14 SOCIAL SCIENTIST guaranteed, including the right of the priests to a share in tax-collection, and how the lowly Jatts continued to be subjected to the same humiliating restrictions that remind us of the Manusmitriti's injunctions against the Chandalas1 On the last point, we have an independent confirmation from Balazuri.2 The same tolerance of the established religion extended to the Buddhists: they continued to make votive offerings of Arab coins at the great Stupa of Mir Pur Khas.3 Epigraphy attests to a similar attitude on the part of the Arab rulers in an area further northward. In 857-8 in the Tochi Valley, North-West Frontier Province (Pakistan), an Arab Governor Fayy ibn 'Ammar constructed a pond, and then had a bilingual inscription set up, in Arabic (Kufic) and Sanskrit (Sharda), the latter duly beginning with 'Ow'4 These actions belie the picture of the Arab conquerors as uncouth, avaricious barbarian nomads coming out of the desert, fired with a fanatical belief that God was on their side. The picture is by no means a modem one. In the llth century Firdausi put the following words of indignant portrayal of the Arab Victor in the mouth of the vanquished Persian Aristocrat : From living on camel's milk and lizard's flesh The Arabs have suddenly reached a State That they have set their sights on the throne of the Emperors, Fie be upon thee, the ever altering fortune5 But the picture, though early, is overdrawn, even for the Arabs who overthrew the Persians in the 630s. The over-drawing was aided by the Muslims' own tendency to stress the pagan Arabs' barbarous ways in order to highlight the change wrought by Islam. Recent research has tended to discount much of this, and to suggest, by an interpretation of the word ummi, that the Prophet himself was not unlettered but only a 'gentile', in the Jewish and Christian meaning of the term, and that, even the early Arabs obtained leadership and organization from the mercantile and sophisticated Quraish.6 By the end of the seventh century, the situation was different. The Bedouin element in the conquering Arabs had been suppressed through a series of bloody civil wars, by the Umayyads—the cream of the Quraish—relying upon the Syrians, the most Hellenised of the Arabs. (We must remember that it was through Syriac that Arabic was to receive the wealth of Greek science and learning under the Abbasids). By the time the Arabs invaded Sind, other civilized elements had entered the scer^e, the non-Arab Muslims, largely from Iran, called the mawali. Their existence was essential to the Arab regime, yet their pretensions had to be severely suppressed in the interest of the Arab ruling class.7 The elite position of the Syrians and the contempt for mawali, are duly attested by the Chachnama8 It is this hierarchical structure pre-existing among the Arab conquerors, which explains their readiness immediately to accommodate the existing hierarchy in Sind.