Nahawand, the Opening of Openings

The Twenty-First Year

In the twenty-first year of the Hijra, which in the Gregorian reckoning corresponds to the years 641 and 642, in the mountains of the western Iranian highland, near a town called Nahawand, a battle was fought that would receive its own name in the annals of Islamic history. Suyuti ﵀ records it in a single sentence, and in that single sentence lies enclosed the further fate of the Sassanid empire. He writes that in the year 21 after the Hijra Alexandria was opened by force, and Nahawand, and Barqah, and other places, and to Nahawand he adds a brief characterisation that says more than a long description: after Nahawand, he writes, the Persians could no longer mobilise an army.

That is the sentence around which this article turns, for what lies enclosed in those six Arabic words is the end of an empire that, since Cyrus the Great, since Xerxes, since Darius, since the dynasty that was called the Achaemenids, since the Parthians who succeeded them, since the Sassanids who in turn succeeded the Parthians, had held a place of its own in the world. Twelve centuries of Persian power had the Near East known when the Muslims set their first foot there in the years ten to twenty after the Hijra: twelve centuries of kings, palaces, armies, fleets, satraps, treasure chambers and capitals. And in that one year 21 after the Hijra that power broke, not because a last palace was taken, not because a last emperor was captured, but because an army that the Sassanid empire had gathered in a last attempt to drive the Muslims back was defeated on the battlefield of Nahawand, and thereby lost the capacity ever again to array itself as a coordinated military force.

The Muslims would come to call this battle, and its consequences, Fath al-Futuh, which in Arabic means the Opening of Openings, the victory of all victories, the opening that made all subsequent openings possible. Suyuti ﵀ himself does not use the term in his concise record of the year, but the spirit in which he sets down Nahawand, with that one characterisation that the Persians could thereafter no longer mobilise an army, supports what the Muslims have come to call it ever since that day. The phased narrative of the battle itself, the hour-by-hour account of the manoeuvres in the mountains around Nahawand, calls for a space of its own, and for that we refer to the battle-story that belongs to this article:

In the rest of this article we follow Suyuti ﵀ in what he gives, and build up the spiritual and administrative meaning that lies enclosed in his concise record.

The Road to Nahawand

To understand Nahawand, we must look back at what preceded it. In the fifteenth and sixteenth years of the Hijra the battle of al-Qadisiyyah had been won by the Muslims under the command of Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁, the Persian capital Madāʾin, the Ctesiphon of the Sassanid emperors, had fallen, and the emperor Yazdegerd III, a young man who in the despair of the fall of his capital had fled to the east, had withdrawn to the highlands. The Muslims had in the years thereafter steadily conquered territory: Ahwaz, Hulwan, Jundaysabur, great parts of Khuzestan and Mesopotamia had been brought within the borders of the Islamic state. The Persian nobles, the dehqans and the marzbans, had partly submitted, partly withdrawn, and partly regrouped in silence in the mountains where Yazdegerd III had set up his new headquarters.

When the twentieth year of the Hijra approached, word came in to Medina that the emperor in the east had summoned a new, great army. The rumours varied in size: thirty thousand, fifty thousand, a hundred thousand. The modern historian would say that the actual size probably lay in the tens of thousands, somewhere between forty thousand and seventy thousand men. For the Muslims, who had their garrisons in Iraq spread across Kufa, Basra and the newly opened frontier posts, every estimate was cause for concern. ʿUmar ﵁ received the news in Medina, called his council together, and weighed the options.

In the council the question stood whether the Khalifah ﵁ should go himself to Iraq to lead the troops there in person, or whether he should appoint a commander. ʿUmar ﵁ inclined at first to the first option; he thought of himself on a horse, ahead of his troops, and he felt the duty of a Khalifah ﵁ not to sit behind his men in heavy hours. ʿUthman ibn ʿAffan ﵁ and ʿAli ibn Abi Talib ﵁ advised him against it. ʿAli ﵁ pointed out that if the Khalifah ﵁ himself were to fall the whole community would waver, whereas if a commander were to fall the Khalifah ﵁ could appoint a new commander and the battle would go on, and ʿUthman ﵁ supported this reasoning. The Khalifah ﵁ listened and chose the second way: he appointed an-Nuʿman ibn Muqarrin al-Muzani ﵁, a Companion of wisdom and courage, and gave him the supreme command.

The Preparations

an-Nuʿman ﵁ was given a force of around thirty thousand men, drawn from the garrisons of Kufa, Basra and the broader Iraqi frontier. The troops were summoned by the Khalifah ﵁ in a letter that reminded them of the duty of the believer in times of trial, and of the promise of Allah ﷻ to those who stand firm. an-Nuʿman ﵁ received from his Khalifah ﵁ in Medina the instructions to march to Nahawand, to seek out the Persians there, and to engage the battle under the blessing of Allah ﷻ. He was also charged that if he were to fall on the battlefield the command was to pass to Hudhayfah ibn al-Yaman ﵁, and if Hudhayfah ﵁ were to fall, to Jarir ibn ʿAbdullah ﵁. The Khalifah ﵁ arranged the line of succession in advance, so that the command would not be unattended for a moment on the battlefield.

