ADMINISTRATIVE THEORY AND PRACTICETHE PROCESS OF ADMINISTRATIVE CONTINUITYAt this point it is possible to make some suggestions about the nature
of administrative continuity. In the simplest terms, direct continuities
were encouraged by the people who were involved; local Persian no-
tables, captives, and defectors, and native Arabs, all of whom expected
administration to proceed as it had before and did what they were
used to doing. Such influences were prolonged by hereditary tendencies
in those families involved in administration and by the existence of
handbooks, in Middle Persian at first, which described administrative
traditions. Nevertheless, the administrative system in early Islamic Iraq
was much less centralized than it had been under the last Sasanians,
and most of the hierarchic structure of the royal court was eliminated.
Gradually, the organizational arrangements occasioned by practical
needs and problems tended to be coordinated with the main outlines
of the Sasanian administrative system. There were important revivals
in the time of Mu'awiya and again under the early Marwanis at the
turn of the century.266
In addition to the pressures of necessity and the employment of local
people, one of the most effective reasons for this convergence and
resurfacing of previous administrative traditions was the mutual re-
inforcement provided by the similarity between Islamic precedents that
had been sC(t in the Hijaz and Sasanian traditions in Iraq. The fact
that both the Sasanian monarch and the Muslim am,r had military,
fiscal, and judicial responsibilities eased the reconstitution of the bu-
reaucratic system with its hierarchic principles and the adoption of
certain royal customs by governors. The same may be said of the
superficial resemblance between the Muslim Arab divider of booty
and the Sasanian military scribe, and between the tribal council and
a royal audience. To a certain extent, the very nature of these insti-
tutions and their interrelationship, the inherent problems, and the
particular solutions they evoked set up a process in which the system
tended to reconstitute itself once it had begun. Such pressures are most
evident in the way centralized institutions in which authority devolved
through a hierarchic chain of command required devices for control
and security.
As a result, the administration had been centralized at the provincial
level in Iraq by the time of Mu'awiya. The fourfold Sasanian bu-
reaucratic system had been reestablished along with Sasanian royal
266 S. Baron, Social and Religious History of the Jews (New York, 1958), Ill, 120.