Historian Bernard Lewis describes the meaning of futūḥ within classic Islamic thought: These were not seen as conquests in the vulgar sense of territorial acquisitions, but as the overthrow of impious regimes and illegitimate hierarchies, and the "opening" of their peoples to the new revelation and dispensation...
For example, a common feature of the genre is an account of the opposing ambassador's first impression of the Arab army in which he remarks favorably upon the primitive virtues of these early Muslim warriors, thus implicitly criticizing the luxury and over-refinement of the author's own time.
The following is a partial list of these histories: The impact of the futūḥ conquests was immense, not least of all on the conquerors themselves, who incorporated many features of the advanced cultures they absorbed into what eventually became classic Islamic civilization.
Thus one trope of converted Muslims' perception of their own history is the depiction of the pre-Islamic political order as one of rampant exploitation and tyranny, with rulers ordering society according to malign whim rather than in humble subordinance to God's beneficent law for mankind: And in Islamic Persia, "Chosroes", from the great Persian king Khosrau II, became as strong a by-word for tyrannical pagan kingship as "Pharaoh" (though ironically the pagan destroyer of the Achaemenid Empire, Alexander the Great, was lionized thanks to an accident of Qur'anic textual sources).
Though initially derided by other Arabs as tafar'un (meaning lapsing into pharaonism), the Egyptian movements were in time emulated elsewhere: The acceptance of classical Islam's interpretation of the futūḥ conquests by the Islamicized/Arabized peoples of the Near East and beyond varies.
Despite a rich pre-Islamic political and cultural heritage, attempts at a reassertion of national identity in Iran have often met with strong resistance: With the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty in 1979, traditional notions of identity returned to Iran, as can be seen by the unabashed embrace of the classic futūḥ interpretation of Persian history in the propaganda of the Iran–Iraq War: Acceptance in Pakistan of futūḥ "salvation history" can be seen in current expressions of alienation from both the political as well as cultural legacies of its pre-Islamic past: An interesting cultural adaptation found mainly here, though, is the widespread claim of descent from the Arab (or Moghul) conquerors: The psychic relation of "converted" (i.e. non-Arab) Muslims to Islam is the subject of V. S. Naipaul's literary travelogues Among the Believers and Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples.