Vendors slip the produce we purchase into plastic bags, paper cones, and burlap sacks as the tinny sounds and surreal sights of Bollywood videos blast away above them. Despite such distractions, they remain true to what they do best, just as generations of their ancestors have done before them: “Is this your first time in the city? Here, try this sun-dried peach! It is all natural, no sulfur coating! It is from Samarkand. You know, the Golden Peaches of Samarkand, heh? Its flavor is unforgettable, you will see. Do you want only a half kilo or an entire kilo of them?”
For their displays, the vendors have set the dried fruits down in layers, like overlapping shingles on a perfectly assembled roof. I take a furry sun-dried peach and pop it into my mouth, closing my eyes. Its intense sweetness overwhelms my palate. I reopen my eyes just in time to see Laurie, her eyes still closed, experiencing the same burst of flavor. When we recover, the merchant comes close to us and whispers, “I noticed that you were looking at the saffron earlier on. Well, that saffron there is for anyone. Let me bring out for you the saffron of the highest quality in the world. It is fresher than the others. You know, just this year’s crop, handpicked from tens of thousands of flowers by a friend of mine. It will brighten any dish of oshi plov, one of the best of Tajik pilafs. You will be proud to go home and make it for your family and dearest friends.”
At neighboring stalls, other merchants are arranging their lemons into geometrically elegant cylindrical pyramids, or stringing together yellow, red, and purple chiles into gorgeous wreaths. One of the wreath makers, a man in his midforties, waves me over while Laurie is looking at the lemons on the other side of the aisle.
“Come here, my friend. You are my elder, but if I may, let me give you some advice. I see you have a beautiful young wife over there. I see from the bags under your eyes that you are quite old—I do not know for sure, maybe sixty?—even though your face is young and your thoughts and desires are too. I have this herb for you. I will not talk about it when your wife comes close, but for men like you it is better than Viagra. You can mix it into your food when no one is looking . . .”
This polyglot of a spice trader smirks at me, but like his Arabian counterpart known as al-tajir al-muqim, he knows how to gain the attention of a potential customer. Such traders proceed easily at first. They use flavors, colors, shapes, and vocal tones to draw you in. And then, to seduce you, they tell stories that speak to your strongest desires, your highest hopes, and your darkest fears.
If only Central Asia’s Bactrian camels and horses could tell this story. They have been the freighters of the desert, the carriers of cassia cinnamon, cumin, ginger, anise, musk, and silk for centuries. But these beasts were also kept close enough to the campfires at night to have heard the parables and poems, the legends and lies told by the Arab cavalrymen, infantrymen, imams, and merchants who traveled far beyond the bazaars where Arabic was spoken. They entered the khans and caravansaries where Turkish and Farsi instead of Arabic were used to describe the heady aromas, unusual flavors, and exquisite textiles that they, as beasts of burden, had carried along. They saw the feasts where Persian chefs and musicians brought out the best they had to offer, while the Arab, Turkish, and Indian poets from the south praised them with an honorific ghazal. On occasion, they scavenged and grazed on the left-over onions, rice, lemongrass, and celery stalks found on the dry desert ground after the party was over.
FIGURE 13. Herbal Viagra in a market in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. (Photo by the author.)
The camels and horses knew all about what had come out of the desert like a whirlwind to stun the unsuspecting community or unprepared rival. They had carried that whirlwind on their backs.
The animals could not speak to me, of course, but as I visited the spice and silk markets of Asia, Muslim shopkeepers and bards all reminded me of the same fact. Following the rise of Muhammad, Islam had spread into Asia with astonishing speed. Indeed, according to old Chinese Muslim texts, even before Muhammad’s death, one of his earliest converts, Sa‘ad ibn Abi Waqqas, a military leader at the Battle of Badr in 624, had gone by ship all the way to Fujian Province in China to alert the emperor of the East of the new prophet in the West. There, in 616, he became the first Arab from Medina to spread the revelations found in the Qur’an.
He then played key roles in Islamic expansion in Asia, helping defeat the Persian forces from the Sassanid Empire on the Euphrates at the Battle of al-Qadisiyya in 637, and vanquishing the last Sassanid army in 642 at the Battle of Nihāvand.1 As commander of Muslim troops in Iraq, he tried to motivate their pride with this encouragement: “You are Arab chiefs and notables, the elite of every tribe and the pride of those who follow you.”2 Finally, as a fifty-six-year-old elder, in 651, he returned to Asia with his son as a Muslim envoy from Caliph Uthman ibn Affan to Tang emperor Gaozong. That same son would one day build the first mosque in Han-dominated China.
Of course, it took more than fast horses and Bactrian camels to accomplish the expansion of the Islamic empire with such lightning speed. It took Arabs willing to spread their unshakable belief in the Prophet’s compelling vision for the world. They had to be individuals capable of forming and managing a social organization that could allow such a vision to bear fruit.
