Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World

Unlike Egypt, Iraq accommodated not one but two provincial identities, the Assyrian and the Babylonian. Both cultures had of course suffered violent destruction on their fall a thousand years before the Arab conquests as Nabopolassar and the Medes turned Assyria into ' heaps and ruins' in 612 B.C. so Xerxes razed the walls of Babylon, expropriated its citizens and turned its god into bullion after the revolt of 482. Both identities nonetheless survived, the first under a Christian aegis, the second under a pagan. This unusual division of labour between Christianity and paganism was a result of the differing impact of foreign rule on the two provinces. Assyria, which had neither the fabled wealth nor the strategic importance of Babylon, had been left virtually alone by the Achaemenids and Seleucids; condemned to oblivion by the outside world, it could recollect its own glorious past in a certain tranquillity. Consequently when the region came back into the focus of history under the Parthians, it was with an Assyrian, not a Persian let alone Greek, self-identification: the temple of Ashur was restored, the city was rebuilt, and an Assyrian successor state returned in the shape of the client kingdom of Adiabene. The Sasanids put an end to the autonomy of this kingdom, but they did not replace the local rulers with a Persian bureaucracy: though reduced to obedient servants of the Shahanshah, a native aristocracy therefore survived. In one respect, however, their position in the Persian state was an uncomfortable one. Already under the Parthians the Shahanshahs tended to demand religious conformity in return for political significance; and under the Sasanids they did so systematically, thus imposing a Persian truth on an Assyrian identity. As long as the level of integration remained low this disharmony could be disguised by syncretic manoeuvres; but as the Sasanids brought the local aristocracy into closer contact with the Persian court, the meshes were closed. A Persian monarchy thus did for an ethnic God in the east what an ethnic God did for Greek culture in the west, and here as elsewhere the provincials were faced with the choice between the rectification of genealogy and the rectification of faith,. Like the provincials of the west, the Assyrians stuck to their genealogy, but unlike them they could not merely go heretical: even a heretical Zoroastrian was still conceptually a Persian, and visa -vis the Persians the Assyrians therefore …