AHC/WI: Persian (Farsi) remains lingua franca of Middle-East

What happens if Persian (or rather Farsi) ended up as lingua franca of the Middle-Eastern world, rather than Arabic?

Persian is the second lingua franca of the Islamic world, in particular in the eastern region. Aside from serving as the state and administrative language in many Islamic dynasties, some of them include Mughals and early Ottomans, Farsi also serves as Persian cultural and political norms used by the cultural elites from the Balkans to India.

Today, Persian serves as a lingua franca in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan.

Arabic (of the Quranic dialect) in OTL remains as lingua franca due to the fact, there're more Arabic speakers than those of Iranic-language speakers. That, also on religious grounds since Arabic is the language of the Qur'an.
 
Persian never was the lingua franca; Aramaic was, pretty much all the way from the Achaemenids to Muhammad. To do this you'd need a very early Achaemenid POD, and one which I fear won't be easy considering how populous and culturally relevant the Fertile Crescent was for any Middle Eastern kingdom.

Butterflying Islam (easy with pretty much any POD in the fifth or sixth centuries) will keep Arabic as a regional, albeit regionally important, language. Doing so will also probably boost Middle Persian's status as a literary and state language, but actually getting Mesopotamians and Levantines to prefer speaking to each other in a completely foreign language rather than their own mutually-intelligible native dialects is a real challenge.
 
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Wasn't Persian widespread in Mesopotamia by the late Sassanid period?

Persian never was the lingua franca; Aramaic was, pretty much all the way from the Achaemenids to Muhammad. To do this you'd need a very early Achaemenid POD, and one which I fear won't be easy considering how populous and culturally relevant the Fertile Crescent was for any Middle Eastern kingdom.

Butterflying Islam (easy with pretty much any POD in the fifth or sixth centuries) will keep Arabic as a regional, albeit regionally important, language. Doing so will also probably boost Middle Persian's status as a literary and state language, but actually getting Mesopotamians and Levantines to prefer speaking to each other in a completely foreign language rather than their own mutually-intelligible native dialects is a real challenge.
If Arabic replaced Levantine I'm not sure what stops Persian from replacing it as well.
 

Albert.Nik

Banned
I have three timelines:
A strong Kushan(or Graeco-Bactrian or any Unified Indian and Iranian Central Asian empire like that) Empire survives encompassing parts of Iran and central Asia and is friendly with Iran,
Persian Empire is less erratic in its last days and goes back to the glory days of the Achaemenid empire,
Roman and Persian friendship.
 
Persian was the elite lingua franca in the Early Modern era.

All right, but that's not really what people mean by "lingua franca" in most cases. I think it's perfectly reasonable to assume OP meant "the language of common intercourse", in which case you've got Aramaic leading straight to Arabic.

Wasn't Persian widespread in Mesopotamia by the late Sassanid period?

Persian was widespread as a state and literary language, but for trade and communication between Mesopotamians and Levantines Aramaic was the basic and universally-understood language. Which is understandable, since it was native to them.

If Arabic replaced Levantine I'm not sure what stops Persian from replacing it as well.

Long story, but the short is that it can't really apply to Persian without a dramatic shift in Persian governance. The Arabian peninsula gradually became more populous and less socioeconomically equal over the course of the fifth and sixth centuries, which led to a substantial emigration to Iraq (such that Lower Mesopotamia was already called ʿIrāq ʿArabī by Muhammad's time), so the Islamic conquests already had a substantial Arabic-speaking population to draw upon. Moreover, Islam was institutionally concerned with propagating the Arabic language and identity. In the Persian case, you don't have either sufficient emigration from the Iranian plateau (that had already happened a millennium earlier and with Elam, not Iraq) or a mass-religious motive to Persianize. People have a tendency to underestimate cosmopolitanism; the Persians did it just fine.
 
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