The Prophet’s relatives and disciples first drove into the heart of the Levant and of Mesopotamia early in 633. Within the next couple of years, they took Damascus, Antioch, and Homs. Over the following decade, the first Quraysh tribal converts to Islam recruited other related tribes to join their cause. Among these new allies were members of the northernmost Tayy tribe, who were living as Marsh Arabs in southern Iraq at the time. Together, they challenged neighboring Turks and Persians constrained by the Byzantine Empire to join them against the Christianized Roman rulers there.
When Sa‘ad ibn Abi Waqqas and his Arab Muslims first stirred up the Persian dust in late 637, the locals did not immediately warm to them. For a time, it seemed as though fierce counterattacks by both Roman troops and the Persians themselves might stop the Arabs at the Zagros Mountains. Force—and fright—would be needed to break this log jam.
But Sa‘ad ibn Abi Waqqas had a new innovation to employ in an assault on the Persian capital. He used twenty heavy artillery units with so-called sling beam engines, which were essentially catapults that shot missiles from slings.3 The same weapons were used to breach the walls of Samarkand. They were successful in terrorizing their opposition and helping Islam gain the ground that the lure of trade could not muster.
With the final victory over the Persian troops in 642, Islam arrived at its most remarkable turning point in Asia. It could now reach far beyond the Arabic-speaking world into the land of Farsi speakers, of Persians, Sogdians, and the ancestors of the present-day Tajiks. That is how key portions of the Sassanid Empire began at last to fall into the hands of the Muslims: it was clear that this religion was not meant merely for the old Arabic-speaking tribes from the interior of the peninsula. From Medina, thousands of miles to the south, Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab directed Sa‘ad ibn Abi Waqqas and others to move their Arab troops on multiple fronts until the outlying stretches of Persia still under Sassanid control were conquered in 644 and then integrated into the emerging empire.4
In short, Islam had suddenly become the most pervasive economic power in the entire “known” world. It had stitched into a single cohesive quilt all of the isolated regions and cultures that had formerly been ragtag fragments of an imperfectly functioning network.
Within two decades after Muhammad’s death, the Umayyad dynasty was formed by the Banu Umayyah clan of the Quraysh tribe. Its members recruited a broader amalgam of tribes, Arab, Persian, and Turkish, to become a single community under Allah. Curiously, newly converted Muslims began to call this collection of tribes by the name they already had for the northernmost Bedouin-like Arabs, the Tayy. Some of the chroniclers called this Arabized mix the Taits, or in Persian, the Tazik. But soon the name was being applied to Arabized Persians by their Farsi-speaking kin to the east. In
time, the term Tajik was used for “Arab-influenced” tribes in general.5
As Islam marched eastward, the term came to embrace all Farsi-speaking Muslims as far away as Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and present-day Tajikistan. Chinese traders and monks coming west over the many strands of the intercontinental cable now known as the Silk Road called these Arab-influenced Farsi speakers dashi ren, with the Banu Umayyah in particular called the white-robed dashi ren. As one Islamic envoy boasted to his kin back in Mecca during the seventh century, with their conversion to Islam, “all people would become Arabs.”6
Wandering the city streets and market walkways of Dushanbe, I become obsessed with the hope or dream that I might meet a Tajik who clearly understands that he or she is descended from the Tayy. My dream arose out of just a few words I once read in an obscure manuscript, one for which I have unfortunately forgotten both the author and the title. It suggested that when the Banu Nebhani and Tayy tribes had come out of Arabia around 170, they were inextricably hitched at the hip. They were so intermarried that the two differently named tribes were genetically one and the same. I imagined that some of my Banu Nebhani ancestors had come north with the Tayy to live as Marsh Arabs along the Tigris and Euphrates. These Arab clans had converted to Islam and assisted the empire with its eastward march into the deserts and steppes of Central Asia. They had then settled down in a trading town in the Vakhsh River valley, adding Farsi to their repertoire of tongues.
Did they take on the role of cross-cultural traders in their newly found homes? Were spices, herbs, and incenses among the items that they moved between the West and the East? Perhaps I want too much from these distant relatives.
So it is not surprising that my hopes of finding these hypothetical long-lost kin are dashed. I learn from a scholar in Dushanbe that the only residual enclave of Arabic-speaking Muslims left in Tajikistan is located a couple of hundred miles to the south of the city. Their villages are on the Afghan border, in a zone known for its black-market trade in opium and firearms. Regardless of whether or not they stand in harm’s way along one of the world’s most volatile borders, I would be a sitting duck if I were to show up in their midst. My vainglorious dream of potentially discovering a few distant Nabhan kin hidden among the many Tayy Tajiks living there will have to wait.
The proposed spiritual, cultural, economic, and culinary makeover of Persians and Sogdians did not occur instantaneously, of course. The Umayyad dynasty established the Diwan al-Kharaj as a central council of revenue to manage the finances of the entire empire. It tried to jump-start the tedious process of consolidation by attempting to instill a shared ethic of sacred Islamic economics into all of its trading partners.
