“Why Ctesiphon, Not Constantinople?” Myth, Memory, and the Magnetic Power of Persian History in Early Islamic Thought

“Why Ctesiphon, Not Constantinople?”

Myth, Memory, and the Magnetic Power of Persian History in Early Islamic Thought

بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ

"In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful."

When Muslim historians and chroniclers of the 8th to 10th centuries turned their gaze to the past, they did so not with equal interest in all the empires that had ruled the lands of Islam. Despite the Qur’an’s attention to the Romans in Surah al-Rūm, and the fact that Constantinople remained the most powerful Christian rival to the Caliphate for centuries, early Arabic historiography displayed a marked fascination with Iran—particularly the Sasanian Empire and its legendary predecessors.

From the monumental Khwadāynāmag to the universal histories of al-Ṭabarī, al-Masʿūdī, and Ḥamzah al-Iṣfahānī, Persia and its kings—both mythical (Jamshīd, Zahhāk, Kay Khusraw) and historical (Ardashīr I, Khusraw Anūshirwān, Yazdgird III)—were accorded central narrative roles. In contrast, Roman emperors—aside from the occasional mention of Heraclius (Hiraql)—remained distant figures, seldom imbued with grandeur, rarely described in detail, and often depicted as marginal to the unfolding of Islamic history.

Why did Ctesiphon, the Sasanian capital on the Tigris, exert such an irresistible pull on Muslim historical imagination, while Constantinople, the Christian capital of the Roman Empire, remained relatively peripheral? What explains the deep narrative space accorded to Iranian kingship, even though it was Zoroastrian and overtly monarchical, compared to the limited and episodic treatment of Roman-Christian emperors?

This blog post explores the cultural, political, theological, and literary reasons behind this imbalance. We will examine:

How the memory of the Sasanians was integrated into Islamic imperial identity, especially by the Abbasids
The availability of Persian sources, including oral traditions and translations like the Khwadāynāmag, that fed Islamic historiography
The spiritual geography of the Islamic world, which increasingly looked eastward toward Iran, Transoxiana, and India
The symbolic power of Persian kingship in shaping Islamic ideas of rule, justice, and empire
Why Heraclius, despite his dramatic encounter with the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, remained an exception rather than the rule in Islamic narratives of Rome

Ultimately, this is a story not just about what was remembered, but why it was remembered—and how the Muslim understanding of history was forged not in the shadow of Rome, but in the afterglow of Persia.

II. Framing the Question: What the Qur’an Says About Rome and Persia

The opening verses of Sūrat al-Rūm (30:1–5) offer a rare glimpse into Qur'anic commentary on contemporary political affairs, expressing explicit sympathy for the Romans (referred to as al-Rūm) after their crushing defeat by the Sasanians in the early 7th century. These verses are exceptional in that they do not speak in general spiritual or moral terms, but rather in geo-political prophecy—a Quranic validation of future Roman victory over the Persians.

"Alif-Lām-Mīm. The Romans have been defeated in the nearest land. But they, after their defeat, will overcome within a few years. To Allah belongs the command before and after. And on that day, the believers will rejoice in the help of Allah. He helps whom He wills. And He is the Mighty, the Merciful."
— Qur’an 30:1–5

These verses, interpreted to refer to the events of 613–622, when Xusro II's armies conquered much of the Levant before the Roman counter-offensive under Heraclius, had deep emotional and theological significance for early Muslims, the Romans were Christians—Ahl al-Kitāb—and thus seen as spiritually closer to the monotheist message of Islam than the Zoroastrian Sasanians, who practiced a dualist religion and were categorized by many early Muslim commentators as mushrikūn (polytheists).

📜 Al-Ṭabarī’s Tafsīr on Sūrat al-Rūm: The Victory of the Believers

The Tafsīr of al-Ṭabarī (d. 923), one of the most authoritative Qur'anic exegeses in the Islamic tradition, provides a critical reading of these verses. His commentary emphasizes not only the historical event—Rome’s loss and predicted resurgence—but also the divine symbolism of that reversal. Below is an analyzed version of al-Ṭabarī’s interpretation of Qur’an 30:1–5:

"غُلِبَتِ الرُّومُ فِي أَدْنَى الْأَرْضِ":
“The Romans have been defeated in the nearest land.”
Al-Ṭabarī notes that all major Qur’anic readers agree on the passive construction of “ghulibat” (were defeated), affirming that Persia had defeated Rome—likely in the region of Syria or Mesopotamia.

