The Qor’an urged respect for women within marriage and respect for their modesty and
privacy, though it made no specific rules for women’s dress or veiling, and
some have suggested that the veil originated as an elite practice, copied from
the Christian Byzantine court—comparable perhaps with the custom among
aristocratic Englishwomen in Victorian times. The Qor’an gave women the
right to own property in their own name. It also discouraged the pre-Islamic
practice of killing unwanted girl infant. (p. 71)

The conquest (of Iran) was not, for the most part, followed by mass murder, forced
conversion, or what today we would call ethnic cleansing. Instead the new
Arab masters were content, as a matter of policy, simply to replace the ruling
elites of the territories they had conquered. The Arab troops set up armed
camps in the new lands, on the fringe of existing cities or in the form of new
settlements, often on the margin between cultivated land and uncultivated
territory that could be used to graze animals. The Arabs generally allowed
existing proprietors, peasants, and merchants to go about their business as
normal, expropriating only state land, the estates of the Zoroastrian tem-
ples, and those of members of the old elites who had fled or had died in the
fighting. (p. 74)

ordinary Iranians probably benefited from the replacement of a
strongly hierarchical aristocratic and priestly system by the more egalitarian
Islamic arrangements, with their emphasis on the duty of ordinary Muslims
to the poor. But as in other epochs, the victors wrote the history; if more
contemporary material from the peoples of the conquered lands had sur-
vived, the picture of tolerance might be more shaded. There were massacres
at Ray and Istakhr, both Mazdaean religious centers that resisted more
stubbornly than elsewhere. (p. 75)