Central Asia in World History_New Oxford World History
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This detail from the manuscript of the Canon of Medicine, an Arabic encyclopedia, dates to about the fifteenth century. It consists of 492 folios, many of which are illuminated with colored inks and gilding. The great care taken in producing the manuscript is proof of the high value placed on the contents. Gerard of Cremona, who lived in Toledo, Spain, a center for the transfer of Arab learning to the Western world, translated the text into Latin in the twelfth century. Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine
Islamic authors portray the Muslim frontiers of Central Asia as an area of unceasing Jihâd (war for the faith), and the Sâmânids were anxious to present their conquests as part of the expansion of the Dâr al-Islâm (Abode of Islam). Turkic converts also wanted to demonstrate their fervor for their new faith by fighting their pagan kinsmen. Although some of these conquests resulted in the conversion of local lords and their followers to Islam, ultimately it was not the sword alone that brought the religion to the steppe people. Political advantage, along with unnamed missionaries, often merchants and subsequently Muslim mystics called Sûfîs who sought an ecstatic spiritual union with God,6 also played a role. The word Sûfî comes from Arabic sûf (wool), a reference to the simple woolen garments that the early devotees of this movement wore. In Persian they were called darvîsh (poor), rendered in English as dervish. Originally a movement of individuals, Sûfîsm subsequently formed orders or religious brotherhoods. Orthodox Muslims often viewed them with suspicion. Muslim merchants, later followed by mystics, ventured into the steppes, establishing business contacts with nomadic chieftains and patterns of reciprocal hospitality. Commercial and social bonds quietly expanded into a common religious communion.
Some of the Sûfîs, who arrived later, were charismatic, colorful, eccentric people who in many ways resembled Turkic shamans. They often appeared in outlandish attire; some shaved off all body and facial hair and wore only horns and loincloths. Like shamans, it was believed that they could transform themselves into animals, could cure illnesses and had the ability to divine the future. The Turks, already familiar with a variety of religions (Buddhism, Mazdaism, Christianity, Judaism, and Manichaeism), easily accepted this blend of folk Islam and mysticism. Islamic concepts of heaven and hell, for example, were notions for which words already existed in Turkic, although, not surprisingly, they were borrowings from Sogdian. The melding of the Turkic Tengri with the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God was not a difficult stretch.
Islam, whether brought by conquest, commerce or mystics, initially came to the Turks from a Persian-speaking world. Muslims were (and still are) divided between the minority Shi’ites, who believe that the caliph should be a descendant of ‘Alî, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad and the father of his only grandsons, and the majority Sunnîs, who believe that the caliphate should not necessarily be limited to the house of ‘Alî, but could be given to any worthy member of the Prophet’s tribe, the Quraysh. The Islam that came to the steppe was basically Sunnî, but blended, to varying degrees, with local usages that did not fully distinguish it from earlier shamanistic and other practices, such as ancestor worship or the use of dance and chanting to produce ecstatic trances by which shamans entered the spirit world. As with the implantation of any new faith, the implementation of religious orthodoxy took many generations and was often uneven.
The Turkic nomads closest to the Muslim cities of Central Asia first entered the larger Islamic orbit. The Volga Bulghars, unhappy vassals of the Khazars, had close commercial ties with Khwarazm and the Sâmânids. Political and economic considerations moved them towards Islam. Their king converted to Islam, and in 921 requested a delegation from the ‘Abbâsid caliphate to build up Islamic institutions in his realm. In 960, according to Ibn al-Athîr, a thirteenth-century Arab historian, “200,000 tents of the Turks converted.”7 The accuracy of the number cannot be verified. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that large groupings of Turkic nomads had embraced Islam. This was probably connected with the conversion of Satuq Bughra Khan, the progenitor of the Qarakhanid dynasty (992–1212), whose state encompassed much of western and eastern Turkestan. When the khan or leader converted, his fellow tribesmen usually followed. The tenth century marked a turning point in the Islamization of Turkic western Central Asia. Mass conversions notwithstanding, shamanistic and other elements remained. These included idol worship, one of the worst sins in Muslim belief. Such syncretism is typical of the conversion process. Islamic legal scholars did not regard those who kept the old beliefs alongside the new as real Muslims and considered it legal to take them prisoner in war.