He records a variant reading from Ibn ʿUmar, who read it actively (غَلَبَتِ الرُّومُ, “Rome defeated [Persia]”), but dismisses it as unsupported by consensus. This shows how firmly entrenched the standard narrative was in Islamic tradition: Rome was initially the victim of Persian aggression.

"وَهُمْ مِن بَعْدِ غَلَبِهِمْ سَيَغْلِبُونَ":
“But they, after their defeat, will overcome…”
This promise, says al-Ṭabarī, refers to Rome’s future victory over Persia, a divine decree that reflects God’s ability to raise and lower nations as He wills. Importantly, he associates this event with the Muslim victory at Badr, showing a symbolic overlap between Rome’s resurgence and Islam’s rise.

"وَيَوْمَئِذٍ يَفْرَحُ الْمُؤْمِنُونَ بِنَصْرِ اللَّهِ":
“On that day, the believers will rejoice in the help of Allah.”
Al-Ṭabarī interprets this rejoicing as both literal (rejoicing in Roman victory over the mushrikūn Persians) and spiritual (joy at the victory of Islam at Badr). This dual reading merges Roman-Christian geopolitical success with Islamic monotheist triumph, emphasizing their shared opposition to Persian idolatry.

He concludes by stressing that God alone grants victory, that Rome’s rise is a sign of divine mercy, and that God punishes and rewards according to His will, not by worldly standards of power.

🧭 Qur'anic Sympathy vs. Historiographical Memory

One might reasonably expect that this Qur'anic vindication of Rome, coupled with Rome’s status as a fellow Abrahamic civilization, would ensure lasting narrative prominence in Islamic historiography. Yet as your series and many primary sources show, this is not the case.

Instead, as historians such as Robert Hoyland, Chase Robinson, and Touraj Daryaee have demonstrated, early Muslim historical writing was far more preoccupied with Persian kingship, its myths, dynasties, and cultural legacies than with the legions and emperors of Rome.

So why this discrepancy?

Theological Proximity Did Not Equal Cultural Intimacy:
Despite their Christianity, the Romans remained adversaries of Islam throughout the Umayyad and early Abbasid periods. They were viewed with a mix of theological tolerance and political hostility. In contrast, Persians—though Zoroastrian—converted en masse, and their cultural apparatus was co-opted into the Islamic empire.

Absence of Greek Sources in Arabic:
While Persian epic history (via the Khwadāynāmag) was translated early into Arabic by ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, Greek historiography was largely unavailable. The Roman past remained locked behind linguistic and theological walls.

Rome as a Present Rival, Not a Past Inspiration:
The Romans remained alive, politically and militarily. They were not a vanished civilization to be remembered, but a living enemy to be defeated. This kept them from being romanticized or incorporated into Islamic identity.

Persia as a Usable Past:
The Sasanians were defeated, and thus symbolically subjugated to Islam. Their kingship, administrative genius, and civilizational grandeur could now be safely recast as part of Islamic heritage. In the Abbasid imagination, they were not rivals—they were ancestors.

⚖️ The Asymmetry: Revelation vs. Historiography

What emerges is a striking asymmetry:

The Qur'an offers theological and emotional support for Rome at a moment of crisis

But Muslim historiography, shaped decades later in Abbasid and Persianized circles, reorients memory toward Iran, its dynasties, its myths, and its bureaucracies

The Qur’an reflected a moment—Rome’s loss and expected return.
Islamic historiography reflected an empire—Arab-ruled, Persian-administered, and narratively indebted to Sasanian models.

Ctesiphon, not Constantinople, became the wellspring of imperial memory.

III. The Fall of Ctesiphon and the Birth of Memory

In March 637 CE, Muslim forces under Saʿd ibn Abī Waqqāṣ captured al-Madāʾin—the fabled twin-capital of the Sasanian Empire, nestled on the Tigris just south of modern Baghdad. Known to classical sources as Ctesiphon, this vast imperial complex had for centuries been the political, cultural, and symbolic heart of Ērānshahr, the Iranian world. With its palatial halls, Zoroastrian temples, gardens, libraries, and treasuries, it was not merely a city—it was the crown of an empire.

Its fall was not just a tactical success. It was a civilizational rupture.

🏛️ The Conquest of al-Madāʾin

The Muslim campaign leading to the capture of Ctesiphon followed the monumental Battle of al-Qādisiyyah, in which the Sasanian army, commanded by Rustum Farrokhzād, was decisively defeated. In the aftermath, the road to the imperial capital lay open. Yazdgird III, the last Sasanian shahanshah, fled eastward—never to reclaim his throne.

