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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Iran
Index
The beduin Arabs who toppled the Sassanid Empire were propelled
not only by a desire for conquest but also by a new religion,
Islam. The Prophet Muhammad, a member of the Hashimite clan of the
powerful tribe of Quraysh, proclaimed his prophetic mission in
Arabia in 612 and eventually won over the city of his birth, Mecca,
to the new faith
(see Religious Life
, ch. 2). Within one year of
Muhammad's death in 632, Arabia itself was secure enough to allow
his secular successor, Abu Bakr, the first caliph, to begin the
campaign against the Byzantine and Sassanid empires.
Abu Bakr defeated the Byzantine army at Damascus in 635 and
then began his conquest of Iran. In 637 the Arab forces occupied
the Sassanid capital of Ctesiphon (which they renamed Madain), and
in 641-42 they defeated the Sassanid army at Nahavand. After that,
Iran lay open to the invaders. The Islamic conquest was aided by
the material and social bankruptcy of the Sassanids; the native
populations had little to lose by cooperating with the conquering
power. Moreover, the Muslims offered relative religious tolerance
and fair treatment to populations that accepted Islamic rule
without resistance. It was not until around 650, however, that
resistance in Iran was quelled. Conversion to Islam, which offered
certain advantages, was fairly rapid among the urban population but
slower among the peasantry and the dihqans. The majority of
Iranians did not become Muslim until the ninth century.
Although the conquerors, especially the Umayyads (the Muslim
rulers who succeeded Muhammad from 661-750), tended to stress the
primacy of Arabs among Muslims, the Iranians were gradually
integrated into the new community. The Muslim conquerors adopted
the Sassanid coinage system and many Sassanid administrative
practices, including the office of vizier, or minister, and the
divan, a bureau or register for controlling state revenue
and expenditure that became a characteristic of administration
throughout Muslim lands. Later caliphs adopted Iranian court
ceremonial practices and the trappings of Sassanid monarchy. Men of
Iranian origin served as administrators after the conquest, and
Iranians contributed significantly to all branches of Islamic
learning, including philology, literature, history, geography,
jurisprudence, philosophy, medicine, and the sciences.
The Arabs were in control, however. The new state religion,
Islam, imposed its own system of beliefs, laws, and social mores.
In regions that submitted peacefully to Muslim rule, landowners
kept their land. But crown land, land abandoned by fleeing owners,
and land taken by conquest passed into the hands of the new state.
This included the rich lands of the Sawad, a rich, alluvial plain
in central and southern Iraq. Arabic became the official language
of the court in 696, although Persian continued to be widely used
as the spoken language. The shuubiyya literary controversy
of the ninth through the eleventh centuries, in which Arabs and
Iranians each lauded their own and denigrated the other's cultural
traits, suggests the survival of a certain sense of distinct
Iranian identity. In the ninth century, the emergence of more
purely Iranian ruling dynasties witnessed the revival of the
Persian language, enriched by Arabic loanwords and using the Arabic
script, and of Persian literature.
Another legacy of the Arab conquest was Shia Islam, which,
although it has come to be identified closely with Iran, was not
initially an Iranian religious movement. It originated with the
Arab Muslims. In the great schism of Islam, one group among the
community of believers maintained that leadership of the community
following the death of Muhammad rightfully belonged to Muhammad's
son-in-law, Ali, and to his descendants. This group came to be
known as the Shiat Ali, the partisans of Ali, or the Shias. Another
group, supporters of Muawiya (a rival contender for the caliphate
following the murder of Uthman), challenged Ali's election to the
caliphate in 656. After Ali was assassinated while praying in a
mosque at Kufa in 661, Muawiya was declared caliph by the majority
of the Islamic community. He became the first caliph of the Umayyad
dynasty, which had its capital at Damascus.
