had a dual purpose, objects like these.

They were used in religious ceremonies, but also

in defence to ward off looters and invaders from the fire temples.

And this particular mace head has been dated to the 7th century,

so it's tempting to imagine it used in anger

against the invading Arab Muslims

who came to fight the Persian armies

and to extinguish the flames at the Zoroastrian temples.

For the Persians, the Islamic conquest came

as an overwhelming shock.

It must have felt their entire culture would be swallowed up,

including the religion that Islam replaced.

So what was the Zoroastrian religion

and who was the god they worshipped?

In central Iran, at a fire temple in Yazd,

this flame, it is said, was first lit before Islam arrived.

It's been burning for 1,500 years.

The fire represents the Zoroastrian god, Ahura Mazda...

..the god worshipped by King Yazdegerd and his ancestors.

Zoroastrianism is the great forgotten world faith.

It's a great shame because Zoroastrianism has embedded

in it very basic principles of good thoughts, good works,

good deeds under the head of one supreme god,

Ahura Mazda, which means "the wise lord".

And he gives this principle of Atar,

which means truth and from truth

then you get order and harmony.

The faithful were commanded to pray in the direction of the light.

The only light the ancients controlled was fire,

so they created temples to keep the flame burning for eternity.

The Iranians and their rulers had always been Zoroastrian.

Figures such as the winged god Ahura Mazda had been worshipped

since the earliest of times,

putting the Zoroastrian religion

at the heart of Persian identity.

After the rise of Islam, many Zoroastrians fled to India.

But there are still around 25,000 followers in Iran today.

I've come to a village just outside Yazd, which is the birthplace,

it's said, of Zoroastrianism.

THEY CHANT AND SING

Zoroastrians believe they will remain together

both in life and in death.

This is called a tower of silence

and it looms over the city of Yazd below.

A reminder to the ancient Persians that all life's journeys

will end here.

Traditionally, Zoroastrians did not want to pollute the Earth

by burying their dead or the air by cremating them,

so they brought them up here

and it really does feel closer to the heavens.

The bodies were left to rot, to be picked apart

by desert vultures,

the bones bleached by the sun.

Some believe Yazd is where Zoroastrianism was born

and, looking down on this beautiful desert city,

I feel I finally understand the remarkable resilience

of the Persian people who knew invasion could come

from any direction.

The spirit of the Zoroastrian religion runs right through

Persia's pre-Islamic history

because of the special powers the god Ahura Mazda

bestowed on her kings.

This place is called Naqsh-e Rostam.

It's home to a series of extraordinary rock carvings,

memorials to Iran's pre-Islamic kings.

Every year, Iranians flock here

to connect with their lost civilisation

and to marvel at the pride and strength

of their ancient rulers.

The figure on the right of this carving

was called Ardashir I

and he came to the throne in the year 224 AD.

Ardashir was descended from a Zoroastrian priest called Sasan.

He was the first in a dynasty of Persian kings

called the Sasanians.

It was Ardashir who made Zoroastrianism

the official religion of Persia

and he's shown on this rock carving

seated there on horseback,

receiving the diadem of kingship from God himself,

Ahura Mazda.

We see the king approach the god and the god gives him a ring,

so the giving of this ring is really

the investing of the king with this divine essence,

this charisma,

this light, which then sort of envelops the king

for the rest of his reign.

And, interestingly, this kind of...this light, which we kind of,

I suppose, describe as a halo, we see then transferred

into Christian art, into Buddhist art

and even into Muslim art as well,

so this idea goes very, very deep into these religions.

To many Iranians, this is one of the most precious carvings

in the country.

They're drawn to it because the mysterious symbols and cryptic

runes represent the birth of the Persian nation.

Written in three languages,

the first known inscription of the country he ruled,

it says,

"Worshipper of Ahura Mazda,

"this is Ardashir,

"King of Kings of Iran."

But even a great king like Ardashir cannot live forever.

In his last days, Ardashir made a prophecy.

The dynasty would last 500 years, he said,

but the last Sasanians would fall from the true faith.

Echoing the sense of fatalism that runs right

through the Zoroastrian religion,

this is what Ardashir said.

"Whatever I have bound, they will release.

"The faith that I have purified will cease.

"My testament will be as naught

"and all our sovereignty will crumble and fall."

