Al-Hirah, the Nasrids, and Their Legacy: New Perspectives on Late Antique Iranian History

This paper argues that the famous conqueror of al-Andalus, Mūsā ibn Nuṣayr, who originally came from ʿAyn al-Tamr, a town under the hegemony of Naṣrid al-Ḥīrah, transmitted aspects of Sasanian administrative practice to al-Andalus and hence to Europe, as evidenced by the taxation terms tasca and kafiz attested in Latin and Romance texts. This specific argument is embedded in a larger argument about cultural hybridity centering on the city of al-Ḥīrah as a pre-Islamic and Islamic contact zone among cultures—Roman, Iranian, Arab; Christian, Muslim; tribal and urban. It thus links the processes of transculturation observable in al-Ḥīrah with developments in the far edges of the Islamic world through the person of the conqueror Mūsā b. Nuṣayr