The Arab conquest and the Persian revival

The decisive battles came within a few years of each other. At al-Qadisiyya, in southern Iraq, an Arab army defeated the Sasanians around 636, though the exact year is disputed. At Nahavand, in the Zagros south of Hamadan, a second defeat in 642 broke organised Sasanian resistance; Arab historians called it the 'victory of victories'. Conquest was quick; conversion was not. Most historians think it took several centuries for Muslims to become a majority on the Iranian plateau. Zoroastrian communities endured, especially around Yazd and Kerman, and some later migrated to western India, where their descendants are known as Parsis.

Persians in the caliphate

Iranians soon became central to the new Islamic world. In 750 a revolt launched from Khorasan, in the north-east, brought the Abbasid dynasty to power, and in 762 the caliph al-Mansur founded Baghdad not far from the ruins of Ctesiphon. The Abbasid court borrowed Sasanian ceremony, and Persian families such as the Barmakids served as its ministers. Ibn al-Muqaffa, a Persian convert, put Kalila wa Dimna into Arabic prose.

A new Persian

Meanwhile spoken Persian was changing. In the 9th and 10th centuries, at courts in the east, it began to be written in a modified Arabic script, its vocabulary enriched with Arabic words. Scholars call this New Persian, Fārsi, and a Persian reader today can still follow it with some effort. Its great early patrons were the Samanids, a dynasty of Iranian origin who ruled from Bukhara, in today's Uzbekistan. At their court Rudaki, who died around 941, wrote verse that later generations honoured as the beginning of Persian poetry. The masterpiece of this revival came from Tus, near modern Mashhad. There Abolqasem Ferdowsi spent some three decades on the Shahnameh, the 'Book of Kings', a verse history of Iran from the first mythical king to the fall of the Sasanians. He finished it around 1010. It runs to roughly 50,000 couplets and is noted for its sparing use of Arabic words. In the same world the physician and philosopher Ibn Sina, known in Europe as Avicenna, was born near Bukhara in 980; his Canon of Medicine was taught in European universities for centuries.