How Islam came to Iran

How did Islam first take root on Iranian soil? What did medieval Iran - or Persia - look like before and afterwards? How do those early encounters still echo through Iranian society today? The roots of the present-day tensions in Iran are much deeper than just the last 47 years following the Islamic Revolution. To understand more, Matt Lewis is joined by Dr. Khodadad Rezakhani. MORE Medieval Europe's Encounter with Islam Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/medieval-europes-encounter-with-islam/id1564113746?i=1000738662471&uo=4&itscg=30200&ls=1&mttnsubad=6442463604&at=1000l3ctA&itsct=podfollow_podcasts&ct=gone-medieval-eplink Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/4MOefogCzPYZPh0zqYzsrd Prophet Muhammad Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/prophet-muhammad/id1564113746?i=1000732984774&uo=4&itscg=30200&ls=1&mttnsubad=6442463604&at=1000l3ctA&itsct=podfollow_podcasts&ct=gone-medieval-eplink Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/1XD7MLfJdJeeqNQwXVlZ8t Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. Audio editor is Tim Arstall, the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:01Matt Lewis?

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  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the Headline Hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work, and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at go.o.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's go.o.gle/workspacewithGemini.

• 1:15Speaker 02

  In Our Time is a world-class seminar every week. Why was Jeremy a lonely snail? What were lines doing in York in the third century? I'm Misha Glennie, and every week I'm joined by expert guests to explore the ideas that shape our world.

• 1:30Speaker 03

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• 1:49Matt Lewis?

  Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots, and murders, to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.

• 2:26Matt Lewis?

  Welcome to this special extra episode of Gone Medieval. Only two months ago, millions of Iranians took to the streets to protest, and events in recent days have spiraled, putting the country once again in the media spotlight. And while it may seem like this is a crisis born of the present moment of politics, economic sanctions, modern discontent, and Iran's alleged nuclear ambitions, tensions in Iran run deeper than the last five decades. The Iranian people have been wrestling with power, faith, and identity for centuries. To understand why Islam in Iran looks the way that it does today, why it's embraced, contested, reshaped, and resisted, we have to travel back, not just centuries, but more than a millennium,

• 3:10Matt Lewis?

  to the land the world once called Persia. Before, it was Islamic. Medieval Iran, or Persia as we call it, was not a cultural backwater waiting to be transformed. It was one of the great prizes of the ancient world, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and fiercely proud of its identity. Then, in the 7th century, came the armies from Arabia, bearers of a new faith: Islam. In a matter of decades, the mighty Sassanian Empire fell, and Persia was drawn into the orbit of a religion born far beyond its borders. But conquest is never just about swords and banners. It's also about memory, about adaptation and resistance, about how people take a foreign faith

• 3:55Matt Lewis?

  and over time make it their own, or resist it. Today on Gone Medieval, we're going back to the moment of that collision: the Arab Muslim conquest of Persia. To help us understand the medieval world that shaped Iran today, I'm joined by Dr. Hodid Adrezakhani, a historian of global late antiquity and early Middle Ages with a focus on Central and West Asia between 500 and 700 CE. We'll explore how Islam first took root on Iranian soil, what medieval Persia looked like before and afterwards, and how those early encounters still echo in Iranian attitudes towards Islam today.

• 4:37Matt Lewis?

  A very warm welcome to Gone Medieval Cardadad. It's great to have you with us.

• 4:39Speaker 04

  Thank you very much. Same. Very happy to be with you.

• 4:43Matt Lewis?

  I'm looking forward to finding out more about this topic too. So we're going to talk about the area that would have in ancient times been known as Persia. And when we get to the beginning of the early medieval period, so from around the third century, so just before we would think we've moved into the early medieval period, the empire that exists in that region is the Sassanian Empire. So I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about them. How did they come to power in that region?

• 5:09Speaker 04

  Very good. If I might start with your use of the term Persia, which might in this day and age, sounds very political and politicized because now certain people with certain political leanings tend to use Persian Persian as a designation than Iran and Iranian. And I'm not going to purely get into that. I'm just going to clarify that Persia is an exonym, is an external name given to the region, specifically comes from an area of the greater region we are talking about. And the endonym, the internal name was always something derived

• 5:48Speaker 04

  from the term er or ar, which is the root of the word Iran, which essentially means the people, really, like everything else, you know, we are the people, everybody else is, you know, something else, barbarians or whatever. So the word er and the combination Iran, which is a substantive sort of plural of it, was always the exonym of the area. So this should be clarified that Persia, in a sense, is still a valid term. It's sort of like Holland and the Netherlands, where Holland is a part of the Netherlands, but for many times, many centuries, the entire area was known as Holland because that was

• 6:31Speaker 04

  the important political area. So that's for that. And specifically for the empire, which actually calls itself the ruler of Iran Shah, the ruler of the empire of Iran or empire of er, that is, you know, Sort of the Middle Persian term Aeron Shah is the Sassanian Empire. Sassanian Empire is a, you could say in a sense, a quintessential late antique empire in the sense of it comes up towards the earliest part of what we call late antiquity and ends around the time that we maybe with a bit of a stretch, imagine to be the late end of late antiquity. Late antiquity being a very fluid term and being sort of a creation of the last half a century.

