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- [00:02]
Matt Lewis
From long lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Elena Jarninger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life. Only on History. Hit with your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:42]
Stephen
With almost half a million customers and over a trillion dollars of secure payments, Bill isn't new to intelligent finance. It's the proven way to simplify bill pay and maximize cash flow. Want to learn more? Visit bill.comproven for a special offer.
- [00:59]
Hayden
Howdy, howdy ho, and welcome to Fantasy Fan Fellas. I'm Hayden, producer of the Fantasy Fangirls podcast and your resident lover of all things Sanderson.
- [01:07]
Stephen
And I'm Stephen, your bookish Internet goofball, but you can call me the Smash Daddy.
- [01:11]
Hayden
And we are currently deep diving Brandon Sanderson's fantasy epic Mistborn. But here's the catch. Steven here has not read Mistborn before.
- [01:20]
Stephen
That's right.
- [01:20]
Hayden
Hey.
- [01:20]
Stephen
Hey. So each week you'll get my unfiltered raw reactions to every single chapter.
- [01:25]
Hayden
And along the way, we'll do character deep dives, magic explainers, and Steven will even try to guess what's next. So, spoiler alert, he'll be wrong.
- [01:32]
Stephen
Newsflash, I'm never wrong. Episodes come out every Wednesday, and you can find Fantasy fanfellas wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:39]
Dr. Hodad Rezakhani
With its two juicy beef patties, three slices of melted cheese, and tangy Big Arch sauce. The Big Arch is what happens when you start making a McDonald's burger and never stop. The Big Arch, the most McDonald's McDonald's burger yet for a limited time.
- [01:57]
Matt Lewis
Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval. From History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and latest groundbreaking research. From the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the Crusades, we cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots, and murders, to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with. Gone Medieval. Welcome to this special extra episode of Gone Medieval. Only two months ago, millions of Iranians took to the streets to protest. And events in recent days have spiraled, putting the country once again in the media spotlight. And while it may seem like this is a crisis born of the present moment of politics, economic sanctions, modern discontent, and Iran's alleged nuclear ambitions. Tensions in Iran run deeper than the last five decades. The Iranian people have been wrestling with power, faith and identity for centuries. To understand why Islam in Iran looks the way that it does today, why it's embraced, contested, reshaped and resisted, we have to travel back, not just centuries, but but more than a millennium, to the land the world once called Persia. Before it was Islamic. Medieval Iran, or Persia, as we called it, was not a cultural backwater waiting to be transformed. It was one of the great prizes of the ancient world. Sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and fiercely proud of its identity. Then, in the seventh century, came the armies from Arabia, bearers of a new faith, Islam. In a matter of decades, the mighty Sasanian Empire fell, and Persia was drawn into the orbit of a religion born far beyond its borders. But conquest is never just about swords and banners. It's also about memory, about adaptation and resistance, about how people take a foreign faith and over time, make it their own or resist it. Today on Gone Medieval, we're going back to the moment of that collision, the Arab Muslim conquest of Persia. To help us understand the medieval world that shaped Iran today, I'm joined by Dr. Hodad Rezakhani, a historian of global late antiquity and early Middle Ages with a focus on Central and West Asia between 500 and 700 CE. We'll explore how Islam first took root on Iranian soil, what medieval Persia looked like before and and afterwards, and how those early encounters still echo in Iranian attitudes towards Islam today. A very warm welcome to God Medieval Khadidad. It's great to have you with us.
- [04:47]
Dr. Hodad Rezakhani
Thank you very much. Same. Very happy to be with you.
- [04:51]
Matt Lewis
I'm looking forward to finding out more about this topic too. So we're going to talk about the area that would have in ancient times been known as Persia. And when we get to the beginning of the early medieval period, so from around the third century, so just before we would think we've moved into the early medieval period, the empire that exists in that region is the Sasanian Empire. So I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about them. How did they come to power in that region?
