Persianate Islam and Its Regional Spread

The civilizational area that grew in the Islamic era on the basis of the Persian language (as the lingua franca) centered on present-day Iran but stretched far into Central Asia, as well as the Indian subcontinent. As such, its cultural and civilizational unity justifies calling it the Persianate world. With the revival of Persian, written in the Arabic alphabet in the tenth century, the major commentary of the Qur’an was translated into Persian, and Imam Maturidi wrote a concise creed in Persian. Under the impact of Persian Sufi texts in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a distinct Persianate variant of Islam emerged in that civilizational zone. The chapter discusses its components as a topic in civilizational analysis via its spread to India in the thirteenth century, the Malay sultanate in the fifteenth century, and subsequently into Indonesia and the Philippines.