PEOPLE
and employed to suppress the sedition of J::Iujr ibn 'AdI in Kufa in
- Among them were Bakr ibn 'Ubayd and Bukayr ibn J::Iumran al-
Al},mari, whose genealogies suggest that, thirty years after the original
settlement, we are already dealing with second generation Ijanira' by
the 670s.107 Indeed, by the time of Mu'awiya's caliphate, the natural
increase of the Ijamra' population of Kufa had begun to pose a prob-
lem and some of them were transferred to Basra, where they joined
other Persians, or to Syria.^108
Nevertheless, nearly twenty thousand Ijamra' were still at Kufa in
the 680s. They were favored by al-Mukhtar, who gave them stipends
and attended their assemblies (Ar. majalis). In return, they supported
him and are supposed to have accounted for most of the army of
twenty thousand men al-Mukhtar sent against 'Ubaydullah ibn Ziyad
under IbrahIm ibn al-Ashtar.109
Although the Daylamis are likely to have been infantry, large num-
bers of heavy, mailed cavalry (M.P. usvaran, Ar. asawira) also went
over to the Muslim side. The main group of Asawira was the force
under Siyah al-UswarI, which formed the vanguard of Yazdagerd's
army when the latter headed for Isfahan after abandoning Hulwan.
Siyah was sent on ahead from Isfahan towards Istakhr with three
hundred men, seventy of whom were members of the high aristocracy
and army officers. He was told to gather other soldiers along the way,
and from Fars, he turned westwards into Khuzistan. Here his force
settled at Kalbaniyya, probably as a defense against the Muslims at
Basra. Siyah eventually converted to Islam when Abii Miisa al-Ash'arI
was governor of Basra, and the Asawira settled there. Their numbers
were increased by other elements in the Persian army who heard of
the successful accommodation'they had made and came to Basra to
join them, especially landless Persian soldiers who converted to Islam
and settled in Basra.l1O
Apart from the involuntary settlement of captives and the voluntary
gravitation of defectors from the Persian army to Basra and Kufa, a
third factor contributing to the new concentration of Persians in lower
Iraq following the Islamic conquest was the way individual Persians
tended to be attracted to the cities of the new rulers. This type of
migration is rather difficult to document because it was generally
107 TabarI, Ta'rzkh, 11, 118, 129, 148.
108 BaladhurI, Futul;, p. 280; Ibn 'Abd Rabbihi, 'lqd, 11, 270, 334; Ill, 413.
109 Dinawari, Akhbiir at-tiwiil, pp. 296, 301-2, 306.
110 Baladhuri, Futul;, pp. 372-74.
