With the closure of the third civil war the reorganization of the conquest society could no longer be postponed. On the one hand, the common past had receded beyond the point where it could offset the drastic changes accompanying the rise of the new dynasty. In particular, the new dynasty drew its soldiers from Khurāsān, a highly distinctive frontier province in which Iranian civilization enjoyed a unique Fortleben in Islam, so that the revolution could not fail to be ominously reminiscent of a Persian reconquest. For all their illegitimacy the Syrian soldiers had at least been Arabs who never stooped to speaking Syriac, but it was no secret that the Khurāsānīs did speak Persian. Hence it was only too easy to believe that the ʻAbbāsids had ordered the extermination of the Arabs in Khurāsān, and there was widespread fear that the conquerors would now have to endure the humiliation of being ruled by their own clients. With the loss of the common past the idea of secession was likely to suggest itself. Not that it came easily: despite the massacre of his relatives, the Umayyad refugee in Spain acknowledged ʻAbbāsid overlordship until as late as 757 [139]. But when Spain eventually did secede, the precedent had been set.