The Islamization of Central Asia in the Sāmānid era and the reshaping of the Muslim world

Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies

Volumn 72, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 279-299

  Tor, D G ^a  

^a BAR ILAN UNIVERSITY   (Israel)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 75249083538     PISSN: 0041977X     EISSN: 14740699     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0041977X09000524     Document Type: Review

References (86)

1. On the establishment of Muslim rule in Transoxiana, see W. Barthold, Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion, third edition, tr. T. Minorsky, ed. C. E. Bosworth (Taipei: Southern Materials Center, 1968), 180-93
2. On the course and significance of the clashes of the 730s with the disintegrating Türgesh kingdom see H. A. R. Gibb, The Arab Conquests in Central Asia (London: The Royal Asiatic Society, 1923), 59-85, especially 84-5
3. On the earlier and later decades see Barthold, Turkestan, 187-96
4. For a succinct discussion of the significance of the Battle of Talas, see Golden, "The Karakhanids and early Islam"
5. The term proto-Sunni is borrowed from G. H. A. Juynboll, "An excursus on ahl al-sunna in connection with Van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft, vol. IV", Der Islam 75, 1998, 318-30
6. On the religio-political significance of the caliphate until al-Ma'mūn's time, see Patricia Crone, God's Rule: Government and Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 21-3
7. On the loss of the early religious authority of the caliphate, ibid., 130-33. For the consequent political crumbling of the caliphate resulting from this process see D. G. Tor, "Privatized Jihād and public order in the pre-Seljūq era: the role of the Mutatcombining dot belowawwi'a", Iranian Studies 38/4, 2005, 555-73
8. On this problem see Jürgen Paul, The State and the Military: The Sāmānid Case (Papers on Inner Asia 26. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 1994), 6-7
9. and Roy P. Mottahedeh, Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society, revised ed. (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 180-81
10. Scholars such as Julie Meisami and Elton Daniel have correctly noted the Sāmānid need to legitimize their rule, while paradoxically not attributing their stringent adherence to an "ideologically 'correct' version of Islamic history and doctrine" to this need, but rather to what they describe as a wholly unrelated aim: "to counter the teachings of various heterodox and sectarian groups", Julie Meisami, Persian Historiography to the End of the Twelfth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 24. The present author concurs with their analysis, but believes that Daniel overlooked how integral a part of the legitimizing project the Persianate dynastic militant proto-Sunni stance was; this is why we find it so conspicuously displayed by all three of the major Persianate dynasties - Scombining dot belowaffārids, Sāmānids and Ghaznavids
11. In Bosworth's words, "Campaigns against the Khārijites and the infidels of eastern Afghanistan gave the Scombining dot belowaffārids prestige in the eyes of the orthodox ...", C. E. Bosworth, "The Tcombining dot belowāhirids and Scombining dot belowaffārids", The Cambridge History of Iran. Volume 4: The Period from the Arab Invasion to the Saljuqs, ed. R. N. Frye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 112
12. "The 'Ayyār and the Caliph", 159-83
13. Obviously, it is the Sāmānids rather than the Scombining dot belowaffārids who managed to appropriate the status of militant Sunni Persianate dynastic paradigm to themselves. While it is outside the scope of this paper to delve into this question, we can note briefly that the reason the Sāmānid jihādī dynastic state became the paradigm rather than the Scombining dot belowaffārid one on which they were modelled was due to three main factors: 1) greater Sāmānid dynastic longevity, coupled with the fact that they were the victors over the Scombining dot belowaffārids, and could therefore perform a thorough damnatio memoriae; 2) Their far lower level of tension with the 'Abbāsids, which in turn was the outcome of the twin happy facts that: a) they shared no common border with the caliphs; and b) the latter were most satisfactorily neutralized during the course of the early tenth century by their own precipitous political decline; 3) above all, the Sāmānid mobilization of historical writing in service of their own legitimating project. On this last point, see Julie Meisami, "Why write history in Persian? Historical writing in the Sāmānid period", Studies in Honour of Clifford Edmund Bosworth. Volume II: The Sultan's Turret: Studies in Persian and Turkish Culture, ed. Carole Hillenbrand (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 348-74
14. Barthold notes this change in policy without, however, drawing the present author's conclusions regarding its purpose and function: "As we have already seen, the Sāmānids renounced the defensive policy of the previous governors of Khurāsān and Transoxiana. They ceased maintaining the walls that served to defend the cultivated lands from the nomads, and commenced . . . military expeditions into the steppe regions". Barthold, Histoire des Turcs d'Asie Centrale, French tr. by M. Donskis (Paris: Librairie d'Amérique et d'Orient, Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1945, 48)
15. and Mīrkhwānd, Rawdcombining dot belowat al-scombining dot belowafā' 4: 32
16. On comparable Scombining dot belowāffārid behaviour, see D. G. Tor, Violent Order, chapters 3, 4 and 6
17. Soucek has also noted this phenomenon: "The Arabs subsequently transmitted this zeal to the converts of the newly conquered Central Asian territories, so that when the caliphate began to lose its youthful vigor, the jihād was no longer led by them but by a new Iranian dynasty of Transoxania, the Sāmānids". Svat Soucek, A History of Inner Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 70