According to al-Ṭabarī, al-Balādhurī, and others, the Muslim army entered a half-abandoned city, shrouded in royal mystery. They found:

The ruins of the legendary White Palace (al-Qasr al-Abyad), the Sasanian seat of power

Great halls decorated with gold and silver

Costly treasures—so vast that the share for each soldier was unprecedented

As reported by al-Balādhurī, the Crown of Khusrow—an iconic jewel-laden headpiece—was paraded and eventually sent to the caliph ʿUmar in Medina.

📖 From Chronicle to Myth: Ctesiphon in Islamic Memory

The conquest of al-Madāʾin was soon mythologized in Islamic historiography as a cosmic pivot:

The fall of arrogance and fire-worship

The end of tyranny and gold-covered thrones

The humble Muslims entering the halls of emperors in patched clothes and dusty sandals

In later narratives—such as those by al-Masʿūdī and Hamzah al-Iṣfahānī—the city takes on an almost eschatological role: its fall symbolizing not just the end of a kingdom, but the death of the old world.

From that moment, Persian history enters the Islamic archive not as foreign conquest, but as inherited memory.

The White Palace, in turn, was both a literal structure and a symbol:

A palace that once ruled the East

A marble mausoleum for a vanished world

A stage for Islam’s entry into empire

🧠 Ctesiphon as Turning Point: Moral and Political Narratives

Islamic authors like al-Ṭabarī and al-Masʿūdī constructed the fall of Ctesiphon as more than a military feat. It was framed in moral, religious, and eschatological terms:

The Muslims were poor, righteous, and guided by God

The Persians were corrupt, luxurious, and blind to truth

The conquest fulfilled divine will—not imperial ambition, but the dawning of a new order
Such details were meant to contrast the austere justice of Islam with the decadent absolutism of Persia.

🏁 The End of a Capital, the Birth of a Civilization

From 637 onward, the world had changed.

Rome and Iran would never again face each other as equals

A new capital—Baghdad, only kilometers away—would later rise in the Abbasid era, drawing upon the memory and majesty of Ctesiphon

And Muslim identity, empire, and historical consciousness would be forever marked by what was found, and lost, in those golden halls

Ctesiphon was not merely conquered.
It was absorbed, re-narrated, and reborn in the memory of Islam.

IV. Abbasid Iranophilia: Court Culture and the Sasanian Ideal

The conquest of Ctesiphon in 637 CE may have ended the Sasanian Empire militarily, but the Persian imperial model would soon return—not as a rival, but as the blueprint for a new world. Under the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258), a remarkable shift took place: the very culture that Islam had once subdued was now embraced, translated, revived, and idealized as the basis for a universal Islamic civilization.

From the caliph’s court to the scribe’s inkpot, Persian memory was resurrected—and nowhere was this more evident than in the Abbasid embrace of Sasanian kingship, bureaucracy, literature, and political theory.

🏛 Baghdad: From Madāʾin to a New Capital

As Robert Hoyland explains, this Iranization of Islamic rule began with geography itself. The Abbasids, unlike their Umayyad predecessors who ruled from Damascus, deliberately moved their imperial headquarters to Iraq—specifically to Baghdad, founded in 762 CE, only miles away from the ruins of Ctesiphon. This was more than a practical decision; it was symbolic:

“The new imperial headquarters, Baghdad, lay only a short distance from the former Persian capital, and many who ran the new government were of Persian extraction, who now felt confident to celebrate their origins and their culture.”
— Robert Hoyland, The History of the Kings of the Persians in Three Arabic Chronicles

Indeed, the Abbasid rise itself was made possible by the Khurasani movement, an alliance of eastern Iranians and Arab sympathizers. Cities like Merv had long hosted garrison towns of Arab soldiers who intermarried with locals and adopted Persian norms. The troops that brought down the Umayyads in 750 were as Persian in spirit as they were Muslim in faith.

📚 The Translation Movement and the Revival of Sasanian Lore

Once in power, the Abbasids presided over the great Translation Movement (8th–10th centuries), centered in institutions like Bayt al-Ḥikma (The House of Wisdom) under Caliph al-Maʾmūn (r. 813–833). While Greek philosophy famously entered Arabic here, so too did Middle Persian wisdom literature, court etiquette, and imperial history.

Central to this was ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (d. ca. 756), a Persian convert to Islam who served in the Abbasid administration. He translated the now-lost Khwadāynāmag, a royal chronicle of the Sasanian kings, into Arabic. This work (possibly titled Siyar Mulūk al-Furs) would shape later Islamic universal histories—especially al-Ṭabarī’s Tārīkh al-Rusul wa’l-Mulūk—and anchor the memory of Persian monarchy in Islamic historiography.

