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As they did in other lands they conquered, the Arabs made a clean sweep of the Persian Empire. Islam holds the achievements of all civilizations before their conquest by Muslims to be worthless trash, jahiliyya, products of the society of unbelievers. And so in the fourteenth century the pioneering Arab historian Ibn Khaldun had to ask, “Where are the sciences of the Persians that Umar ordered to be wiped out at the time of the conquest?” The answer was that they had been obliterated at the hands of those who believed, as in a quip attributed to the Caliph Umar, that if books agreed with the Qur’an, they were superfluous, and if they disagreed with it, they were heretical—in either case, of no account. (en) |