- [05:17]
Dr. Hodad Rezakhani
Very good. If I might start with your use of the term Persia, which might in this day and age sounds very political and politicized because now certain people with certain political leanings tend to use Persia and Persian as a designation then Iran and Iranian. I'm not going to purely get into that. I'm just going to clarify that Persia is an exonym, is an external name given to the region. It specifically comes from an area of the greater region we are talking about. And the endonym, the internal name was always something derived from the term er or a, which is the root of the word Iran, which essentially means the people, really like everything else. You know, we are the people, everybody else is, you know, something else, barbarians or whatever word er. And the combination, which is a substantive sort of plural of it was always the exonym of the area. So this should be clarified that Persia in a sense is still a valid term. It's sort of like Holland and the Netherlands, where Holland is a part of the Netherlands, but for many time, many centuries, the entire area was known as Holland because that was the important political area. So that's for. And specifically for the empire which actually calls itself the ruler of Iran, Shahr, the ruler of the empire of Iran or empire of er, that is, you know, sort of the Middle Persian term. Eran Shahr is the Sasanian Empire. Sasanian Empire is a, you could say, in a sense a quintessential late antique empire in the sense of it comes up towards the earliest part of what we call late antiquity and ends around the time that we maybe with a bit of a stretch, imagine to be the late end of late antiquity. Late antiquity being a very fluid term and being sort of a creation of the last half a century. So in the third century, there has been over half a century of crisis in the Arsacid Empire. They had been dealing with what we now realize is a social and economic crisis and a serious political and sort of dynastic crisis and threats from outside, both from, well, the most well known Roman side and also from the east, where various powers in the east, including the Kushan Empire, had been pushing against them from their eastern borders and the Parthians had really have started breaking down. And all of a sudden, in the third century, this upstart power, local ruler of a province in the south of the country called Persis, hence the Persian Empire, Rutten comes up very quickly, removes all the Arsacets, establishes this empire, has a very uniform and very, very quickly forming solid image of an empire. So we see this solid image in expression of some sort of a divine grace given to them by use of the word Mazd, meaning Mazda worshiping Ahura Mazda, the God of Zoroastrian, Mazda worshiping king. They start using the term Iran. And very soon Iran and Iran, they call themselves Shahan Shah Iran or an Iran King of Iran. Iranians and non Iranians, they start issuing these coins which stay pretty uniform throughout the entire 400 and more year of their rule. With a fire altar in the reverse of the coin. The face of the king on the obverse of the coin, very quickly recognizable, really becomes the basis of all the eastern silver coinage up to the medieval Islamic period, up to even, you could say, the Mongol period and even beyond. Very iconic coinage, very iconic image, very iconic words. It all of a sudden becomes a very discernible empire with eastern and western borders. They more and more move towards the center. That center in Ctesiphon, 35 km south of modern Baghdad, becomes this grand capital, very comparable to Rome or Constantinople. It's made up of five or six little cities that are attached to each other. It becomes the center of the Jewish learning in the region. It becomes the center of the Patriarchate of the east, which still exists and bears its name. It's still called the Patriarchate of Seleucia. Ctesiphon, the city is called Ctesiphon. And very much an imperial center, imperial power, an economy that is very easily identifiable through this coinage and through everything else and of course, constant conflicts.
- [10:26]
Matt Lewis
Can we just pin down kind of exactly geographically what this empire looks like? If we were to overlay it onto a modern map, presumably it would incorporate Iran. You've mentioned the capital is not far south of Baghdad. Does it include Iraq, modern Iraq as well. Does it cover other areas too?
- [10:42]
Dr. Hodad Rezakhani
There is a core territories of the empire which is really modern Iran, modern Iraq, parts of modern Turkey would be parts of a whole lot of modern Afghanistan. Places that would be modern Turkmenistan and parts of modern Uzbekistan. And then in the Caucasus, basically, essentially Azerbaijan, Armenia and parts of eastern Georgia, as well as the southern or the eastern part of the Arabian Peninsula. So modern parts of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Oman, and in a good part of it, particularly in the last hundred years, Yemen. There is also a period of about 15 to 20 years where they also rule over all of pretty much modern Turkey, all of Syria, all of Lebanon, all of Jordan, all of Israel, Palestine and all of Egypt. So in the 7th century they actually managed to push into Africa and pretty much the borders of Europe as well. But that's only like towards for a short while. So I would say those are not the core territories. The core territory loosely is defined access to Euphrates, meaning sort of Afghanistan, to Iraq and western part of Iraq. And from Georgia, let's say, to, yeah, eastern Arabia, to, let's say, United Arab Emirates.
- [12:09]
Matt Lewis
How powerful is an aristocracy in The Sassanian Empire. And how is society kind of structured throughout the empire from the aristocracy down?
- [12:18]
Dr. Hodad Rezakhani
There is an ideal version of that that has been promoted for more than a century and even more by Orientalists, particularly, who had been looking at these things from the point of view of Indo, European idealized society, from the point of view of Zoroastrian texts, so on and so forth, which imagines a very stratified and even caste based system in which the king goes on top. There is an aristocracy, there is a religious aristocracy, there is a urban elite group, then there are producers and then there are the farmers. You know, this is going down more and more shows that it's not real. Our problem really is that the issue of aristocracy has just been focused on and there are differing ideas on them. There is the idea that there was a set set of high families. This is something that was already set in the 19th century by the great orientalist Theodore Nolteke, who provisioned seven noble families of the Sasanian Empire, ruling over various grand territories around the empire. So these are the large landowners and they are ruling in some sort of an agreement with the central sort of imperial family. I would imagine that Sasanians had various types of aristocracy, including genealogical aristocracies, including military aristocracies, including economic aristocracies and elites, religious ones. And I think as a whole we should consider this entire thing together. And I am trying to write something about that and I don't have clear ideas about it yet. So my complicated answer to a simple question is we don't know. But of course it has aristocracies, it has elite. What they are, we still are in the process of finding out.
- [14:12]
Matt Lewis
We've talked a little bit then about the political structures of the region and how that is changing. I wondered if we could talk a bit about the religious situation too. The Sasanians are bringing about all of these centralizing political reforms. Do they make any religious reforms? What is the dominant religion in the Sasanian Empire?