“Books on Persian wisdom, courtly manners and imperial history began to circulate, in part translated from Persian originals and in part recreated and reimagined for a new age.”
— Robert Hoyland

✍ Persian Models: Bureaucracy, Adab, and Statecraft

This revival was not limited to literature. The Abbasid bureaucratic system, with its viziers, scribes, and court etiquette, mirrored the old Sasanian court in both structure and spirit. As Touraj Daryaee observes:

“Islam had no other choice but to follow the Sasanian model in many respects... The Abbasid caliphate was in many ways a revival of the Sasanian Empire.”

Even the political theory of kingship in Islamic thought came to reflect Persian ideals. Works like al-Muqaffaʿ’s Adab al-Kabīr and the Mirrors for Princes genre borrowed heavily from Sasanian ideals of justice (ʿadl), kingly wisdom (khirad), and centralized power.

The Persian concept of “king of kings” (shāhān-shāh) echoed in the caliphal claim to universal rule, not merely as religious leader but as imperial heir.

🌍 Shuʿūbiyya and the Rise of Persian Pride

This cultural Persianization found further expression in the Shuʿūbiyya movement—a broad cultural trend in the 8th–10th centuries wherein non-Arab Muslims, especially Persians, asserted the value of their pre-Islamic heritage.

In response to the Arab elite's cultural chauvinism, Shuʿūbī authors argued that Persian literature, statecraft, and ethics were equal—if not superior—to those of the Arabs. For them, remembering the Sasanian past was not nostalgia. It was a reclamation of dignity and history within the Islamic empire.

“The Sasanians made the Persian world-view and civilization take hold over what Marshal G. Hodgson later termed the Perso-Islamicate world.”
— Touraj Daryaee, Sasanian Persia

This new cultural pride found its crowning moment in the Shāhnāmah of Firdawsī, composed around 1010 CE. Though outside the Abbasid timeframe, its roots were firmly Abbasid—drawing on the historiographical legacy shaped by the first century of Persian revival under Islamic rule.

🔚 From Empire to Civilizational Backbone

To many Muslim historians and thinkers, the Sasanian past came to represent not a defeated empire, but a legacy absorbed and reborn:

Islam adopted Persia’s political forms, not its religion

It inherited Sasanian memory, not its monarchs

And it transformed Iranian universalism into an Islamic universalism

The Abbasid caliph, seated in Baghdad, looked east—not to Rome, but to Ctesiphon’s shadow, and from there imagined a civilization that spanned from the Oxus to the Nile, adorned not only with Qur’anic revelation but with the memory of Persian kingship.

V. Why Rome Was Marginal: The Case of Constantinople and Heraclius

While the Qur’an addressed the Roman Empire in Surah al-Rūm, and the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ is said to have corresponded with Heraclius, the celebrated Roman emperor who reigned during Islam’s formative period, Roman history remained surprisingly marginal in the great works of early Islamic historiography. Unlike Sasanian Iran, which became central to Abbasid narratives of civilization, Roman political memory was largely eclipsed in Islamic thought and writing—except for a few brief flashes.

To understand this asymmetry, we must consider five key themes: language, geography, cultural contact, religious framing, and military legacy.

1. Rome as the Other: Religious and Political Distance

From the outset, the Roman Empire—especially after the Arab-Muslim conquests—was the religious and military adversary par excellence. Christian, Greek-speaking, and centered in Constantinople, Rome represented a culturally alien and imperially hostile world, especially as Islam emerged as a rival universalist project.

While Iran had also been an adversary, it did not retain territorial depth post-conquest the way the Romans did. The Roman Empire survived in Asia Minor, the Balkans, and North Africa long after the Prophet’s death. This continued rivalry ensured that Muslim-Roman relations were defined more by military opposition than by historical assimilation.

The Qur’an’s sympathy for Rome in Surah al-Rūm (30:1–5)—“alif-lām-mīm. The Romans have been defeated in the lowest land, but they, after their defeat, will overcome”—was a momentary alignment of interests against the Zoroastrian Sasanians, not a wholesale endorsement. Despite this scriptural gesture, Heraclius and his empire never became beloved figures of Muslim historical imagination. He remained a passing, albeit dramatic, character: the emperor who read the Prophet’s letter, hesitated, and lost Syria forever.

2. Heraclius as an Exception

Only Heraclius (r. 610–641) breaks through the general neglect. Why? Because his interaction with the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ is given space in Islamic tradition. The famous letter he received and the Qur'anic prediction of Roman victory in Surah al-Rūm set him apart.

