Is There a Middle East?
Page 18
Figure 6.2. Map of Safavid Persia with the Oxus River still depicted as flowing into the Caspian Sea (original in color). Sanson, 1680.
In the least, there remains substantial evidence to suggest that the Aralo-Caspian lands saw significant environmental changes in the early modern period, including the occurrence of great fluctuations in water channels, with consequences for patterns of settlement and networks of irrigation canals.18 Some nineteenth-century sources claimed that within the space of one hundred years (1780s-1880s), three hundred lakes disappeared in the Aralo-Caspian region.19 Similarly, others speculated, as noted above, that that the Aral and Caspian had been separated or disconnected due to the drying up of overflow channels and connections.20 Along the upper course of the Oxus, the wind-blown “flying sands” and loess of the Qara Qum Desert accumulated over silted, alluvial flood plains, effacing irrigation deltas and riverbeds. The expansion of desert sands in the alluvial plains is thought to have corresponded with an increase in aridity, the shrinkage of seas, the contraction of streams and deltas, the drying of channels, and, lastly, the depopulation of oases.21 In the early modern period, the process of desertification led to the expansion of the Qara Qum as an ecological zone in between empires. The Black Sands Desert was transformed into a space in between and distant from the Safavid and Qajar dynasties of Iran. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Safavids and Qajar strived, without much success, to reclaim this desert frontier.
THE SETTLEMENT OF THE CENTRAL ASIAN FRONTIER, C.1500s–1800s
In 1501, when the Safavid dynasty was established, the Oxus River was still loosely conceived as the eastern boundary of Iran.22 From the beginning, however, this figurative boundary proved difficult to manifest in reality. The Safavid project to reclaim the Oxus became even more vexed after the river changed course away from the Caspian Sea in the 1570s, leaving behind a desert.
During the early sixteenth century, the steppes of the Oxus were a contested frontier between the armies of the Safavid Shah Isma‘il I and those of the Uzbek Muhammad Shaybani Khan (d. 1510). The Uzbeks had risen to power in Mavaralnahr in the 1490s and began their expansion into Khurasan upon the death of Husayn Bayqara, capturing the Timurid capital of Herat in 1507.23 The pervasiveness of the notion of the Oxus as the frontier between Khurasan and Mavaralnahr, Iran and Central Asia, is suggested by references to the river in Safavid histories, such as the early sixteenth-century chronicle Tarikh-i Habib al-Siyar by Ghiyath al-Din Khvandamir. The river was represented as a natural boundary contemplated by the armies that crossed it from both sides. Time and time again, Khvandamir depicted armies passing to and from Iran and Central Asia on their marches across the river, such as in the spring of 1507, when Muhammad Shaybani Khan entered Khurasan and ousted the last Timurid ruler of Iran, Badi’ al-Zaman: “And since winter had come to an end and verdure and sweet basil grew on the banks of the river and in the hills and plains ... Muhammad Shaybani Khan became set on the conquest of the land of Khurasan and crossed the waters of the Oxus.”24
In response, Shah Isma‘il marched his armies into the Qara Qum, capturing the oasis of Marv in 1510, and prepared to take the frontier city of Balkh, near the banks of the Oxus.25 The Safavids, however, were unable to hold the Oxus frontier, conceding it to two independent Uzbek khanates, one based in Bukhara and Samarqand and another in Khvarazm.26
In the years following the death of Shah Tahmasp (1524–76), when the Oxus had turned away from the Caspian Sea, the Safavids increasingly struggled to preserve their Central Asian frontier. With the expansion of the Qara Qum, pastoral nomadic tribes such as the Turkmen found new opportunities, wielding great power and autonomy on the distant borderlands of empires. With their pastoral economy and equestrian culture thriving in the Black Sands Desert, the Turkmen boldly raided the eastern borderlands of Iran, taking Shi’i captives for the slave markets of Khiva and Bukhara.27 By the late sixteenth century, their raids became so prevalent that the Safavids were forced to mount punitive expeditions. In the 1590s, the Turkmen overran and destroyed the fortress of Mubarakabad (Aq Qal‘a), near the shores of the Caspian, which had been designed as a bulwark against their incursions.28
