Compare And Contrast Arabia And Sasanian Empires

On the eve of the Islamic era, the Middle East was divided into two great realms. No other imperial states contributed more to the rise of Islam than the late Byzantine and Sasanian empires. Both empires were supported by religious organizations with the concepts of religion and empire heavily intertwined. The Romans had strong parallel support from Christians while the Persians enjoyed the support of the Zoroastrians or Magians. Religion was a critical component for these two powerful empires and religious conformity was insisted upon and identified with political loyalty; nonconformity was treason. Few marginalized groups retained their political as well as religious resistance to the state and maintained their social and cultural distinctiveness. These two political and religious regions would become part

In contrast to the imperial world, Arabia was primarily pastoral, pagan, home to camps and oases, and politically fragmented. The Byzantines and Sasanians interventions in Arabia connected the region furthermore to the empires. The “diffusion of Judaism, Christianity, and Gnosticism in Arabia” made the region part of the Hellenistic empires (A History of Islamic Societies, 26). Commerce brought economic competition, social conflict, and “moral confusion.” Commercial activities intensified social stratification on the basis of wealth and “morally inassimilable discrepancies between individual interests and clan loyalty” (A History of Islamic Societies, 31). The Muslim faith would condemn the displacement of tribal values for the “ambition, greed, arrogance, and hedonism of the new rich” because while it had given Arabia political and commercial order, it was changing its moral and social identity. Arabia became a fermented society touched by imperial influences, marked by monotheistic religions but with competing and henotheistic beliefs, and a prospering society caught in social and moral