The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran Tradition, Memory, and Conversion By Sarah Bowen Savant (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 277pages.)

Abstract

Perhaps no single historical occurrence looms larger in the imagining of contemporary
Iranian identity than Islam’s rise and the ensuing widespread conversions
on and around the Iranian plateau. Of course, as with any events
occurring over a millennium ago, not to mention events that have shaped their
heirs’ confessional commitments, one encounters a gulf between how Iran’s
Muslim conversion is written in the popular imagination and how historiographical
studies attempt to make sense of such complex transformations.
Nonetheless, Sarah Bowen Savant’s The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran:
Tradition, Memory, and Conversion might ultimately shape Iranian and Islamic studies not only by contributing novel scholarship to the field, but also
by speaking to non-specialists’ interests as well.
As evidence of popular interest, one need only note the continual reprints
of Abd al-Husayn Zarrinkub’s seminal 1957 study, Dū Qarn Sukūt (Two Centuries
of Silence), which considers the period following the Islamic conquest
and the Sasanian Empire’s collapse. Savant’s study picks up where Zarrinkub’s
ends, arguing that post-conquest Iranians experienced a twofold conversion
during the ninth to eleventh centuries: becoming both Muslim and Persian.
And while the author disavows simplistic notions like historical silence or static
national identities, her book, like Zarrinkub’s, sheds new light on Persian Muslim
identities in a particular historical context and suggests how they are
formed, negotiated, contested, and transformed over time and space ...