• 7:15Speaker 04

  So in the third century, there has been over half a century of crisis in the Arsacid Empire. They had been dealing with what we now realize is a social and economic crisis, a serious political and sort of dynastic crisis and threats from outside, both from well, the most well-known Roman side and also from the East where various powers in the East, including the Kushan Empire, had been pushing against them from their eastern borders and the Parthians had really have started breaking down. And all of a sudden, in the third century, this upstart power, local ruler of a province in the south of

• 8:00Speaker 04

  the country called Persis, hence the Persian Empire, comes up very quickly, removes all the Arsaces, establishes this empire, has a very um, uniform and very, very quickly forming solid image of an empire. So we see this solid image in expression of some sort of a divine grace given to them by use of the word Mazdesn, meaning Mazda worshipping, Ahura Mazda, the god of Zoroastrian Mazda worshipping. King, they start using the term Iran and very soon Iran and Iran.

• 8:44Speaker 04

  They call themselves Shah and Shah Iran or an Iran, king of Iran, Iranians and non Iranians. They start issuing these coins which stay pretty uniform. Throughout the entire four hundred and more year of their rule with a fire altar in the reverse of the coin, the face of the king on the obverse of the coin, very quickly recognisable, really becomes the basis of all the eastern silver coinage up to the medieval Islamic period, up to even, you could say, the Mongol period and even beyond. Very iconic coinage, very iconic image, very iconic words.

• 9:26Speaker 04

  It all of a sudden becomes a very discernible empire with eastern and western borders. They more and more move towards the centre. That centre in Tassifon, thirty five kilometres south of modern Baghdad, becomes this grand capital, very comparable to Rome or Constantinople. It's made up of five or six little cities that are attached to each other. It becomes the centre of the Jewish learning in the region. It becomes the centre of the Patriarchate of the East, which still exists and bears its name. It's still called the Patriarchate of Salusia, Tassifon. The city is called Tassifon and very much an imperial centre, imperial power,

• 10:10Speaker 04

  an economy that is very easily identifiable through this coinage and through everything else. And of course, constant conflicts.

• 10:18Matt Lewis?

  Can we just pin down kind of exactly geographically what this empire looks like? If we were to overlay it onto a modern map, presumably it would incorporate Iran. You've mentioned the capital is not far safe of Baghdad. Does it include Iraq, modern Iraq as well? Does it cover other areas too?

• 10:34Speaker 04

  There is a core territories of the empire, which is really modern Iran, modern Iraq, parts of modern Turkey would be parts of a whole lot of modern Afghanistan, places that would be modern Turkmenistan and parts of modern Uzbekistan. And then in the Caucasus, basically essentially Azerbaijan, Armenia and parts of eastern Georgia, as well as the southern or the eastern part of the Arabian Peninsula. So. Modern parts of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Oman, and in a good part of it, particularly in the last hundred years, Yemen.

• 11:16Speaker 04

  There is also a period of about fifteen to twenty years where they also rule over all of pretty much modern Turkey, all of Syria, all of Lebanon, all of Jordan, all of Israel, Palestine, and all of Egypt. So in the seventh century, they actually managed to push into Africa and pretty much to the borders of Europe as well. But that's only like towards for a short while. So I would say those are not the core territories. The core territory loosely is defined Oxus to Euphrates, meaning sort of Afghanistan to Iraq and western part of Iraq. And from Georgia, let's say, to, yeah, Eastern Arabia, to, to, let's say, United Arab Emirates.

• 12:01Matt Lewis?

  How powerful is an aristocracy in the Sassanian Empire? And how is society kind of structured throughout the empire from the aristocracy down?

• 12:10Speaker 04

  There is an ideal version of that that has been promoted for more than a century and even more by Orientalists particularly, who had been looking at these things from the point of view of in the European idealized society, from the point of view of Zoroastrian texts, so on and so forth, which imagines a very stratified and even caste-based system in which the king goes on top, there is an aristocracy, there is a religious aristocracy, there is a urban elite group, then there are producers, and then there are the farmers, you know, and this is going down. More and more shows that it's not real. Our problem really is that the issue of aristocracy

• 12:51Speaker 04

  has just been focused on, and there are differing ideas on them. There is the idea that there was a set set of high families. This is something that was already said in the nineteenth century by the great Orientalist Teodor Noldeke, who provisioned seven noble families of the Sassanian Empire, ruling over.