- [14:30]
Dr. Hodad Rezakhani
There is no doubt that some sort of, what we call Zoroastrianism for all practical purposes is a much later formalization of a series of religious beliefs. So think of it more like pre British Hinduism. There is some sort of a religious identity which we recognize as Zoroastrianism. And certainly in the lands of the Iranian plateau and Central Asia and initially even in the Caucasus, this is a dominant belief system. Let me call it, I am allergic to the term religion. The emperors certainly from Ardashir I, from the very first emperor Ardashir I under coinage called themselves Mazda sin bag. So the Mazda worshipping lord. So this identity with Ahura Mazda, the great God of Zoroastrianism is certainly a established. But we run into the problem of what Zoroastrianism is. I wouldn't give you a headache on that. From the second emperor we have a support for a new religion which seems to be a hybrid of various Christian oriented cults mixed with various local ritualistic and cultic beliefs that gets the title of Manichaeism. You might have heard of, your listeners might know of this is sort of popularized in the west as being the original religion of St. Augustine. St. Augustine is originally a Manichaean, then becomes a Christian and writes something against the Manichaeans actually. So this religion comes to existence in the center of the Sasanian Empire in Mesopotamia. The prophet Mani, after whom the religion is named, comes to the court of Shapur I, the second Sasanian emperor, the son of Ardashir I and writes a book in his honor describing, in Middle Persian, describing his religious beliefs. And it seems that for at least the reign of Shapur and his son Hormuz I, the religion is given some sort of a royal protection. How widely it spreads initially we don't know. Manichaeism eventually survives until the 11th century in Central Asia and we have it going all the way to Tibet and you know, western China and Mongolia and there's an empire over there. Then we obviously have Christianity that starts coming in in the second and third century and even towards the beginning of the second century we already have Christianities in Iran. So it predates the coming of the Sasanians. Mani himself is very much influenced by various Christian cults. There is even a speculation that at one point there were as many Christians in the Sasanian Empire that were in the Roman Empire. We have churches in southern Iran today, even from that period. So Christianity is very widespread and of course not to forget Judaism in particularly Mesopotamia is very widespread, quite popular. And so Judaism was, at least in the western part of the empire, very important, very big. So actually religiously it's a big, very, very interesting empire and in many senses is much more tolerant than the Roman Empire because all of these religions are actually, they seem not to have an attitude of supercession of religions, that one religion has to dominate everything else. Unlike what you see, for example, after Emperor Theodosius in Rome, there doesn't seem to be a Sausanian idea that there should be an official religion. So while the emperor is obviously Zoroastrian, he supports the Christian church and marries a Christian queen. So it seems to be that they are much a lot more open towards religious beliefs.
- [18:25]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, it's fascinating how diverse and tolerant it is because you would tend to think that a really centralizing empire is going to want to also control the religion. And if Zoroastrianism is kind of the state religion, I guess that they would be looking to enforce that as much as they could. But it seems like they're not. I mean it's that kind of toleration. Is that part of Zoroastrianism? I actually don't know too much about Zoroastrianism so I understand you don't want to give us a big detailed breakdown of the belief systems and everything else, but is Zoroastrianism a particularly tolerant religion?
- [18:57]
Dr. Hodad Rezakhani
Don't blame yourself. Nobody knows a lot about Zoroastrianism.
- [19:01]
Matt Lewis
I know the name, I know the name Zoroastrian, I've come across it before. But I don't really know too much about what Zoroastrians believe.
- [19:06]
Dr. Hodad Rezakhani
In Britain probably the term would be better known under the name Parses. I mean, so we have a lot of Parsees in Britain. Parsis would love it because the biggest representative of the Parsis or Austrian communities, Freddie Mercury. So you know Freddie Mercury's religion, let's say Zoroastrianism I don't think is particularly itself tolerant of other religions is that possibly there is an idea that religions belong to groups of people and that different groups of people have different religions. So if those people want to have that religion it just means that they are not us. So there is this idea of air and an Iranian or Aryan whatever you wanted air people and non heir people which as I said under coins, so Samuels call themselves the king of Kings of Air and Aner and it seems that the Zoroastrianism is the religion of air and everything else is a religion of Anir. So it's not that Zoroastrianism itself, it's very tolerant, it's that the Sasanian emperors consider themselves the king of both. And there is no, it's not a missionary, it's not an evangelizing religion, it doesn't try to convert anybody. Well in modern Indian version of it particularly, it's actually banned to convert to it. You can't convert to it. It's much like Orthodox Judaism, it has become now an ethno religion in the modern sense. There's no reason that we believe that it's an ethno religion back then, but it just means that they don't think of religion as that closely connected to the idea of the Empire the way we are used to in the Roman world. It just means that the political use of religion is much more limited in the Sasanian world than it is in what we think as the blueprint of Empire witches. Rome Foreign.
