Free Iran: Empire of the Mind by Michael Axworthy

thereby concealing his final purpose and ensuring a wide appeal. Drawing support from Arab settlers in Khorasan, who resented their taxes and felt betrayed by the Umayyads, Abu Muslim and his followers defeated local opposition and, starting from Merv, led their armies westward under a black banner. They defeated the forces sent against them by the Umayyad caliph in a series of battles in 749-750 and in the latter year proclaimed a new caliph in Kufa—Abu’l Abbas, who was not a descendant of Ali, but of another of Mohammad’s cousins. But before long the new caliph, uneasy at the continuing strength of Abu Muslim’s support in Khorasan, had him executed (in 755). 10 The effect of this was to endorse orthodox Sunnism and to marginalise once again the followers of Ali, the Kharijites and other disparate groups that had supported the revolt originally. But the revolt of Abu Muslim was another important religious revolution in Iran, and he was remembered long afterwards by Iranians, and still later by Iranian Shi‘ites, as a righteous, brave and successful revolutionary betrayed by those he put in power.
    Instead of Damascus, the new capital of the Abbasid dynasty was established in Baghdad, hard by the old Sassanid capital of Ctesiphon(though the seat of Abbasid government later moved north to Samarra). The centre of gravity of the empire had moved east in a deeper sense too. As time went on Persian influence at the court of the new dynasty became more and more marked (especially through the Persian Barmakid family of officials), and some historians have represented the Abbasid supremacy as a cultural reconquest of the Arab conquerors by the Persians. The strengthening of Persian influence had begun already under the Umayyads. But texts recording Sassanid court practice were translated into Arabic and applied by the new bureaucrats, creating a more hierarchical pattern of government, in which the caliph was screened by officials from contact with petitioners (a departure from earlier Umayyad practice, according to which the caliph had still taken counsel from tribal leaders in assembly, and manipulated their loyalties and allegiances in age-old patriarchal fashion). New offices appeared in the government of the Abbasids, including that of vizier, or chief adviser or minister; and the administration was divided into separate departments or ministries, called diwans . These institutions were taken directly from Sassanid court practice, and were to endure in Islamic rulership for over a thousand years.
    The influence was also apparent in the buildings constructed by the Abbasids, and many of the buildings of Baghdad were built by Persian architects. Even the circular ground-plan of the new city may have been copied from the Sassanian royal city of Ferozabad in Fars. Where the Umayyads had tended to follow Byzantine architectural models, Abbasid styles were based on Sassanid ones. This is apparent in the open spaces enclosed by arcaded walls, the use of stucco decoration, the way domes were constructed above straight-walled buildings below, and above all (the classic motif of Sassanian architecture), the iwans: large open arches, often in the middle of one side of a court, often with arcades stretching away on each side, often used as audience-halls. As with other cultural inheritances from Sassanid Iran, these architectural motifs survived for centuries in the Islamic world 11 .
    Particularly under the Abbasid caliph Al-Mansur and later, many Persian administrators and scholars came to the court (though they still worked there in Arabic, and many had Arabic names), mainly fromKhorasan and Transoxiana. These Persians encountered opposition from some Arabs, who called them Ajam , which means the mute ones, or the mumblers; a disparaging reference to their poor Arabic (not so different from the origin of the term ‘barbarian’ as used by the Greeks of the Persians a thousand years before). The Persians defended themselves and