Islamization of Iran
Although Arabization was a common element of the early Muslim conquests, it did not have as significant of an impact in Iran as it did elsewhere, as the Iranian populace persisted in maintaining many of their pre-Islamic traditions, such as their language and culture, albeit with adaptations to conform to the nascent religion.
Integrating a heritage of thousands of years of civilization and being at the "crossroads of the major cultural highways"[2] in the Near East contributed to the Iranians emerging at the forefront of the Islamic Golden Age under the Abbasid Caliphate.
After the Muslim conquest of Iran, during the 90-year-long reign of the Umayyad dynasty, until the time of Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, the divan was dominated by the mawali and accounts were written using the Pahlavi script.
The controversial Umayyad governor Al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf forced all the mawali who had left for cities, in order to avoid paying the kharaj tax, to return to their lands.
[3] There are a number of historians who see the rule of the Umayyads as setting up the "dhimmah" to increase taxes from the dhimmis to benefit the Arab Muslim community financially and by discouraging conversion.
[4] Governors lodged complaints with the caliph when he enacted laws that made conversion easier, depriving the provinces of revenues.
"[5] The Arab conquerors, according to many historians, formed "a ruling aristocracy with special rights and privileges, which they emphatically did not propose to share with the mawali".
[6] Some rulers, such as Hajjaj ibn Yusuf even went as far as viewing the Mawali as "barbarians", implementing harsh policies such as branding to keep the subjects in check.
[4] Both periods were also marked by significant migrations of Arab tribes outwards from the Arabian Peninsula into the newly conquered territories.
The historian al-Masudi, a Baghdad-born Arab, who wrote a comprehensive treatise on history and geography in about 956, records that after the conquest: Zoroastrianism, for the time being, continued to exist in many parts of Iran.
This general statement of al-Masudi is fully supported by the medieval geographers who make mention of fire temples in most of the Iranian towns.
[13] Later, the Samanids, whose roots stemmed from Zoroastrian theocratic nobility, propagated Sunni Islam and Perso-Islamic culture deep into the heart of Central Asia.
[15][16][17][18] In the 9th and 10th centuries, non-Arab subjects of the Ummah created a movement called Shu'ubiyyah in response to the privileged status of Arabs.
After the rise of the Safavid dynasty, Twelver Shia Islam became the official state religion and its adoption imposed upon the majority of the Iranian population.
The caliphs adopted many administrative practices of the Sasanian Empire, such as coinage, the office of vizier, or minister, and the divan, a bureaucracy for collecting taxes and giving state stipends.
Iranians, since the beginning had interest and sincere efforts in compiling the study of Arabic etymology, grammar, syntax, morphology, figures of speech, rules of eloquence, and rhetoric.
It was for the sake of the Quran and Islam that books of philosophy, mysticism, history, medicine, mathematics, and law had been written or translated into this language.
In 1377, the Arab sociologist, Ibn Khaldun, narrates in his Muqaddimah:[22] "It is a remarkable fact that, with few exceptions, most Muslim scholars ... in the intellectual sciences have been non-Arabs, thus the founders of grammar were Sibawaih and after him, al-Farsi and Az-Zajjaj.
Thus the truth of the statement of the prophet (Muhammad) becomes apparent, 'If learning were suspended in the highest parts of heaven the Persians would attain it "...
