The Arab conquest and the survival of Persian
Muslim Arab armies destroy the Sasanian Empire; over the following centuries most Iranians become Muslim but keep their language and much of their culture.
- A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind — Michael Axworthy, Basic Books (2008)
- Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire — Touraj Daryaee, I.B. Tauris (2009)
- Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings (trans. Dick Davis) — Abolqasem Ferdowsi, Viking (2006)
- An Introduction to Shi'i Islam — Moojan Momen, Yale University Press (1985)
In the 630s, Arab armies inspired by the new faith of Islam struck an empire exhausted by decades of war with Byzantium. At Qadisiyya, in today’s Iraq, in about 636 or 637, they routed the main Sasanian army; the capital Ctesiphon fell soon after. In 642 the battle of Nahavand, in the Zagros mountains, which Arab chroniclers called “the victory of victories”, broke organised resistance. The last Sasanian king, Yazdegerd III, fled east and was killed near Merv in 651.
- Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire — Touraj Daryaee, I.B. Tauris (2009)
- A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind — Michael Axworthy, Basic Books (2008)
A slow conversion
Iran did not become Muslim overnight. Zoroastrians, Christians and Jews became protected but taxed communities, and many converted over the following centuries for reasons of belief, career and tax. Historians generally think Muslims became a majority in Iran only by about the ninth or tenth century. Some Zoroastrians held on in desert towns like Yazd, and some emigrated to India, becoming the Parsis.
- A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind — Michael Axworthy, Basic Books (2008)
- Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices — Mary Boyce, Routledge (1979)
Persianising Islam
What makes Iran unusual is what happened next. Unlike Egypt, Syria or Iraq, Iran kept its own language. Persians staffed the bureaucracy of the Abbasid caliphate, which from 750 ruled from Baghdad on the edge of the old Persian heartland and borrowed heavily from Sasanian court culture. Persian scholars wrote in Arabic and became central to Islamic learning: the grammarian Sibawayh, the hadith scholar Bukhari, the philosophers and scientists al-Razi and Ibn Sina (Avicenna).
- A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind — Michael Axworthy, Basic Books (2008)
Meanwhile, in the eastern lands of Khorasan and Transoxiana, local dynasties, above all the Samanids (819–999), patronised a new kind of Persian: written in Arabic script, enriched with Arabic words, but grammatically and spiritually Persian. The poet Rudaki wrote in it in the tenth century, and Ferdowsi used it to write the Shahnameh. This “New Persian” is, with relatively little change, the language Iranians speak today; a schoolchild in Tehran can still read Ferdowsi.
- A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind — Michael Axworthy, Basic Books (2008)
- Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings (trans. Dick Davis) — Abolqasem Ferdowsi, Viking (2006)
- Shahnameh — Encyclopaedia Britannica
Two stories
How Iranians talk about this period depends a great deal on who is talking. For secular nationalists, especially since the twentieth century, it is a wound: the end of a glorious empire, sometimes summed up as “two centuries of silence”. For the devout, and for the Islamic Republic, it is the moment Iran received Islam, and Iranians’ Shia faith is a source of pride, not loss.
- Modern Iran since 1797: Reform and Revolution — Ali M. Ansari, Routledge (2019)
- An Introduction to Shi'i Islam — Moojan Momen, Yale University Press (1985)
Either way, the result was a people who adopted a religion from Arabia but never became Arab, a distinction many Iranians are keen that outsiders understand.
- A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind — Michael Axworthy, Basic Books (2008)
- Iran — Encyclopaedia Britannica
A national catastrophe in which a refined civilisation was conquered by desert armies, followed by "two centuries of silence" (the title of Abdolhossein Zarrinkoub's famous 1957 book) before Persian culture reasserted itself. Iran survived by Persianising Islam rather than being Arabised.
- A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind — Michael Axworthy, Basic Books (2008)
- Modern Iran since 1797: Reform and Revolution — Ali M. Ansari, Routledge (2019)
Iranians embraced Islam and became some of its greatest scholars, from the hadith collector Bukhari to the grammarian Sibawayh and the philosopher Ibn Sina. The conquest brought Iran the true faith, and, for Shia Iranians, a deep bond with the family of the Prophet.
- A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind — Michael Axworthy, Basic Books (2008)
- An Introduction to Shi'i Islam — Moojan Momen, Yale University Press (1985)
The military conquest was quick, but conversion was slow, probably reaching a majority only by the ninth or tenth century. Persians shaped the Islamic empire as much as it shaped them, especially under the Abbasids, and a new Persian literary language emerged in the east in the ninth and tenth centuries.
- A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind — Michael Axworthy, Basic Books (2008)
- Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire — Touraj Daryaee, I.B. Tauris (2009)
- Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings (trans. Dick Davis) — Abolqasem Ferdowsi, Viking (2006)
Why it matters today
This is the hinge of Iranian identity. Iranians are Muslim, mostly Shia, yet they are not Arab, and they are very aware of it. How you tell this story, as a catastrophe or as the coming of the true faith, often says a lot about your politics: secular nationalists and the Islamic Republic tell it very differently. Calling Iranians "Arabs" remains one of the quickest ways to offend.