This is such a haunting, forlorn place.

It's hard to believe this lonely column, once crowned

by a fantastical carved beast,

and this section of wall are all that remain

of Ardashir's capital city, Istakhr.

The conquering Arab armies would raze it to the ground.

Its magnificence now lies hidden under these fields.

Ardashir's prophecy proved eerily correct.

By the year 651,

the last Sasanian king, Yazdegerd, was dead.

The conquest was complete.

Now the Persians were under Arab Muslim rule.

This is the Jameh Mosque in the centre of Yazd.

It's one of the oldest mosques in Iran.

The modern Iranian state requires

women to wear a chador to come inside.

On the brick ceiling behind me,

the patterns spell out

more than 100 different names of God.

Beyond the craftsmanship and exquisite tile work,

the mosque is emblematic of what happened to the Zoroastrian religion

after Islam arrived.

A major fire temple once stood here.

But, when Islam reached Yazd,

its days were numbered.

The Persians and their religion, it seemed, were crushed.

The conquest was quite quick.

It was over in a decade,

but you have to imagine that the Persian Army

was quite exhausted by that time.

There was also quite a bit of unrest from within.

Conversion is a fairly incremental thing.

It happens in cities first,

then it grows into the into the rural areas,

but some parts of the Caspian don't convert at all

for many, many centuries. They were very hard to get to...

..and you find rebellions.

I mean, you find Zoroastrian-inspired rebellions.

Like their religion, the remnants

of the Persian army went underground,

but it transformed into something new and powerful

that would endure for centuries.

And if you explore the winding passageways of Yazd's old city,

you can find a living connection

to the ancient Persian resistance movement

that grew after the Arabs invaded.

This is a zurkhaneh

which means "house of strength".

UPLIFTING SINGING

They can be found all over modern Iran.

The roots of zurkhaneh stretch back to when Persian men

were forbidden to train openly

by their Arab conquerors.

They met in secret instead,

preparing for the day they might be called again to fight.

The symbolic movements represent the battlefield,

exercises that mimic the bow and arrow,

shields, clubs and wrestling.

What began as secret training for the defenders of ancient Persia

over time grew into a brotherhood

helping men of every generation

to become heroes of their local communities.

APPLAUSE

The movements are accompanied by epic songs and poems

that date back to pre-Islamic Iran.

MAN SINGS

Words of wisdom from ancient poets

that strengthen the souls of men and boys alike.

The fusion of these exercises and these stories

is symbolic of a struggle that went far beyond

armed resistance against the Arabs.

They reveal an ancient determination

to protect Persian culture,

history, and language.

In 750 AD, a century after the Arab invasion,

a dynasty called the Abbasids rose to power.

They held the title Caliph,

Islam's supreme religious and political leaders.

A new Caliphate called for a new capital city,

and the Abbasids set their eyes on Baghdad,

now in Iraq, but then

close to the heartlands of Persia.

The process of Islamisation...

..was quite quick.

The process of Arabisation...

..never worked.

And the reason why Arabisation never worked...

..is because of the power of Persian culture.

This coin is called a dirham.

It contains everything we need to know about the resilience

of Persian culture in the face of the Arab invasion.

For centuries, Persian money,

coins like these,

were the most powerful currency in the ancient world.

The dirham was the US dollar or the euro of its day,

and the Arab invaders tried introducing their own currency,

but nobody trusted it, and, of course, like today,

confidence is central to the economy.

Without it, the trade would collapse.

So, the Arab rulers had no choice but to continue

minting Persian coins.

The designs on the coin depict Persia's pre-Islamic kings.

One side bears the king

and, on the other, a Zoroastrian fire altar.

The only change the new Abbasid rulers later made

was to add the name of the local Arab governor.

And that sanctifies the coin,

Arabises the coin,

legitimises the coin,

and everybody was happy.

This was the dollar of antiquity.

It went everywhere.

They were minted in their millions every year.

The Persian dirham was the beating heart

of the Islamic world's economy.

But Persian influence didn't stop here.

The bodyguards of the Abbasid rulers,

wore Persian clothes, too...

..called jamah.

I'm going to take this one as well.

Thank you.

You know, I was always told that the word "pyjamas" comes

from India and it came back with the British Raj,

but, in fact, the word "jamah"

there's something familiar about that, isn't there?

