Literature in Iran
Persian is Iran's official language and the language of the country's ethnic majority (i.e., the Persians), and Persian literature has been the country's most influential literary tradition. Apart from Iran, Persian literature was used and developed further through several medieval Persianate societies in Asia Minor, Central Asia, and South Asia, and the language is still used widely in Central Asia (Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) and Afghanistan.
Persian studies
The coming of Islam announced the end of the world of Antiquity and the replacement of Zoroastrianism with Islam as the most important faith of the Iranian plateau. Iran became part of the great Islamic community, the Ummah, and saw the rise of Arabic as the new language of literature and learning. Iranian-born grammarians, rhetoricians, scientists, philosophers, theologians, contributed to the intellectual vitality of this new and vibrant civilization alongside other Muslims from other nationalities. Among the most prominent are:Many regions of this Arab Empire saw the almost total replacement the indigenous language by Arabic: the pre-Islamic languages of Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and North Africa exist only in isolated communities and have been largely replaced by Arabic. Not so in Iran, where the Persian language continued, albeit with an infusion of Arabic vocabulary, and thrived as the courtly language of the Islamic Orient. In fact it was in the Eastern reaches of the Caliphate, far from the seat of Arab power in Baghdad, where New Persian reemerged as a literary and courtly language.