Posted on 10/21/2026 1:26:58 PM PDT by little jeremiah
When an Iranian dissident proclaims that “the greatest killer of Iranians has been Islam,” the statement is less an exercise in academic historiography than a cry of immediate political exhaustion. Across the diaspora and within the quiet corners of Tehran, Isfahan, and Shiraz, a powerful counternarrative has taken hold. Confronted with the gallows, morality police, and institutional dogmatism of the Islamic Republic, many Iranians have turned history into a weapon of resistance.
In this narrative, the seventh-century Arab conquest is not a distant chapter in antiquity, but the original sin of Persian history – an ongoing catastrophe linking the fall of the Sasanian capital of Ctesiphon in 637 A.D. directly to the prison yards of Evin today.
To understand contemporary Iran, one must grasp the potency of this neo-nationalist memory. Yet to understand Iran’s actual past, one must untangle this emotional countermyth from the messy realities of imperial violence, political pragmatism, and cultural assimilation.
The foundational pillar of the anti-clerical narrative is the catastrophic rupture of the Rashidun conquest. The popular memory laments a sophisticated, enlightened Zoroastrian civilization abruptly dismantled by religious fanaticism.
The historical reality was far more mundane and agonizingly political. By 633 A.D., the Sasanian Empire was an exhausted shell. Decades of brutal, total war against the Byzantine Empire had depleted the treasury, shattered the peasant economy through punitive taxation, and broken the imperial army. Internal dynastic fratricide saw nearly a dozen claimants’ cycle through the throne in a span of four years.
When the Arab Muslim armies advanced across the Mesopotamian floodplains, they encountered an empire already unraveling from within. Many regional dehqans (landed nobility) and Nestorian Christian minorities negotiated surrenders and retained their administrative posts rather than sacrifice themselves for a fractured Sasanian court. The subsequent conversion of the Iranian plateau was not a sudden, sword-point event; it took over three centuries of fiscal pressures, social incentives, and localized assimilation before Muslims formed a demographic majority.
The dissident text draws a continuous line of religious terror through later conquerors such as Timur (Tamerlane) and Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar. Here, historiography diverges sharply from theological polemic.
Timur was a Turco-Mongol conqueror of terrifying efficiency who constructed minarets of human skulls across the Middle East. While he invoked Islamic rhetoric to legitimize his campaigns, he massacred Sunni and Shi’i populations with equal ferocity, from Baghdad to Damascus and Isfahan. His violence was the legacy of the Eurasian steppe empire – A.D. terror designed to force rapid capitulation – not a campaign to impose Quranic dogma on Persians.
Similarly, when Agha Mohammad Khan blinded thousands of men in Kerman in 1794, his fury had nothing to do with religious piety. He was a ruthless dynastic warlord extinguishing the rival Zand dynasty to consolidate the Qajar Empire. Folding these bloody campaigns into an unbroken “thread of Islamic terror” strips regional history of its political and dynastic context, reducing complex geopolitics into a single religious motive.
The true paradox of Iranian history lies in what happened after the conquest: Persia did not merely survive; it thoroughly captured its conquerors.
While the languages and cultures of Roman Egypt, the Levant, and North Africa were largely Arabized, Iran retained its linguistic and cultural autonomy. Through the Shu’ubiyya literary movement of the ninth century, Persian scholars asserted their cultural superiority within the caliphate. Under the Abbasids, the machinery of imperial governance – from viziers and tax ledgers to court etiquette – was overwhelmingly staffed by Persians.
Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh revived the Persian language and pre-Islamic mythology, codifying a distinct Iranian civilizational identity. Thinkers like Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Al-Biruni, and Al-Razi operated within an Islamic framework while drawing extensively upon classical Persian, Indian, and Hellenistic traditions. Iranian culture was not an inert victim of a foreign creed; it fundamentally reshaped Islamic civilization into a Perso-Islamic ecumene.
Why, then, does the narrative of absolute religious rupture remain so compelling today?
Because inside the Islamic Republic, history is never academic; it is ideological warfare. For over four decades, the ruling theocracy has attempted to erase or diminish pre-Islamic heritage, framing everything prior to 622 A.D. as Jahiliyyah (an age of pagan ignorance). School curriculums were engineered to prioritize religious martyrdom over national antiquity.