- [21:14]
Hayden
Deserves to be Connected T Mobile and US Cellular are joining forces Our networks are coming together, bringing more T Mobile coverage all over the country. Switch to T Mobile and save up to 20% versus Verizon by getting built in benefits they leave out. Check the math@t mobile.com Switch and now T Mobile is available in a US cellular store near you Bigger network the combination of T Mobile's and US Cellular's network footprints will enhance the T Mobile network's coverage savings versus comparable Verizon plans plus the costs of options, benefits, plan features and taxes and fees vary. Savings with three plus lines include third free line free via monthly bill credits Credit stop if you cancel any lines. Qualifying credit required. Howdy, howdy ho and welcome to Fantasy Fan Fellas. I'm Hayden, producer of the Fantasy Fangirls podcast and your resident lover of all things Sanderson.
- [21:52]
Stephen
And I'm Stephen, your bookish Internet goofball. But you can call me the Smash Daddy.
- [21:56]
Hayden
And we are currently deep diving Brandon Sanderson's fantasy epic Mistborn. But here's the catch. Steven here has not read Mistborn before.
- [22:05]
Stephen
That's right.
- [22:05]
Dr. Hodad Rezakhani
Hey hey.
- [22:06]
Stephen
So each week you'll get my unfiltered raw reactions to every single chapter.
- [22:10]
Hayden
And along the way we'll do character deep dives, magic explainers, and Steven will even try to guess what's next. Spoiler alert. He'll be wrong.
- [22:17]
Stephen
News flash. I'm never wrong. Episodes come out every Wednesday, and you can find Fantasy fanfellas wherever you get your podcasts. Over 90 of the top 100 US accounting firms trust Bill to handle bill pay processes. Why? Because our tools are built on over a trillion dollars of secure payments. We're not just moving money, we're powering financial workflows for half a million customers. That's a level of expertise you just can't fake. Ready to talk with an expert? Visit bill.comproven to get started and grab a $250 gift card as a thank you. Terms and conditions apply. See Offer page for details.
- [22:54]
Dr. Hodad Rezakhani
With its two juicy beef patties, three slices of melted cheese, and tangy Big Arch sauce, the Big Arch is what happens when you start making a McDonald's burger and never stop. The big arch, the most McDonald's, McDonald's burger yet for a limited time.
- [23:23]
Matt Lewis
As we move through, you've mentioned that the Sasanian Empire kind of falls in the seventh century. So as we move towards that, there is going to be, you know, a new political and religious power move into the region on the verge of the Arab invasion. What kind of state is the Sassanian Empire in? I mean, we've looked at it being quite centralizing. We've talked about it being going through a period of expansion too. And at its height, covering this huge geographic area, is it waning by the 7th century or is it actually at the peak of its powers?
- [23:55]
Dr. Hodad Rezakhani
It is at the peak of its powers and that's the irony in its disappearance. My answer to why it falls in the peak of its power is that we have to separate the fall of the Sasanian dynastic rule separately as the fall of the empire they created. I semi humorously call it the empire outgrows the dynasty. The dynasty has done its best, the empire has now outgrown, and the dynasty is incapable of managing the empire. The empire by all means seems to be at the height of its power in the sense that right prior to the rise of Islam, it actually has had a couple of decades of amazing expansion of its power, while for about 400 years it has stayed at the other side of the Euphrates and has set up Euphrates at its border with Rome. And there is a sort of a status quo there where, you know, Romans come and take over a couple of cities here and the Sasanians go and take over a couple of cities over there. Things are okay all of a sudden. From the beginning of the 6th century, there seems to be on part of the Sasanians a grand effort to actually go and conquer. In the 6th century, the Sasanian emperor actually reaches Antioch, the grand city of the Eastern Roman Empire. And he just doesn't go and extract tribute and go back. He actually takes his time, goes to the sea, swims in the Mediterranean, does prostration towards the sun, and then gets on his horse and very calmly comes back. And as the Roman sources tell us, doesn't hurt anybody in the process. And for me, this is a symbolic sort of Sausanian emperors telling the Romans, we are now here, we have arrived. The Sausanians are now we are going to come here. And then between 610 and 628, they actually get there. They are actually controlling entire eastern Mediterranean. They control anything from all of modern Anatolia. They reach the walls of Constantinople and down there they reach Libya, and all of eastern Mediterranean now becomes their territory, the empire. Very quickly. The Emperor Khosrow II, the one who actually does this, yes, in 628, is defeated, basically is removed through a coup d' etat in his court, and his troops in northern Mesopotamia lose a couple of battles to Emperor Heraclius, which causes this domino effect of removal of the emperor, which causes a lot of chaos in the dynasty. You have replacement of five emperors within, like, three years. You know, things start falling apart. But less than 10 years after the man's death, Muslims are there. They have taken over Ctesiphon, they have taken over. Now, pretty much everything that he conquered, they just take over his empire, the one he conquered. The Muslims are now in eastern Mediterranean and Egypt and are pushing against the walls of Constantinople. So exactly what he was doing 10 years ago gets repeated within 10, 15 years after his death. So in a sense, you could say that the power that the Sasanians sort of unleash in the seventh century, with its roots in the sixth century, really comes to culmination under the Muslim. So I'm very much of a fan of putting the Islamic conquests in context of the Sasanian conquest that preceded it, and see them as a collective effort that starts in 6, 10. So in a sense, you could say, I could be ironic and say that Islamic Conquest starts in 610. And I jokingly have called Khosra II the first Muslim caliph. He is the one who really starts this whole thing. But, yes, it's at the height of its power. There is no waning. There seems to be, actually. The treasury is full, the soldiers are there, everything is happening. Well, nothing is really wrong. And the fact that it causes this is the impetus behind all of this later conquest tells me that things are okay. It's just that the dynasty is not very okay at all. And it's gone.
