Why did the arab language and identity spread to mesopotamia, syria, egypt, etc. yet not take over persia?

why did the arab language and identity spread to mesopotamia, syria, egypt, etc. yet not take over persia?

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Because Islam and also Islam

Because it was developed in Mesopotamia as an administrative language based on the North Arabian dialect of the Umayyads based there for the bureaucratic elite that grew up within their households, while Persia was a more distant outpost manned instead by a distant Arab colony intermarrying with the locals to secure their status and power.

In other words the Arabs of Mesopotamia settled in segregated garrison towns, and when their half-Arab descendants or non-Arab adopted clients and slaves came to outnumber them, and when Yemeni Arabs began to flood the Imperial registers, the Umayyads began a systematic policy of defining who was an elite Arab and who was not, leading to everyone from North Africa to Iraq to begin to fashion themselves as Arabs in the same way people fashioned themselves Roman centuries earlier. The Arabs of Iran, who intermarried into local politics like most other invaders, didn't end up pushing Arabic language and culture as the gateway to the upper ranks.

persia was sunni for a significant portion of time

was persian culture more deeply rooted than syriac/egyptian culture?

I meant more along the lines that Islam is really just an Arabic cult that was really only a threat to inferior cultures that would get breed out, Islam did much in strengthing the Persian culture, even if it did wipe out many traditions.

No. It just had more of an established aristocratic culture than the other two since Egypt and Syria were effectively under the thumb of Roman, Greek, and Persian rule for centuries before the Arabs ever showed up. The difference with Arab rule was that the Arabs were linguistically closer to them, and the religion they brought didn't have as big an ethnic barrier after a few decades.

Which would be incorrect and anachronistic. The 'Arabic cult' was just a minor Abrahamic movement among Arab Christians and Jews who all participated in the new Arab confederation that eventually became known as the Caliphate. It was those very Syrians and Iraqis who adopted the courtly and household culture of the Arabs that turned it into Islam, an imperial religion in the model of Byzantine Orthodoxy and Sassanid Zoroastrianism. It was a courtly culture that, alongside more esoteric Shia antics at the fringes, ended up spreading to society as a whole in the way the culture of a few Greek or Italian city-states spread throughout the Mediterranean.

Also, besides Syria where Arabs already had a demographic presence, the Arab garrison towns were almost always connected to the desert heartland and not beyond a major river, and almost always in a place that was uninhabited or abandoned by the local population. Arab culture dominated in these garrison cities because there was no other competing culture to absorb them before the 3rd and 4th generation born in these boomtowns spread out throughout the empire and spread a common Arabized culture.

>was persian culture more deeply rooted
Yes, which is why it still survives to this day.

"To conquer Persia and force Islam, the Arab invaders resorted to many inhumane actions including massacre, mass enslavement of men, women and children, and imposition of heavy taxes (Jezyeh=Jizya) on those who did not convert. By the order of “Yazid ibn-e Mohalleb” in Gorgan so many Persians were beheaded that their blood mixed with water would energize the millstone to produce as much as one day meal for him, as he had vowed.[3] The event of blood mill has been quoted by the generations of Iranian Zoroastrian families to this day, yet our books of history have been silent about it."
cais-soas.com/CAIS/History/Post-Sasanian/zoroastrians_after_arab_invasion.htm

New Persian is not that different from Sassanian Middle Persian, and much of the Avesta was preserved. Zoroastrian folklore was preserved in the Persia national epic, Shahnameh, also.

Also, Persians still celebrate Zoroastrian holidays such as Nowruz, Yalda, and Mehregan.

>The event of blood mill has been quoted by the generations of Iranian Zoroastrian families to this day, yet our books of history have been silent about it.

Well, that's usually how black legends are treated universally. They're excellent for studying the culture of the time period they were first written in, but since they usually refer to events centuries ago they're not that useful as history of the period they're describing.

It's really crazy to me how quickly and dominantly Islam spread. Is there a reason for their prowess in battle? Were there really that many Arabs scattered throughout the peninsula before they were united?
Early Islamic history is very fascinating.

Is there any speculation on what would have happened if the Arabs had won at Tours?