And the word "jamah" in the Persian language means "clothing"

and the word "pa" means "leg."

Pa-jamah - leg-clothing.

By the middle of the 9th century,

Persian words, ideas, and practices

were wrapping themselves around the Caliphate like ivy.

These ceramic bowls tell the same story.

In the early years, Islam forbid imagery

allowing only religious and heavenly symbols,

like birds,

to be painted on everyday wear like this.

But, soon, favourite tales and characters began to appear.

Here's the story of a Sasanian king

and his doomed love affair

with an Armenian princess.

Stories re-emerging like ghosts

from Iran's pre-Islamic past.

As well as conversion to Islam,

Persians were obliged to speak the language

it brought with it...

..Arabic,

but that didn't stop them making it their own.

Persian as a language re-emerges,

almost empowered, if you can put it by this, by the Arabic alphabet.

THEY GREET EACH OTHER IN ARABIC

Basically, through the medium of the Arabic alphabet,

New Persian, as we know it, emerges that becomes, really,

the lingua franca of Eastern Islamic world.

It's a very, very powerful force.

After the arrival of Islam in the 7th century,

Persians adapted the Arabic alphabet,

adding four letters to give the 32 of the modern Persian alphabet,

and, in classes like this,

modern Iranians are seeking to connect

to the long tradition of matching form

to the content of the words,

through the art of beautiful writing.

By elevating the simple written word into something beautiful,

calligraphy has become a highly prized skill

and master calligraphers continue the work of

preserving the Persian language.

Professor, I have to ask,

would you give that a grade, that piece of work?

Excellent. Fair. Firm but fair.

From calligraphy...

..to coins...

..to ceramics.

In the battle between two cultures,

the Persians were making an extraordinary comeback.

I think that in these early years or early decades,

early centuries of Islam,

actually, the Arabs become conquered by Persia,

in many respects.

The tables are turned and they become Persianised

by the much stronger culture of the Persians.

They celebrate the Persian New Year.

They wear Persian costume.

They have the veiling of women.

They have the curtain that is drawn in front of the ruler.

All sorts of things that come from the Persian tradition.

The new Arab rulers also adopted the Persian civil service,

which was centuries old

and a well-oiled machine.

They even kept on the Persian civil servants,

including the most powerful position of all,

the chief minister, known as the vizier.

The most significant viziers were from the Barmakid family,

and they had been for generations

top officials under the Sasanians,

and they simply became the top family

for a full century

under the Abbasids.

So, the making of the Arab state

as an empire

happens as a result of the astonishing comeback

of the Persians.

At the beginning of the 9th century,

the ruling Caliph, Harun al-Rashid,

started to grow suspicious of his Barmakid vizier.

He was called Ja'far Barmaki.

You might recognise the names of Harun and Ja'far.

They're the real people made famous as characters in

Tales From 1,001 Nights,

the story of Aladdin.

Harun's vizier had become too powerful, too grand.

Harun jailed his entire family,

dispossessed them of their lands,

and had Ja'far beheaded.

Ja'far Barmaki was anything but evil,

and, yet, he's being remembered in the West as the archetypal,

wicked, grand vizier in the Disney version.

The vizier has made it all the way from the Abbasid Caliphate

into modern culture,

always portrayed as wicked, underhand, and greedy

with a devilish moustache.

But Harun didn't abolish the office.

He appointed another vizier,

also Iranian,

a former slave who would know his place.

Harun underestimated the crucial role Ja'far played...

..and, as soon as he was dead,

the empire started to crumble.

This was the beginning of the end

of Arab rule in Persia

as competing warlords fought for dominance.

In 809 AD, Harun led an army

to crush a rebellion in the deserts of the north-east,

but he became ill and died

just outside a little town called Tus.

In 935 AD,

a century after the Abbasids lost power in Persia,

a man named Abul-Qasem Ferdowsi was born in the same town of Tus

where Harun had died.

Ferdowsi was a writer

and, in the battle to preserve Persian culture,

it was Ferdowsi who would prove

to be the most powerful warrior of all.

The town of Tus that Ferdowsi knew

has long since vanished,

but, in Iran's desert regions,

there are a handful of villages

and little towns that, remarkably,

have survived the ravages of time,

like this one.

Oh, this so beautiful.

