Although Arab incursions into Armenia began c. 640, it wasn’t until the rise of the Marwānids that the province Armīniya, a catch-all toponym to designate the Arab conquests in the South Caucasus, came under the direct control of the caliphate. The position of Armīniya as a frontier against the Byzantines and the Ḫazars required that the land not only be conquered by Muslim armies and home to Muslim settlers, but that it should be relevant to the Islāmic world in a more profound manner. We therefore find descriptions of mosques and Islāmic shrines in Armīniya, as well as stories that link Armīniya to the Qur’ānic narrative and Prophetic tradition. Geographers, exegetes, and historians of the Islāmic world described Armīniya as significant to both caliphal history and the apocalyptic future of the Muslim community. The political and military frontier between Islām and Byzantium was thus reinforced by a conceptual border, one which delineated a distinct difference between Armīniya and her Greek neighbors.
This paper will examine the relationship between Islāmic traditions about Armīniya and their Sāsānian antecedents by considering the geographical material produced in Arabic and Persian in comparison to information available in the Syriac, Greek, Armenian, and Georgian sources. It will briefly discuss the geographical divisions of the province and reject the common assertion that Arab Armīniya consisted of Armenia, Iberia, and Albania, instead highlighting the importance of the Sāsānian administrative model for early ‘Abbāsid geographical conceptions. Furthermore, the paper will consider the choices made in describing the cities of Armīniya as additional evidence of the de-Byzantinization and subsequent Islāmization of provincial identity. The goal is to determine the extent to which Armīniya’s inclusion into “Islām” had significant political implications and to illustrate the polyvocal nature of geographical production in the early ‘Abbāsid era.