The Qarakhanids, of uncertain origins, ruled over an amalgam of Turkic tribes and crushed the last of the Sâmânids in 1005. As Sunnî Muslims, the Qarakhanids faced no popular resistance when they entered the Sâmânid cities. Ibrahim Tamghach Bughra Khan, the founder of the western Qarakhanid realm, was known for his strict but fair rule and the security he provided. When thieves wrote on the door of the ruler’s citadel in Samarkand, “We are like an onion, the more we are cut the bigger we grow,” Ibrahim responded under the thieves’ graffiti: “I stand here like a gardener; however much you grow I will uproot you.”8
The Qarakhanid royal house continued Türk political traditions, viewing the state as the collective property of the royal clan and dividing it in two around 1043, each half ruled by a Qaghan and various sub-Qaghans, who awaited their turn on the ladder of succession. The realm was further divided into often poorly defined territorial grants, governed by members of the dynasty and subdivided among vassals. Given the paucity of data, scholars are still debating how the Qarakhanid system worked. The nobility remained nomadic, or seminomadic. Many held an iqta’, a revenue grant based on land given in return for state service, somewhat akin to the European fief. The system was, undoubtedly, abused over time and may have contributed to separatist tendencies among the Qarakhanid dynasts and tribal aristocrats.
The economy was essentially unchanged since the Sâmânid period. Archaeologists have found considerable evidence of urban development under Qarakhanid rule, especially in river valleys such as the Talas and Chu, whose inhabitants engaged in agriculture, viticulture, handicraft production, and trade. Some regions had extensive irrigation systems. In the northeastern Taraz area, there was a canal that extended some 100 km (62 miles). The Otrar oasis was crisscrossed with canals, dams, and water delivery systems. Transoxiana and Ferghana continued their ancient traditions of highly developed settled life. There is no evidence that the Qarakhanids attempted to transform farmlands into pasturages.
Nonetheless, their rule adversely affected elements of the old, rural order. The dihqâns lost their high social status and the word dihqân came to denote an urban artisan or free peasant. In modern Tajik it means “peasant.” Subjects paid taxes in the form of produce, labor, or a combination of both. Some peasants fell into debt, lost their lands, and were forced to become sharecroppers. They gave one-third of their harvest in taxes to the government, one-third to the landowner from whom they rented the land, and could keep one third for themselves. Those who were completely bankrupted often sold themselves or family members into slavery. Women, who enjoyed relative physical freedom in nomadic society in the Qarakhanid dominated Irano-Islamic sedentary world, lived largely secluded lives in their homes and could only venture out veiled and accompanied. The sparse information that deals with this era mentions periods of rural or urban unrest.
Another Turko-Islamic state emerged in the later tenth century. In 961, a powerful Sâmânid Turkic slave-general, Alp Tigin, established himself in the city of Ghazni, in southern Afghanistan, which he nominally held for the Sâmânids. One of his successors, Sebük Tigin, made it into an independent state and founded the Ghaznavid dynasty (977–1186). He and his son, Mahmûd, brought much of eastern Iran, Afghanistan, and northern India under their rule while establishing an uneasy border with the Qarakhanids on the Amu Darya. The Ghaznavids raided Hindu India, bringing back enormous wealth and combat elephants. The historian
al-’Utbî describes Sebük Tigin’s army as having 200 of these elephants, joined together by chains and “all adorned with splendid trappings and incomparable housings.” Behind them was a vast army, “assembled, like locusts or ants, innumerable, and as immeasurable as the sand of the desert.”9 The Ghaznavids were the first Muslim forces to use elephants as an essential part of their battle tactics.10 This military machine was supported by a complex state with Iranian and Indian subject populations ruled by a largely Iranian bureaucracy and a Turkic military elite, the prototype for a number of future regimes.
The Ghaznavids, like the Sâmânids, patronized Persian arts, especially poetry. Many poets flocked to Mahmûd’s court. The greatest of them was undoubtedly Firdowsî, the author of the Shâhnâma, the Persian national epic poem based on oral and written tales about ancient Iran. Al-Bîrûnî, who came to Ghazni from Khwarazm as the Sâmânids were collapsing, also eventually found support at the Ghaznavid court. He traveled with Mahmûd’s plundering armies to India, acquired some Sanskrit, and became one of the foremost experts in the Islamic world on the complex cultures of the Indian subcontinent.
