THE EXISTENCE OF AN ELITE in a society depends on relative differences in status and how higher status is claimed or acknowledged. The main determinants are usually wealth, power, lineage, knowledge, and religious qualifications. The possession of one or more of these determinants to a greater degree than other people tends to take the form of hierarchic military, administrative, religious, and socio-economic structures. These might constitute parallel élites, or they might be dominated by the same social class. A hierarchic, pyramidal, stratified élite structure of grades and ranks appears to have been characteristic of Late Antiquity in general; it was as typical of the Sasanian empire as it was of the Late Roman state. It is tempting to contrast this with a more simple bifurcated structure, conceptualized and expressed in the Arabic phrase of “élite and general public” ( khāṣṣ wa- ‘ āmm), following the Arab/Muslim conquest. Actually de facto status differences did appear among Muslim Arabs in the very fluid circumstances during the first century after the conquest. The boundary between the khāṣṣ and the ‘ āmm was not always well defined.

Nevertheless, compared to Sasanian society, there appears to have been a general leveling of élite structures in former Sasanian territories during the century following the conquest. But members of the conquered populations seem to have seen the change as something more t han this, and expressed it in terms of the overturning of the social order (“slaves have become masters“) both in Christian literature and in Zoroastrian apocalypses. Toward the end of the seventh century, the East Syrian John bar Penkāyē thought that the proper ordering of kings, priests, and ordinary people had become confused.He asked: