Islamic rule in Iran and Central Asia, 650-1000 CE. In ABC-CLIO World History Encyclopedia, Era 4: Expanding Regional Civilizations 300-1000, vol. 7, ed. Wilfred J. Bisson. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011. (original) (raw)

The Islamic conquests define the sharpest periodization in Iranian history particularly and West Asia more generally. Although an underlying tenacious continuity is discernible in the Persian-Islamic ethos to the present, the acceptance of a new religion marked the start of a new order, and it became the basis of a new civilization whose identity, development, and efflorescence, subsequent to enslavement, slaughter, and destruction, were completely remolded. It merits reiteration that its articulation, despite pre-Islamic inspiration, was unassailably Islamic. The Sassanian-Zoroastrian legacy of art, attitude, statecraft, thought, and sophistication-neither fully assimilated nor rejected but always ambivalent-was bequeathed to the Islamic tradition. This became evident in Islam's treatment of Zoroastrians who were expediently, and never unanimously, recognized as ahl al-kitab (People of the Book). Zoroastrianism or Mazdeism, the state religion of its Sassanian upholders (224-651 CE), 297 eclectically also flourished in Afghan and Transoxianian principalities, which completely collapsed with the Arab conquest of Iran and central Asia. It lacked any recuperative power and, of all religions that encountered Islam, suffered the most. Byzantine Christians could at least count on allies or adherents elsewhere, and Jews, unlike Zoroastrians, had honed bitter survival skills over generations. Islam was to leave Zoroastrianism a remarkable remnant