THE QUESTION OF CONTINUITYreal external "influences" have different degrees of effectiveness on
people who have different backgrounds and interests.CULTURAL INTERACTION
Questions of continuity and change have thus become a matter of
cultural interaction. This book is a study of the emergence of a local
form of Islamic society in Iraq in the seventh and early eighth centuries
and of the interaction of Muslim conquerors from Arabia with the
native population they found there. It is hardly sufficient to explain
their influences on each other in terms of "cultural osmosis." People
do not necessarily imitate their neighbors, and when they do, the
reasons can usually be found. One of the main purposes for evaluating
the extent of continuity and change in early Islamic Iraq is to under-
stand the nature and process of cultural continuity and transmission.
It is to discover and to demonstrate the causes and means responsible
for change or continuity and how and why either occurred. This, in
turn, involves understanding the circumstances, identifying the chan-
nels of transmission, and appreciating the reasons why anyone would
adopt aspects of the culture of someone else or why changes were
effective.
Theories of cultural transmission have been used to explain diffu-
sion. Since diffusion involves the social or geographical spread of an
element of culture, it is a matter of change for the society that receives
it. But when cultural transmission is put into a temporal context as
the means whereby a local culture is preserved or adapted by successive
populations in the same place, it becomes an aspect of continuity. The
validity of the concept of continuity through transmission depends
partly on whether or not the adoption of the external aspects of a
culture necessarily means the adoption of the attitudes and values of
the donor. Ashtor has denied that there was a donor-receiver rela-
tionship at all between the natives of the conquered territories and
the Arab conquerors.^6 Glick identifies channels of communication as
one of the elements necessary for cultural change through transmission
by diffusion, although he seems to assume that otherwise culture is
inherently conservative. He also uses the concept of selectivity by a
recipient culture in adopting what is offered by a donor culture, and
he identifies economic demands, fashion, the desire for knowledge,
6 E. Ashtor, A Social and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle Ages
(Berkeley, 1976), p. 21.