On a winter night in Samarra in 247/861, the caliph Jaqfar al-Mutawakkil held a carousing session with some companions and courtiers. With Samarra and Baghdad absorbed by inner conflict in the 860s and trying to recover from it during the following decades, most of the empire fell apart. Having acted as chief commander for al-Muqtazz's side during the civil war of 865, he enjoyed the respect of the soldiers. Brett sees ninth-century Ismailism as part of a larger brew of oppositional trends, the 'sectarian milieu' which John Wansbrough described as the religious and doctrinal environment of early Islam. Al-Mutadid achieved a reputation and popularity that went beyond the army, and his reign constituted the high point of what is known as the 'Abbasid restoration'. The decline of Abbasid power was felt throughout the Islamic world. A powerless Abbasid caliphate was still indispensable to the Buyids for several reasons, including their need for formal legitimacy.

Muslim tradition speaks of the existence of soothsayers or sorcerers (kahins) in the pre-Islamic period. The period immediately preceding the Arab invasions had proved as disastrous for the Sasanian Empire as for Byzantium. The Qur'anic revelations were being used in early Muslim worship and memorised by the faithful. Like Moses before him, Muhammad, the 'seal of the Prophets', was involved in social action as well as preaching. The formation of the Islamic empire, which followed the death of the Prophet in 632, falls conveniently but not rigidly into two phases. The first was an explosive and surprisingly easy series of conquests of the territories closest to Arabia, which soon brought Byzantine Syria, Palestine and Egypt as well as Sasanian Iraq into the orbit of government from Medina. The second involved protracted and more difficult conquests that eventually added Sasanian Iran and parts of Central Asia in the east and the North African littoral in the west.

Arabic literature in its entirety and in the restricted sense is the enduring monument both of a civilization and of a people. The atomicity of pre-Islamic verse and the convention of the monorhyme naturally favoured short compositions on single themes. During the second half of the sixth century AD, a far-reaching change came over the spirit of Arabic poetry. The Umayyad period witnessed a poetic outburst reminiscent of the pre-Islamic one in sixth-century Arabia. The revolution which brought to power a new dynasty, the Abbasids, also opened for Arabic literature its golden age. The political decentralization of the Arab empire in the fourth/tenth century, and the reduction of Baghdad itself in 334/945 to a provincial capital by the Buyids, inevitably affected the course of a literature. The vitality of the Arabic literary tradition was transferred to younger and more vigorous Islamic literatures, whose growth it had directly or indirectly stimulated, namely, Persian, Turkish and Urdu.

This chapter gives an account of all the principal political events in Iran under the ‘Abbāsids and then discusses the long-term significance of these events for the history of that country; but it should never be forgotten that the ‘Abbāsids intended to create and for a time nearly succeeded in creating a universal Islamic empire. When Zaidī 'Alid pretenders rebelled in the Yemen and in Māzandarān they posed essentially similar political threats to the ‘Abbāsids. The actions of the central government, and the reactions of the Iranian Muslims under ‘Abbāsid rule, were always more subject to Islamic considerations than to any specific feeling about Iranians as a group. The success of the ‘Abbāsid revolution has often been viewed as a success by Iranians over Arabs; but a very great number of the soldiers and propagandists who won and maintained ‘Abbāsid rule were Arabs, and there is sign that the Iranian supporters of the dynasty in the early period were anti-Arab.