• 13:15Speaker 04

  Over various grand territories around the empire. So these are the large landowners. And they are ruling in some sort of an agreement with the central sort of imperial family. I would imagine that Sassanians had various types of aristocracy, including genealogical aristocracies, including military aristocracies, including economic aristocracies and elites, religious ones. And I think as a whole, we should consider this entire thing together. And I am trying to write something about that, and I don't have clear ideas about it yet. So my complicated answer to a simple question is, we don't know.

• 13:57Speaker 04

  But of course, it has aristocracies, it has elite. What they are, we still are in the process of finding out.

• 14:03Matt Lewis?

  We've talked a little bit then about the political structures of the region and how that is changing. I wondered if we could talk a bit about the religious situation too. The Sassanians are bringing about all of these centralizing political reforms. Do they make any religious reforms? Kind of what is the dominant religion in the Sassanian Empire?

• 14:22Speaker 04

  There is no doubt that some sort of what we call Zoroastrianism, for all practical purposes, is a much later formalization of a series of religious beliefs. So think of it more like pre-British Hinduism. There is some sort of a religious identity which we recognize as Zoroastrianism. And certainly in the lands of the Iranian plateau and Central Asia, and initially even in the Caucasus, this is a dominant belief system, let me call it. I am allergic to the term religion.

• 15:01Speaker 04

  The emperors, certainly from Ardashir the first, from the very first emperor, Ardashir the first, under coinage called themselves Mazdees and Bagh, so the Mazda worshipping lord. So this identity with Ahura Mazda, the great god of Zoroastrianism, is certainly established. But we run into the problem about Zoroastrianism is I wouldn't give you a headache on that. From the second emperor, we have a support for a new religion, which seems to be a hybrid of various Christian oriented cults, mixed with various local.

• 15:41Speaker 04

  Ritualistic and cultic beliefs that gets the title of Manicheism you might have heard of, your listeners might know of, this is a sort of popularized in the West as being the original religion of Saint Augustine. Saint Augustine is originally a Manichean, then becomes a Christian and writes something against the Manicheans, actually. So this religion comes to existence in the center of the Sassanian Empire, in Mesopotamia. The prophet Mahni, after whom the religion is named, comes to the court of Shapur I, the second Sassanian emperor, the son of Aldashir I, and writes a book in his honor, describing, in Middle Persian, describing his religious beliefs.

• 16:24Speaker 04

  And it seems that for at least the reign of Shapur and his son Hormuz I, the religion is given some sort of a royal protection. How widely it spreads, initially we don't know, Manicheism eventually survives until the 11th century in Central Asia and we have it going all the way to Tibet and, you know, Western China and Mongolia and there is an empire over there. And then we obviously have Christianity that starts coming in, in the second and third century and even towards the beginning of the second century, we already have Christianities in Iran. So it predates the coming of the Sassanians.

• 17:08Speaker 04

  Mahni himself is very much influenced by various Christian cults. There is even a speculation that at one point there was as, there were as many Christians in the Sassanian Empire that there were in the Roman Empire. We have churches in southern Iran today, even from that period. So Christianity is very widespread and of course, not to forget Judaism. In particularly Mesopotamia, is very widespread, quite popular. And so Judaism was at least in the western part of the empire, very important, very big. So actually religiously, it's a very, very interesting empire. And in many senses, it is much more tolerant than the Roman Empire because all of these religions are actually,

• 17:48Speaker 04

  they seem not to have an attitude of supersession of religions, that one religion has to dominate everything else. Unlike what you see, for example, after Emperor Theodosius in Rome, there doesn't seem to be a Sassanian idea that there should be an official religion. So while the emperor is obviously Zoroastrian, he supports...

• 18:09Speaker 04

  The Christian church and marries a Christian queen. So it seems to be that they are much a lot more open towards religious beliefs.

• 18:17Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, it's fascinating how diverse and tolerant it is because you would tend to think that a really centralising empire is going to want to also control the religion. And if Zoroastrianism is kind of the state religion, I guess, that they would be looking to to enforce that as much as they could, but it seems like they're not. I mean, is that kind of toleration? Is that part of Zoroastrianism? I actually don't know too much about Zoroastrianism. So I understand you don't want to give it, give us a big detailed breakdown of the belief systems and everything else. But is Zoroastrianism a particularly tolerant religion?

• 18:49Speaker 04

  Don't blame yourself. Nobody knows a lot about Zoroastrianism.

• 18:52Matt Lewis?

  I know the name. I know the name Zoroastrian. I've come across it before, but I don't really know too much about what Zoroastrians believe.

