THE NATURE OF CONTINUITYitation of the turban to Muslim soldiers, they did adopt articles of
Persian clothing such as the qalansuwwa and taylasan. Continuity in
change is also suggested by the fact that the reintroduction of the
principles of Sasanian statecraft under al-l;:Iajjaj actually meant the
suppression of the dahaqtn, and by the fact that the awareness of the
symbolism and purpose of the Sas ani an coins resulted in Islamizing
the Arab-Sasanian coins and culminated in the production of a re-
formed Arab-Islamic coinage.CONTINUING CHANGE
Several trends extending from the sixth until the eighth century
actually involved a more or less continuing development for which
the Islamic conquest, in some cases, provided a catalyst. Such contin-
uing trends are exemplified by the sedentarizing forces that were al-
ready at work among Iraqi Arabs in the late Sasanian period and were
intensified by the conquest, and by the cultural amalgam in pre-Islamic
Hira that prefigured the syncretism of early Islamic Iraq. Similarly,
the decline of paganism, mainly through conversion to Christianity,
was a development of the late Sas ani an period that extended through
the early Islamic period and relegated the old cult to the level of
folklore. The Islamic conquest actually accelerated the decline in the
number of Magians in Iraq by destroying their organization and by
removing the difficulty of conversion to another religion, but this only
completed the tendencies of the late Sasanian period. There was also
continuity in the direction of change in the development of political
institutions and theories and in the organization of society along re-
ligious communal lines.
The creative adaptability of the Islamic regime in employing Sa-
sanian traditions allowed a continuing development based on the pos-
sibilities those traditions contained. Muslims made the Sasanian system
more regular and uniform and continued the ideological development
of administrative theory. Sasanian methods of administration tended
to be elaborated and were more developed in Islamic legal and ad-
ministrative theory than they ever were in practice. Islamic law in-
creased the exemptions from the poll tax and the competence of the
ma:r,alim court. However, the development of land and poll taxes under
Islamic rule also reflected developments in agriculture and society. The
use of preferential taxes to encourage agriculture on newly developed
land eventually made it necessary to identify kharaj on land that was