- [28:20]
Matt Lewis
And when the Muslims begin to arrive, the Arab Muslims begin to arrive, is it easy for them to take over the Sassanian Empire despite its kind of strength, or is it a more gradual process than that?
- [28:33]
Dr. Hodad Rezakhani
Mesopotamia is very easy. It seems to be very easy. So Mesopotamia and then the rest of these areas that they have conquered, so the Greater Syria and Egypt and stuff, this goes very quickly. So by 642, the Sasanian emperor, the remaining Sasanian emperor, Yazgir III, has to put up a fight against the Muslims in what is essentially now western Iran in 642. So, what, 14 years after his grandfather was killed, only nine years after he supposedly ascends the throne, he has to put up a fight already in western Iran. So Mesopotamia, the capital of the Sasanian Empire. The area of Mesopotamia in Middle Persian is Deli Iran Shahr, the heart of the empire of Iran. So the heart of the empire of Iran, that capital city of Ctesiphon, that area falls very quickly. The conquest of the rest takes about a century. So Muslims really reach the borders of Sasanian Empire itself in the Oxus region only in the early 8th century.
- [29:45]
Matt Lewis
Yeah. And how significant in that process is the battle of Nahavan? We have this set piece battle. Is that a turning point?
- [29:52]
Dr. Hodad Rezakhani
Naharavan is interesting. Usually Qadisiya is called the turning point because that's the first time that supposedly Arab Muslims managed to defeat a Sassandian grand army. But that seems to be a lot more of a literary creation of later historians. Ravana itself is the place where Arab Muslims have now faced. The Sasanian troops are conquering them and are now threatening the center of the Sasanian Empire. So it is significant very much in, I would say, morale way for the Sasanians. This is when they actually, they realize they are being conquered. Before this, they probably could have thought of this as some sort of a regional raid or conflict. Here is no, oh, no, we are being attacked. We are actually being conquered. So in that sense, it is very important.
- [30:43]
Matt Lewis
And presumably then the Arab Muslims that arrive having managed to break the power of the Sasanian Empire, they acquire this kind of centralized government and authority. Does that make it fairly smooth because they, unlike Zoroastrianism, they are going to look to convert the area to Islam. Is that process made smooth and even across the Sassanian lands by this kind of centralized government? Or do we see lots of resistance to the Islamization of the region?
- [31:10]
Dr. Hodad Rezakhani
That's a very sort of hard question to answer. We don't really know when the majority of the population converts to Islam, but it's almost certain that it's not as the Muslims come in. Generally, the picture we have, which is based on mostly later narrative sources, because you have to notice that the narratives of Islamic conquests that we have often come from things that were written between 150 to 200 and even more years later than the events. Among the surprising facts of world history is that 7th century is the time that, you know, we almost have codec. We have modern books almost, but we have very little about the conquest, or we have had little that we have noticed because we keep on talking. This is the bias of historiography. We read history through the languages. We know, so so far we have been reading Latin, Greek and Arabic and maybe Persian and these sources generally did not reflect enough about the seventh century. Now we have Syriac sources, we have Armenian sources and all of these things that we are learning more about them. And now we have primary Middle Persian documents, for example, from central Iran and from northern Iran, which we're still reading because, well, it's Middle Persian. Maybe we should have an excursus into that. What a horrible writing, terrible writing system Middle Persian has, makes it really hard to read. So we knew less about all of these. So the process of conquest is ill understood. We have tales of military conquest, but we know really little about its cultural, its economic, its social, you know, any other aspect of it. Even politically it is little understood. Generally we think that the conversions happen about the third century of Islamic rule. So in the ninth century of the common era. So coming in early on, it's not like that Muslim armies come in, conquer, and then behind them everybody is converting to Islam. Even they don't make these claims. They say that we arrive at cities, we offer terms of peace, which is often, accept us, quarter us, don't attack us from the back and pay us tribute and we leave you alone or fight us. And if we conquer you, we are going to take you prisoners and extract whatever money we want and force you to convert to Islam. Right. So, you know, even they don't claim that they are converting everybody absolutely to Islam, but we certainly know that they didn't, they couldn't. It's not Islam, despite the picture that obviously later sources give of it. Obviously at the beginning is not a religion of the majority. There's an