• 18:58Speaker 04

  In Britain, probably the term would be better known under the name Parsis of India. So we have a lot of Parsis in Britain. Parsis would love it because the biggest representative of the Parsis, Zoroastrian communities, Freddie Mercury, so you know, Freddie Mercury's religion, let's say. Zoroastrianism, I don't think is particularly itself tolerant of other religions. Is that possibly there is an idea that religions belong to groups of people? And that different groups of people have different religions. So if those people want to have that religion, it just means that they are not us.

• 19:38Speaker 04

  So there is this idea of air and an air, Iranian or Aryan, whatever you wanted, air people and non-air people, which, as I said, on their coins. So it's, I mean, they call themselves the king of kings of air and an air. And it seems that the Zoroastrianism is the religion of air. And everything else is a religion of an air. So it's not that Zoroastrianism itself, it's very tolerant. It's that the Sassanian emperors consider themselves the king of boats. And there is no, it's not a missionary, it's not an evangelising religion. It doesn't try to convert anybody. Well, in modern India. Version of it particularly, it's actually banned to convert to it.

• 20:21Speaker 04

  You can't convert to it as much like Orthodox Judaism. It has become now an ethno religion in the modern sense. There's no reason that we believe that it's an ethno religion back then. But it just means that they don't think of religion as that closely connected to the idea of the empire. The way we are used to in the Roman world. It just means that the political use of religion is much more limited in the Sasanian world than it is in what we what we think as the blueprint of empire, which is wrong.

• 21:06Speaker 05

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• 21:40Speaker 06

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• 23:03Matt Lewis?

  As we move through, you've mentioned that the Sassanian Empire kind of falls in the 7th century. So as we move towards that, there is going to be, you know, a new political and religious power move into the region. On the verge of the Arab invasion, what kind of state is the Sassanian Empire in? I mean, we've looked at it being quite centralising, we've talked about it being going through a period of expansion too, and at its height, covering this huge geographic area. Is it waning by the 7th century? Or is it actually at the peak of its powers?

• 23:36Speaker 04

  It is at the peak of its powers. And that's the irony in its disappearance. My answer to why it falls in the peak of its power is that we have to separate the fall of the Sassanian dynastic rule separately as the fall of the empire they created. I semi-humorously call it, the empire outgrows the dynasty. The dynasty has done its best. The empire has now outgrown and the dynasty is incapable of managing the empire. The empire, by all means, seems to be at this height of its power in the sense that right

• 24:16Speaker 04

  prior to the rise of Islam, it actually has had a couple of decades of amazing expansion of its power, while for about 400 years, it has stayed at the other side of the Euphrates and has set up Euphrates as its border with Rome. And there is a sort of a status quo there, where, you know, Romans come and take over a couple of cities here and the Sassanians go and take over a couple of cities over there. Things are okay. All of a sudden, from the beginning of the 6th century, there seems to be... Part of the Sassanians, a grand effort to actually go and conquer. In the sixth century, the Sassanian emperor actually reaches Antioch,

• 25:02Speaker 04

  the grand city of the Eastern Roman Empire. And he just doesn't go and extract tribute and go back. He actually takes his time, goes to the sea, swims in the Mediterranean, does prostration towards the sun, and then gets on his horse and he calmly comes back. And as the Roman sources tell us, doesn't hurt anybody in the process. And for me, this is a symbolic sort of Sassanian emperors telling the Romans, we are now here, we have arrived. The Sassanians are, now we are going to come here. And then between six ten and six twenty eight, they actually get there. They are actually controlling entire Eastern Mediterranean. They control anything from all of modern Anatolia.

• 25:47Speaker 04

  They reach the walls of Constantinople and down there they reach Libya. And all of Eastern Mediterranean now becomes their territory. The empire very quickly, the emperor, Khosra the Second, the one who actually does this. Yes, in six twenty eight is defeated, basically is removed through a coup d'etat in his court. And his troops in northern Mesopotamia lose a couple of battles to Emperor Heraclius, which causes this domino effect of removal of the emperor, which causes a lot of chaos in the dynasty. You have replacement of five emperors within like three years. You know, things start falling apart.

• 26:31Speaker 04

  But less than ten years after the man's death, Muslims are there. They have taken over Tessifon, they have taken over now pretty much everything that he conquered. They just take over his empire. The one he conquered, the Muslims are now in Eastern Mediterranean and Egypt and are pushing against the walls of Constantinople. So exactly what he was doing ten years ago gets repeated within ten, fifteen years after his death. So in a sense, you could say that the power that the Sassanians sort of unleash in the seventh century with its roots in the sixth century really comes to culmination under the Muslims. So I'm very much of a fan of putting the Islamic conquests

• 27:14Speaker 04

  in context of the Sassanian conquest that preceded it and see them as a collective effort.

