THE QUESTION OF CONTINUITYvisions are among those whose primary language was a form of Ar-
amaic, Persian, or Arabic. Several other groups such as Kurds, Syrians,
Indians, etc. are treated in the last chapter of this section. The first
concern in dealing with all of these categories is to locate them geo-
graphically and socially in Iraq in the late Sasanian period and to
discover whether or how their location changed as a result of the
conquest. However it is equally important to consider the nature and
significance of such ethnic identities because many people were poly-
lingual and there was extensive cultural interpenetration and inter-
action. There is a general tendency to orient discussions of such matters
towards the assumptions of cultural nationalism, to identify a land
with a people, to place a positive value on cultural homogeneity, and
to put the significance of language in terms of "national" identity. The
intent here is to avoid such issues and to concentrate instead on the
realities of ethnic diversity and on the cultural influences exerted by
different ethnic groups on each other. The assumption that a geo-
graphical or ecological region coincides with a cultural region is es-
sentially a projection of modern cultural nationalism. There seems to
be a feeling that geography, language, and religion ought to coincide
and that something is wrong if they do not. Cultural unity tends to
be identified with stability, and diversity is regarded as not merely
untidy but as somehow unstable, even though diversity may provide
some of the conditions for cultural creativity. Iraq may be viewed
either in terms of the survival of ancient, indigenous Mesopotamian
traditions or as a cross road of culture with no real geographical bound-
aries in cultural terms, but having different degrees of interaction and
integration with the larger cultural region in western Asia of which it
was a part.
The third section is based on religious categories and will discuss
the people of Iraq as Magians, Jews, Christians, pagans, gnostics, and
Muslims. The formation of social boundaries along religious lines in
late Sasanian and early Islamic Iraq is an undeniable fact. The question
is what it signifies. The realities of life for such religious communities
are usually understood in terms of their legal status vis-a-vis their
rulers and the degree of religious toleration they were granted. Al-
though this is an important issue, there is a tendency to overlook their
internal social organization and continuing change and development,
especially among the non-Muslim population. The treatment of these
religious communities also tends to be compartmentalized. There is a
separate scholarly literature for each religious tradition, very little