CONCLUSIONof the growing regional unity of western Asia, which was actually
consummated by the Muslim Arabs who created the Islamic empire
rather than by the Sasanians.
Should the new cultural forms that emerged following the Islamic
conquest be defined in religious terms as Islamic or in regional terms
as the premodern civilization of western Asia? They are very nearly
the same; what we call Islamic civilization was, in fact, the regional
culture of western Asia. The general significance, then, of the late
Sasanian-early Islamic period in Iraq is as a bridge between antiquity
and "medieval" history. Although Muslims helped to build this bridge,
the significance of Islam may be neither that it was cause or conse-
quence but that it was the most successful crystallization of the di-
rection of change during Late Antiquity.