The Central Asian frontier was a prime concern for Safavid Shah Abbas I (1588–1629). In 1598, he marched from Isfahan to Khurasan, restoring Mubarakabad, retaking Mashhad and Herat from the Uzbeks, and attempting to stabilize the empire’s Central Asian borderlands. The shah attempted to drive the Turkmen from the valleys of the Kopet Dagh and ordered a deep trench to be dug from the foot of the mountains to the shores of the Caspian Sea.29 Shah Abbas also relocated numerous tribes from the Zagros, where they enjoyed great autonomy and local power, to the Central Asian frontier in order to guard against the raids of the Uzbeks and Turkmen. The forced relocation of the Kurds and other tribes from the western Zagros Mountains to Iran’s eastern frontier became a Safavid policy used to bring order to the arid eastern frontier of the empire. Thus, even under Shah Abbas, the Safavids could only assume a defensive policy on the Central Asian frontier. By then, hundreds of miles of the Qara Qum, the homeland of the independent Turkmen tribes, separated Safavid Iran from the Oxus River.30
Coming to power in the aftermath of the interregnums and civil wars of the eighteenth century, the Qajar dynasty could only aspire to restore the boundaries of the Safavid Empire before its fall in 1722. On the Central Asian frontier this meant the western margins of the Qara Qum, which became established as the border between the two territories in the nineteenth century. During the Qajar period, the Qara Qum remained distant and beyond the pale of imperial rule. The autonomy of the Turkmen tribes in the Central Asian steppes reached unprecedented proportions; they boldly disregarded the writ of the shah by conducting their slave raids (alaman: chapu) into Iran.31 Numbering between 75,000 to 192,000 yurts, or 375,000 to 960,000 individuals, the Turkmen carved out a loose trading and raiding confederation in the Qara Qum, which the Qajar dynasty perennially struggled to contain.32 The Turkmen followed clan and tribal authorities, paying only a nominal tribute, if any at all, to the Qajar dynasty and the Khanate of Khiva. They were effectively beyond the control of state power, and their autonomous territory marked the frontiers of surrounding empires. The delimitation of the boundaries between Iran and Central Asia hence became connected to the imperial settlement and reclamation of the Qara Qum. The Qajar dynasty proved incapable of pacifying the Turkmen and reclaiming the steppes at the moment when the Central Asian frontier was becoming fixed.
The demarcation of the boundary between Iran and Central Asia came about in the mid- to late nineteenth century as a result of British and Russian expansion into the region. The boundaries between Iran and Afghanistan were drawn. In 1857, due to British imperial interests in India, Herat was separated from Iran and awarded to Afghanistan.33 In the 1870s, Major General Frederic Goldsmid of the Indian Telegraphic Department led boundary commissions that established the Helmand River as the border between Iran and Afghanistan in the region of Sistan.34 As for the Oxus frontier, the Russo-Afghan Boundary Commission established the river as the northern border of the Durrani dynasty in Afghanistan. A nineteenth-century Persian history of Afghanistan acknowledged the extent of the Afghan Durrani kingdom as reaching from the Oxus to the Sind and from Khurasan to Kashmir.35
The Qajar project to reclaim the Central Asian frontier effectively came to a disastrous end in 1861 during a military campaign against the Tekke Turkmen stronghold at the oasis of Marv. The Turkmen routed thousands of Qajar troops, capturing their artillery, taking many soldiers into captivity, and proving once and for all that the Qara Qum was a land apart from the guarded domains of Iran.36 Iran’s frontier with Central Asia was subsequently delimited under the shadow of the Trans-Caspian Railway and the Russian expansion into the Eurasian steppes. In 1881, a Russo-Persian boundary commission permanently fixed the border between Russian Central Asia and Iran at the Caspian Sea in a line extending eastward along the lower Atrak River to Darra Gaz, Kalat-i N
adiri, Sarakhs, and the slopes of the Atek on the edge of the Qara Qum, which became the last Persian outposts on the border before the steppes.37 The treaty was an indication of Iran’s diminishing frontiers in the east and a sign of the Russian Empire’s expansion into the Central Asian steppes. In his itineraries and reports, ‘Abdallah Khan Qaragazlu, a Qajar frontier agent posted in Sarakhs and Kalat-i Nadiri in the late 1870s and the early 1880s, discusses the creation of the “boundary line” (khat-i sarhadd) between Russia and Iran in 1881, commenting that because of the agreement “the subjects (ra‘iyat) have been unable to freely pass in the valleys and along the rivers as they have in the past.38
These fixed boundaries were recorded and published in printed surveys and maps, appearing in such geographic texts as the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London (published in fifty volumes in 1831–80), the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of London (twenty-two volumes in 1855-78), and the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography (fourteen volumes in 1879–92). In addition, a body of lesser-known nineteenth-century Persian geographic texts also mapped and surveyed the emerging Central Asian frontier.