The preparations ran over weeks. The troops were supplied from the treasury of Kufa and Basra, which in the past years had grown through the growth of the provinces. The weapons were checked, the horses watered and fed for the long march, and the provisions were carried in sufficient quantity for what might become a campaign of weeks. an-Nuʿman ﵁ divided his army into three main wings, with a centre, a right and a left flank, and among his experienced Companions he appointed the sub-commanders.

The Persian array under their commander, a nobleman whose name is rendered variously in the Arabic sources and whose identification in the Persian sources reads Mardanshah or Firuzan, took shape in the vicinity of Nahawand. It was an army of some tens of thousands, with heavy cavalry, with elephants such as the Persians had deployed in earlier battles, and with warriors who, under the panic of the previous defeats, now made a last common attempt to drive the Muslims out of the highland. The Persians chose their position carefully, in a valley surrounded by hills, where they thought to be able to catch the Muslims in a pincer that would offer no escape.

The Battle

The phased narrative of the battle itself, with its manoeuvres, its change of command, its night attack and its final breakthrough, belongs in the battle-story indicated above. What we mention here remains within the space that Suyuti ﵀ gives us in his concise record. The battle lasted several days. The Persians, in their chosen position, defended themselves with the tenacity of men who knew that this was their last chance, while the Muslims, under an-Nuʿman ﵁, held to a strategy of patient pressing, of probing the Persian lines, of searching for the weakness. an-Nuʿman ﵁ fell on the battlefield in the critical hour of the breakthrough, and as the Khalifah ﵁ had foreseen Hudhayfah ﵁ took over the command without the Muslim line falling into confusion for even a moment. The breakthrough came about, the Persian line broke, the cavalry took to flight, and the army fell apart into fragments that fled into the hills, pursued by the Muslims until the evening fell.

The spoils were enormous. The Persian treasures left behind in the camp, the weapons, the horses, the tents, the silver, the gold, the silk: all fell into the hands of the Muslims. Hudhayfah ﵁ drew up the distribution according to the rules the Khalifah ﵁ had laid down, and the news went up to Medina. an-Nuʿman ﵁ was buried on the battlefield where he had fallen, and his name was inscribed in the Diwan that ʿUmar ﵁ had established in the same period in Muharram of the previous year, in the grade of the fallen martyrs whose merits would be borne in eternity.

What Nahawand Truly Was

The battle was no technical victory; it was a turning point of a world order. Twelve centuries of Persian state power had the Near East known, the Sassanid empire had in the sixth century managed to raise itself to a power that stood on equal footing with the Roman empire, and in the wars under Khusraw II it had even taken Jerusalem and Egypt, before the Byzantine emperor Heraclius won those territories back in a last advance. This was an empire with a long tradition of statecraft, of army, of writing, of religion, and this empire was in a single battle stripped of its military backbone.

Suyuti ﵀ sums it up in his concise sentence: after Nahawand the Persians could no longer mobilise an army. That was the spiritual and strategic core. Not that the emperor Yazdegerd III had died, that would happen only in the thirty-second year of the Hijra in distant Marw; not that all the Persian cities had been taken, that would happen step by step in the years after Nahawand; but that the coordinated Persian military power ceased to exist. From Nahawand the Muslim advance in Iran would proceed city by city, province by province, without a central counterforce ever again being able to reverse the advance on a battlefield. The Persian nobles negotiated locally or withdrew to remote strongholds, but of an army that could meet the Muslims again on an open field there was no more question.

That is why the designation Fath al-Futuh, which the Muslims have given to this battle ever since, is justified. It was not an opening among other openings, but the opening that made all subsequent openings possible. Whoever reads Suyuti’s cautious formulation well sees that in his brevity he supports precisely this meaning: he gives Nahawand no more space than other openings in his record of the year, but he adds to it a qualification that he gives to no other opening, namely that the Persians could thereafter no longer mobilise an army. That is the implicit Fath al-Futuh acknowledgement from the most concise of all chroniclers.

The News in Medina

When the news of Nahawand arrived in Medina, ʿUmar ﵁ received it in the Masjid an-Nabawi in the manner that was typical of him. He ascended the minbar, spoke a short khutbah, thanked Allah ﷻ in simple words, and reminded the community of the fallen. an-Nuʿman ﵁ was named by name, with the prayer for mercy upon his soul, and the other shuhada were named together, with the same prayer. The Khalifah ﵁ stood on the minbar in his patched cloak, and the community saw that the victory had not changed him: no euphoria, no display, no announcement of a feast, only gratitude, and the remembrance of duty.

In the same khutbah, as the broader tradition transmits, ʿUmar ﵁ spoke of the responsibility that this victory had laid upon the community of the Muslims. He warned that an opening so great carried within it a danger greater than any Persian army, and that danger was the prosperity that would now flow in, the luxury one might grow accustomed to, the softness that would sooner or later make men forget that they had fought because they had believed in tawhid, not because they had sought wealth. He spoke that sentence, according to the tradition, with tears in his eyes. The community listened, and it knew that the Khalifah ﵁ in that moment uttered not only the concern of a leader, but the prophecy of a seer. What he feared would in the generations to come become reality, but in his own days he kept those dangers under control through the austerity he displayed in his own person.

