ABSTRACT
The Battle of al-Qadisiyya was the decisive victory for the Muslim-Arabs over the Sasanian empire, opening up Iran for conquest and resulting in the eradication of the Sasanian dynasty. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on historical "memory" and the way early Muslim scholars living between 750 and 1050 remembered the pre-Islamic Arabs and Iranians, as well as the Muslim conquest of Iran. The trend of analyzing Islamic historiography as a product of constructed memory has its roots in the "source-critical" tradition of modern Western scholarship on Islam. Concomitant with the recent boom in memory studies scholarship, the past few decades have witnessed a proliferation of research analyzing the theme of memory in early Islamic society from a variety of angles. Scholars of memory have, moreover, theorized that narrative is the bridge linking collective memory and identity construction.
