The integration of Sasanian Studies into the broader field of Late Antiquity is by now a well accepted proposition, one that is being applied with varying degrees of success in recent, more general studies on Sasanian Iran. However, in spite of the importance of synchrony as an attempt to evaluate Sasanian Iran in dialectics with other actors of the late antique world, a diachronic view, which assesses the impact of formative cultural forces throughout ancient Iranian history, as a corrective to the synchronic perspective, is of methodological importance. The institutionalization of religious groups, that is, the creation of the Exilarchate and the Church of Persia, within the Sasanian realm may benefit from comparisons with Achaemenid religious practices, and serve a a paradigm for diachrony.

The study of polemics between religions in the late Sasanian-early Islamic era is a crucial albeit undertheorized field of study. This presentation explores how scholars can and cannot access textual data that speaks to the issue of interreligious dialogues. What are the sources for reconstructing polemics between Jews, Zoroastrians, Christians, and early Muslims, and how should scholars study them in light of questions of polemics? Does one need to limit oneself to works of literature that explicitly engage the outside world--such as the late Zoroastrian work, the Shkand Gumming Wizar--or are there polemics between the lines of legal and narrative writings? This paper will address these questions through a selected study of Jewish and Zoroastrian writings in circulation from around the sixth through tenth centuries C.E., including the Babylonian Talmud, Geonic, Karaite literature, and Zoroastrian Pahlavi literature.

The Islamic conquest of the Sasanian Empire inaugurated, among many other transformations, the progressive Islamization of the region. The pace and mechanisms of this transformation remain poorly understood. No demographic data survives from early Islamic Iraq, and the question of Islamization did not much exercise authors from that period. Yet the progress of Islamization in the capital province of the Abbasid caliphate is a significant hidden variable in the study of Muslim relations with non-Muslims and the Abbasid state’s interactions with its subject populations. One scholar estimated that Abbasid rule witnessed the change from a small Muslim minority in Iraq (16% in 791) to a large supermajority (84% converted by 976), and a large number of studies have proposed various motivations and mechanisms for mass Islamization during the early Abbasid period. This paper will adopt a spatial approach to Islamization, looking for differential developments in different areas within Iraq, with particular sensitivity to the distinctions between newly founded and pre-Islamic cities, and between urban and rural society. The study is based on a comparison of Muslim geographical sources (such as al-Balādhurī, Ibn Ḥawqal, and al-Muqaddasī) with Christian sources in Syriac and Arabic (including Ishoʿdnaḥ of Baṣra, Eliyā b. ʿUbayd al-Dimashqī, and ʿAmr b. Mattā), as well as archaeological evidence where available. Rather than attempting a quantitative approach on such uneven data, this paper will offer a rhetorically sensitive reading of relevant literary passages, anecdotes which often unself-consciously reveal what each author presents as normal or unusual. These readings will synthesize not only reports of multi-religious presence, but also the changing distribution of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and monastic networks, as well as the spread of mosques and changing uses of religious buildings. This paper will argue that Islamization was more rapid in southern Iraq than in the north, but as late as 950, substantial areas of the countryside had been only lightly influenced by Islamization. This suggests that we must explain mass Islamization by forces relevant to the period of Abbasid disintegration or later, rather than to that of Abbasid dominance, and certain aspects of Morony’s thesis on the continuities between Sasanian and early Islamic Iraq may be extended to the end of the first millennium. Rather than replacing an Arab nationalist story with an Iranian, this paper suggests the importance of considering Jews and Christians as links between the multi-religious and multi-ethnic Sasanian Empire and the Abbasid caliphate.

This paper argues that an interdisciplinary method of approaching local histories from the Persianate world written in Arabic and Persian between the 10th and 15th centuries opens up new avenues for understanding how communities, rulers, and individuals framed issues of authority and identity in early Islamic Persia. How did authors balance their multiple identities as Persians, Muslims, and members of various regional, provincial, ethnic, sectarian, ideological, and professional communities? Patterns within city and regional histories from the peripheries of the Islamic empire – with its perceived heartlands in Arabia, Syria, and Iraq – identify local structures of authority and legitimacy. Histories produced in Anatolia, another notable periphery, provide a heuristic device to flesh out a comparative perspective. With this approach – freed from the reconstruction of events as the primary goal – intriguing dreams, fanciful genealogies, and suspect etymologies are transformed from data-poor curiosities into rich sources of information about identity, rhetoric, authority, legitimacy, and center-periphery relations. Authors positioned their communities to better fit into the scope of Islamic history. Consequently, local histories from Persia both respond to and challenge assumptions about the centrality of Arabs, Arabic, Arabia, Iraq, Syria, ṣaḥāba, tābiʿūn, ʿAlids, sayyids, and sharifs while at the same claiming their own centeredness and importance within these same frameworks. The Persian local histories from the 10th – early 15th centuries analyzed in this paper are Tārīkh-i Bukhārā, Tārīkh-i Bayhaq, Tārīkh-i Qum, Tārīkh-Sīstān, and Tārīkh-i Tabaristān. The Anatolian sources considered as a heuristic counterpoint are al-Avāmir al-ʿalāʾiyya fī al-umūr al-ʿalāʾiyya, Musāmarat al-akhbār va musāyarat al-akhyār, Tārīkh-i Āl-i Saljūq dar Ānātūlī, Saljūqnāma, and Abū Muslim-nāmah. Authors of local histories from the Persianate world argued for the legitimacy and centrality of their communities on the peripheries of empire by including narratives about descendants of the Prophet associated with the region; incorporating narratives of legitimating dreams and visions; associating ṣaḥāba with the land; highlighting sites of pious visitation (ziyārat) and other sources of blessing or sacred power (baraka); and incorporating sacralizing etymologies. In contrast to the Persian texts, the Anatolian sources from the 13th – 14th centuries focus on the construction of dynastic and specifically Seljuq legitimacy and couch claims to legitimacy in terms of military success, genealogy, and the virtues of kingly rule. This paper concludes by arguing for the broader theoretical implications of a functionally skeptical reading of local history attuned to a metanarrative constructed by authors for audiences with hybrid Perso-Muslim identities.