The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran

Perhaps no single historical occurrence looms larger in the imagining of contemporaryIranian identity than Islam’s rise and the ensuing widespread conversionson and around the Iranian plateau. Of course, as with any eventsoccurring over a millennium ago, not to mention events that have shaped theirheirs’ confessional commitments, one encounters a gulf between how Iran’sMuslim conversion is written in the popular imagination and how historiographicalstudies attempt to make sense of such complex transformations.Nonetheless, Sarah Bowen Savant’s The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran:Tradition, Memory, and Conversion might ultimately shape Iranian and Islamic studies not only by contributing novel scholarship to the field, but alsoby speaking to non-specialists’ interests as well.As evidence of popular interest, one need only note the continual reprintsof Abd al-Husayn Zarrinkub’s seminal 1957 study, Dū Qarn Sukūt (Two Centuriesof Silence), which considers the period following the Islamic conquestand the Sasanian Empire’s collapse. Savant’s study picks up where Zarrinkub’sends, arguing that post-conquest Iranians experienced a twofold conversionduring the ninth to eleventh centuries: becoming both Muslim and Persian.And while the author disavows simplistic notions like historical silence or staticnational identities, her book, like Zarrinkub’s, sheds new light on Persian Muslimidentities in a particular historical context and suggests how they areformed, negotiated, contested, and transformed over time and space ...