A Persianate society, or Persified society, is:
- a society that is either based on, or strongly influenced by
- the Persian language, culture, literature, art, and/or identity
The term "Persianate" is a neologism credited to Marshall Hodgson
- In his 1974 book, "The Venture of Islam: The expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods", he defined it thus:
- The rise of Persian had more than purely literary consequences:
- it served to carry a new overall cultural orientation within Islamdom
- Most of the more local languages of high culture that later emerged among Muslims
- depended upon Persian wholly or in part for their prime literary inspiration
- We may call all these cultural traditions, carried in Persian or reflecting Persian inspiration,
- 'Persianate' by extension
The term consequently does not solely designate ethnic Persians
- but has been extended to include those societies that may not have been ethnically Persian or Iranian,
- but whose linguistic, material, or artistic cultural activities were influenced by, or based on Persianate culture
Examples of pre-19th-century Persianate societies were:
- the Seljuq,
- Timurid, and
- Ottoman dynasties,
- as well as the Qarmatians, who entertained Persianate notions of cyclical time even though they did not invoke the Iranian genealogies, in which these precepts had converged
"Persianate" is a multiracial cultural category, but it appears at times to be:
- a religious category
- of a racial origin.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persianate_society