• 27:22Speaker 04

  That starts in 610. So in a sense, you could say, I could be ironic and say that Islamic conquest starts in 610. And I jokingly have called Khosrow II the first Muslim caliph. He is the one who really starts this whole thing. But yes, it's at the height of its power. There is no waiting. There seems to be actually the treasury is full. The soldiers are there. Everything is happening well. Nothing is, nothing is really wrong. And the fact that it causes this, is the impetus behind all of this later conquest tells me that things are okay. It's just that the dynasty is not very okay at all and it's gone.

• 28:01Matt Lewis?

  And when the Muslims begin to arrive, the Arab Muslims begin to arrive. Is it easy for them to take over the Sassanian Empire despite its kind of strength? Or is it a more gradual process than that?

• 28:13Speaker 04

  Mesopotamia is very easy. It seems to be very easy. So Mesopotamia and then the rest of these areas that they have conquered. So the Greater Syria and Egypt and stuff, this goes very quickly. So by 642, the Sassanian Emperor, the remaining Sassanian Emperor, Yazgar III, has to put up a fight against the Muslims in what is essentially now Western Iran in 642. So what, 14 years after his grandfather was killed? Only nine years after he supposedly ascends the throne. He has to put up a fight already in Western Iran. So Mesopotamia, the capital of the Sassanian Empire.

• 28:54Speaker 04

  The area, the area of Mesopotamia in Middle Persian is called Dele Iran Shah. The heart of the Empire of Iran. So the heart of the Empire of Iran, that capital city of Tezefon. That area falls very quickly. The conquest of the rest takes about a century.

• 29:13Speaker 04

  So Muslims really reach the borders of Sassanian Empire itself in the Oxus region only in the early 8th century.

• 29:25Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And how significant in that process is the Battle of Nahavan? We have this this set piece battle. Is that a turning point?

• 29:33Speaker 04

  Nahavan is interesting. Usually Khadisiya is called the turning point because that's the first time that supposedly Arab Muslims managed to defeat a Sassanian grand army. But that seems to be a lot more of a literary creation of later historians. And Ravan itself is the place where Arab Muslims have now faced the Sassanian troops, are conquering them and are now threatening the centre of the Sassanian Empire. So it is significant very much in, I would say, moral way for the Sassanians. This is when they actually are, they real, they realise they are being conquered. Before this, they probably could have thought of this as some sort of a regional raid or

• 30:17Speaker 04

  conflict. Here is no, oh, no, we are being attacked. We are actually being conquered. So in that sense, it is very important.

• 30:24Matt Lewis?

  And presumably then, the Arab Muslims that arrive, having managed to break the power of the Sassanian Empire, they acquire this kind of centralised government and authority. Does that make it fairly smooth? Because they, unlike Zoroastrianism, they are going to look to convert the area to Islam. Is that process made smooth and even across the Sassanian lands by this kind of centralised government? Or do we see lots of resistance to the Islamisation of the region?

• 30:51Speaker 04

  That's a very sort of hard question to answer. We don't really know when the majority of the population converts to Islam, but it's almost certain that it's not as the Muslims come in. Generally, the picture we have, which is based on mostly later narrative sources, because you have to notice that the narratives of Islamic conquest that we have often come from things that were written between hundred and fifty to two hundred and even more years later than the events. Among the surprising facts of world history is that seventh century is the time that, you know, we almost have codex, we have modern books almost.

• 31:31Speaker 04

  But we have very little about the conquest, or we have had little that we have noticed. Because we keep on talking, this is the bias of historiography, we read history through the languages we know. So so far, we have been reading Latin, Greek and Arabic, and maybe Persian. And these sources generally did not reflect enough about the seventh century. Now, we have Syriac sources, we have Armenian sources, and all of these things that we are learning more about them. And now we have primary Middle Persian documents, for example, from central Iran and from northern Iran, which we are still reading, because what, it's Middle Persian. Maybe we should have an excursus into that, what a horrible writing, terrible writing system Middle Persian has, makes it really hard to read.

• 32:17Speaker 04

  So we knew less about all of these things. So the process of conquest is ill-understood. We have tales of military conquest, but we know really little about its cultural, its economic, its social, you know, any other aspect of it, even politically, it is little understood. Generally, we think that the conversions happen about the third century of Islamic rule. So in the ninth century of the common era. So coming in early on, it's not like that Muslim armies come in, conquer, and then behind them, everybody is converting to Islam. Even they don't make these claims.

• 32:59Speaker 04

  They say that we arrive at cities, we offer terms of peace, which is often, accept us, quarter us, don't attack us from the back, and pay us tribute and we leave you alone, or fight us. And if we conquer you, we are going to take you prisoners, extract whatever money we want and force you to convert to Islam, right? So, you know, even they don't claim that they are converting everybody absolutely to Islam. But we certainly know that they didn't, they couldn't. It's not, it's not, Islam, despite the picture that obviously later sources give of it. Obviously, at the beginning, it's not the religion of the majority. There's an entire controversy about if it understands itself as a common centralized religion even.

