"Islamic Conquest of Persia" Topic

How much of the conquest would you credit to the armies of Islam, and how much would you blame on the weakened Persian state after its prolonged wars with Byzantium?

100% Islam / 0% Persia
90% Islam / 10% Persia
etc.

60/40

Yeah, 60/40.

60/40 sounds pretty reasonable.

20/80.

Not to mention there was actually a virtual civil war going on within factions in the Sasanian empire. 5/95.

Pourshariati is pretty good on this.

link

There are also serious arguments about how much of a conquest it was, and how much was various Spahbods and other senior nobles throwing their lot in with the Arabs. By this stage a lot of Zoroastrian belief was discredited, especially following the Mazahkite problems.

20/80 with all the internal problems.

40/60

Clearly, Cyrus the Great should know.

20/80

I think it would be valuable to break this into two distinct questions:

1. To what degree were the Arab military victories due to the strength of the Arab armies and how much to the weakness of the Sassinid armies?

2. To what degree was the collapse of the Sassinid dynasty due to the effectiveness of the Arab conquerors and how much to the weakness of the Sassinid state?

If I had to put numbers on these, I would go with something like:

80/20 for the military victories. The Arab armies of the conquest were successful against a range of enemies, including the Sassinids. While they didn't have any advantages in equipment or technique, it seems that religious fervor will carry you a long way.

30/70 for the collapse of the Sassinid dynasty. As others have pointed out, the Sassinid dynasty was badly weakened by decades of fighting the Byzantines and rife with internal divisions. It was a hollow shell ready to be crushed.

But I have to give some credit to the Arabs as well. To successfully take over such a large territory and make it their own was a significant achievement. Yes, greater Iran remained culturally Persian, but it also became throughly Islamized and was fully integrated into the Arab/Islamic state.

The Arab conquest of Persia, and Syria/Palestine, and Egypt, and North Africa, and Transoxiana remains one of the most remarkable events of history.

- Jack

50/50. History is crammed with examples of events swinging one way when they could just as easily have swung the other way. Timing is everything. Islam arose when neighboring states and cultures were enervated by internal strife and centuries of wars against each other. The "time of the Arab" had arrived. Later history saw the "time of the Norman" and the the Turk and the Mongol and the Mameluk and the Ottoman. Religion played into their spreading influence in about half of these cases; in the others, religion got added on later. The Arab expansion was driven by Islam; but Normans and Turks and Mongols only adopted the religious trappings after their main conquests, because the religious "angle" was seen as an advantage….

The latest book on the Arab expansion by Tom Holland goes a bit beyond religious enthusiasm. The Arabs had been building their power for a long time and the weakness of the two empires attracted them to taken lands that were already substantially infiltrated by Arabs, Syria, Palestine and Iraq. I think Holland sees the religious thing coming rather later as the Arabs attempt to organise the conquests and to unify and differentiate themselves. If I read him right we have the view of Islamic historians writing 200 years later who project backwards the organised religion and dynastic claims of their time. That gives the impression of maybe more religious cohesion than there was.
However, any argument that it is the defaults of the Empires that allow the Arabs to win rather fails because they beat everyone available at the time.
One of the big things that they have going for them is that they raid so effectively and that destroys the economic base of their neighbours and then the arabs come along with larger forces and go for a bigger battle, but if they lose its back to raiding. That gives them the advantage of being able to wait until an opponent is divided politically and then to up the intensity. In their period no one else has the drive to conquer and maybe that is more driven by loot than by religion?
Roy

However, any argument that it is the defaults of the Empires that allow the Arabs to win rather fails because they beat everyone available at the time.

I think the Byzantines would argue against that conclusion.