Khwarwaran
Khvārvarān was a military quarter of the Sasanian Empire. Intensive irrigation agriculture of the lower Tigris and Euphrates and of tributaries such as the Diyala and the Karun formed the empire's main resource base.
Etymology
The
. The term Iraq is widely used in the medieval Arabic sources for the area in the centre and the south of the modern republic as a geographic rather than a political, term, implying no precise boundaries.The area of modern Iraq north of Tikrit was known in Muslim times as Al-Jazirah, which means "The Island" and refers to the "island" between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. To the south and the.west lay the Arabian deserts, inhabited largely by Arab tribesmen who occasionally acknowledged the overlordship of the Sasanian Emperors.
Until 602, the desert frontier of greater
Ethnic diversity and religion
The inhabitants were very mixed. The aristocratic and administrative upper class was mostly
Ethnic diversity was matched by religious pluralism. The Sasanian state religion,
The Nestorians, who originally converted from
In the early 7th century, the stability and the prosperity of the multicultural society were threatened by invasion. In 602, Khosrow II Aparviz launched the last great Iranian invasion of the Byzantine Empire. At first, he was spectacularly successful. Syria and Egypt fell, and Constantinople itself was threatened. Later, the tide began to turn, and in 627-628, the Byzantines, under the leadership of the Heraclius, invaded Khvārvarān province and sacked the imperial capital at Tyspawn (Ctesiphon). The invaders did not remain, but Khosrow was discredited, deposed and executed.
Then followed a period of infighting among generals and members of the Imperial family, which left the country without clear leadership. The chaos had also damaged irrigation systems, and it was probably then that large areas in the south of the country reverted to marshlands, which they have remained ever since. It was with that devastated land that the earliest Muslim raiders came into contact.
Arab conquest and early Islamic period
The first conflict between local Arab-Bedouin tribes and Iranian forces seems to have been in 634, when the Arabs were defeated at the Battle of the Bridge. There was a force of some 5,000 Muslims under Abu 'Ubayd ath-Thaqafi, which was routed by the Iranians. In 637, a much larger Arab force, under Sa'ad ibn Abi Waqqas, defeated the main Iranian army at the Battle of Al-Qadisiyya and later sack the capital of the Iranian Empire, Ctesiphon. By the end of the following year (638), the Muslims had conquered almost all of the Western Iranian provinces (modern Iraq), and the last Sasanian Emperor, Yazdegerd III, had fled to central and then northern Iran, where he was killed in 651.
The Islamic conquest was followed by a mass immigration of Arabs from eastern
The intention was that the Muslims should be a separate community of fighting men and their families that lived off taxes paid by the local inhabitants. Mosul began to emerge as the most important city and the base of a Muslim governor and garrison. Apart from the Iranian elite and the Zoroastrian priests who did not convert to Islam, who lost their lives and had their property confiscated, most Iranian people became Muslim and were allowed to keep their possessions.
Khvarvaran was now became a province of the Muslim Caliphate with a new name, Iraq.
At first, the capital of the caliphate was at Madinah (al-Medina), but after the murder of the third caliph, 'Uthman, in 656, his successor, the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law 'Ali, made Iraq his base. In 661, however, 'Ali was murdered in Al-Kufah, and the caliphate passed to the rival Umayyad family in Syria. This
See also
Sources
- S., Suren-Pahlav, Khvārvarān Province (Nowadays Iraq), (1999).