And yet, the fascination ends there. Unlike Xusro I or Xusro II, Heraclius inspired no epic tales, no theological elaborations, no moral reflections. He did not enter Islamic storytelling as a symbol of kingly virtue, prophetic justice, or failed arrogance. He remained a historical moment, not a civilizational archetype.

3. A Linguistic Barrier: The Problem of Greek

A major reason for Rome's marginality in Islamic historiography was the scarcity of Greek-to-Arabic translation in the early centuries. The translation movement under the Abbasids overwhelmingly favored Persian, Syriac, and eventually Greek science—but not Roman historiography. The Greek Christian histories, liturgies, and annals were often inaccessible to Muslim authors, who worked largely in Arabic and in Persian or Syriac.

By contrast, Persian narratives had already begun filtering into Arabic well before the Abbasid revolution, notably through ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s translation of the Khwadāynāmag and other court texts. This gave the Sasanians a literary advantage, making their world available, translatable, and narratable in a way the Greek-Christian world was not.

4. After Yarmouk: The Collapse of Roman Syria

The Battle of Yarmuk (636 CE) was the tipping point. As Walter Kaegi vividly shows, it led not to an organized Roman resistance, but to fragmentation, panic, and flight. The Roman commanders and soldiers retreated toward Antioch and Asia Minor. As Kaegi writes:

“Those Byzantine soldiers and commanders who escaped destruction at the battle of Jabiya-Yarmuk followed one of several options… many soldiers and commanders simply fled north… some sought refuge in monasteries… the greatest levels of panic gripped the Byzantine military.”

In contrast, Persian elites, including entire units such as the Asāwira, embraced Islam and integrated into the Islamic military and bureaucratic structure. The fall of al-Madāʾin (Ctesiphon) became a civilizational handover; the Persian aristocracy did not simply vanish—they became part of the new world.

In the Roman case, the geopolitical depth of the empire allowed it to survive and regroup. But this very survival meant continued enmity, not cultural intimacy. Constantinople was never conquered, and its story was never absorbed the way Persia’s was.

5. Rome in the Shadows: A City Never Taken

The symbolic power of Constantinople, the “second Rome,” remained intact throughout the early Islamic period. Its invincibility preserved its otherness. The many failed sieges, including those under Muʿāwiya, only heightened its mythic status—but did not invite integration into Muslim historical memory.

Unlike Ctesiphon, which fell in 637 and became the site of triumph and reflection, Constantinople became a wall—a target, not a memory. While Persia was rewritten into the Islamic world, Rome remained a rival, a foil, and eventually, a fading adversary.

Conclusion: The Memory Gap

Rome was not entirely forgotten, but it was never internalized. The Sasanians became a mirror for the Abbasids. The Romans did not. The Persian court, ethics, bureaucracy, and literature were all translated, adapted, and embedded into Islamic thought. Roman Christianity, imperial ideology, and Hellenic heritage were largely left behind.

The story of why Ctesiphon was remembered and Constantinople was not is thus the story of assimilation vs. antagonism, of translation vs. distance, and of memory shaped by power and proximity.

In the end, Heraclius stood alone—a man of a vanished war, who opened a letter, made no reply, and disappeared from Islamic memory.

VI. Kings and Cosmogony: Myth, Iran, and the Universal Past

In the Islamic historiographical imagination, the kings of ancient Persia were not just rulers—they were cosmic actors. Unlike Roman emperors, who were often treated in Muslim chronicles as distant bureaucrats or military men, Persian monarchs like Jamshīd, Zahhāk, Kay Kāwūs, Kay Khusraw, and Bishtāsb occupied a realm that blurred myth, religion, law, and civilization. They reigned not just over empires, but over epochs of human and cosmic development.

This section explores how Muslim historians inherited, adapted, and reimagined the Persian past—not as a linear chronicle of kingship, but as a universal story of time, civilization, and divine order. And in doing so, they constructed a framework in which Iran was not simply a conquered land—it was a sacred inheritance.

Mythical Kings in Islamic Memory

The Islamic historical tradition is saturated with references to legendary Persian rulers, many of whom are now familiar thanks to works like Firdawsī’s Shāhnāmah. But these figures also appear across Arabic chronicles by authors like Ṭabarī, Masʿūdī, Dīnawarī, and Yaʿqūbī, drawn not only from Islamic-era storytelling but from the Khwadāynāmag (Book of Lords) and its derivatives.

Robert Hoyland notes how accounts of many rulers are only sustained by the stories attached to them, not sequential facts. For example:

King Ṭahmūrat(h): His entry is filled with a tale about the origins of idolatry, linking his reign to cosmic degeneration and spiritual peril. The story connects pre-Islamic idol-worship, Buddhist fasting, and even Qur’anic categories like ṣābi’ūn and ḥanīfs .

