PEOPLEa palace with a thousand gates (Hazardar) for her on a canal in Basra
named after Umm I:Iabib, Ziyad's daughter.^163
The Asiiwira survived fairly intact as a military unit and community
at Basra for over half a century. During the first civil war, they avoided
becoming compromised by participating in the Battle of the Camel or
the Battle of Siffin. Nevertheless, in 662 Mu'awiya transferred some
of the Asiiwira from Basra and Kufa to Antioch. They only began to
participate in inter-Muslim conflicts during the second civil war, when
they acted in concert with the Tamim in the rising against Mas'iid
ibn 'Amr at Basra in 683. Afterwards they fought on the side of
Mu~'ab ibn az-Zubayr and then joined the revolt of Ibn al-Ash'ath,
which proved their ruin. In retribution, al-I:Iajjaj destroyed their houses
in Basra, reduced their stipends, and deported some of them.^164 There-
after they disappeared as a separate element in Basran society, although
their descendents preserved their identity as late as the ninth century.165
It should be noted that the disbanding of the Asiiwira coincided
with the decline of the dahiiqfn, the change of the language of the tax
bureau from Persian to Arabic, and the coinage reform. These nearly
simultaneous changes underscore the impression that most of the direct
survivals from the Sasanian period lasted for about sixty years after
the conquest, until about 700, before they either disappeared or were
integrated into a new Islamic civilization.
CHANNELS OF TRANSMISSIONIn the interval, captives, defectors, and dahiiqfn provided important
channels for the transmission of Persian culture to Muslim Arabs.
Their very survival contributed to the effectiveness of such cultural
influences.^166 They continued to live as Persians to the best of their
ability under the changed conditions, and assumed that they should
approach their new rulers in ways that had been customary with the
Sasanian authorities. They were employed as scribes and tax collectors
163 Baladhuri, Futu/J, pp. 358, 373-74, Ibn al-Faqih, Buldan, p. 191. An alternative
explanation of the name of Hazardar offered by Baladhuri (p. 359) is that a Sasanian
king had settled one thousand Asawira there.
164 Baladhuri, Ansab, IVb, 107-8; idem, Futu/J, pp. 117,374.
165 Some of them were famous religious teachers and storytellers, such as Miisa ibn
Sayyar al-Uswari, who recited the Qur'an and explained it in both Arabic and Persian
UaI,i?:, al-Bayan wa-t-tabytn [CairolBeirut, 138811968], 1,368). Others were involved
in the theological discussions at Basra (Ibn an-Nadim, Fihrist, I, 381, 390).
166 Persian was spoken at both Basra and Kufa (Tabari, Ta'rtkh, n, 454, 724).