The defeat of the Sasanian Empire

This is an important day in the history of the Middle East. It is the anniversary of the final day of the four day Battle of al-Qadisiyyah, in Iraq, in 636. 

The Sasanian Empire, centered in what we now call Iran, first came into existence in the middle of the third century AD, and became at once the great eastern rival of the Roman Empire.  

The fatal blows to the Sasanians in the 7th century came not from the west, from what by then was known as Byzantium, but from the growth of new Moslem Arab powers. Qadisiyyah was the decisive five-day battle that led to the defeat of the Sasanians, the loss immediately of Iraq and ultimately Persia/Iran itself, Sasanian homeland, to the new militantly Islamic wave in the region.


The battle was a ferocious enough struggle and story tellers began embellishing upon it immediately. In recent times, it is invoked within the Arab/Moslem world as a great victory over a people who were not "of the book." Saddam Hussein of Iraq invoked the memory of al-Qadisiyyah in support of his war against Iran, presumably the damned Sasanians were back posing as Ayatollahs and had to be taught a lesson again. 

How might the history of the world have been different had this battle gone differently? Perhaps Islam would have permeated Persia anyway, spreading there by persuasion rather than by conquest, and perhaps that more peaceful spread of the faith would have been better for the region. And indeed for the world.  

Of course, Islam also spread by the sword from its original homeland to the west, across the top of the African continent to the Atlantic, then northward through Spain and into France. So there would be that much history whatever happened at al-Qadisiyyah. BUT it is the memory of this accretion to the east of the Arab homeland, the memory of al-Qadisiyyah, that has come to be overlain with the Shiite/Sunni split, the contest for control of the valuable geopolitical prize of the Straits of Hormuz, and much else.

So spend a moment today thinking of this battle, and its outcome, as an accidental misfortune, which may have made the history of our species needlessly complicated. Personally, I find it comforting to think of such matters as contingent rather than as necessary.