The Further Openings

In the same breath with which Suyuti ﵀ names Nahawand, he also mentions Alexandria, Barqah, and other places. The community of the Muslims opened in this one year 21 after the Hijra a group of territories each of which would in itself have been a considerable expansion, but which in the shadow of Nahawand receive somewhat less weight in the annals. Barqah, a town in the eastern part of what we now call Libya, came into the hands of the Muslims by treaty, after the opening of Alexandria had cleared the western front. The other places that Suyuti ﵀ names in his concise sentence include some towns in Khuzestan, in Khorasan, in the highland of Fars, which in the direct aftermath of Nahawand were taken without much resistance.

The pattern that sets in from Nahawand is that the Persian cities offered themselves to the Muslims one by one, some by treaty, some after a brief siege, some by internal surrender by their local rulers who saw the hopelessness of further resistance. Yazdegerd III kept fleeing, from one city to another, from one hospitable nobleman to the next, until eleven years later he would be killed in Marw by one of his own subjects. But the battle had long since been decided before that moment; Nahawand had decided it, and the rest was the conclusion.

The Spiritual Meaning

For the Muslims Fath al-Futuh meant more than a military victory; it meant a confirmation that the promise given to the believers in the Qur’an was becoming reality in this world. Allah ﷻ had in many verses promised the community of believers victory over the tyrants of the earth. He had given Musa ﵇ victory over Pharaoh, He had given David ﵇ victory over Goliath, He had given Muhammad ﷺ victory over the Quraysh, and now, in the generation that bore the banner after the passing of the Prophet ﷺ, He gave them victory over the Sassanids of Iran and the Byzantines of Syria and Egypt. It was no coincidence, it was no merit of the Muslims in themselves, it was the fulfilment of a promise.

ʿUmar ﵁ knew this, and he said it. He kept the community in remembrance that the victory was no right they had wrested, but a gift they had received, and a gift, unlike a merit, must be borne with gratitude and not with pride. Hence the austerity he demanded of himself and of his commanders, hence the instruction to an-Nuʿman ﵁ before the battle that he was to fight not for himself but for Allah ﷻ, hence the prayer in the mosque after the victory, instead of a triumphal march through the streets.

The Position of the Persians Who Remained

What happened to the Persians who survived the battle is, in the same spirit, important. The Muslims took no revenge: the prisoners were treated according to the rules of the law of war, the non-combatants were not attacked, the Zoroastrian priests were not killed, the temples were not destroyed. The Persians who submitted were offered the jizyah as a covenant and kept their community, their language, their customs and their worship. In the centuries that would follow, a considerable part of them would enter Islam, and from their midst would come some of the greatest scholars of the Muslim world: al-Bukhari ﵀, Muslim ﵀, Abu Hanifa ﵀, al-Ghazali ﵀, and countless others. The legacy of Nahawand was not destruction but absorption. The Persian civilisation, in its science, in its statecraft, in its literature, did not perish but was integrated into a greater whole in which its contributions were preserved and passed on.

The Spiritual Reckoning

We close this chapter with the observation that recurs in every serious consideration of Nahawand. The battle has a twofold meaning. The first is worldly: it put an end to an empire that had ruled for twelve centuries, and it opened the way for the spread of Islam throughout the whole east as far as the borders of China. The second is spiritual: it was an embodiment of what a believing community, under a just Khalifah ﵁, can attain in a time of steadfastness when it trusts in Allah ﷻ and continues to live in simplicity.

The Muslims have called this battle Fath al-Futuh ever since. We in this article have used the term with the caution that Suyuti’s own brevity prescribes: he gives the battle the characterisation it deserves without using the term itself, and he lets its meaning shine out from the moving sentence that the Persians could thereafter no longer mobilise an army. We follow that caution. What it has become in the mouth of the Muslims is what it has become; what Suyuti ﵀ writes about it remains the source on which our article rests.

Looking Ahead

In the years that followed Nahawand, the Khalifah ﵁ would exercise his office for some years more. The pilgrim route to Mecca was extended, the Masjid al-Haram was improved, the Masjid an-Nabawi in Medina was enlarged, the Muslim armies pressed further into Iran, further into Central Asia, and further out of Egypt to the west of North Africa. But the central battle, the battle that had determined the course of history forever, had been fought: it was Nahawand, it was the Opening of Openings.

In the following article we return to Medina and to the expansion of the two great mosques, the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca and the Masjid an-Nabawi in Medina, which ʿUmar ﵁ had completed in the years between Yarmuk and his death. For just as he had extended the power of Islam in the provinces, so he wished in the capital to make the houses of prayer more spacious, to give the growing community of believers room to bow down before Allah ﷻ.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed.), p. 136 (year 21 AH: Alexandria, Nahawand, Barqah and other openings, with the characterisation that the Persians could thereafter no longer mobilise an army).
• Further mentions elsewhere in the same Suyuti ﵀ edition on the governing style of ʿUmar ﵁ and his instructions to commanders, pp. 134–151.