How the Zoroastrian Persia was vandalized & Zoroastrianism wiped out from the land of its birth (634-651)

The Persians today have faint memories of their pre-Islamic past,  of the glories of Cyrus and Darius, of Pasargade, Persepolis, Ctesiphon, of Zarathushtra, and the Shah-Nameh.

As they had provoked the pre-Muslim Quraish of Mecca into battle by raiding their caravans, the Muslim Arabs followed the same tradition of raiding their first non-Arab neighbor, the Persians who were a settled civilization.

The Muslim Arabs set their eyes on Persia, to conquer land and impose a creed on the Persians making them as bloodthirsty as themselves to attack, other parts of the world. Those who fell victim to the swords of the Jihadis could only save their lives by becoming Muslims.

The Battles of Namraq and Kasker 12 A.H. 634 C.E.
The town of Hira had been occupied by the ArabsKing Yazdjurd/ Yazdgard sent a reconnaissance force under the command of a general named Jaban to save the people of the border areas of Euphrates river, from the depredations of the Muslim Arabs.On seeing the Persians approach, who were on horses, the Arab force on camels, withdrew towards the desert into the oasis town of Namraq/ Kufa & drew the Persians into the desert, a terrain that the Persians were not familiar with, thus inflicting a defeat upon them. The Persian force withdrew to join the main Persian army at a town called Kasker. 





The town of Kaskar was far away from the Muslim camp. Persian general Narsi had assembled a good concentration of forces, felt that no Muslim attack could be imminent. The Muslim commander Abu Ubaid, in the wake of the battle of Namaraq itself rushed to Kaskar before the forces under Persian general Jalinus could come to their assistance. Persians hurriedly brought their military into formation and the two forces faced each other at Saqatia a few miles from Kaskar but Arabs were able to overwhelm the Persians at Kasker too and force them to retreat to the east, beyond the Euphrates. 

The Battle of the Bridge Al Jisr - 14 A.H. 636 C.E.
At the battle of the Bridge/ Al Jisr in Arab chronicles, the Persians used their elephants to trample over the Arab attackers including the Arab general. The Arab army stared retreating in panic and the Persians chased them up to the Bridge on the Tigris river, the boundary between the Persian empire and the domain of the Arabs. 

The Persians stopped at the bridge and did not follow the Arabs into the Arabian desert wasting an opportunity to hunt down the Muslim Arabs in their homeland and slaughter them in the same manner in which they slaughtered their adversaries.

An opportunity to do this was lost by the Franks at the Battle of Poitiers, 732, by the Austrians and Poles at the battle of Vienna, 1683,  by the Hindus at the Battle of Tarain, 1191,  at the Battle of the Bridge by the Persians, 634, by the Israelis at the six day war, 1967 , the liberation of Afghanistan, 2001, Iraq in 2003, after which the defeated Muslims  should have been forced to choose between Islam or death!

...but the non-Muslim do not yet have an understanding of the enemy's mindset..

The Battle of Ghadasia/ Cadesia/ Qadisiyah 15 A.H., 637 C.E.

General Rostam Farrokhzad 

At this ground breaking battle fought over four days, the Persians were led by general Rustam-e-Farrokhzad/ Farokh Hormazd.  Under Saad-ibn-Waqas, the Muslim Arabs used the tactic of luring the Arab contingent to defect from the Persian army betraing their non-Muslim Zoroastrian paymasters. 
One of these tactics was the cutting off the girdles of the Howda/ seats of those who were riding the elephants making them directionless and defeat their more superior Persian adversary. 
The second tactic told by the defectors was to blind the elephants in one eye only, causing disorder in the Persian army that then opened up passages for the Muslims to advance into the Persian ranks. 
The Arabs and Persians had agreed at the beginning of the battle not fight after sundown, but when the tide of the battle began to turn against the Persians on the third day of the battle, the Arabs attacked the Persians all through the night, shouting Allah-o-Akbar. This was the Night of Clangor, during which the Arabs waylaid the Persian general Rustam, beheaded & displayed his decapitated body to the Persian army at the next morning. The grisly sight of their general’s headless body riddled with arrows lying on the battlefield with his severed head pierced on a spear paraded by the depraved Muslims was a sight that even the war-hardened Persian army was not used to. This sealed the fate of the battle, and the Arabs could make short shrift of the remaining Persian army, killing it to the last man, except a few who managed to retreat towards their capital Ctesiphon, which was the next target for the attacking Muslims.

