Given the religious extremism that inspires terrorism, the world has naturally raised the question: can the core tenets of Islam and its original martial development genuinely be said to be in sync with the ideologies and acts of extremist as they claim?

A host of media-pundits , journalists and even Christian apologists have propagated that it does. Graeme Wood, in his widely read article published in The Atlantic, wrote that ISIS fighters were authentic throwbacks to the early Muslims, faithfully reproducing their norms of war. As Muslims, shaken by the extremism that has emerged in our religion and the high profile attacks at its core and origin, we have a deeper stake in answering the question than non-Muslims.

Critics (and extremists) often pluck verses from the Holy Quran and snippets out of hadith-texts (sayings of Prophet Muhammad) that address war, and draw an ahistorical conclusion devoid of context and backdrop feeding the extremist narrative. Yet, historical record and analysis of geopolitics (and identity-politics), conflicts and developments reveals a remarkably alternate picture.

This article is first in a three-piece installment analyzing the vast backdrop of the Roman-Persian conflict in Asia-minor, its implications on identity politics and religious tolerance, and how the the rise of Islam in the 7th century impacted these dynamics.