In response, the Iranian public engineered a mirror image of the regime’s dogma. Where the state proclaims Islam brought total enlightenment, dissidents proclaim it brought total destruction. Pre-Islamic symbols – the tomb of Cyrus the Great at Pasargadae, the Faravahar, the fire temples of Yazd – have become subversive counter-symbols of freedom. When young women remove their headscarves to chants of “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” (Woman, Life, Freedom), they are rejecting an ideology that has weaponized faith to control their bodies, lives, and modern aspirations.
The emotional cry that “Islam is the greatest killer of Iranians” is historically simplistic, but sociologically revelatory. It is the raw voice of a society that has endured decades of ideological enclosure and chosen to look back into the deepest wells of its memory to imagine a future free of clerics. Iran’s greatest triumph has never been ethnic purity or religious isolation, but its stubborn, millennia-old capacity to outlive every ideology that sought to erase it.
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Persian scholars asserted their cultural superiority within the caliphate.Pretty much every intellectual accomplishment of "Islam" was done by a Persian. Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, the inventor of algebra and the namesake of algorithm, was Persian, not Arab. So was the poet Omar Khayyam.
And while the Persians made great cultural strides in the early centuries following their adoption of Islam, that stopped as the Arabs gained more control.
Exactly. Islam is a retrograte ideology. To put it mildly.
"Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world,"
Persia needs a modern Cyrus.
Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi was also a major figure in the adoption of “Arabic” numerals.
Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi was also a major figure in the adoption of “Arabic” numerals.
Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi was also a major figure in the adoption of “Arabic” numerals.
Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi was also a major figure in the adoption of “Arabic” numerals.
Interesting history. Thanks posters. BUMP.
After the Arab invasions, most of the civilization ruled by the Byzantines - all the land west of Mesopotamia, up to the Mediterranean and North Africa - lost their language and history. They became Arab.
Everything East of it - all the way through Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan - maintained Persian language. Even the royal court of India adopted Persian language for a period.
Read my profile about the evils of the rulers of Iran.
There are hopes of a resurgence of a pan-Iranism, extending from the Persian Gulf into Central Asia, bordering China and Russia, as a firewall against expansion of pan-Islamism.
A strong, free, prosperous Iran is a natural ally of the United States, as it was for 50 years under the last Shahs ... until Carter messed it all up.
I do sometimes worry a bit about Kurdish and Turkish/Azeri separatists. A fractured Iran, reduced to micro-nationalist fiefdoms will be a petri dish for narco-terrorist and Islamist states.
Read my profile to learn more about the evil of the rulers of Iran.
Persians are muzzies but not arabs. Is there any hope for them? They traded the Shah for what they got now. If they’re that dumb is there any hope for when Trump takes out the ayatollahs?
It’s the sunnis that are causing all the trouble and the shiites predominate in Iran(+Iraq). Should we root for both sides?
True except for one anachronistic word! Armies advanced on an unraveling empire. The armies were Arabs, somewhat corresponding to the pre-existing Arab client kingdoms of the Byzantine empire (the Ghassanids) and of the Sassanian Persian empire (the Lahkmids) to their east. Both empires had been severely affected by the Justinian (bubonic) plague the prior couple centuries. Both Arab kingdoms had been relatively spared as their desert terrain wasn't nearly as rat friendly as the two empires' population centers. Both empires had spent the preceding decades beating each other up in a series of wars, exhausting their treasuries and thus their ability to keep paying the client states. The Sassanians finally ran out of adult royals, causing their final collapse. The no longer paid, and suddenly relatively strong mercenaries from the desert fringe, jumped to loot the Sassanian corpse. And progressed to prey and pillage the weakened Byzantines.
But the term "Muslim" wouldn't appear in writing for decades. Nor could the name of the alleged Muslim prophet be well written in their Arabic for decades - they had to invent written vowels first. And his alleged career never took him within a thousand miles of the historical initial Arab conquests. Nor can his allegedly completed, by then written down, revealed book be found in full form until many decades later. And his alleged birthplace and place of revelations, purported by his story to be the oldest and one of the most important cities in the world, appears nowhere in the historical records of any of its surrounding peoples until a century after the initial conquests. If an event as large as the Arab conquests were driven by a story as specific as the modern 'Muslim' one of a very specific person getting revealed a very specific book at a very specific time and place there should still be specific historical connections identifiable, beyond the anachronistic core story, from Persia to Morocco. Where are they?
The wave of Arab conquests was most impressive. But hardly unprecedented behavior for suddenly unpaid mercs presented with a power vacuum. Less common was their finding a way to keep the power they'd seized.
Great profile. Thank you for being here.
Neither. Evil collectives that have done significant damage to any attempt of humans to form a civilization.
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