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...

Mia Bloom encourages us to take a more nuanced approach to understanding the demographics and ideology of foreign fighters emigrating to join ISIS. Franck Salameh challenges the claim that ISIS is anomalous in the political and social history of the modern Middle East, which has been dominated by secular nation-states and only in recent decades witnessed perennial appeals to so-called 'fundamentalist' groups that espouse radical ideologies grounded in religious claims.