Prose, not just poetry

From Refashioning Iran, p 16-17:

The conventional Persian literary histories […] regard poetry as a characteristically Iranian mode of self-expression. With the privileged position of poetry in the invented national mentalite, the prose texts of teh humanities are devalued and scholarly efforts are infrequently spent on editing and publishing non-poetic texts. Thus a large body of historically significant prose texts of modernity have remained unpublished. Thsi willful marginalization of prose is often masked as a sign of the prominence of poetry as an intrinsically Iranian mode of expression.