A New Study of the Status of Persian and Arabic Languages and Literature in the Court of Ya'qub ibn al-Layth al-Saffar and His Successors

Identifying the historical moment which saw the first Persian speaking poet is a key – and yet confusing and undeterminable - issue in today’s scholarly circles of Persian language and poetry. According to some scholars, the court of Ya'qub ibn al-Layth al-Saffar and his successors revived Persian language and poetry through shunning the scriptural importance of Arabic language and poetry. In contrast to this observation, the present study believes that the court of Ya'qub ibn al- Layth al-Saffar and his successors – especially in the 10th century CE – did not exercise a linguistic and literary phobia against Arabic language and literature, and that it even encouraged the linguistic and literary status of the Arabic language and poetry in Persian language and poetry. After identifying the status of Arabic language and poetry through surveying pertinent library sources, the present study presents a number of reasons for not considering this court – and, by extension, this period – a revivalist period of Persian language and poetry. Through its analytic-descriptive methodology, the study also believes that the false claim of considering this period revivalist comes from a book called The History of Sistan.