18. Found in Ibn al-'Adīm's Bughyat al-talab, cited and translated in D. Cook, "Muslim apocalyptic and Jihād", Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 20, 1996, 98
19. Pace Peter Golden's assertion, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples: Ethnogenesis and State-Formation in Medieval and Early Modern Eurasia and the Middle East (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1992), 211-12: "Muslim sources often depict the entire frontier as the scene of Jihād. Strictly speaking, this was undoubtedly an exaggeration . . . Jihād, in Central Asia as in Southeast Asia and Africa, when practiced was more often the domain of the newly Islamicized local populations pursuing political goals than of foreign Muslims". Golden adduces no evidence, however, to back this assertion
20. and C. E. Bosworth, The Ghaznavids: Their Empire in Afghanistan and Eastern Iran, 994-1040 (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1973), 31-2
21. in Bukhārā, Gardīzī, Tārīkh-i Gardīzī, 361
22. see C. E. Bosworth, "The City of Tarsus and the Arab-Byzantine Frontiers", reprinted in The Arabs, Byzantium and Iran: Studies in Early Islamic History and Culture (Variorum Collected Studies Series. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996), article XIV
23. and D. G. Tor, Violent Order, chapter 2. The present author is not trying to assert that the stream of eastern Iranian volunteers ceased; rather, that the eastern limes began to compete in importance with the western one, and probably to surpass it
24. Jürgen Paul, The State and the Military, 20-22, has noted the close relations between the earlier Sāmānid rulers and the religiously motivated warriors and religious leaders, and even that the loss of this support "was instrumental in [the Sāmānid] downfall", without, however, drawing the present author's conclusions regarding the central legitimizing role of these groups in the actual establishment of Sāmānid rule
25. For a closer examination of the composition of the Sāmānid amies see D. G. Tor, "The Mamluks in the military of the autonomous Persianate dynasties", IRAN: Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies, 46, 2008, 213-25
26. Al-Narshakhī, Tārīkh-i Bukhārā, 98
27. Khalid Yahya Blankinship, The End of the Jihād State: The Reign of Hishām Ibn 'Abd al-Malik and the Collapse of the Umayyads (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), chapter 1, "Jihād and the caliphate before Hishām", 11-36
28. D. G. Tor, "Privatized Jihād and public order"
29. Thus, as Frye notes (R. Frye, "The Sāmānids", Cambridge History of Iran. Volume IV: The Period from the Arab Invasions to the Saljuqs, 150), the jihādic warriors constituted a significant factor in Sāmānid military forces: "On [military] expeditions the ghāzīs or warriors for the faith were an important factor in Sāmānid successes"
30. This was true of the Sāffārid armies as well, although that fact has been obscured by the uncertainty and controversy surrounding the meaning of the term 'ayyār; see e.g. Bosworth, "The armies of the Sāffārids", BSOAS XXXI/3, 1968, 538-9
31. idem., The History of the Saffards of Sistan and Maliks of Nimruz (247/861 to 949/1542-3) (Costa Mesa: Mazda, 1994), 340-5
32. and Tor, Violent Order
33. Études Karakhanides, 19-22
34. This kind of national conversion, mandated by political rulers is, of course, well-known in the Christian context from both the Anglo-Saxon and the Frankish examples; on Clovis's conversion and its attendant political considerations see Ian Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (London: Longman, 1997), 41-8; for the famous conversion of the Northumbrians under King Edwin at a royal council of 627
35. see Bede, A History of the English Church and People, tr. Leo Sherley-Price, rev. R.E. Latham (London: Penguin Books, 1968), 126-9
36. and also F. M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, third edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 114-5
37. The question always arises in the case of mass conversions of the depth of the actual religious commitment of the converts. While this is to a certain extent unanswerable - particularly in the present case, in light of the extreme paucity of information on the Qarakhanids - at least in the Frankish context there have been several convincing attempts to argue for genuine "barbarian" intellectual sophistication and religious conviction; see John Moorhead, "Clovis' motive for becoming a Catholic Christian", Journal of Religious History 13/4, 1985, 329-39
38. and Danuta Shanzer, "Dating the baptism of Clovis: the bishop of Vienne vs the bishop of Tours", Early Medieval Europe 7/1, 1998, 29-57
39. Note also the example of an alleged itinerant Muslim preacher cited by Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History, tr. James Ward (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 315-6
40. Usbānīkath or Subānīkath was in the tenth century a heavily-fortified border town lying north-east of the Jaxartes river; see G. Le Strange, Lands of the Eastern Caliphate (London: Frank Cass, 1966), 485
41. al-Sam'ānī, al-Ansāb, 1: 131-2
42. Paul, "Nouvelles pistes", 22, does not fall into the trap of the assumed Sufi missionaries; rather, he notes the various empirically verifiable factors that went into aiding Islamization: "Car on distingue très nettement les vecteurs culturels qui aident à l'Islamisation de la region de Kachgar: le commerce d'abord, la supériorité culturelle (supposée) de Mavarannahr sur le Turkestan oriental et l'intensité des contacts et échanges entre les deux regions. . ., [et] les guerriers de la guerre sainte. . ."
