The full integration of Iran and Iraq into the dynamically shifting field of Late Antique Studies is greatly overdue. Scholars have recognized for some time that the major transformations of the period were stimulated by the centuries-long confrontation between the Roman and Sasanian Empires. Long the province of specialists in ancient Iran, Sasanian Studies has in recent years been revitalized by scholars seeking to shift focus and bring the field into conversation with other scholarly discourses...

Several claims are made in Arabic primary sources concerning the original function and meaning of the Dome of the Rock. Modern scholars have combined these primary sources with analyses of the structure and ornamentation of the building. Dominant lines of interpretation have suggested that it was designed to assert the victory of Islam; to evoke the Solomonic Temple; to mark the role of the Temple Mount at the end of time; and even to serve as an alternative locus for Muslim pilgrimage (ḥajj) during the second Islamic civil war...

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...