According to the earliest Arabic sources, the mid-seventh century witnessed the permanent and complete subjugation of almost the entire ancient Iranian cultural world from Iraq to Sind. Recent research has shown, however, that this smooth-and-permanent-early-conquest tradition is, in fact, largely a wishful prettification of history rather than a description of historical fact, and also heavily influenced by ?Abbbsid-era Islamic conceptions of a centralized Sasanian state. While this recent work has shed much light on the political and religious history of the northern and western Iranian lands, far less attention has been devoted to the political, military, and religious tension between Iranian relicts and the new Islamic order in the history of the Southeast, the area which today constitutes the heartland of Afghanistan. In fact, since Bosworth's trailblazing studies of forty years ago, nothing at all has been written about the ongoing wars of the S st?nt borderlands in early Islamic times. The present study will address this lacuna by examining the role of the surviving ruling dynasties of Late Antiquity, known as the Zunb ls and K bul-Sh?hs, in the provinces of Zamsndfwar, Znbulist,n, and al-Rukhkhaj (Arachosia) throughout the early Islamic period, from the beginning of the Muslim conquests in the mid-seventh century until the political disintegration of the caliphate in the mid-ninth century and the reorganization of the eastern Islamic world under the daffdrids. In tracing the ongoing importance of these kingdoms, this study will show that the survival of these Late Antique relicts constituted the most salient religious and political fact of the south-eastern borderlands throughout the two centuries of transition to Islamic rule, and a crucial element in shaping the history of the entire Islamic world. It will do so through the use of chronicles such as those of al-Ya qhbs and Khalafa b. Khayyd ; local histories including the Ttrrkh-i Scstdn, Marvaz?'s Tkr-khn?ma-yi Herat, and Zamchr ?sfiz?ra's Rawrat al-Jannat f? awssf-i mad?nat Her?t; conquest literature such as Baladhurr's Futon al-Buldtn; and the major geographical works.

As is often remarked, in the first centuries of Islam, after the conquest of Iran, historians working in Arabic were in large measure influenced by Sasanian historiography, especially the late-Sasanian Pahlavi history known as the Khuday-namag. Given the Sasanian sources' own limitations, there are limitations to what one can learn, even with regard to the Sasanians themselves. Still, when modern scholars seek to address questions about pre- and early Islamic Iran, they turn to the Arabic sources. Many studies have enumerated the positive fruits of these labors. Surprisingly, even though much effort has been expended trying to see what the early Arabic sources can tell us about pre- and early Islamic Iran, virtually no systematic attention has been given to the other side of the question: What is it that the early Arabic historical tradition can't - or won't - reveal about pre- and early Islamic Iran, and whyn In this paper, I address this question through the case of the Sasanian capital of Ctesiphon and its topography. After its conquest in the 630s, Ctesiphon and its environs briefly served the Arabs as an administrative centre, but declined significantly. As early as the ninth century, detailed knowledge about Ctesiphon's topography was forgotten. When was Ctesiphon founded, and by whom Which monuments were located in Ctesiphon, versus in other of the cities (Arabic, mada'in)i That the Arabs referred to the entirety of the Sasanian metropolis, of which Ctesiphon represented one piece, as Mada'in, only added to the confusion (and which cities were the mada'inw). The impressive detritus of al-Mada'in demanded explanation, but with the death of generations who knew it in Sasanian times, left few clues. The paper's most important contribution is its application of the concepts of memory and forgetting to the Arabic sources regarding Ctesiphon. The sources include geographies, histories, and belles-lettristic texts, as well as core sources of Muslim religious tradition. The concepts of memory and forgetting draw attention to the power of texts to affect individuals and collectivities, and to create knowledge fundamental to all cultural, social and political interactions. Applying them to Arabic texts extends earlier scholarship on the literary dimensions of Arabic texts and the construction of historical meaning, now drawing attention to the power of texts to affect readers and listeners. Such knowledge is fundamental for group identities, and was critical in the early years of Islam in Iran.

Persian Nestorian physicians, trained in Hellenized Syriac tradition, played a prominent role in early Abbasid history. An overwhelming amount of information on them, and other physicians, is found in a thirteenth century Arabic work titled 'UyUyn al-Anb-' f? Tabaqat al-Atibb ' by Ibn Abn Usaybi'a (d. 1269/70). The Bakhtish.' family, of Persian Nestorian background, is accredited with transferring the Jundishaprr school of medicine to Baghdad. It ought to be noted here that some scholars, like Roy Porter, while acknowledging Jundishapor as an intellectual meeting place and crossroads for scholars of various backgrounds, have cast doubt on whether a medical school physically existed. Whatever the case may be, in this paper I propose to address and clarify certain problems on the intellectual history concerning Persian Nestorian physicians. The Bakhtishc' family lived during a peak in the translation movement where rationalism played a significant role in the fields of medicine, science, theology and philosophy. Christopher Melchert has suggested that opposing theological parties in early ninth century Islam maybe better classified as rationalists, semi-rationalists and traditionists. I shall argue that this classification may be extended to the Nestorian physicians in this period as a well. I will further examine how the intellectual history of the Persian Nestorian community effected these physicians' relations with the caliphs, the church, and other court physicians.

W.T. H. JACKSON, in the "foreword" to the English translation of The Fihrist by Bayard Dodge correctly states: that the Fihrist "surely, was a work which fitted the purpose of this series, for it provided a link of a unique kind between several civilizations." Then he adds: "[i]n this tenth-century work is a compendium of the knowledge possessed by a learned Arab of Baghdad, knowledge in great part derived from earlier cultures, particularly Hellenic and Roman" when only 3% of the total book is dedicated to naming ancient Greek philosophers, mathematicians, and physicians and no mention is made of anything derived from Roman or Hellenic cultures. Dodge takes the name of the author of al-Fihrist, nadim (boon companion or court jester), literally as a courtier attached to the court of the Buyid Mu'izz al-Dowlah and no where questions the possibility of al-Nadim being an Iranian mawali. Dodge does not take into account or analyze the major events which were taking place inside the Iranian plateau during al-Nadim's time which may be significant for understanding which works were included in al-Fihrist such as: the rulership of the Samanids who sponsored original works of Arabic and Persian works and commissioned the translations of the Tafsir and History of al-Tabri into Persian, or the completion of the Twelver Sh'ii's first Hadith compendium of al-Kafi by Kolini, and Mu'izz al-Dowlah's reinstitution of the Sasanian title shahansha (king of kings) and Nowruz (the Iranian New Year) celebrations in his capital in Shiraz. This paper argues that al-Nadim should not be considered a typical Islamic scholar as traditional and orientalist scholarship has previously done. al-Nadim was a child of the post-Sasanian "multi religious era" and his invaluable book, al-Fihrist, reflects the transitional period from the Sasanian era to the early Islamic period. In this last regard, we find that over 30% of the subject topics he deals with are in regard to Iranian history, and the remainder refers to the books written by many Iranian scholars who were clients of Arab tribes. Though many of the works of al-Nadim lists are no longer extant, the paper examines the titles of the texts that were in his lifetime to delineate the possible interests of this compiler and his multi-cultural and religious milieu.