Ali's youngest son, Husayn, refused to pay the homage commanded
by Muawiya's son and successor Yazid I and fled to Mecca, where he
was asked to lead the Shias--mostly those living in present-day
Iraq--in a revolt. At Karbala, in Iraq, Husayn's band of 200 men
and women followers, unwilling to surrender, were finally cut down
by about 4,000 Umayyad troops. The Umayyad leader received Husayn's
head, and Husayn's death in 680 on the tenth of Moharram continues
to be observed as a day of mourning for all Shias
(see Religious Life
, ch. 2).
The largest concentration of Shias in the first century of
Islam was in southern Iraq. It was not until the sixteenth century,
under the Safavids, that a majority of Iranians became Shias. Shia
Islam became then, as it is now, the state religion.
The Abbasids, who overthrew the Umayyads in 750, while
sympathetic to the Iranian Shias, were clearly an Arab dynasty.
They revolted in the name of descendants of Muhammad's uncle,
Abbas, and the House of Hashim. Hashim was an ancestor of both the
Shia and the Abbas, or
Sunni (see Glossary),
line, and the Abbasid
movement enjoyed the support of both Sunni and Shia Muslims. The
Abbasid army consisted primarily of Khorasanians and was led by an
Iranian general, Abu Muslim. It contained both Iranian and Arab
elements, and the Abbasids enjoyed both Iranian and Arab support.
Nevertheless, the Abbasids, although sympathetic to the Shias,
whose support they wished to retain, did not encourage the more
extremist Shia aspirations. The Abbasids established their capital
at Baghdad. Al Mamun, who seized power from his brother, Amin, and
proclaimed himself caliph in 811, had an Iranian mother and thus
had a base of support in Khorasan. The Abbasids continued the
centralizing policies of their predecessors. Under their rule, the
Islamic world experienced a cultural efflorescence and the
expansion of trade and economic prosperity. These were developments
in which Iran shared.
Iran's next ruling dynasties descended from nomadic,
Turkic-speaking warriors who had been moving out of Central Asia
into Transoxiana for more than a millennium. The Abbasid caliphs
began enlisting these people as slave warriors as early as the
ninth century. Shortly thereafter the real power of the Abbasid
caliphs began to wane; eventually they became religious figureheads
while the warrior slaves ruled. As the power of the Abbasid caliphs
diminished, a series of independent and indigenous dynasties rose
in various parts of Iran, some with considerable influence and
power. Among the most important of these overlapping dynasties were
the Tahirids in Khorasan (820-72); the Saffarids in Sistan
(867-903); and the Samanids (875-1005), originally at Bukhara (also
cited as Bokhara). The Samanids eventually ruled an area from
central Iran to India. In 962 a Turkish slave governor of the
Samanids, Alptigin, conquered Ghazna (in present-day Afghanistan)
and established a dynasty, the Ghaznavids, that lasted to 1186.
Several Samanid cities had been lost to another Turkish group,
the Seljuks, a clan of the Oghuz (or Ghuzz) Turks, who lived north
of the Oxus River (present-day Amu Darya). Their leader, Tughril
Beg, turned his warriors against the Ghaznavids in Khorasan. He
moved south and then west, conquering but not wasting the cities in
his path. In 1055 the caliph in Baghdad gave Tughril Beg robes,
gifts, and the title King of the East. Under Tughril Beg's
successor, Malik Shah (1072-92), Iran enjoyed a cultural and
scientific renaissance, largely attributed to his brilliant Iranian
vizier, Nizam al Mulk. These leaders established the observatory
where Umar (Omar) Khayyam did much of his experimentation for a new
calendar, and they built religious schools in all the major towns.
They brought Abu Hamid Ghazali, one of the greatest Islamic
theologians, and other eminent scholars to the Seljuk capital at
Baghdad and encouraged and supported their work.
A serious internal threat to the Seljuks, however, came from
the Ismailis, a secret sect with headquarters at Alumut between
Rasht and Tehran. They controlled the immediate area for more than
150 years and sporadically sent out adherents to strengthen their
rule by murdering important officials. The word assassins,
which was applied to these murderers, developed from a European
corruption of the name applied to them in Syria,
hashishiyya, because folklore had it that they smoked
hashish before their missions.
Data as of December 1987
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