CONCLUSIONeventually made their way back to Iraq as members of a Muslim
society.
Pre-Islamic influences on the development of Islamic administrative
institutions in Iraq were assured by Muslim employment of some of
the same persons who had served the Sasanians, by hereditary tend-
encies among administrators, and by the existence of handbooks which
described administrative traditions. The Muslims continued to employ
the minters who knew how to make Sasanian coins. Because the Sa-
sanians had employed Arabic-writing scribes in their own translation
bureau, the Muslims found local Arabs in Iraq whom they could
employ in administration. The landed aristocracy, which served as
agents in the assessment, registration, and collection of taxes for the
Muslims, not only continued Sasanian practices at the local level, but
also assisted in the organization of the Muslim taxation system and
in the recovery of the Sas ani an register of crown property. In this case,
the dahaqtn survived long enough to transmit their knowledge of
Sasanian procedures and their own style of life to a similar class of
Muslim Arab landlords. In the same way, the survival of the Asawira
made the transmission of Sasanian military traditions to the Muslims
possible.
Such influences were often, but not always, encouraged by converts
to Islam who brought their backgrounds along with them. However,
one of the most important requirements for such transmission was the
ability of people who were bilingual or possibly tri-lingual to com-
municate with each other. In this respect, the situation at Hira before
the conquest, where Persians and Arabs were mixed and where some
people could speak and write both languages, made the local Arabs
of Iraq as important as intermediaries as the Persians were in the
transmission of the culture of Iraq to the new Arab settlers from the
peninsula. Communication was facilitated by the existence of bilingual
Muslims such as Ziyad and al-Mughira ibn Shu'ba, but it should be
noted that it was a Persian who finally put the tax accounts into Arabic
for al-J:Iajjaj.
CONTACT
Along with survival and the ability to communicate, the transmission
of pre-Islamic customs and practices depended on actual contact with
the new rulers by the natives of Iraq. It is important to realize that it
was the Iraqis themselves who often took the initiative in introducing
the Muslim immigrants to local customs and procedures, which some