The genre of Persian travel narratives (safarnama) reified the newly formed boundaries between Iran and Central Asia. The border was reaffirmed, for instance, during Nasir al-Din Shah’s two tours of the eastern province of Khurasan and pilgrimages to the Shi’i shrine city of Mashhad during the years 1865 and 1882. The shah’s pilgrimage tours, and the geographic texts produced during these journeys, reaffirmed that the frontier between Qajar Iran and Central Asia extended little beyond the shrine city of Mashhad.
Nasir al-Din Shah’s first journey to Khurasan in 1865 was six months in duration and its itinerary was written by Ali Naqi Khan Hakim al-Mamalik as Ruznama-yi Safar-i Khurasan.39 In the opening pages of the work, Hakim al-Mamalik notes that the shah’s pilgrimage was also a scientific mission of cartographic exploration on the frontiers:
A pilgrimage (ziyarat) to the threshold of the holy eighth saint and a journey to the eastern parts of the country (bih janib-i sharq-i mamlikat) were planned in order to show gratitude and charity, as well as to bring together detailed accounts of that illuminated garden which is a source of blessings. This travel was to also produce solid and reliable information about the frontiers and borderlands (saghur u sarhaddat) of the area of Khurasan (sahat-i mamlikat-i Khurasan), one of the largest provinces in the guarded domains of Iran.40
Subsequently, Hakim al-Mamalik explains the geographical purpose of the Ruznama, which was to provide “a summary of the geographical knowledge (t‘alimat-i jughrafiyih-i), including the condition of roads, terrestrial forms (hayat-i arzi), mountains, rivers, villages, and lands.”41 Nasir al-Din Shah’s premier journey and pilgrimage to the shrine of Imam Reza at Mashhad in 1865, memorialized in Hakim al-Mamalik’s Ruznama-yi Safar-i Khurasan, was part of the process through which the Qajar dynasty mapped and measured imperial territories on the Central Asian frontier.
Nasir al-Din Shah followed his Khurasan mission of 1865 seventeen years later with a four-month return journey that he took in 1882. Although shorter in duration than the shah’s first mission, the 1882 journey proved to be more prolific in terms of the production of texts. The first of these texts was Nasir al-Din Shah’s own Safarnama-yi Khurasan, and like its predecessor, it also included numerous lithographed illustrations of landscapes and architectural sites in the province drawn by the artist (naqqash) Abu Turab Ghaffari.42 In the Safaranama, the shah left a record of the stages (manazil) on the roads between Tehran and Mashhad.43
The most substantial of the texts produced in commemoration of the shah’s second tour of the eastern frontier was Muhammad Hasan Khan Sani’ al-Dawla I‘timad al-Saltana’s fourteen-hundred-page lithographed regional history Matla‘ al-Shams: Tarikh-i Arz-i Aqdas va Mashhad-i Muqaddas, dar Tarikh va Jughrafiya-yi Mashruh-i Balad va Imakan-i Khurasan [The Place of the Rising Sun: History of the Sacred Land and Sacred City of Mashhad, On the Known History and Geography of the Lands of Khurasan].44 In Matla‘ al-Shams, I‘timad al-Saltana strived to present “a precise geography and history” of the eastern borderlands of Qajar Iran, detailing the environs, monuments, cities, ruins, mosques, tombs, and caravanserais.45
Matla‘ al-Shams is of interest here not simply for what it includes but also for what it leaves out. The text is not without reference to the steppes of the Oxus as Iran’s legendary eastern frontier. In one passage, I‘timad al-Saltana presents a full explanation of the legend from the Shahnama as to how the Oxus came to be designated as Iran’s eastern frontier by the flight of an arrow arched eastward from the summit of Damavand: “wherever the arrow (tir) falls on the ground is the frontier between Iran and Turan.”46 He continues to recount the flight of the arrow as it “passed over Nayshabur and Sarakhs and Marv, landing on the banks of the river Jayhun [Oxus].”47 Seeking to explain this myth, he offers several theories as to how an arrow launched from Damavand could reach the Central Asian river, ranging from the idea that there was something magical in the preparation of the arrow to the notion that there was no arrow from a bow but rather a line of sight (tir-i nazar): “since in the past the Jayhun used to empty into the Caspian Sea, from the summit of Damavand the line of vision set upon the Shatt-i Jayhun and the river came to be designated as the border between the countries of Iran and Turan.”48