entire controversy about if it understands itself as a common centralized religion. Even so, just to be said that early on there is little evidence to think that Muslims come in and everybody becomes Muslim. And you have to consider that in the Muslim countries the process of conversion is never complete because there are still native non Muslims in the Muslim countries. We have Zoroastrians living in Iran, we have native Christians in Palestine, we have native Christians in Egypt, we have native Jews in Morocco and you know, up to few decades ago everywhere else in the middle we have native Jews in Iran, we have native Mandans in southern Iraq, we have native Yazidis in northern Iraq, we have, you know, all sorts of. So interestingly enough, Islam doesn't become a religion. That is, there are no native Roman pagans remaining. There are not even any native Lithuanian pagans remaining. And Lithuanians converted to Christianity only 700 years ago. But Christianity is a supersessionist religion. When you go somewhere and you become thinking, everybody becomes Christian, right? There are no native anything left in Europe, but there are native religions all over Middle East. Even there were Jews living in Bukhara until 50 years ago in Uzbekistan. You know, they are all around. So in a sense you could say that Islam never completely converts the concurred population. But so as far as religion goes, I would say that we have to be very careful. As far as resistance goes though, again, the process is ill understood. But yes, from these documents we can say that it seems like that in that center, in that heart of Iran, Chad, in that Mesopotamia, it goes pretty smoothly. When they get inside Iran, it's really, there is no uniform pattern. There is resistance, there is cooperation. In central Iran, it seems to be that there is a cooperation in the east. There is great resistance in the way that the East. Rev. Rev. You know, interestingly enough, early Muslims never get into Afghanistan. You know, we now think of Taliban, but Afghanistan is actually the area that resists the longest. Afghanistan really gets conquered and converted to Islam in the 10th century and actually by the local powers, like people just across the border near Iran. And a medieval Iranian ruler called Ya' Go is the guy who actually conquers Kabul and removes the local Hindu Shahi, the Hindu kings of Kabul and converts the locals to Islam. Right. So like in the east it seems to be like it really doesn't go beyond the borders of modern Iran and Afghanistan. In the north of Iran they never managed to conquer because of the geography of the Alborz range, southern Caspian region. Muslims never managed to pass the mountains and go to the other side and convert people. And the conversion of the people in the north really happens through completely different dynamics and even to another version of Islam, you know, not the majority orthodox Islam. Even so there is resistance. Armenians obviously never conquer despite the fact that they are part of the empire. There is resistance, there is local resistance, there is local cooperation, gradual political, I would say process of osmosis in a sense. And then at the end is just the locals joining a greater power, agreeing to pay tribute, agreeing into various peace treaties that makes them part of what the great Islamic historian Marshall Hudson has called the Islamicate world. So we shouldn't think of this as a process of constant conquest, conquest, resistance, cooperation, complete stopping of the process of conquest. All of these are part of the game that we are talking about. Foreign.
- [37:59]
Hayden
Deserves to be connected. T Mobile and US Cellular are joining forces. Our networks are coming together bringing more T Mobile coverage all over the country. Switch to T Mobile and save up to 20 versus Verizon by getting built in benefits they leave out. Check the math@t mobile.com Switch and now T Mobile is available in a US cellular store near you Bigger network the combination of T Mobiles and US Cellular's network footprints will enhance the T Mobile network's coverage savings versus comparable Verizon plans plus the costs of options, benefits, plan features and taxes and fees vary. Savings with three plus lines include third free line free via monthly bill credits credit stop if you cancel any lines
- [38:27]
Stephen
Qualifying Credit Required Over 90 of the top 100 U.S. accounting firms trust bill to simplify and secure bill pay that's proven financial infrastructure built on over a trillion dollars of secure payments. Visit bill.com proven for a special offer.
- [38:59]
Matt Lewis
I think if we look at modern Iran today, we can see a country there that despite the fact that Arabic becomes ubiquitous in most other places, Iran is a place that maintains its language, that retains Persian and retains an awful lot of its stories and its connections to Zoroastrianism and things like that. So I wonder whether you feel that it's a case that Persia undergoes or Persian society undergoes a form of Islamization, or does actually Islam undergo a bit of Persianization when it arrives there?
