How to evaluate narrative-historical sources is the subject of intense controversies in Islamic Studies and beyond. Arguably, no student of Islamic history can escape the conundrum of debates surrounding these sources. Chase Robinson aptly observed, “it is a measure of just how conservative the professional study of Islamic history remains that the noisiest controversy of the last 25 years concerns the reliability of our written sources, rather than the models according to which we are to understand and use them.” When a scholar makes a claim about the supposed “unreliability” of late antique Islamic sources, she often operates under the positivist assumption of the existence of an “original Truth” that can be discovered through a specific methodology...

It was in the context of a West Asian world dominated by the Sasanians that Islam began as a political and religious movement in Arabia Deserta. The Sasanian regime, however, was extending itself too far. The cost of the war with Byzantium was mounting, and the task of managing all the new territories was something for which their administration was not ready. The Sasanian government was in fact unable to control its own empire: the domain had simply outgrown the administration...

The conventional narrative of the conquest of Iran, based mainly on accounts drawn from standard Islamic histories such as those of al-Balādhurī, al-Ṭabarī, and so forth, considers this event to have been the result of quick and successful campaigns by Muslim armies. These campaigns, exemplified by the battles of Qādisiyya and Nahāvand, are understood to have caused the near-instantaneous fall of the Sasanians as an imperial and cultural unit. Furthermore, this fall is assumed to be the fall of Iran itself; as a result, it represents no less than a national failure, the beginning of Iran’s subordination to Arabia and/or Islam...