Commander Apranik of Sassanid Army in Battle against the invaders

Apranik,a symbol of the “Persian Resistance & Freedom”, the mighty daughter of general Piran, never surrendered, “No retreat, no surrender” was her policy. 

The Capture of the Persian capital Ctesiphon revealed the nature of the Islamic threat.


Seeing the Arabs approach Persian capital Ctesiphon/ Teesfoon after slaughtering two third of the Persian army at Qadissiyah, the hapless Persian emperor Yazdgard sent out an emissary to them with the message:
"Our emperor asks if you would be agreeable to peace on the condition that the Tigris should be the boundary between you and us, so that whatever is with us on the eastern side of the Tigris remains ours and whatever you have gained on the western side is yours."

Saad-ibn-Wagas the Arab Muslim Commander-in-Chief said that if the Persian emperor wanted peace it was open to him to accept Islam, or the sword could decide..
and so occupied the White Palace of the Persian kings, where as token of thanksgiving to allah, they beheaded the Persian commandant of the retreating Persian Emperor, and displayed this head to the assembled Persian captives.  


Children, old people were left behind in the chaos. The older were given the choice of Islam or death, the young girls and boys were taken as slaves and distributed amongst the Arabs as war booty. This rapacious behavior was to be repeated over and over again at Jerusalem (636), Damascus (637), Cesaria (639), Alexandria (650), Constantinople (1453) and in every defeat which the Muslims inflicted on their non-Muslim adversaries.

Among the unfortunate children  left behind, was three year old Shahrbanu, the child princess of the Persian King Yazdgard. The Arabs presented her to the Caliph Umar, who in turn gifted her to thirty two years old Mohammed’s son-in-law Ali as maal-e-ganimat (slaves obtained by Muslims after a war), as his concubine!


(The father in law Mohammed had married and consummated his marriage with a seven year old Ayesha in addition to many other young and beautiful ones captured in the numerous wars at Badr, Uhud, Trench, Autas in the Arabian peninsula)

History erased- books burnt, scholars killed 

When the Arab commander Saad ibn-e Abi Vaghas faced the huge Persian library of Ctesiphon n 641 C.E he wrote to Omar(Caliph) about it, only Koran is sufficient, the blasphemous books should be burnt, came the reply.
The huge library was destroyed, the books- works of the generations of Persian scientists and scholars were burnt/ thrown in the Euphrates making the waters of the river ran black with ink from the enormous numbers of books. Literate Persians, historians, writers and Mobeds/ Zoroastrian priests were massacred. Other libraries in Ray and Khorassan faced the same fate. Only few books from the University of Gondishapour survived because the Persian scholars translated them into Arabic in order to save them.  One of the rare books that survived the carnage was Khodai-namak, a Pahlavi writing of the Sassanid era.


After the occupation of his capital Ctesiphon, the Persian emperor Yazgard, withdrew to the fortress of Hulwan, from there to Rayy and finally to Merv, near the border of the Persian empire with the domain of the Central Asian Turks, where he died fighting the Muslims in 651 – seventeen years after the Arabs had first attacked Persia. But before this the Persians put up one final major resistance to the Muslims at Nihavend/ Nihawand. 

The battle of Nihavend
The Persians regrouped at Nihavend under a new Commander-in-Chief Pirojan who re-organize the Persian army in the light of the foul tactics that the Arabs used, purged the Persian army of all Arab contingents and provided the Persian army with Maille Armours. 

  

They took oath by the holy fire that they will die, but not let the Arabs occupy Persia. The Persians took a vantage position on the slope of a hill. The Arab historians describe the Persian army as a ‘Mountain of Steel’. On the first day of the battle the determined Persians put up a stiff resistance under the leadership of their general Mardanshah and the Arabs could not make any headway. 


Ali suggested a base move to the Arab Muslim commander Mugheera-ibn-Shu'ba, and that he offer the Persian princess as a bait to the Persian army to tempt it to leave its fortified position and walk into an Arab trap.