Despite such allusions to the legendary eastern boundaries of Iran, reference to this greater Khurasan, in Matla‘ al-Shams I‘timad al-Saltana sketched the geographical limits of the Qajar’s Central Asian frontier far more conservatively. Although he never explicitly defines where the eastern frontier province of Khurasan begins or ends, he clearly conceives it as a world centered on the Shi’i holy city of Mashhad. Written as a geographical compendium to memorialize Nasir al-Din Shah’s pilgrimage to the shrine complex of Imam Reza in Mashhad (Astan-i Quds-i Razavi), the chronicle begins by describing the roads from Tehran to Mashhad—one leading from Semnan, Damghan, Shah-rud, Sabzevar, and Nayshapur and another leading from Damavand, Firuz Kuh, Bistam, Bujnurd, and Quchan.49 Gone were the classic oasis cities of the Central Asian frontier: Balkh, Marv, Herat. In Matla‘ al-Shams and other Persian travel narratives from the late nineteenth century, the Shi’i shrine city of Mashhad is represented as the practical and spiritual end of Khurasan, with little mention of what lies beyond it. By the close of the nineteenth century, the steppes had been reclaimed in the Russian conquest of Central Asia, and Iran was gradually absorbed into the nascent geographical category of the Middle East.
CONCLUSION
This chapter has offered an environmental interpretation of the making of the frontier between the Near / Middle East and Central Asia. The Oxus River had long marked the ecological frontier between the steppe and sown, and it marked the figurative border between Central Asia and Iran. During the late sixteenth century, the river changed course away from the Caspian Sea, expanding the desert on the eastern borderlands of Iran. As independent pastoral nomadic populations found new possibilities in the steppes, early modern Islamic empires, including the Safavids and Qajars of Iran, struggled in vain to reclaim the arid Oxus frontier. The Qara Qum was transformed into a borderland desert in between empires, with major consequences for the settlement of the modern boundaries of the Middle East and Central Asia, which occurred in the late nineteenth century under the auspices of imperial boundary commissions and upon the basis of European military dominance. Consequently, the settlement of the Oxus frontier, and the effective division of the Middle East from Central Asia, overlooked the historic ecological and cultural ties between the two regions. The newly determined borders between the Middle East and Central Asia were mapped, inscribed, and made permanent in nineteenth-century European and Persian geographical literature and travel writing about the Eurasian steppes. Someone reading the Persian epic of the Shahnama today may find it difficult to understand why the Persian hero Rustam and his horse Rakhsh had ever crossed
the distant Oxus at all.
7
AN ISLAMICATE EURASIA
Vernacular Perspectives on the Early Modern World
Gagan D. S. Sood
IN 1748, AS SAYYID MUSTAFA’S SHIP was crossing the Arabian Sea on its way to Iraq, the winds changed direction and he was forced to turn back. While waiting out the monsoon in ports along India’s Malabar Coast, this pious Shi’i merchant turned his mind to the problems that were bound to arise from this unexpected detour. Of course, he knew that such vicissitudes were among the inescapable hazards of his age; they simply had to be endured and if possible turned to one’s advantage. Knowing this, however, did little to raise his spirits. His journey, which was at once a commercial venture, a pilgrimage to the shrine city of Karbala, and a quest for a family tree, would now be much prolonged, delaying by nearly half a year his return home to Bengal and to his beloved son. Sayyid Mustafa was not alone in experiencing misfortune in 1748. Living close to Basra, where his ship had intended to drop anchor, Sarina was short of money and feeling abandoned. It had been a long, long time since she had last set eyes on her husband. And what was worse, she had also recently had to bid farewell to her eldest son, who was off to India to join his father. Like many wives and mothers of her Armenian community, she belonged to a family of itinerant merchants and brokers. The menfolk were expected to spend much of their lives abroad, often for years at a stretch. But they also were expected, before the onset of old age, to return and stay at home. Sarina was indignant that her husband was refusing to give her what she felt was her due, leaving her at the mercy of others.