The trick to figuring it out is to understand that Islam didn't spread with the Arabs, but with the Arabized non-Arabs that grew up around the garrison towns they settled in a few decades later. What spread in the first few decades of Arab conquest were a small number of Arab soldiers who built these garrison towns initially to respond quickly to the provinces on the border of the Arabian desert - Syria, Egypt, and Mesopotamia - while also being accessible to the Arab heartland in the desert and inaccessible to the majority non-Arab populace since they weren't desert dwellers and the places these garrison towns went up were poor for agriculture and uninhabited.

Battle prowess you could say came with their centuries of experience fighting not only each other but in major conflicts for both the Romans and Persians as auxiliary forces. Basically like the Germanic tribes during the fall of the WRE. Population wise no, the Arabs were always small in number, but they could mobilize whole tribes to settle in these garrison towns and be well protected from non-desert-nomad military threats like rebellious mountain tribes or Byzantine naval attacks.

If the Arabs had won at Tours, Aquitaine would have probably become like northern Spain where a patchwork of increasingly independent Muslim governors began making local alliances with local Gallo-Roman nobles. Basically Southern France would probably be its own kingdom and perhaps even country, and not part of a single France centered around Paris.

This. Islam wasn't instantaneous. It was a powerful tool of generational influence. Hence why conquered peoples retained their newfound beliefs even centuries after being invaded.

Because the Iranian culture and identity was able to outlast the Arabic conquest. There was an influence, but Iranian cultural identity was strong and forced Islam to assimilate with it (to a certain degree). Much of Islamic influence was by the hand of Iranian scholars. Still preserved to this day.
Personally, I'm not a fan of Islam. Pretty shit, forced my family to leave my homeland. Don't like that aspect that ethnic members of the nation have to leave because of Arabic influence, seems pretty traitorous. Feels bad, man.

t. Iranian

nice map btw.

see Arabic didn't overtake Iran because the Arabs settled in eastern Iran as a ruling minority living among Iranians, but in Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia they lived in Arab majority garrison towns segregated from the majority Assyrian, Copt, and other Near Eastern populations. When these towns began to prosper, the natives started migrating to them only discover that they were the minority in an Arab speaking majority city, so they assimilated rather than the other way around.

Because Persian culture was strong unlike Assyrian, Aramaic, and Coptic culture, and because arabs killed those who spoke their native languages.

>because arabs killed those who spoke their native languages
?

Same happened for others non arabic speaking people. The early muslims simply killed them if they spoke another language.

What? No. I have no clue where your excerpt is from, but it looks like it's doing a good job misleading you to an odd conclusion. The early Muslims did not simply kill Copts for speaking Coptic. Most of our earliest sources of Arabic are government bills from the Rashidun and Umayyad period in which both Arabic and Coptic are written side by side, and Coptic remained a colloquial language in Egypt for centuries due to its significance in Coptic liturgy. That's why it, and several other Middle Eastern languages, survived in large numbers to the present day, and why the great irony (though not unsurprising given the history of it consolidating and wiping out dialects in Europe) is that these languages have only severely disappeared in recent memory under the modern Middle Eastern nation-state.

Because Persians retained their cultural and ethnic identity strongly, unlike most cultures in the Middle East/Western Asia who converted to an "Arab" identity with the early Caliphate's conquests. On top of that, the Umayyads were replaced by the Abbassids who were already pro-Shia and pro Mahwali i.e. "very friendly" with non-Arab Muslims. The Abbassid Caliphate was overwhelmingly a Persianized dynasty that was heavily influenced by Persian aristocratic high culture, and its elementals of administration was reinforced by patronage of Iranians.Thus Persian and other Iranian languages retained their survival as both the official administrative tongue of the Caliphate but also a reminder of their ethnic identity and pride. Then the development of the Iranian intermezzo period at the start of the Abbassid Golden Age and height of power further reinforced the unique Iranian identity which Islam couldn't corrode

>No
It actually was. Also there were over 40+ million Iranian people at the time of the Sassanid Empire's fall in 651 AD, it was more heavily entrenched then most Semitic cultures comparatively.