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Persianate society


A Persianate society, or Persified society, is a society that is either based on, or strongly influenced by the Persian language, culture, literature, art, and/or identity.

The term "Persianate" is a neologism credited to Marshall Hodgson. In his 1974 book, The Venture of Islam: The expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods, he defined it thus: "The rise of Persian had more than purely literary consequences: it served to carry a new overall cultural orientation within Islamdom. ... Most of the more local languages of high culture that later emerged among Muslims ... depended upon Persian wholly or in part for their prime literary inspiration. We may call all these cultural traditions, carried in Persian or reflecting Persian inspiration, 'Persianate' by extension."

The term consequently does not solely designate ethnic Persians, but has been extended to include those societies that may not have been ethnically Persian or Iranian, but whose linguistic, material, or artistic cultural activities were influenced by, or based on Persianate culture. Examples of pre-19th-century Persianate societies were the Seljuq,Timurid,Mughal, and Ottoman dynasties, as well as the Qarmatians who entertained Persianate notions of cyclical time even though they did not invoke the Iranian genealogies in which these precepts had converged. "Persianate" is a multiracial cultural category, but it appears at times to be a religious category of a racial origin.

Persianate culture flourished for nearly fourteen centuries. It was a mixture of Persian and Islamic cultures that eventually became the dominant culture of the ruling and elite classes of Greater Iran, Asia Minor, and South Asia.


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