This crumbling and deserted town in central Iran is Kharanaq.

It was first settled 4,000 years ago.

The buildings aren't that old, but it's said some do date back

to the time of Ferdowsi,

preserved for a millennium in the dry desert air.

Coming to Kharanaq is like stepping back in time

and exploring these labyrinthine streets

and mud-built buildings is beginning

to give me a real sense of the ancient Persia

once familiar to Ferdowsi.

Ferdowsi was from that useful dehqan class,

the gentry and middling bureaucrats who oversaw the collecting of tax

and administered the country at a local level.

As a young man, Ferdowsi would have wandered streets

and passageways like these...

..gathering both taxes and stories, myths, legends

about pre-Islamic Persia...

..even though this was a region where Islam and the Arabs

still echoed powerfully.

In Ferdowsi's time, doorways like this

would have been very familiar

with a separate door-knocker for a man and a woman

so that the person inside would know the gender of who had come.

So, this is the male knocker...

HEAVY KNOCKING

..and this is the female locker.

LIGHT, TINNY KNOCKING

Here's a rare image of Ferdowsi

greeting a fellow poet.

Like many Iranians, Ferdowsi was torn in two.

While he was a good Muslim,

he rejected the Arabs and their culture.

I think Ferdowsi was a patriot.

I think you shouldn't speak in terms of the nation-state at this time,

but he had what you might call national sentiment.

Ferdowsi wasn't alone.

Following the collapse of Abbasid rule in Persia,

another new dynasty rose to dominance.

They were Persian, not Arab.

They were the Samanids and they were on a mission.

There was a project known

as the first Persian princedom,

kingdom, if you like,

after the Islamic conquest of Iran.

They very much modelled themselves on the pre-Islamic kings,

and, therefore, it makes sense that they wanted

to promote that image.

They promoted that image by commissioning Ferdowsi

to turn his collection of stories about Persia's ancient kings

into a book.

It was called The Shahnameh.

I think he wrote that book as a way of rescuing

the past from what he saw as an over-Arabised present,

and he was afraid that Persian would just get lost,

would be drowned.

So, Ferdowsi wrote the Shahnameh

not in Arabic but in Persian

to preserve, like a time capsule,

as much as he could of his country's story

before the arrival of Islam.

The characters are part-mythical and part-historical,

and the book tells of their heroic deeds

against divine and human forces.

This is a tract which gives a heart back to an Iranian people

who had been oppressed by an Arab invader.

He is consistent throughout it, that he is a good Muslim,

but he is anti-Arab and he is...

..I suppose we can call him an Iranian nationalist.

The prototype, I suppose, of a kind of Iranian nationalism

you find in Shahnameh.

It took a long time.

Anything between 30 to 34 years.

There were many legends around how much he was going to be paid,

whether it was a gold coin for every line,

which I think would have bankrupted the treasury,

if that was true.

In the end, Ferdowsi wrote 60,000 lines.

He was going to be rich...

..or so he thought.

By the time Ferdowsi was finished writing,

over three decades later,

so was the Persian dynasty that had commissioned him.

Now Iran was under the heel of yet another new ruler,

and this painting shows Ferdowsi praising the new Sultan,

having presented him with the Shahnameh.

The new king, Sultan Mahmud, is a completely different man.

He doesn't even necessarily speak Persian,

so, Ferdowsi brings the book to the court

and the king is less than impressed.

Ferdowsi hoped that when he finished it, Father Christmas would give him

a life's pension and make it all worthwhile.

And Father Christmas, in his case,

had short arms and deep pockets

and didn't pay up.

This is all that remains of the town Ferdowsi called home...

..a section of the old wall that once defended Tus.

The story goes that the Sultan was eventually persuaded

the Shahnameh was a truly monumental work.

So, he made good and sent Ferdowsi

a generous sum of money in gold.

Tragically, according to this story, as the sack of gold coins

was being carried in through one of the city gates,

Abul-Qasem Ferdowsi was leaving through another,

carried in his coffin.

Ferdowsi, it seemed, had died a bitterly disappointed man,

but he would have been astonished to learn

that, 1,000 years later,

his life's work would still be read all over Iran.

In Tehran, statues...

..squares...

..even subway stations are named after him.

It's not just Ferdowsi's name that's famous.

The stories of his characters are so popular

they're even the subject of street art.

