The conquest that effected the strongest influence upon Persian music—and indeed upon most aspects of Persian life—was, of course, the Islamic conquest in the seventh century. The great intellectual movements of the ninth and tenth centuries, which resulted in the translation of the Greek philosophers into Arabic and the writing of the great Perso-Arabic treatises on music, left Persian musicians with a concern for the science of music, especially the measurement of intervals. This preoccupation with the mathematical and metaphysical sides of music is evident in the contents of all the theoretical treatises produced in Iran from the tenth century onward and is reflected even today in the Persian attitude that a country's music ought to have a scientific basis to be respectable. If the coming of Islam gave to Persian music a particular direction, it performed a serious disservice at the same time, for although the Arabs looked with favor on the theory of music, they disapproved of the practice. Thus, the Islamic prohibitionagainst music eliminated for Persian music what was the most important stimulus to music in the West—the patronage of the church. In the face of opposition from religious leaders, Persian art music was driven underground and kept alive only in the privacy of the royal court or the nobleman's home, out of public view. Even though the effectiveness of the prohibition varied from century to century depending on the relative power of the king and the clergy, the social pressures against the performance of music resulting from this attitude did serve to keep Persian music from extensive technical development over a period of many centuries (Source: Persian Classical Music).
Persian Classic Music: Performer-Composer Dialectic
