Iran in World History

shi‘at ‘Ali
, “the partisans of Ali.”) The Umayyads were 
also seen as having murdered the Prophet’s only surviving grandson, 
Husayn, who stood against them at the Battle of Karbala in 680.
Despite this Umayyad victory, Karbala along with the rest of south-
ern Iraq remained a Shi‘ite stronghold, as it still is today, and since 

---

Th e I r a n i z a t i o n o f I s l a m
49
that time annual mourning ceremonies commemorating Husayn’s 
martyrdom—representing on some level a continuation of the ancient 
Mesopotamian Tammuzi myth—have remained central to Shi‘ite reli-
gious practice. According to a Shi‘ite 
hadith
(a report regarding the 
words or deeds of the Muhammad or the Imams), “Every believer, 
whose eyes shed tears upon the killing of Husayn b. Ali and his com-
panions, such that the tears roll down his cheeks, God shall accommo-
date him in the elevated rooms of paradise.”
3
Over the subsequent decades further revolts occurred in eastern Iran, 
far from the Umayyads’ Syrian power base. When the Arabs, seeking to 
bring the Silk Road under their control, conquered Samarkand in 712, 
the Sogdian elites preserved their position by “becoming Muslim”—
literally, they “submitted” (Ar. 
aslamu
). However, for the next ten 
years they rebelled whenever they thought they could get away with it, 
enlisting Turkish and Chinese support. The Arabs had to send another 
army to reconquer the region, which they did in 722, but the Sogdians 
remained restive. The Umayyads faced even greater challenges in the 
eastern province of Khorasan, where several major rebellions occurred 
during the late 740s.
The Iranians who rose up against Umayyad rule in the east were 
mostly either superficially Islamicized or not at all. Many joined the 
so-called Abbasids, a para-Shi‘ite movement that sought to challenge the 
legitimacy of the Umayyads on the principle that the caliph should be a 
member of the Prophet’s family. (They rallied in the name of a descen-
dant of Abbas, one of Muhammad’s uncles.) But this rationale appears to 
have been mainly symbolic, since the movement attracted not only disen-
franchised Arab settlers but also a whole range of local Iranians whose 
religious affiliations are unclear. Even the movement’s military leader, the 
Iranian general Behzadan known in the Arabic sources as Abu Muslim, 
was seen by many of his followers as a semi-divine figure in his own right.
More or less simultaneous with Abu Muslim’s uprising was 
another led by Behafarid, whose claim to authority was explicitly 
Zoroastrian. Ironically, the Zoroastrian priests of the region, threat-
ened by their rival’s religious claims, turned to Abu Muslim to quell 
Behafarid’s rebellion and asked their Zoroastrian followers to give 
him their support. After having Behafarid captured and executed in 
748, Abu Muslim went on to challenge the Umayyads directly, defeat-
ing them on the banks Iraq’s Zab River in 750. The Umayyads over-
thrown, the new Abbasid caliph al-Saffah moved the capital from 
Damascus to the Shi‘ite stronghold of Kufa in southern Iraq, at the 
western edge of the Iranian world.

