Who brought Sanskrit to Baghdad? This is how Iranian Buddhists, Zoroastrians changed Arabs

#thinkingmedieval
In India today, the Arab conquests of the 7th to the 8th centuries CE are confidently proclaimed as proof of “Islam’s” iconoclastic savagery. But the medieval world isn’t that simple. For a few decades in the 8th century, as the Abbasid Caliphate was being consolidated, a dynasty of former Buddhists from Balkh (present-day Afghanistan) ranked among the most powerful in the empire. Anirudh Kanisetti explores their story.

Sources:
Abbas, I. “Barmakids.” Encyclopædia Iranica, III/8, 806-809. Available online at https://iranicaonline.org/articles/ba... (accessed on 18 December 2023).
van Bladel, Kevin. "The Bactrian Background of the Barmakids." in Akasoy, Anna, Charles SF Burnett, and Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim, eds. Islam and Tibet: Interactions along the Musk Routes. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2011.
Vaziri, Mostafa. Buddhism in Iran: an anthropological approach to traces and influences. Springer, 2012.


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