On the second day Mugheera-ibn-Shu'ba displayed the captured Persian child princess to the assembled Persians and said that he would kill the princess on the battle field and if the Persians had the courage, they could come and save her. 
The astonished Persians on recognizing the princess who had been captured by the Arabs four years back, went into a frenzy of rescuing her. Against their commanders’ orders the front ranks of the Persian soldiers leaving the fortified heights, broke their formation and charged at the Arabs.
Seeing the Persians leaving their fortified unassailable positions, Mugheera ordered his troop to withdraw into a valley and then climb into the hill of the opposite hill. 
The Persians thinking that the Arab Army was retreating with their princess, completely broke their formation to liberate her from the clutches of her captors, and charged at the Arabs who were feigning to retreat. 


When the Persians with their heavy armor, reached the lowermost portion of the valley, the Arab with their light cavalry fell upon them from three sides. Weighed down by their armor and being chained to each other, the Persians had little room for maneuvering in the narrow valley where the Arabs had hemmed them in. After a valiant but futile battle, what followed was a carnage of the Persian army all through the day. By nightfall the remnants of the Persian army retreated in the dark and many of the retreating Persians fell into the steep cliff, behind the hill on which they had assembled to attack the Arabs from the high ground. 


Using foul tactics the Arabs, could annihilate the Persians once again. The carnage of Nihavend  broke the back of the Persian resistance, the remaining history of Persia is that of Arabization and Islamization.

The Persia we next hear of is the Islamic Persia of Muslim dynasties the Samanids, the Safavids of Muslim kings- Shah Abbas and Nader Shah. Although forced to convert, they preserved the faint memory of their pre-Muslim past, that was captured by poets, historians and bards in their works, of which Firdawsi’s Shah-nameh is a famous example.
The credit for the much touted Islamic Renaissance with advances in calligraphy, astronomy, mathematics, literature goes to the Persian converts and not to the Muslim Arabs or to Islam. The centre of this Renaissance was Baghdad, which was built near the ruins of the ancient Persian Sassanian capital of Ctesiphon.

The Shia-Sunni divide

It was from Princess Shahrbanu, that Ali fathered his two sons Hassan and Husain, who were murdered in Battle of Karbala in October of AD 680. The descendants of Hassan and Hussain were to be the Shiite Imams who founded the Shia sect of Islam that had mixed Persian (royal Sassanid) and Arab ancestry. (Arab historians deliberately attribute the motherhood of these two sons of Ali to Fatima, another of Ali’s wives, and the daughter of Mohammed in order to keep the ancestry of Husain and Hassan purely to Arabs and to suppress the royal Sassanid Persian element of their ancestry.
The Muslim historians have us believe that Shahrbanu was honorably married off by Ali to his son Hussain from whom she begot Ali's grandon Ali Zayn al Abidin (the fourth Shia Imam) in 658 CE. 

(Princess Shahrbanu was abducted in 637, according to Arab accounts she gave birth to a son in 658. If she was a young lady when she was abducted in 637 then why did she have to wait for 21 years till 658 to beget, especially so considering that the Muslims force their wives to procreate as soon as they can lay their hands on them)

The reason why most Persians are Shias, the Zoroastrians who yearned for a return to the Sassanid days saw in  Hussain, Hassan, being the sons of their princess Shahrbanu, and in the Shiite Imams, a continuation of their pre-Islamic royal Sassanid lineage.

So they formed a cult within Islam separate from that of the Sunnis who came from the Arab Peninsula that was not a part of the Sassanid empire. Thus in today’s Shia-Sunni divide we can see the expression of the Persian-Arab divide that existed before the birth of Islam.

With Persia subjugated, it was now the turn of the Byzantine Christians to shed their blood to resist the Islamic Jihad.  While Persia fell in seventeen years,  634 - 651, the jihad against Byzantium started in 635 but went up to 1453 when Constantinople fell to the Muslim Turks.

Continued...

History Of Jihad On Humanity

sources
The Sword of the Prophet: History, Theology, Impact on the World by Srdja Trifkovic

Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic (Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam) by David Cook

Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide by Bat Yeor

Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide by Bat Yeor

The Origins of the Koran: Classic Essays on Islam's Holy Book by Ibn Warraq 

Perfect Soldiers : The Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It by Terry McDermott