---

I r a n i n Wo r l d H i s t o r y
50
Ironically, but perhaps not surprisingly, the new government 
quickly shed its Shi‘ite ideology in an effort to establish its legitimacy in 
the eyes of Sunni Muslims, who outnumbered the Shi‘ites. Also, fearing 
Abu Muslim’s charismatic popularity, the new caliph appointed him 
governor of Syria and Egypt to distance him from his support base in 
eastern Iran. Relations between Abu Muslim and the new government 
deteriorated, until he was eventually executed. His followers were out-
raged; some of them even broke off into a new religious sect, claiming 
him to be immortal and awaiting his miraculous return.
Not all Iranians welcomed the new political order, especially in 
the wake of Abu Muslim’s murder. In 755, a neo-Zoroastrian leader 
named Sunpadh raised an army with the vow to avenge Abu Muslim 
by marching on Mecca and destroying Islam’s most sacred shrine, the 
Kaaba. (He was not successful.) Another rebellion, led by a Central 
Asian Mazdakite known as Moqanna‘ (the Veiled One) who had been 
one of Abu Muslim’s commanders, was not put down until 780.
The last major nativist Iranian revolt was that of the neo-Mazdakite 
Babak in Azerbaijan, which lasted from 816 to 837. After eluding gov-
ernment authorities for more than two decades, Babak was finally 
captured and brought before the Caliph Mu’tasim for judgment. The 
caliph, seeking to make an example of the rebel leader, had his hands 
and feet cut off one at a time. Babak surprised the Muslim ruler by rub-
bing the bloody stumps upon his cheeks, explaining that “I am making 
my face red so that when my body loses blood, people will not say my 
face has turned yellow from fear.”
4
After Babak’s uprising was crushed, 
with more than 100,000 of his followers killed, rebel movements in 
Iran tended to take the outward form of Shi‘ism; many of these retained 
certain Mazdakite or Zoroastrian beliefs, however.
The establishment of the Abbasid Empire represented a sea change 
in the history of Islam. First, it was a victory over Umayyad elit-
ism, putting Arab and non-Arab Muslims once and for all on equal 
footing. Henceforth Islam would be a universal religion, not an ethnic 
one. Second, by moving the political center of the empire to Iraq, the 
Abbasids replaced the Byzantine administrative model favored by the 
Damasacus-based Umayyads with a Mesopotamian one that preserved 
in many respects the system of the Sasanians. In 762 they built a new 
capital, Baghdad (a Persian word meaning “God’s gift”), just north of 
the former Sasanian capital of Ctesiphon.
In fact the new regime adopted the Sasanian administrative appa-
ratus so completely—including government ministries, tax collection, 
titles, court etiquette, and the patronage of poetry and music—that 

---

Th e I r a n i z a t i o n o f I s l a m
51
the Abbasid state could be considered a continuation of the Sasanian 
Empire in Islamic guise. Military commanders were recompensed for 
their service by land grants, allowing them to derive their income by 
extracting revenue directly from those who worked the land. This kind 
of tax-farming system, which enriched the owners of huge estates even 
as it impoverished the peasants, survived in various forms well into the 
second half of the twentieth century.
The social and geographical changes brought about by the 
Abbasid revolution created new impetus for what would develop into 
“Islamic” civilization. Even in strictly religious terms, Islam is based 
on far more than simply the sacred text revealed to Muhammad—just 
as Christianity is more than the Gospels, and Judaism is more than 
the Torah. Jesus was a Jew and Muhammad was an Arab, but in the 
same way that Christian theology and philosophy were produced by 
Gentile thinkers steeped in the Hellenistic tradition, Islam was shaped 
by scholars of Iranian, Babylonian, and Syrian backgrounds. Islam, 
like Judaism, is largely a religion of divine law, and like the Jewish 
Talmud, the Islamic Sharia, or divine law, was codified primarily by 
jurists living in the Iranian world.
The Qur’an is often thought of—by Muslims and non-Muslims 
alike—as containing the totality of the Islamic religion, but this is not 
the case. It is not a particularly lengthy text, and while it addresses a 
number of issues explicitly, there is a whole range of matters on which 
it is silent. Believing the Qur’an to be a form of direct instruction from 
God, the Arabs quite naturally assumed that any aspect of their social 
norms not directly altered by the divine revelation must be acceptable 
in God’s eyes. Thus, except where Qur’anic guidance was clear and 
specific, existing Arab traditions were seen as the ones society should 
follow, or at least the Arabs thought so.
However, as the demographic balance among people claiming 
Muslim identity shifted in favor of non-Arabs, the expectation that 
Arab norms would govern all social interactions became problematic. 
Non-Arabs can hardly be blamed for feeling that their own traditions, 
in the absence of Qur’anic injunctions, were no less valid than those of 
the Arabs, but this expectation resulted in frequent conflicts within the 
increasingly cosmopolitan Muslim community. The Arabs had a habit of 
appointing Arab judges (
qadi
s) to resolve local disputes, and non-Arabs 
objected to what they often saw as arbitrary rulings. Students of the 
Qur’an began to realize the need for a uniform legal code that would 
serve to maintain social stability within what had become a far-flung 
and highly diverse empire.

---

I r a n i n Wo r l d H i s t o r y
52
The Qur’an was naturally the first source to which this emerging 
class of legal scholars, the Ulama (