King Bishtāsb: Remembered not as a temporal monarch but as the patron of Zoroaster, whose conversion shaped the religious identity of ancient Iran. The Avesta, Zoroastrian scripture, is described by Masʿūdī as having been written “on 12,000 ox skins with golden pens” —a visual linking sacred scripture, imperial power, and cosmic literacy.

These kings did not simply reign—they founded civilization, enforced religious truth, or invited demonic corruption. They inhabited a cosmogonic time that Islamic historians treated with reverence, if not full credulity.

Cosmic Kingship and Sacred Time

This sacred aspect of kingship explains why Persian monarchy in Islamic memory was not just about governance—but about world-order. Touraj Daryaee emphasizes that the Sasanian Empire “established the first post-Hellenic civilization on an imperial scale”, and its values like ethical dualism and imperial unity shaped later Islamic ideas of universal rule .

This worldview, according to Daryaee, forced early Islam to adopt the Sasanian model in many respects, especially when the Abbasids took power. The result was an Islamicate civilization—infused with Persian bureaucratic, moral, and narrative ideals—that outlasted the empires that had inspired it.

Myth vs Chronicle: Iran and Rome in Contrast

The Muslim engagement with Roman history was notably more restrained. Roman emperors were often treated chronologically—as bureaucratic entries or opponents to the Muslims, as seen in Surah al-Rūm or the brief appearance of Heraclius. There was no Qur’anic or Arabic tradition about Romulus, Caesar, or Augustus.

By contrast, Persian history was treated as mythic inheritance. As Hoyland observes:

“There is an assumption that we are talking about a regular sequential narrative history… but the surviving material suggests a more complex picture… Many notices are simply a pretext for embedding moral, cosmic, or religious stories.”

Examples include:

The death of Dara (Darius III), at the hands of Alexander, was not just political. It became a cultural tragedy about the loss of Persian knowledge, destroyed or stolen by the Greeks. Stories circulated in Islamic sources about Alexander burning Persian books after translating them into Greek—a reversal of classical admiration .

Ardashīr I’s mission to retrieve wisdom from India and China is told like a salvific act, harmonizing scattered truths across civilizations .

These stories merged cosmic fall with imperial history. And Muslim authors adopted this blend enthusiastically.

The Rise of Epic Historiography

Eventually, these epic strands were fused into continuous Persian histories. Authors like Ibn al-Kalbī, Abū ʿUbayda, and Dīnawarī (whose history survives) built unified national narratives out of once-fragmented tales.

Later, in the 10th century, with the rise of Persian-speaking dynasties, we see the grand flowering of mythic history—culminating in Firdawsī’s Shāhnāmah in 1010 CE. That work made myth into memory and sacralized Iranian history in a way that Islamic historiography never attempted with Rome.

Conclusion: The King as World-Maker

In sum, Roman history was treated as chronicle—sequential, bureaucratic, and largely reactive. Persian history, by contrast, was cosmic: it began with the origins of idolatry, introduced new religions like Zoroastrianism, and closed with Islam as its successor.

This explains why Muslim historians, even in Arabic, gave their literary and emotional allegiance to the Persian model. The king of Iran was not just a sovereign—he was the custodian of the world’s moral and cosmic balance.

For early Islamic civilization, Rome was history. Iran was memory.

VII. A Shift in Spiritual Geography: From West to East

In the wake of the early Islamic conquests, the Muslim world underwent a subtle but permanent realignment of its spiritual, intellectual, and political geography. This was not just a change of capital—from Damascus to Baghdad—or a shift in courtly fashion. It was a civilizational turning, one in which Rome (i.e., Constantinople) faded from Muslim imagination, while Iran rose to become the central axis of thought, memory, and empire.

This shift was not immediate, nor was it purely geographic. It reflected a deeper logic: Rome was remote; Iran was intimate. And that intimacy remade the very contours of Islamic civilization.

From Ctesiphon to Baghdad: A Shift of Center

The founding of Baghdad in 762 CE by the Abbasids was no accident. It was deliberately placed near al-Madāʾin—the ancient Sasanian capital of Ctesiphon—and symbolically situated along the Tigris River, where Iran’s imperial traditions had long flourished. This proximity was cultural as much as strategic.

As Robert Hoyland explains:

“The Abbasid clan of Quraysh moved the capital to Iraq and drew heavily on the men of Merv and east Iran… The new imperial headquarters, Baghdad, lay only a short distance from the former Persian capital, and many who ran the new government were of Persian extraction, who now felt confident to celebrate their origins and their culture.”

