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It is well known that books under this title, "the proper and the improper" or "the licit and the illicit" are to be found among the Pahlavi tracts the time of whose composition can be fixed somewhere between the seventh and the ninth centuries A.D. Comparing the Pahlavi tracts with reference to these questions with Arabic books on good and bad qualities and manners, we have to bear in mind the general features, general outline, as well as the conditions of civilisation of the period when these books were written, in other words, the circumstances of their intimate relation generally of a cultural nature, particularly of a literary form obtaining between the Arab and Persian nations, and between Islam and Parsism.
Later Judaism is like Parsism in arranging the heavenly beings in a hierarchy, and assigning to the chief angels special functions in the administration of God's kingdom, and still more so when the upper hierarchy is confronted by a lower one with a great adversary and father of lies at its head. But this takes place long after the Persian contact.
Later Parsism, both in Iran and in India, has shown a disposition to cast off dualism, and to become, both philosophically and practically, a monistic system. S. B. E. vols. iv., xxiii. The Zendavesta, vols. v., xviii., xxiv., xxxvii., xlvii. The Histories of Antiquity of Duncker, Maspero, and Ed. Meyer. Haug's Essays on the Sacred Language, Writings, and Religion of the Parsis.
As a matter of fact, the rigorous ordinance which awarded the punishment of death for apostacy could not have existed before Parsism became with Ardeshir the State religion.
The doctrine of immortality, as the continuation of man's moral development, which was formerly unknown in Israel, appeared, as in the later Parsism, in the form of a bodily resurrection of the dead, at first of the righteous only, but afterwards in the form of a general resurrection, by mediation of the Messiah, at whose appearing, which was expected just before the end of the present state of things, the great judgment of the world, of living and dead, was to be held, heaven and earth renewed, and the kingdom of God founded.
The old dualism of force and matter, beneficent and destructive powers of nature, light and darkness, becomes in Parsism moral. The deity, no longer identified with nature, becomes a personal, spiritual being, the creator of mankind; and the end of the world's development is conceived as the triumph of the good.
The appreciation of the influence of Parsism on Islam has only just commenced. But we are already in a position to emphasise the great influence, which Parsi ethics have exercised on Islam and this influence has been attested by a number of Greek and Christian witnesses.
Later, as it seems, the theology and worship of the neighboring nomadic Arya penetrated to these nations, and caused a religious conflict which ended with the migration of Arya to the south. From these conceptions there was developed in the later Parsism the system of the four periods of the world, each of three thousand years, in the book "Bundehesh."
The ethics of this religion comprises the high moral requirements of Sufism and Parsism: complete toleration, equality of rights among all men, purity in thought, word and deed. The demand of monogamy, too, was added later.
The fact is that Ibn Miskawaihi worked upon that class of Persian material, for instance the Pand Nameh or Andarz, which had nothing to do with the province of the indefinite gnomic literature but which had the character of a catechism and therefore expresses a definite system of religious morals, the morals of Parsism.
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