When the decisive battle of the Yarmuk in 636 AD gave the Muslim Arabs control of Syria, they gained a land that had been Roman for 700 years. Yet in the memory of most of its inhabitants, their recent subjection to the Sassanian Persians would have been fresh and even dominant. The forces of Chosroes II, which had controlled Syria for a generation, had only been withdrawn in 630. Anyone who had reached adulthood by the time the Arabs arrived had already experienced the Persian occupation; many were born or raised during it. This period of Persian rule, which lasted twenty years or more in Syria, Mesopotamia and Armenia, fifteen in Palestine and ten in Egypt, may have played a major role in accustoming the locals to non-Roman rule, or may have had violently disruptive effects that facilitated the subsequent Arab conquest. So far, the period has been poorly known and never studied as a whole, allowing many theories to be projected upon it. For the most part, historians and especially archaeologists have assigned to the Persians a highly negative and destructive role.

Luri is an Indo-Iranian language cluster with over four million speakers. The Luri ethnic area is found in southwestern Iran and southeastern Iraq, although smaller numbers of speakers have emigrated to elsewhere in Asia and a number of cities in the West.

From the beginning of Orientalist studies of the Muslim world, it was axiomatic to define certain religious phenomena in terms of their origins. Because of the tendency to view all Eastern doctrines as essentially alike, Orientalist scholars of the Romantic period invariably defined Sufism as a mysticism that was Indian in origin; from the first appearance of the term in European languages, “Sufism” was characterised as essentially Looking back at this early scholarship today, it is surprising that this unanimous belief in the Indian origin of Sufism was almost entirely unconnected to any historical evidence. From the days of Sir William Jones and Sir John Malcolm to relatively recent times, this opinion has had a remarkable longevity, despite the ludicrous appearance of some of these claims today. As an example one may consider the outrageous claim of Max Horten, in a 1928 study that sought to explain Sufism as a pure expression of Vedanta: “No doubt can any longer remain that the teaching of Hallaj (d. 922) and his circle Another pertinent example is found in an observation of William James in his 1902 Gifford Lectures, published as The Varieties of Religious Experience:

In the Mohammedan world the Sufi sect and various dervish bodies are the possessors of the mystical tradition. The Sufis have existed in Persia from the earliest times, and as their pantheism is so at variance with the hot and rigid monotheism of the Arab mind, it has been suggested that Sufism must have

James's remark illustrates, innocently enough, how widely this opinion was shared at the time by the academic world in Europe and America. It is easier to see from the perspective of the later twentieth century that this opinion was conditioned by nineteenth-century racial attitudes as well as assumptions about the unchanging nature of religions.

Usually the European perception of South Asia and, related to it, academic research into this region, is informed by specific, powerful images and metaphors that establish a dichotomisation of the world. The reasons for this development cannot be analysed in detail here. Suffice it to say, however, that this organisation and designation of the world has deep roots. Until the Reformation, Europe was basically perceived only in terms of geographical boundaries. But the dichotomy between “Europe” and “Asia” acquired a new dimension in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when, in the wake of a change of paradigm into modernity, European self-consciousness gradually developed into a sense of European intellectual superiority. Just as a new form of collective identity had developed within the boundaries of Europe, based on the idea of “nation” in the late eighteenth century, and just as the members of the early nation-states forcibly dissociated themselves by definition from members of other societies in order to be able to establish their own identity, now, with the same intention, though on a different level, Europeans dissociated themselves from “Asia”, the “Orient” and “Islam”. The political recollection of important master narratives kept the mythical fictions in mind and imbued the nation-building process with enormous real power. This development towards a modern European identity was based, as can be deduced from many travellers' testimonies, on the history of reception, reciprocal perceptions, and the development of enemy images. In this process, the Orient and the Orientals were also used by Europeans as a didactic background for the critique of their own (European) urban societies. The literary technique of contextual alienation and distancing, such as can be found in Montesquieu's “Persian Letters”, was born in this period. These and following processes of projection were connected among others things with the fact that Europeans, as colonial masters, advanced to confront the world outside Europe. There they were faced with attitudes and norms that forced them to question their own perceptions. In doing so, they also tended to accept some of these strange and different ideas, and, thus, exposed themselves to cultural hybridisation which could then only be overcome by the reconstructing of their own culture as something “pure”, in contrast to the “degenerate” culture of the colonialised. In this way, collective antagonisms developed. Even the Oriental crusades that had been critically evaluated by European academicians, were now for the first time perceived in terms of cultural clash. Analogously, Europe and Asia were constructed in the eighteenth century and very predominantly in the nineteenth century in terms of arenas of power politics. For instance, it was during this time that the eastern borders of Europe were conceptualised, with the Balkans and Transoxania being considered as buffers or gaps between the two.