Arabs and Iranians in the Islamic Conquest Narrative

This book analyzes how early Muslim historians merged the pre-Islamic histories of the Arab and Iranian peoples into a didactic narrative culminating with the Arab conquest of Iran. Through an in-depth examination of Islamic historical accounts of encounters between representatives of these two ethnicities taking place in the centuries prior to the coming of Islam, this book uncovers anachronistic projections of contemporaneous Islamic discourses. It shows how the formulaic placement of such embellishment within the context of the narrative served to justify the Arabs' rise to power while explaining the fall of the Iranian Sasanian Empire. By so doing, this book sheds new light on how historians of the early Islamic era both perceived and constructed pre-Islamic history.