• 33:44Speaker 04

  So just to be said that early on, there is little evidence to think that Muslims come in and everybody becomes Muslim. And you have to consider that in the Muslim countries, the process of conversion is never complete. Because there are still native non-Muslims in the Muslim countries. We have Zoroastrians living in Iran, we have native Christians in Palestine, we have native Christians in Egypt. We have native Jews in Morocco and, you know, up to a few decades ago everywhere. And in the Middle East, we have native Jews in Iran. We have native Mandians in southern Iraq, we have native Yazidis in northern Iraq. We have, you know, all sorts of.

• 34:26Speaker 04

  So, interestingly enough, Islam doesn't become a religion that is, there are no native Roman pagans remaining. There are not even any native Lithuanian pagans remaining, and Lithuanians converted to Christianity only seven hundred years ago. But Christianity is a supersessionist religion. When you go somewhere and you become, everything becomes Christian, right? There are no native anything left in Europe. But there are native religions all over Middle East, even, I don't know, there were Jews living in Bukhara until fifty years ago in Uzbekistan. You know, they're all around. So, in a sense, you could say that Islam never completely converts the conquered population. But so, as far as religion goes, I would say that we have to be very careful.

• 35:07Speaker 04

  As far as resistance goes, though, again, the process is ill-understood. But yes, from these documents, we can say that it seems like that in that center, in that heart of Iran, in that Mesopotamia, it goes pretty smoothly. When they get inside Iran, it's Really, there is no uniform pattern. There is resistance, there is cooperation. In central Iran, it seems to be that there is a cooperation. In the east, there is great resistance in the way that the east reverend, you know. Interestingly enough, early Muslims never get into Afghanistan, you know, we now think of Taliban. But Afghanistan is actually the area that resisted the longest. Afghanistan really gets conquered and converted to Islam in the 10th century.

• 35:52Speaker 04

  And actually by the local powers, like people just across the border in Iran. And a medieval Iranian ruler called Yagub El-Aif is the guy who actually conquers Kabul. And removes the local Hindu Shahi, the Hindu kings of Kabul and converts the locals to Islam, right? So like in the east, it seems to be like it really doesn't go beyond the borders of modern Iran and Afghanistan. In the north of Iran, they never managed to conquer. Because of the geography of the Albor's range, southern Caspian region. Muslims never managed to pass the mountains and go to the other side and convert people. And the conversion of the people in the north really happens through completely different dynamics.

• 36:34Speaker 04

  And even to another version of Islam, you know, not the majority orthodox Islam even. So there is resistance, Armenians obviously never conquered, despite the fact that they are part of the empire. There is resistance, there is local resistance, there is local cooperation. Gradual political, I would say, process of osmosis in a sense. And then at the end is just the locals joining a greater power, agreeing to pay tribute. Agreeing into various peace treaties that makes them. Part of what the great Islamic historian Marshall Hightson has called the Islamic Age world. So we shouldn't think of this as a process of constant conquest.

• 37:17Speaker 04

  Conquest, resistance, cooperation. Complete stopping of the process of conquest, all of these are parts of the game that we are talking about.

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• 39:03Matt Lewis?

  I think if we look at modern Iran today, we can see a country there that, despite the fact that Arabic becomes ubiquitous in most of the places, Iran is a place that maintains its language, that retains Persian, and retains an awful lot of its stories and its connections to Zoroastrianism and things like that. So I wonder whether you feel that it's a case that Persia undergoes, or Persian society undergoes, a form of Islamization? Or does actually Islam undergo a bit of Persianization when it arrives there?

• 39:38Speaker 04

  I love this question, and it's a very smart question.

• 39:43Speaker 04

  I guess you know that your modern average Iranian would go for the second option. There is this sort of a understanding in modern Iran that, you know, Persian culture slash Iranian culture, this being this grand old, you know, constantly during the Pahlavi time, particularly the number 2500 was thrown around, 2500 year old empire and civilization and obviously even older before that, has this civilizing effect over whoever conquers it. Iranians like to think that we made Alexander Iranian, you know, because Alexander comes and aspires to be an acumened great king and we made Muslims Persians and, you know,

• 40:28Speaker 04

  they very much understand Shiism in the context of Muslims having become Persians. And of course, we civilized the Mongols, you know, coming from on the back of their ponies from Mongolia and then commissioning the reproduction and illustration of the great Persian epic, the Shahna Mea Firdosi. You know, Iranian culture has a civilizing effect. It is a nice and it is a very sort of hopeful national myth, and I don't mean myth in the sense of it's a lie, mythology is not a lie, a national narrative and it's a very, it's a very heartwarming national narratives. It gives you hope that whatever happens, the civilization builds itself up and goes back.