- [39:33]
Dr. Hodad Rezakhani
I love this question and it's a very smart question. And I guess you know that your modern average Iranian would go for the second option. There is this sort of a understanding in modern Iran that, you know, Persian culture slash Iranian culture, this being this grand old, you know, constantly during the Pahlavi time, particularly the number 2500 was thrown around 2,500 year old empire and civilization and obviously even older before that has this civilizing effect over whoever conquers it. Iranians like to think that we made Alexander Iranian, you know, because Alexander comes and aspires to be an Achaemenid great king. And we made Muslims Persians and you know, they very much understand Shiism in the context of Muslims having become Persians. And of course we civilized the Mongols, you know, coming from on the back of the ponies from Mongolia and then commissioning the reproduction and illustration of the great Persian epic, the shahnamerdousi. You know, Iranian culture has a civilizing effect. It is a nice, and it is a very sort of hopeful national myth. And I don't mean myth in the sense of it's a lie, mythology is not a lie, a national narrative. And it's a very, it's a very heartwarming national narratives. It gives you hope that whatever happens, the civilization builds itself up and goes back. And to be quite honest, as an Iranian, and right now, when we are talking about this In February of 2026, even I need this heartwarming narrative. I need to think that our country can rise against whatever adversaries offer it and threaten it with. But like all narratives, it's obviously greatly smoothing over a whole lot of detail. So if I might be permitted to go through a bit of detail on this, the greatest part of this mythology, particularly from the Islamic period onwards, is this sort of narrative of the resistance and rejuvenation and sort of expansion of the Persian language. That the Persian language as the great monument of Iranian Persian culture is the means through which Iranians resist, you know, because in so many senses it is so true that the Shahnama Firdawsi defines the Iranian culture in many senses now, today. And it is written in Persian and it is a grand Persian epic. This even becomes stronger, this idea becomes even stronger. But as I said, like all narratives, the devil is in the details. The idea that Persian survives the onslaught of Arabic, first of all assumes that Persian was the language of the Sasanian Empire before Arab became it, which is by some stretch of definition. Yes, it was. But then, much like the Sasanian Empire lacks a centralized religion, unlike the Roman Empire, it also lacks a centralized language like the Roman Empire. I have to always bring this to people's notice. Even Roman Empire likes a centralized language. We all think of Roman Empire as a Latin speaker speaking empire. But you know, Greece and the eastern Mediterranean and Egypt are as much part of the Roman Empire as Italy and Spain. And they always spoke Greek. You know, one of the biggest problems of that movie by Mel Gibson, that's a movie about the life of Jesus, was that he had gone through all of this pain to make Jesus and everybody around him speak Aramaic. And then the Roman soldiers spoke Latin. They wouldn't have. They would have spoken Greek. The local administrative language of that area was Greek even in the height of the Roman control. And so even Roman Empire is not the empire of one language. And Sasanian Empire much less. So Sasanian emperors come from Persis? Yes, a version of Middle Persian was spoken by them. But Aramaic was obviously the language, the going language of everyday speaking people in Mesopotamia. Whole lot of documents written in various dialects of Aramaic in northern and eastern Iran. Various Parthian dialects that, you know, now that we go to, that Parthian dialects were spoken. Even the early Sassanian, the greatest of Sassanian inscriptions, this inscription of Shapur and Kabe EZ Artish is written in Middle Persian in Parthian and in Greek. So in Persis itself, the birthplace of Persian is written in Parthian as well. And you have all of these different Iranian languages in the East. You have, in the areas that we see new Persian later, we see Bactrian and Sogdian and Khorezmian and all of these languages. So it doesn't seem to have had a uniform language. Yeah, maybe at some senses, you do have an administrative language, but there's no uniform language. So if you told somebody, for example, in the city of Herat in western Afghanistan, which is, you know, one of the important cities of generally Iranian world, and for sure the Sasanian Empire, your language is Persian, they would have looked at you like you're crazy 1,400 years ago. And the fact is that we are talking about, just for lack of a better term, you're talking about two different languages, but two registers of the same language. The language we speak today, the language in which Ferdows wrote, the language in which we take pride, the language which the Mongols started speaking after is new Persian. It's a new register of this language. It is a language that seems to be spreading via spread of Islam itself. So it seems that as the Muslims enter Mesopotamia and as the local Mesopotamian population becomes Muslim, this Persian language, which is a more, I would like to say, vulgar version of that official Middle Persian of the Sasanian court and the Zoroastrian written text, becomes the everyday folk language of the people who now have converted to Islam. Because this is just so. It is actually, in a sense, grammatically wrong. So if you speak proper Middle Persian, if you put yourself in the robes of a learned Zoroastrian priest of the seventh century, this new Persian language, which we all take pride in and we say like it's the grand monument, it would have sounded to you like the language that old people like me today laugh at the young people and their wrong use of language and, you know, slangs. So it's a slang version of that language. It becomes the language of the newly converted Muslims in Mesopotamia. And now these people are actually going east via the process of conquest, and they go all the way to Central Asia and they take this language with them. And we have textual evidence that the people in Central Asia who are speaking Sogdian and Khorezmian and Bactrian, which are not Middle Persian, they are part of the Iranian language family, the same way that English is part of the Germanic language family, but English is not German. They are different languages of the same family. These people get converted to Islam via this language, via this vulgar language of the west and then through a political process which really happens in the 10th and 11th century in that region, this vulgar language in the east, in the territories of another very interesting empire, the Samanid empire of Central Asia, which is centered in Bukhara in modern Uzbekistan and has the pretty much the territory of modern Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and north eastern Iran. This becomes their empire in the 10th and 11th century. It becomes the administrative language of that empire. Right. And it's through there that where first we see these Persian, new Persian speaking poets like Rudaki and writers like Bal Ami spreading this new Persian which is now is a language that is based morphologically and grammatically on that new Persian. But vocabulary is full of Arabic, full of local Bactrian and Sogdian words, quite a few Turkic words and even morphologically sometimes adopts these influences from these local languages, loses one of its most defining grammatical forms, which is the ergativity case becomes quite simple. It's the only Indo European language that doesn't have any gender. So in English you have he or she and it New Persian doesn't. New Persian just has 1/3 person singular that that, that stands for anybody, man, woman, wall, car, animal, whatever, it doesn't matter. That's the third thing. Right. So it's so simplified. That is obviously it's a language of communication. It's a creole language language made for communication initially and then made into this grand literary language which then in the hands of people like Ruda Key and Bal Ami and then later of course Ferdowsi and his monumental Shahnameh becomes this grand literary language which now we are all proud of. So saying that Persian and this Persian culture always civilizes people is kind of of discounting that the fact that we speak neo Persian today is become because of Islam because they brought it in. Otherwise Tehran should not be a Persian speaking city. Tehran's native language, which was spoken in the generation of my great grandfather still is actually influenced by Parfum or some version of whatever some people think media, whatever. It was a local language. They were local language. They're still Iranian. They are still same family of languages, but it's not new Persian. The reason my native language is new Persian is because Islam brought it. New Persian is the language of western Iran, southern Iraq, that area. So yeah, that beautiful heartwarming narrative is in a way something is nice to hold on to. But the detail of it is so intertwined with the first idea that this is the whole thing is together is because of that and due to that is something that we have to consider basically.