Among the princesses, kings and heroes,

is my favourite...

..Rostam.

Rostam is the biggest figure in the Shahnameh in every sense.

He's a knight the size of eight men.

He lives for hundreds of years.

He rips up tree trunks.

He rescues his kings, maidens, and kills demons.

He's like a cross between Hercules, Hector and the Incredible Hulk,

the ultimate Iranian superhero.

Handed down from one generation to the next,

many characters like Rostam are so popular

they've become household names,

bonding Iranian parents and children with a sense

of pride and adventure in who they are.

I've been invited by the Farzanehs to dinner,

to hear about their evangelical zeal

for Iran's favourite story book.

So, you've got these great pictures from the Shahnameh.

Can you tell me who is this?

I love his weapons.

Do you have a favourite weapon of Rostam's?

What's really amazing is this feeling of walking into a home

which is full of the love of the Shahnameh

and the children really know their stories.

They're passionate about it and you can tell

both Mum and Dad just have brought them up surrounded

by this sense of excitement and adventure and music

and poetry, all together.

Yes?

Yes, you agree?

Yes. Yes.

The Farzanehs have made it their life's mission to preach

the Shahnameh to the next generation.

The stew looks amazing!

Bon appetit!

So, tell me, how would you describe

what you do with the Shahnameh and in your work?

the Shahnameh remains alive

in the hearts of Iranians, young and old.

SHE READS IN PERSIAN

Packed full of heroic adventures and supernatural tales,

it's perfect for bedtime reading.

I've returned to the little town of Tus

on Iran's far north eastern border...

..the place of Ferdowsi's birth, death and burial.

He lies here,

in this magnificent marble-clad mausoleum

fit for a king.

He's the champion who made a stand against the Arab invaders

and, every year, thousands of visitors come to pay their respects

to Iran's national hero.

The words inscribed on his tomb read,

"Here lies the master of Persian storytellers

"who remains in the hearts of the people of this country

"for eternity."

It was Ferdowsi who revived and preserved the idea of Iran

in the Book of Kings,

with its potent mix of history and mythology.

He's the small-town boy who wrote Iran's national epic.

Ferdowsi died in the year 1020,

but the struggle to preserve

Persia's language and identity

was far from over.

I'm travelling next to Nishapur.

It was home to another writer,

a man who would continue the work that Ferdowsi started.

Almost nothing remains of the old city of Nishapur,

but, if you look carefully, there are clues to what made it

one of the ancient world's greatest cities.

Everywhere I look, I see the colour turquoise...

..the colour of heaven.

Turquoise stone has been mined nearby for a staggering 7,000 years.

In the tangle of alleyways and lanes, the sound of grinding

and polishing fills the air...

..as stonecutters painstakingly separate

the turquoise from the rock.

TOOLS WHIR AND BUZZ

It's amazing.

Hundreds of pieces.

How long does it take from sorting these pieces

to making a whole bracelet like that?

Merchants who passed through Nishapur

would buy stones and ceramic objects,

like this beautiful, turquoise, glazed jug.

It dates to the 11th century

when Nishapur's most famous son lived,

Omar Khayyam.

This is his tomb.

In tribute to Khayyam's life and work,

the mausoleum is tiled in the turquoise stone

that made the city famous.

This 1930s mausoleum looks just like a spaceship.

And I love it.

It's perfect because here in Iran, Omar Khayyam is best known

as a mathematician and an astronomer.

His work on algebra has influenced European thinkers

of the Enlightenment.

He's said to be the first person to prove the Earth spun on its axis,

and, thanks to his observations,

he came up with a calendar with eight leap years in every 33,

more accurate than the Gregorian calendar.

But, in the West, he's best known as a poet.

Above me, the turquoise tiles are inscribed with Omar Khayyam's

most famous poems.

Like the Shahnameh, it was Khayyam's poetry

that helped keep the flame of Persian literature burning.

The poem is from The Rubaiyat Of Omar Khayyam.

Rubaiyat means "four line rhyming poetry"

and it was made famous in the West during the 19th century

by the translations of the English poet Edward Fitzgerald.

The message of Khayyam's is very much carpe diem,

live, for, tomorrow, you may die.

And this is really something

that the Victorians found refreshing.

It became a book that, during the World War I,

officers certainly had a little copy of this

in their rucksack because you may die

but this is destiny.