While neighboring states supported and provided a congenial home to the emerging Irano-Muslim culture, the Qarakhanid regime played a seminal role in the birth of Turko-Islamic culture. Under their rule, there appeared original works of literature in Turkic with an Islamic orientation. Following an old genre of “mirror for princes” literature that was popular in the Iranian world and well beyond it, the Qutadhghu Bilig (The Wisdom that Brings Heavenly Good Fortune), written in 1069, is a Qarakhanid political treatise set in the form of a dialogue between the ruler and his advisers. They enjoin him to behave with justice, compassion, and equal-handedness to all, great and small. Extolling brainpower and cool-headedness over brawn, they declare: “true nobility belongs to the man of wisdom and intellect.”11
The author, Yûsuf Khâss Hâjib of Balasaghun, the eastern Qarakhanid capital, cautions that something done in haste out of anger will bring ill, like undercooked food. Punishment should be used only after careful deliberation. The wise ruler “puts his realm in good order so that the common folk become rich, and he in turn makes their wealth a fortress for himself.”12 Yûsuf adds that “a thousand virtues are required for the world-conqueror . . . With these virtues the world-ruler clears away the fog and grasps the realm; he wields the sword and lops off the neck of his foe; he governs his territory and his people with law and justice.”13 Yûsuf was mindful of the nomadic background of his royal audience. While praising the art of the physician, he (although a Muslim) advises that, along with the medicines doctors prescribe, one should also use the shaman’s amulets and incantations.
The brilliant lexicographer Mahmûd al-Kâshgharî produced his Dîwân Lughât at-Turk (Compendium of the Turkic Dialects, about 1077) in Arabic, a work aimed at the literate Muslim public. He sought to give his audience a fuller understanding of the culture of the Turks, who had now become the dominant military and political force in the Middle East. The Dîwân is a treasure trove of data. Many of the lexical entries are illustrated with poems and tales reflecting the Turkic culture of that time. These poems praise the martial valor of the Turks, in particular their victories over their Buddhist and other non-Muslim kinsmen and the defilement of their idols. The vocabulary entries describe all aspects of daily life: clothing, such as an ichük (a kind of sable coat) needed for the wintry steppe, furnishings such as kimishge (a kind of embroidered felt rug from Kashghar), or occupations such as bista (someone who provided overnight lodgings to traveling merchants and guarded their goods).14
Qarakhanid rulers could not escape conflict with the ulama, Islamic religious authorities, especially in Bukhara. Towards the end of the Qarakhanid era that city had become largely independent and under the control of the Burhân family of Muslim clerics, who held the honorific title of “Pillar of the World.” Their opponents, who decried their vast economic and political power, called them “Pillar of Hell.” The Qarakhanids, perhaps because of their troubles with the city-based Muslim scholars (who even accused them of heresy) and urban unrest, spent considerable sums on public buildings, ranging from mosques to bathhouses. Archaeological finds indicate that their cities were well kept, by medieval sanitary standards, with places for garbage and sewage disposal in the form of deep pits that were kept covered. The further development of the Silk Road was probably a factor in the urban growth of Qarakhanid cities. While the cities and trade appear to have expanded in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, there is also evidence for the debasement of the silver-based coins issued by the Sâmânids and Qarakhanids in that same period. Historians continue to debate the causes and extent of the “silver crisis.”
During the Qarakhanid era, Turkic nomads entered the agricultural regions in larger numbers than ever before. The local population became increasingly Turkic in speech. Turkic served as the language used between linguistically different groups. Anthropologists note, however, that the shift initially was linguistic, not ethnic. The earlier people remained, but now speaking Turkic instead of their earlier languages. The poorer Turks also began to settle. Others, depending on local conditions, became seminomadic, practicing both agriculture and livestock raising.
The conversion to Islam of the Turks had repercussions in the Islamic heartlands. The Seljuks, who became masters of much of the Middle East in the eleventh century, stemmed from Seljük, a war-chieftain of the Qïnïq tribe of the Oghuz confederation. Sometime around 985, he broke with his overlord, settled in Jand on the Syr Darya, and converted to Islam. His sons all had Old Testament names recorded in the sources in their Arabic forms: Mikâ’îl (Michael) Isrâ’îl (Israel), Mûsâ (Moses), and Yûnus (Jonah). This might indicate previous contacts with Judaism or Christianity. In Jand, Seljük and his sons fought against their pagan kinsmen. His descendants joined in the struggles between the Qarakhanids and Ghaznavids, frequently changing sides. There were disturbing rumblings deeper in the steppe. Tribes driven by famine and political turmoil from the Mongol-Manchurian borderlands were advancing westward. Dominoes were falling.