- [50:33]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, that's so interesting because I think there is this general perception that Persian as a language is ancient and has always been there and kind of resisted Arabic and refused to be pushed aside. But clearly that's just not the case. And it's so interesting because it really speaks to the deep kind of cultural stories that we all tell ourselves. You know, we hold on to these ideas about ourselves that may not even be true, but they become such a core part of who we are as a society that we almost refuse to let them go in a way to
- [51:07]
Dr. Hodad Rezakhani
just put an ending to that. We don't think of this as Turkish. Right. Turkish is the language of a whole lot of Muslims as well. And Turkish is a cause of the spread of Islam to a whole lot of wars. Right. You know, Western Anatolia shouldn't be Turkish speaking. They are Greeks and Balkans and all of that. The reason that Turkish goes all the way to the Balkans is because of Islam and these people pushing Islam west. So is Turkish too resisting Arabic? You know, we don't ever think of it like that. Right. I don't know. If the very Catholic kings of Spain hadn't forced everybody to become Christian and pushed it, we would have had Spanish speaking Muslims. So could we have gotten them that they are the Muslims that have resisted Arabic? No, they're just speaking Spanish because they are there. And then they converted to Islam. And we now, of course, in this day and age, we have, I don't know, Indonesian and Malaysian speaking Muslims as well. Right. They didn't resist anything. They just Muslims who are speaking their own language. So in a sense, since Persian has been there from the origin, Persian was the language of people who were Muslims already when the founders of Islam were alive. We think of it as this thing. But the best thing is the title that a lot of very good historians, but most particularly Clifford Edmund Bosworth, the great British ironologist and orientalist has given it. Persian is the second language of Islam. Islam is not a monolingual religion. Even from the beginning. It has two languages. Persian is the language of Eastern Islam.
- [52:46]
Matt Lewis
I could talk to you all day about this, Harada. I feel like when you carry on the story and keep going, but it's been absolutely fascinating to get to grips with what is going on in this region during this period and all of the shifting politics and religion and language. It's been so fascinating to get into all of that with you. So thank you so much for joining us and sharing your knowledge with our audience.
- [53:07]
Dr. Hodad Rezakhani
Thank you. Thank you very much. It was really a pleasure. I know that whatever I'm saying is only sort of the tip of the iceberg of what is lying beneath, and I'm hoping that these things pique people's interest enough to follow up on them. Thank you very much for your time.
- [53:23]
Matt Lewis
It's been fantastic to talk to you.
- [53:24]
Dr. Hodad Rezakhani
Thank you.
- [53:29]
Matt Lewis
There are new installments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back and join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can sign up to History Hit to access hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week, and also get all of History Hit's podcasts ad free. Head over to historyhit.com forward/subscribe right now. Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just Gone medieval with History Hit.
- [54:17]
Hayden
Everyone deserves to be connected. T Mobile and US Cellular are joining forces. Our networks are coming together bringing more T Mobile coverage all over the country. Switch to T Mobile and save up to 20% versus Verizon by getting built in benefits they leave out. Check the math@t mobile.com Switch and now T Mobile is available in a US cellular store near you. Bigger network the combination of T Mobile and US Cellular's network footprints will enhance the T Mobile network's coverage savings versus comparable Verizon plans. Plus the costs of options, benefits, plan features and taxes and fees vary. Savings with three plus lines include third free line free via monthly bill credits Credit Stop if you cancel any lines. Qualifying Credit required.
- [54:47]
Stephen
Over 90 of the top 100 U.S. accounting firms trust Bill to simplify and secure bill pay. That's proven financial infrastructure built on over a trillion dollars of secure payments. Visit bill.com proven for a special offer.