• 41:13Speaker 04

  And to be quite honest, as an Iranian and right now, when we are talking about this in February of 2026, even I need this heartwarming narrative. I need to think that, you know, our country can rise against whatever adversaries offer it and threaten it with. But like all narratives, it's obviously greatly smoothing over a whole lot of detail. So if I might be permitted to go through a bit of detail on this, the greatest part of this mythology, particularly from the Islamic period onwards, is this

• 41:52Speaker 04

  Sort of narrative of the resistance and rejuvenation and sort of expansion of the Persian language, that the Persian language as the great monument of Iranian slash Persian culture is the means through which Iranians resist. You know, because in so many senses, it is so true that the Shahnamah Firdousi defines the Iranian culture in many senses now today, and it is written in Persian and it is a grand Persian epic, this even becomes stronger, this idea becomes even stronger. But as I said, like all narratives, the devil is in detail.

• 42:35Speaker 04

  The idea that Persian survives the onslaught of Arabic, first of all, assumes that Persian was the language of the Sassanian Empire before Arabic came in, which is by some stretch of definition, yes, it was, but then, much like the Sassanian Empire lacks a centralized religion, unlike the Roman Empire, it also lacks a centralized language like the Roman Empire. I have to always bring this to people's notice, even Roman Empire lacks a centralized language. We all think of Roman Empire as a Latin-speaking empire, but, you know, Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean and Egypt are as much parts of the Roman Empire as Italy and Spain, and they always spoke Greek.

• 43:16Speaker 04

  You know, one of the biggest problems of that movie by Mel Gibson, that's a movie about the life of Jesus, was that he had gone through all of this pain to make Jesus and everybody around him speak Aramaic, and then the Roman soldiers spoke Latin. They wouldn't have, they would have spoken Greek. The local administrative language of that area was Greek, even in the height of the Roman control. And so even even Roman Empire is not the empire of one language, and Sassanian Empire much less so. Sassanian emperors come from Persis, yes, a version of Middle Persian was spoken by them, but.

• 43:51Speaker 04

  Aramaic was obviously the language, the going language of everyday speaking people in Mesopotamia. Whole lot of documents written in various dialects of Aramaic. In northern and eastern Iran, various Parthian dialects that, you know, now that we go to that, Parthian dialects were spoken. Even early Sassanian, the greatest Sassanian inscriptions, this inscription of Shahpur and Khabezart, which is written in Middle Persian, in Parthian and in Greek. So in Persis itself, the birthplace of Persian, is written in Parthian as well. And you have all of these different Iranian languages.

• 44:33Speaker 04

  In the east, you have, in the areas that we see New Persian later, we see Bactrian and Sogdian and Choresmian and all of these languages. So it doesn't seem to have had a uniform language. Yeah, maybe at some senses you do have an administrative language, but there's no uniform language. So if you told somebody, for example, in the city of Harat, in western Afghanistan, which is, you know, one of the important cities of generally Iranian world and for sure the Sassanian empire, your language is Persian, they would have looked at you like you're crazy 1,400 years ago. And the fact is that, we are talking about, just for lack of a better term, we're talking about two different languages, but two registers of the same language.

• 45:14Speaker 04

  The language we speak today, the language in which Ferdo Seerob, the language in which we take pride, the language which the Mongols, and you know, started speaking after, is New Persian. It's a new register of this language. It is a language that seems to be spreading via spread of Islam itself. So it seems that as the Muslims enter Mesopotamia and as the local Mesopotamian population becomes Muslim, this Persian language, which is a more, I would like to say vulgar version of that official Middle Persian of the Sassanian court than the Zoroastrian written text, becomes the everyday folk.

• 46:00Speaker 04

  Language of the people who now have converted to Islam, because this is just. So it is, it is actually in a sense grammatically wrong. So if you speak proper Middle Persian, if you put yourself in the robes of a learned Zoroastrian priest of the seventh century, this new Persian language, which we all take proud pride in and we say like, it's the grand monument. It would have sounded to you like the language that old people like me today laugh at the young people and their young, wrong use of language and, you know, slangs. So it's a slang version of that language. It becomes a language of the newly converted Muslims in Mesopotamia. And now these people are actually going east via the process of conquest.

