Editing Openai/690e264c-c9e4-800c-ae44-f3cf949de7b4 (section)

==== After the Arab conquest, Iran wasn’t uniformly Islamized. ====
* Urban centers (Nishapur, Bukhara, Marv, Rey, Balkh) — controlled by Abbasid or provincial elites, and strongly connected to Baghdad’s scholarly networks. These were the places where madrasas, hadith circles, and mosques flourished. The scholars here were urban, literate, and Arabic-speaking — even if ethnically Persian.
* Rural and mountain villages — remained semi-Islamic or syncretic for centuries. Old Zoroastrian, Mazdakite, and even local animist traditions persisted. From these margins came millenarian movements, sometimes cloaked in Islamic vocabulary: the Moqannāʿ, the Bābakīya, the Khurramiyya, and later Ismaili da‘wa networks.

So yes — there were revolts from Persian villagers influenced by older Iranian religious worldviews.
But the hadith scholars were urban bureaucrats, not from those rural revolutionary strata.
They represented the state-aligned orthodoxy, not the dissidents.