This is what has been pre-ordained.

This sense of fatalism might sound familiar.

It echoes the tragic prophecy

of King Ardashir and the belief

in destiny that lies at the heart

of the Zoroastrian religion.

And that's not surprising,

given Omar Khayyam's father was a Zoroastrian

and the city once a major centre of the old religion.

"With them, the seed of wisdom did I sow,

"and with my own hand

"laboured it to grow.

"And this was all the harvest that I reaped.

"I came like water

"and, like wind, I go."

Fatalistic lines like these

were forbidden under Islam,

but, fortunately for Omar Khayyam,

he had the protection of the most powerful man in Persia,

the greatest vizier of them all.

I'm travelling next to the fabled city of Isfahan,

where an extraordinary example of this man's talent and power

can still be seen.

At the time of its construction in 1086,

this was the largest dome in the world.

It was built here in Isfahan

by Nizam al-Mulk...

..patron of Omar Khayyam

and vizier to the latest conqueror of Persia,

the Seljuk Sultan.

Nizam al-Mulk wasn't just a great builder, he was also

a very talented administrator.

These days, we would probably call him a technocrat.

Indeed, the very word administrator or even vizier

totally undersells him.

Nizam al-Mulk ran the Seljuk empire.

Like all the other great Persian viziers,

his aim was to impress on his less sophisticated new rulers

the superiority of Persian civilisation

and political wisdom.

Nizam al-Mulk ran the Seljuk empire

as if he was guided by the spirit of Ferdowsi.

But he went one step further.

He wrote a handbook.

Nizam al-Mulk is an astonishing figure.

This was a man who wrote THE...

..definitive mirror for princes,

the manual for statecraft,

how a ruler should behave

and how a ruler should do everything.

How often he should go hunting,

who he should sleep with,

which slaves he can trust

and which he can't trust,

how he should go about raising an army.

He's borrowing a lot from pre-Islamic motifs,

ideas, Zoroastrianism.

I mean, he brings it all in to, basically,

show the Seljuk Sultan, you know, this is how to govern.

This is how to do it.

This is how you administer.

"Your Highness" we can imagine him saying, "There is no need to train

"your people in the arts of good government.

"I have well-trained administrators ready to do it all,

"ready to collect your taxes in silver dirhams

"from all your many subjects.

"Here, Your Highness, is a book of advice

"and instructions in the art of good government.

"You'll find it indispensable."

In writing the book, Nizam al-Mulk overstepped the mark.

Like the vizier Ja'far in the Aladdin story,

Nizam al-Mulk's employer grew resentful

of the enormous powers he wielded.

They decided, "This old man will not die.

"He's a nuisance and we have to snuff him out",

and his murder in 1092

triggers a series of murders right across the stage.

And, within a year, the entire eastern Islamic world looks

like Hamlet in Act V, Scene V,

you know, nothing but corpses on the stage.

Despite his violent end, Nizam al-Mulk is remembered today

as Iran's own Machiavelli,

the brilliant master of statecraft.

At this intersection in Isfahan, Nizam al-Mulk presides proud

and resolute over the modern city, holding,

I would guess, a copy of his book of government.

The plaque pays tribute to his vision and his wisdom

in ensuring that Persian influence would remain

at the heart of government, whoever was in charge.

Since the invasion of the Arabs,

the Persians had been fighting for the survival of their culture.

500 years later, the Persians had made an incredible comeback.

Their culture and language had endured.

And, thanks to powerful viziers like Nizam al-Mulk,

the system of government had remained Iranian.

The shelf on which great Persian literature would be stored

was also beginning to fill.

There was the work of Omar Khayyam

and, beside it, Ferdowsi's Shahnameh.

Next time...

..I'm going back to the centuries when the savagery

of the Mongol invasions threatened to erase Persia altogether.

But from the ashes of conquest

emerged Persia's golden age,

when craftsmen carved the message of Shi'a Islam in stone,

brick and tile,

and when the influence of the Shahnameh takes off...

This is the way to convince people that I am the rightful king!

..becoming the essential calling card of conquerors,

all seeking to prove their Persian authenticity,

right up to Iran's last Shah...

He genuinely believes that this is his mission

to see himself as a new Cyrus.

..with momentous consequences for the world.

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