PERSIANSWhere Persians survived as cohesive social groups, a noticeable
tendency towards cultural preservation and institutional inertia pre-
vailed even in the face of changing circumstances. Attempts were made
to maintain existing standards and customs and impose them on the
new situation. Here the main examples are the landed Persian aris-
tocracy that continued to exist in the agricultural districts of post-
Sasanian Iraq, where the administrative and taxation systems of the
previous regime survived at the lowest levels, and the Persian soldiers
who defected from the Sasanian armies at the time of the conquest
and joined the Muslims. In both cases, Persian methods of local admin-
istration and taxation, landholding and patterns of settlement, festi-
vals, social customs, military traditions, and the lower levels of the
class system were preserved without significant change in early Islamic
Iraq among those Persians who survived the conquest and preserved
their heritage among themselves.
In addition, the institutional lag or overlapping represented by the
survival into the early eighth century of the dahiiqtn as a distinct class
and by the Asiiwira as a military unit lasted long enough for them to
transmit to Muslim Arabs the attitudes and lifestyle appropriate to a
landed aristocracy and the equipment and military institutions asso-
ciated with heavy cavalry tactics. Transmission was facilitated by the
Persians' expectation that their new lords would want to be treated
in the same way as their previous masters, and by their actions in
accordance with this expectation. Channels of Persian cultural trans-
mission were also provided by the presence of captive Persian women
in Muslim Arab households and by the existence of bilingual Arabs
and Persians. This situation shows that Persian influences on early
Islamic society did not have to occur in Iran proper; conditions in Iraq
made that province seem almost more important for significant cultural
interaction and assimilation. But it is equally important to realize that
the Persian cultural presence in Islamic Iraq was not necessarily derived
entirely from the pre-Islamic situation, because some cultural influ-
ences were just as likely to have been brought from Iran by captives
or by Persians who migrated to the garrison cities after the conquest.