É. Apor , I. Ormos (ed.): Goldziher Memorial Conference, June 21–22, 2000, Budapest.
SKJAERV0, P. Oktor: Goldziher and Iranian Elements in Islam
GOLDZIHER AND IRANIAN ELEMENTS IN ISLAM P. Oktor Skjaervo Cambridge, MA The question of pre-Islamic Iranian elements in the early belief system of Islam is not a frequently discussed one. In fact, in my experience, scholars of the early Iranian religion often take little interest in Islam, whereas scholars of Islam are often unhappy with the notion that Islam should have adopted ideas from the Iranian religion. However, the fact that certain elements are clearly of Iranian origin would seem to warrant an extensive investigation of this question. I am not myself well acquainted with Islam and its beliefs, being primarily an Old Iranian scholar. 1 am also not a historian of religions, but rather a philologist and linguist. It is therefore not as a specialist on early Islam or even late Iranian religion that I am here today, and in principle I would have nothing to do in a conference dealing with Islamic scholars and scholarship. Nevertheless, when I received the invitation for the Memorial Conference, I checked the bibliography of Goldziher to see if there might be something I could give a short paper on and discovered that Goldziher had taken an interest in what he called Parsism, that is, the religion of the Parsis, or Zoroastrians. At the International Congress of the History of Religions in Paris in September 1900, almost exactly one hundred years ago, Goldziher presented an article entitled Tslamisme et parsisme.' The article was published in the Acts of the Congress and was later translated into English and included under the title 'The Influence of Parsism on Islam' in C. P. Tiele's book The Religion of the Iranian Peoples. Here I simply wish to present a brief summary of this article and add some comments. Ostensibly, the article is a critique of the common opinion that Islam was a unique and instantaneous creation, the notion that "L'islamisme a jailli d'un seul jet et «au plein jour»," that is, "burst forth all at once into the light of day." Goldziher begins by pointing out that the teachings of the Hadith do not go back simply to the earliest form of Islam as seen in the Koran, but represent a multiplicity of often contradictory tendencies. Thus, he points out, while contemporary scholarship (that is, of the end of the 19th century) had developed a much more critical attitude toward the internal , Muslim, tradition and did not automatically take its claims to authority for granted, yet, he goes on, Muslim scholarship must also take into consideration another source for understanding the beginnings of Islam. 245