43. Barthold, Histoire des Turcs, p. 49
44. La Vaissière, Sogdian Traders, 314 has also drawn attention, in a different context, to the description in Ibn al-Nadīm's Fihrist of the numerous Muslim colonies in pagan Turkestan during the Sāmānid era
45. See e.g. Roman K. Kovalev, "Dirham mint output of Samanid Samarqand and its connection to the beginnings of trade with northern Europe (10th century)", Histoire et Mesure 17/3-4, 2002
46. Monnaie et Espace, 197-216
47. and idem., "The mint of al-Shash: the vehicle for the origins and continuation of trade relations between Viking-age northern Europe and Samanid Central Asia", Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 12, 2002-2003, 47-79
48. On this problem see Golden, An Introduction, 198-9 and 214-16
49. O. Pritsak, "Von den Karluk zu den Karachaniden", Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 101, 1951, 277
50. also "Die Karachaniden", Der Islam, 31, 1953, 22-4
51. 2, ed. B. Lewis et al., III: 1113-17, addresses the even thornier question of borders
52. Boris D. Kotchinev, "Les frontières du royaume des Karakhanides", Cahiers D'Asie Centrale 9, 2001, Études Karakhanides, 41-8, identifies this problem but, unfortunately, proceeds to address the issue only from the very end of the Sāmānid period
53. th centuries", reprinted in Studies in Medieval Eurasian History (London: Variorum Reprints, 1991), Article VI: 157. In another work he states that "Despite [the Qarakhanids' being near neighbors to Muslim territory] the information in the Islamic historiography regarding their eastern neighbors is very incomplete, meager, and confused", O. Pritsak, "Von den Karluk zu den Karachaniden", 278. Similarly, Kliachtorniy, "Les Samanides et les Karakhanides", 39, writes: "Nous sommes confrontés à toute une série de questions embarrassantes. Premièrement, on ne sait rien sur les diverses invasions des Turcs dans le Mavarannahr au IXe siècle, bien que les sources témoignent des confrontations armies avec les Turks aux frontières d'Isfijab, de Chach, et du Ferghana. Du même, il reste à élucider qui furent les initiateurs de ces hostilités, des ghâzîs ou des pillards Turcs"
54. We have empirical evidence that the omitting of inconvenient historical facts was indeed practised in Sāmānid historiography from works such as Bal'amī's "translation" of Tcombining dot belowabarī, where, for instance, he discreetly cuts Tcombining dot belowabarī's entire section on the devout holy warrior background of the Sāffārids; see D.G. Tor, Violent Order, 90-91
55. What Bosworth calls "the assemblage of territories making up the Sāmānid empire", Bosworth, "The rulers of Chaghāniyān in Early Islamic times", Iran: Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies 19, 1981, 3. This was true of the border areas even from the earliest times; thus, for instance, after the conquest of Isfījāb in 840, "Significantly, [the city] remained a largely independent possession of the local Turkish dynasty, which owed only three obligations to the Samanids: military service, the presentation of symbolic gifts, and the inscription of the name of the Samanid suzerain on their coinage"
56. E.A. Davidovich, "The Karakhanids", History of Civilizations of Central Asia, Volume IV: The Age of Achievement, AD 750 to the End of the Fifteenth Century. Part I: The Historical, Social, and Economic Setting, ed. M. S. Asimov and C. E. Bosworth (Paris: UNESCO, 1998), 120-21
57. This episode is summarized in Bosworth, "The rulers of Chaghāniyān", 5-8, without drawing the present author's conclusions
58. Gardīzī, Tārīkh-i Gardīzī, 344
59. On the other hand, M. F. Grenard, "La légende de Satok Bughra Khān", Journal Asiatique 15/1, 1900, 34, has no doubt that this was a Qarakhanid governor, and even draws the conclusion that "From this name and title we see that the khān did not reside in Kāshghar; and that, in effect, the capital of the Turco-Qarluq was Balāsā ghūn . . ."