• 46:44Speaker 04

  And they go all the way to Central Asia and they take this language with them. And we have textual evidence that the people in Central Asia, who are speaking Sogdian and Chorazmian and Bactrian, which are not Middle Persian. They are part of the Iranian language family, the same way that English is part of the Germanic language family, but English is not German. They are different languages of the same family. These people get converted to Islam via this language, via this vulgar language of the West. And then through a political process, which really happens in the 10th and 11th century

• 47:26Speaker 04

  in that region, this vulgar language in the east, in the territories of another very interesting empire, the Samani, the empire of Central Asia, which is centered in Bukhara in modern Uzbekistan and has the, pretty much the territory of modern Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and northeastern Iran. This becomes their empire in the 10th and 11th century. It becomes the administrative language of that empire. Right? And it's through there that where first we see this Persian, new Persian speaking,

• 48:04Speaker 04

  poets like Rudakki and writers like Balani, spreading this new, new Persian, which is now is a language that is based morphologically and grammatically on that new Persian, but vocabulary is full of Arabic, full of local Baktrian and Sogdian words, quite a few Turkic words, and even morphologically sometimes adopts these influences from these local languages, loses one of its most defining grammatical forms, which is the ergative case, becomes quite simple. It's the only in the European language that doesn't have any gender. Like,

• 48:46Speaker 04

  so in English you have he or she and it. New Persian doesn't. New Persian just has one third person singular, that. That that stands for anybody, man, woman, wall, car, animal, whatever, doesn't matter. That's the third thing, right? So it's so simplified that is obviously it's a language of communication. It's a, it's a Creole language, made for communication initially, and then made into this grand literary language, which then in the hands of people like Rudakki and Balani, and then later, of course, Ferdusi and his monumental Shahnamet, becomes this grand literary language, which now we are

• 49:27Speaker 04

  all proud of. So saying that Persian and this Persian culture always civilizes people, it's kind of discounting that the fact that we speak Neopersian today is become because of Islam, because they brought it in. Otherwise, Tehran should not be a Persian speaking city. Tehran's native language, which was spoken in the generation of my great-grandfathers still, is actually influenced by Parthip.

• 49:55Speaker 04

  Or some version of whatever, some people think media, whatever. It was a local language. They were local language. They are still Iranian. They are still same family of languages. But it's not New Persian. The reason my native language is New Persian is because Islam brought it. New Persian is the language of Western Iran, Southern Iraq, you know, that area. So, yeah, that that beautiful, heartwarming narrative is, in a way, something is nice to hold on to. But the detail of it is so intertwined with the first idea that this is the whole thing is together. Is because of that and due to that is is something that we have to consider, basically.

• 50:37Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, that's so so interesting because I think there is this general perception that Persian as a language, you know, is ancient and has always been there and kind of resisted Arabic and and refused to be pushed aside. But clearly, clearly, that's just not the case. And it's so interesting because it really speaks to the the the deep kind of cultural stories that we all tell ourselves. You know, we hold on to these ideas about ourselves that may not even be true, but they become such a core part of of who we are as a society that we almost refuse to let them go.

• 51:11Speaker 04

  In a way, to just put an ending to that, we don't think of this as Turkish, right? Turkish is the language of a whole lot of Muslims as well. And Turkish is a cause of the spread of Islam to a whole lot of world, right? You know, Western Anatolia shouldn't be Turkish speaking. They are Greeks and Balkans and all of the. The reason that that Turkish goes all the way to the Balkans is because of Islam and these people pushing Islam west. So is Turkish to resisting Arabic? You know, we don't think, we don't ever think of it like that, right? I don't know if the very Catholic kings of Spain hadn't forced everybody to become Christian and pushed it. We would have had Spanish speaking Muslims.

• 51:55Speaker 04

  So could we have gotten them that they are the Muslims that have resisted Arabic? No, they're just speaking Spanish because they are there and then they convert to. Islam and we now, of course, in this day and age, we have, I don't know, Indonesian and Malaysian speaking Muslims as well, right? They didn't resist anything. They just Muslims who are speaking their own language. So in a sense, since Persian has been the, has been there from the origin. Persian was the language of people who were Muslims already when the founders of Islam were alive. We think of it as this thing, but the best thing is the title that a lot of very good historians, but most particularly Clifford Edmund Bosworth,

• 52:39Speaker 04

  the great British ironologist and Orientalist has given it. Persian is the second language of Islam. Islam is not a monolingual religion, even from the beginning. It has two languages. Persian is the language of Eastern Islam.

• 52:51Matt Lewis?

  I could talk to you all day about this, Haddad. I feel like I want to carry on the story and keep going. But it's been absolutely fascinating to get to grips with, with what is going on in this region during this period and all of the, the shifting politics and religion and language. It's been so fascinating to get into all of that with you. So thank you so much for joining us and, and sharing your knowledge with our audience.

• 53:11Speaker 04

  Thank you. Thank you very much. It was really a pleasure. I know that whatever I'm saying is only sort of the tip of the iceberg of what is lying beneath. And I'm hoping that these things pique people's interest enough to follow up on them. Thank you very much for your time.

• 53:27Matt Lewis?

  It's been fantastic to talk to you. Thank you.

• 53:33Matt Lewis?

  There are new installments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday. So please come back and join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can sign up to History Hit to access hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week and also get all of History Hit's podcasts ad free. Head over to historyhit.com/subscribe right now. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.

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