The general turmoil affected Seljük’s grandsons, Toghrul and Chaghrï, who fled from the Syr Darya region to Khurâsân (today in eastern Iran and western Afghanistan) by 1034. Hungry and desperate, they raided wherever they could. The disturbances they caused in this revenue-producing Ghaznavid province induced Mahmûd’s son and successor, Mas’ûd (ruling 1031–1041), to bring a large army, including Indian war elephants, to secure the area. In May, 1040, Mas’ûd’s army, exhausted by the hurried march westward, finally caught up with the Seljuk bands. Toghrul and Chaghrï, joined by other Oghuz bands, unexpectedly defeated what should have been superior forces at Dandânqân. This defeat fatally weakened the Ghaznavids, who now ruled a minor state of the Indo-Afghan borderlands.
By 1042, the Seljuks were masters of an empire that included Khwarazm and eastern and central Iran and were advancing into Transcaucasia. The ‘Abbâsids invited them to Baghdad in 1055 to liberate the caliphs from the control of the Shi’ite Buyids. In doing so, the Seljuks became the dominant force in the Sunnî Islamic world. In 1071 Sultan Alp Arslan, Chaghrï’s son, defeated the Byzantines at Manzikert in eastern Anatolia and Turkish tribesmen swarmed into much of Byzantine Anatolia, laying the foundations for the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm (“Rome,” that is the eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire) and subsequently the Ottoman Empire Melikshâh, Alp Arslan’s son brought the Qarakhanids under Seljuk rule.
Waves of Oghuz Turks streamed into northwestern Iran and eastern Transcaucasia, producing the Azeri Turks of modern Iran and Azerbaijan. Other groups of Oghuz, the Turkmen of today, held northeastern Iran. The Oghuz spread across much of Anatolia, setting into motion a more gradual spread of Islam in its Turkic form into what had been Christian Asia Minor. The adoption of the Turkish language even outpaced conversions to Islam. Some Greek and Armenian populations remained Christian, but adopted Turkish speech. A major ethno-linguistic and demographi
c shift occurred, reshaping the Middle East. The process produced the modern Turkish people of today. The Turks had not only adopted Islam, but had also become its champions in the Islamic heartlands as well as in Central Asia.
CHAPTER SIX
The Mongol Whirlwind
At the beginning of the thirteenth century, four states reigned uneasily in Central Asia. The Khwârazmshâhs, rulers of a recently cobbled together realm, dominated Transoxiana and parts of the adjoining Middle East. Former Seljuk subjects, they became independent by the latter part of the twelfth century. In 1194, Khwarazmian troops delivered the head of Toghrul III, the last Seljuk ruler in Iraq and Iran, to the Khwârazmshâh Tekish. Tekish’s son, Muhammad, master of much of Transoxiana and eastern and central Iran, cast covetous glances at the caliphal throne in Baghdad and at his neighbors, but much of his power was illusory. Khwarazm was an unstable mix of professional Turkic soldiery, restless eastern Qïpchaq tribes with whom the dynasty intermarried, and the settled Irano-Khwarazmian people.
To their east were the fading Qarakhanids, under the aegis of the declining Qara Khitai, also called Qara Qitan, nominal overlords of eastern and western Turkestan. Recent arrivals, they had fled the Jurchen destruction of the Qitan-Liao state in 1124–25. Led by their Gür Khan (universal khan), Yelu Dashi, a royal Qitan, the Liao refugees created a new realm in Central Asia. Shamanists, Buddhists, and Nestorian Christians, the Mongolic and Chinese-speaking Qara Khitai imposed themselves on the Turko-Iranian Muslims of Transoxiana. Their religious tolerance, relatively loose system of governance, and the prestige of their Inner Asian and Chinese imperial heritage, made their rule palatable to their Muslim subjects. The Qara Khitai felt no pressure to convert to Islam. Their regime was reasonably successful well into the long reign of Yelu Dashi’s grandson, Yelu Zhilugu, but signs of decline became evident by the early thirteenth century.1