60. Ibn al-Athīr, al-Kāmil, 8: 133-4
61. This intriguing revolt has been noted only by M. F. Grenard, "La légende de Satok Bughra Khān", 34-6
62. Ibn al-Athīr, al-Kāmil, 8: 415
63. For a strange and poetic account of the circumstances surrounding this conversion, see Grenard, "La légende de Satok Bughra Khān", 5-79. The story itself is found on pp. 6-10
64. Richard Frye, Bukhara: The Medieval Achievement (Costa Mesa: Mazda, 1997), 147
65. Despite Frye's admirable attempt to harmonize the conflicting versions into one narrative; R. Frye, Bukhara: The Medieval Achievement, 141-7. Frye similarly avoids entering into the issue of the divergent accounts in his "The Sāmānids", 157, where he notes merely that "The course of events is unclear. . ."
66. On this Qarakhanid title and other titulature see Pritsak, "Die Karachaniden", 23-4
67. and Golden, "An Introduction", 215
68. Ibn al-Athīr, al-Kāmil, 9: 95
69. Ibn Funduq, Tārīkh-i Bayhaq, 69-70
70. Jūzjānī, Tabaqat-i Nāscombining dot belowirī, 216
71. Rashīd al-Dīn, Jāmi' al-tawārīkh, 1: 108-19
72. On the agreement of these two Turkic powers on dividing the spoils see Bosworth, The Ghaznavids, 39-41
73. Mahcombining dot belowmūd also married the Īlig-Khān's daughter at this time; see Muhcombining dot belowammad Nāzcombining dot belowim, The Life and Times of Sultcombining dot belowān Mahcombining dot belowmūd of Ghazna (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1971), 47-8
74. Thus, the Qarakhanids have been termed the "première dynastie turk musulmane d'Asie centrale à avoir gardé son caractère tribal". Jürgen Paul, "Nouvelles pistes," 13
75. Bosworth, Ghaznavids, 43, notes that a Hindu dynasty had ruled in the Kabul valley until Alptegin, Sebuktegin's master, had conquered the area
76. At least one chronicler clearly felt queasy about the Ghaznavid complicity in the downfall of their overlords: Ibn Funduq, uniquely, portrays Mahcombining dot belowmūd as having retained at least nominal allegiance to the Sāmānids until the end, and as having played no part in the Sāmānid downfall: see Tārīkh-i Bayhaq, 70
77. See also Rashīd al-Dīn, Jāmi' al- tawārīkh, 1: 11
78. Mustawfī Qavīnī, Tārīkh-i Guzida, 389
79. Jūzjānī, Tcombining dot belowabaqāt-i Nāscombining dot belowirī, 225-6, terms Sebuktegin "al-amīr al-ghāzī"
80. and Qazvīnī, Lubb al-tawārīkh, 142: "Mahcombining dot belowmūd b. Sebuktekīn was a famous ruler; he continually performed ghazwas against the Infidels in India. . ."
81. An exception to this is Nāzcombining dot belowim, The Life and Times of Sultcombining dot belowān Mahcombining dot belowmūd of Ghazna, 41-85
82. Note that this is an oversight to which most of the primary sources do not fall prey: the Indian and the Central Asian conquests and ghazi raids are given equal mention in e.g. Anon., Mujmal al-tawārīkh wa'l-qiscombining dot belowascombining dot below, ed. S. Najmābā dī and Siegfried Weber (Neckarhausen: Deux Mondes, 2000), 313. One explanation for this relative neglect of the Central Asian conquests has been noted by Paul, "Nouvelles pistes", 17: all post-Barthold studies "portent l'empreinte de l'approche de Barthold. Cela est vrai surtout pour la délimitation du champ de recherche"
83. Although Paul was referring to the dynastic and political approach, his observation is equally valid regarding the geographical area under consideration; in Barthold's wake, most "Central Asianists" tend to limit their geographical purview of Central Asia to the area that accords with what Kotchnev calls "the traditional Soviet definition" of the term - in effect, to Inner Asia; Boris D. Kotchnev, "La chronologie et la généalogie des Karakhanides du point de vue de la numismatique", Cahiers D'Asie Centrale 9, 2001
84. Études Karakhanides, 50
85. and Bosworth, "The early Islamic history of Ghūr", Central Asiatic Journal 6/2, 1961, 122-8
86. implied obliquely in Qazvīnī, Tārīkh-i Guzida, 393