By contrast, Constantinople—the heart of the Roman world—remained unconquered, hostile, and linguistically and culturally distant. It was never integrated into the Islamic mental map the way Ctesiphon had been. Even when Heraclius is featured in Islamic sources—as in the Qur’anic mention of al-Rūm—it is in brief flashes of diplomatic tension or symbolic defeat.

Zoroastrianism vs. Christianity in Islamic Memory

Zoroastrianism, though politically vanquished, was treated in Islamic historical memory as a venerable civilization, whose legacy could be mined for administrative models, literary heritage, and moral frameworks.

Christianity, however, was remembered as a rival faith, an ongoing theological and political competitor. As Daryaee puts it, the Sasanian worldview was so sophisticated and universal that “when Islam entered the picture it had no choice but to follow the Sasanian model in many respects.”

Islam, in its universalist aspirations, found more kinship with the Persian imperial ideal than with the theological exclusivism of Roman Christianity. Zoroastrian Iran was defeated, yes—but it was not othered in the way the Christian Roman Empire was.

Eastward Turn in Language, Literature, and Thought

Under the Abbasids, especially during the reigns of al-Mansūr, Hārūn al-Rashīd, and al-Ma’mūn, the cultural gaze of the Islamic world turned decisively eastward:

Persian bureaucrats like Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ began the process of translating and reworking Persian ethical, political, and literary texts.

The Khwadāynāmag, the Sasanian royal chronicle, became the wellspring for Islamic historical narratives about pre-Islamic Iran.

East Iranian cities like Merv, Nishapur, and Bukhara became centers of Islamic power and cultural production.

Arabic prose and poetry—especially under the movement of adab—absorbed and transformed Persian models.

As Hoyland details:

“Books on Persian wisdom, courtly manners and imperial history began to circulate, in part translated from Persian originals and in part recreated and reimagined for a new age… These pioneers in the creation of an Arabo-Persian imperial culture wrote when the Islamic Empire was booming and Baghdad was a vibrant metropolis.”

Why Rome Was Never Ctesiphon

The Roman Empire (ruled from Constantinople) remained in Islamic eyes a military adversary and religious rival, rather than a model for cultural emulation. Greek remained largely untranslated in the early Islamic period. The translation movement in Baghdad focused on:

Persian texts (statecraft, ethics, epic)

Indian texts (mathematics, astronomy)

Greek works, but filtered through Syriac intermediaries

As a result, Persian culture was accessible, translatable, and integratable. Roman culture was not. Even geographically, Syria, Armenia and Egypt had been minority Greek lands for centuries before the Islamic conquests. The majority of their populations was Aramaic, Syriac, Armenian, and Coptic—not Greek. As Walter Kaegi explains:

“Those Byzantine soldiers and commanders who escaped destruction at the battle of Jabiya-Yarmuk… fled north in the direction of Antioch, Edessa, and even to Melitene… there is no evidence for mass flight of the indigenous Syrian population. The greatest panic gripped the Byzantine military.”

In short: the Greek-speaking elite fled, the local population remained—and was absorbed by the new Islamic order. Persia had no such flight. Indeed, entire Persian military units like the Asāwira embraced Islam and joined the Muslim cause. This was never the case with the Roman military elite.

The Persianization of Islam

The Abbasids’ alliance with Persian elites was not temporary—it redefined the Islamic world. Persian converts, poets, governors, and scholars became central to Islamic governance and cultural life. This produced:

A new imperial style modeled on Sasanian precedent

An administrative elite with deep Persian roots

A literary culture where Iranian kings and cosmology shaped memory

A geopolitical gravity centered in Iraq, Iran, and Central Asia

This was no longer an Arab empire. It was the birth of the Islamicate civilization—a fusion of Qur’anic revelation, Arab oratory, and Persian imperial imagination.

As Hoyland writes:

“The culmination of this was the versified history composed by Firdawsī… entitled the Book of Kings (Shāh-nāmah)… a monumental achievement that has until this day not been supplanted.”

Conclusion: An Eastward Future

The capital may have moved from Mecca to Medina, Medina to Damascus, and finally Damascus to Baghdad, but the spiritual geography of the Islamic world settled firmly in the East. The lands of ancient Ērān—not Rome—became the homeland of Islamic memory. The Persian past offered not just stories—it offered a template for civilization.

This shift explains why Baghdad was not built as a new Rome, but as a new Ctesiphon—a continuation of a sacred, Persian past now Islamized. From Balkh to Bukhara, from Rayy to Merv, the Islamic world looked not to the Mediterranean, but to the Zagros, the Oxus, and beyond.

