Doug Metzger
speaker
2,647 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 11 Sep
Doug Metzger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It will be helpful to remember that some of this golden age's lustre came from Persian fire and the worship of a very ancient deity of light and goodness called Ormazd.
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Over these last few shows, we've turned our focus toward the Persian side of early Islamic history.
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We've learned about the late Sasanian Empire's history and politics, and what the term King of Kings actually meant.
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We've learned about Zoroastrianism in Iran during this later period, and how, although it was a majority religion with occasional ties to monarchical power, it was a religion.
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of variants practiced alongside numerous other ideologies still widespread in the world today.
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We learned that the Abbasid Revolution of the late 740s came from the East.
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A generation after it ended, that celebrated Persian bureaucratic dynasty called the Barmakids attached itself to Abbasid leadership in Baghdad and helped keep the empire running.
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These past three programs on the Abbasid Caliphate and then the Byzantine Sasanian War of 602-628, and just now the Zoroastrian Bundahijan have given us an idea of the high-level history of how old Sasanian Persian culture met and melded with new Arab Islamic culture in the 600s and afterward.
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With the stage now set, with our brief
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If Persian excursion now complete, and the main historical groups introduced, it's time to move back into literature in order to get a more personal view of what life was like on the ground in present-day Iraq and Iran in the 700s and 800s.
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Our first author from the period of classical Arabic poetry will be the Persian-born writer and translator Ibn al-Muqafah, the author of one of the most
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Important works of the entire medieval period, Khalila and Dimna, which he wrote around 750 CE.
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Ibn al-Muqafah, born in the southwest of what is today Iran, spent most of his career in Basra, the naval of Mesopotamia, and cultural heart of the Muslim world for a couple of generations during the 700s.
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Ibn al-Muqafah learned Arabic and converted to
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Islam, serving Arab governors in first Iran and then Iraq, and producing a sheaf of translations and original works.
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Ibn al-Muqafah is an early figure from classical Arabic literature, and his contributions to it reflected his background and historical moment.
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While he wrote original works, he's most famous for rendering Middle Persian books into the contemporary Arabic.
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Arabic of the mid-700s.
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The most famous of these books is the one we'll look at in our next show.
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Kalilah and Dimna is, in a word, a collection of allegorical beast fables.
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Showing 2601–2620 of 2,647 · page 131 of 133
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