Muslim Confessional Identities in Islamic Iran

In less than twenty years following the death of Mohammed in 632, Arab armies had conquered the eastern provinces of the Byzantine Empire and the whole of the Sassanian Persian Empire. The desert warriors had little experience of ruling such complex societies, and continued to employ the officials of the former administrations of their new territories to manage civil affairs and collect taxes. Initially in Persia the Pahlavi language and script continued to be used for this work, but in 697 their Arab overlords forced the introduction of Kufi script and, although the Persian language remained predominant, the elite of the administration became bilingual in Farsi and Arabic. Despite the fact that the Arab Empire was defined by Islam, it was tolerant of other faiths. In the continuing Arab wars of con-quest, conversion of the conquered peoples to Islam was not compulsory but a significant number of non-Arabs did become Muslims. Identified as Mawālīs, initially these converts were second-class subjects especially in matters of taxation, but over time they gained equal status to Arabs. This was the experience in Persia and many of its elite became Muslim although the older religions such as Nestorian Christianity and Zoroastrianism continued to be followed. By the ninth century the Arab Empire had incorporated a large number of Mawālīs and the language as enshrined in the Qur’an was being corrupted. This problem needed to be addressed and it was a Persian scholar, Sibawayh, in Shiraz in 840 who first codified Arabic grammar and produced a dictionary of the language (Versteegh 1997: 4). By then, not only were the elite of the Persian administration bilingual but Persia had become a centre of learning for Arabic as well as Pahlavi literature. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, the Arab Empire in the East began to disintegrate, forming autonomous regions in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Anatolia. Native Persian rulers, and later Turkish invaders, took advantage of the Arabs’ weakened position and gained control of Iran, extending their empire beyond Persia into Afghanistan and parts of northern India. This was the prevailing situation when the Mongols invaded in the thirteenth century capturing the greater part of the region before their advance was halted in Syria by the Mamluks of Egypt.