Rome had ended. Ērān lived on—in a new key.

VIII. Conclusion: Remembering to Rule

Throughout the early Islamic centuries, historians, poets, and scholars continually returned to Persia, not out of nostalgia but out of necessity. The memory of Iran—its kings, cities, courts, and chronicles—offered a usable past, one that served the needs of an empire in search of identity, prestige, and legitimacy.

The Roman Empire had once loomed large, yes. But by the time Muslim historians began crafting the intellectual contours of Islamicate civilization, Rome had already become “the Other”: a foreign, Christian, Greek-speaking, and antagonistic rival. Its emperors were remembered as enemies, its capital an unconquered fortress of imperial Christianity.

Persia, by contrast, was remembered as ancestor.

A Past That Could Be Claimed

What made the Persian legacy so compelling to Muslim historians was not just its antiquity—it was its continuity. The Sasanian Empire had fallen militarily, but its cultural frameworks, administrative systems, and social hierarchies survived long enough to be absorbed and retooled by the Islamic order.

Touraj Daryaee writes:

“Arab Muslim conquerors met stiff resistance… while others agreed to pay a poll tax and remain in charge of their territory and submit to the Arab governors. Part of the Sasanian elite cavalry also joined the Arab forces and… continued the conquest of the region and Central Asia.”

This cooperation produced a fusion, not a rupture. Persian dehgāns (noble landholders), scribes, and cavalry commanders were folded into the new Islamic ruling class. In doing so, they brought with them language, memory, and models of kingship.

Even more, as Daryaee notes after the death of the Great-Grandson of Yazdgird III in 710:

“After Wahram’s death the Persians had to wait only 40 years to topple the Arab rulers at Damascus, and by the ninth century, they would establish their own independent dynasties in Persia… The family of Sasan was never forgotten.”

It is no accident that Muslim rulers—whether Persian, Arab, or Turk—routinely claimed descent from Sasanian kings, or invoked their legacy in ceremonial dress, court rituals, and chronicles. The memory of Sasan gave their rule historical depth, and their subjects cultural familiarity.

Persia as Mirror, Rome as Foil

In the Islamic historical imagination, Rome was distant—geographically, linguistically, and religiously. Persia was proximate. Rome represented a world that had always been in opposition: the Crusader, the enemy, the heretic. Persia, though once a religious opponent, was eventually absorbed, and its legacy domesticated within Islamic forms.

Even the great Abbasid court of al-Ma’mūn, who revered Aristotle and ordered the translation of Greek science, did so through Persian intermediaries, and with Persian models of royal patronage.

Rome was admired—but never inherited. Ctesiphon was conquered and reinhabited. Constantinople remained an icon—but always at a distance.

Ruling with Memory

The historians of Islam’s golden age—al-Ṭabarī, al-Yaʿqūbī, al-Masʿūdī, Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ—knew exactly what they were doing. They did not document Sasanian history to preserve it in a museum case. They did it to build a new civilization.

Persia gave them:

A model of kingship: majestic, ordered, divinely sanctioned.

A story of time: cosmic, cyclical, and moral.

A civilizational anchor: rooted in cities like Ctesiphon, Balkh, Rayy, and Bukhara.

An intellectual inheritance: in adab, ethics (akhlaq), administration, and law.

This was not merely remembering. It was remembering to rule.

The Family of Sasan Was Never Forgotten

The conquest of Persia in the 7th century CE did not end the Persian past—it activated it. In the centuries that followed, the Sasanians lived on in Arabic texts, in Persian poetry, in courtly ritual, and in Islamic statecraft.

“Books on Persian wisdom, courtly manners and imperial history began to circulate… recreated and reimagined for a new age.” —Robert Hoyland

In this reimagining, the Muslim historian was not a passive chronicler, but a curator of empire. His task was to craft continuity from conquest. And in the Sasanian past, he found a rich quarry from which to build.

Ctesiphon, Not Constantinople

So in the final balance, we must ask: why did Muslim historical consciousness turn toward Ctesiphon, and not Constantinople?

Because Ctesiphon—despite being a symbol of a fallen empire—offered a legacy that could be claimed, integrated, and reimagined.

Constantinople offered a legacy that remained alien, contested, and unassimilated—until the Ottomans finally took it in 1453.

In choosing Ctesiphon over Constantinople, early Muslim historians chose familiarity over foreignness, integration over isolation, and memory over enmity.

They did not simply choose a city.
They chose a civilizational inheritance.

THE END.

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