The Diwan al-Kharaj reaffirmed Islam’s initial focus on socially responsible trading and investing, with no money made off goods forbidden by Qur’anic mandates. The Banu Umayyah hoped to distinguish themselves in significant ways from the Jews by upholding Muhammad’s and Khadijah’s ban on usury. When lending had to occur, the counselors of the diwan insisted on the provision that no interest could accumulate at the expense of the lendee. They placed a zakat tax on the harvest of crops only to the extent that it allowed a portion of the harvest to be reallocated to those who were hungry or otherwise in need. They also recommended that trade negotiations be guided by the concept of gharar, “the interdiction of chance,” which cautioned traders in foodstuffs to share with farmers both the equity accrued during bumper crops and the costs of recovery after losses caused by droughts or other random events. In this manner, debts as well as rewards were spread among all partners, much as is done in community-supported agriculture today.
Through the Diwan al-Kharaj, the Umayyad leadership encouraged all Arab spice traders to select their business partners, even those who were neither of Arab blood nor presently of the Islamic faith, from those willing to nurture and support everyone along the entire spice supply chain. In this manner, the whole network of producers, middlemen, brokers, and bankers was anchored in commonly held values. It developed rules for fiscal exchange between banking institutions located considerable distances from one another, so that funds could be transferred, loans could be paid off, and venture capital could finance projects throughout the Islamic world.7
MAP 3. Spice trails of the Desert Silk Roads and Maritime Silk Roads
Further, the Umayyad caliphs demanded that those who benefited from this system, especially Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Nestorian Christians who traded in aromatics, horses, camels, precious metals, silk, and other textiles, were expected to direct a significant portion of their earnings back to the power base of the Umayyad dynasty. The Muslims were the network facilitators to some extent, but they acknowledged the knowledge and wealth of other players.
Protection could not and did not come without a price. The Umayyad elite of Quraysh descent accumulated fortunes for themselves and for their institutions by unilaterally setting that price. Some members of that Quraysh clan must have wondered why their grandparents back in Mecca had ever opposed Muhammad to begin with, for now they themselves were raking in the cash and feasting on far richer fare than the tharīd of unleavened bread soaked in broth that their humble Prophet had favored.8
Perhaps they remembered that their Arab ancestors from the deserts of the peninsula had never been able to accumulate much wealth. Instead, they had been constantly on the move with their caravans or herds, reinvesting whatever gains they accrued in more camels and horses. They had forked over pay-offs to petty sheikhs who offered them the privilege to pass through their territories.
After the Umayyad caliphs settled into their capital of Damascus, they could more easily compare themselves and their abodes to what they witnessed in Persian communities to the north and east. They realized that their newly acquired sedentary life in palatial settings both looked and tasted better than the life they had previously eked out in the searing heart of the Arabian Peninsula.
What Umayyad bureaucrats sooner or later had to learn, however, was that rules, regulations, and ethical aspirations were not enough to solidify their network into a stable empire. They needed something else to make their trading partners among the Persians, Parthians, Sogdians, and Turks want to become “good Arabs.” It would take memorable meals, stories, and songs to forge a culture that was truly galvanized.
Once Persia and Arabia were spiritually, militarily, and politically united, they needed artistic, culinary, and poetic expressions to move their cultural synthesis beyond what either had achieved in the past. And so, perhaps unconsciously at first, the Umayyad dynasty fostered a highly expressive hybrid culture and fusion cuisine that would soon turn the heads of many astute observers.
Throughout the Golden Age of Islam, from 750 to 1257, Persian and Arab chefs, culinary journalists, and physicians generated more cookbooks in Arabic than were written in all of the other languages of the world during the same period.9 This proliferation of recipes was not due solely to the broader range of staple foods and spices that had suddenly become available in Islamic kitchens. It emerged from something akin to hybrid vigor, in that it generated enhanced productivity among Arab and Persian chefs. In particular, the Umayyad court chefs began to experiment with sauces of fermented grains and fish, with steeping and marinating, with molding and layering meats and stuffing the layers with nuts and raisins, with coating fish in reductions of grape juice and honey, and with “cooking” fish not merely with heat and smoke but also with vinegar, lime, or sour orange juice. The culinary techniques and recipes that they perfected, such as sikbāj, the cooking of fish and fowl in sour juices and acidic vinegars, have endured in the Middle East, Maghreb, and Latin America to this day.10 I see them in the desert borderlands of Mexico just south of my home, where sikbāj has been transmogrified into ceviche and escabeche, terms used in contemporary Mesoamerica by Spanish speakers.
Perhaps culinary invention in the world of Arab-Persian fusion, rather than military dominion over the heart of Central Asia, was
the most lasting consequence of the Battle of Nihāvand. Over the following centuries, political boundaries and alliances shifted repeatedly, but the medieval Islamic interest in flavor and fragrance only intensified with time, and their culinary imperialism spread across space.
The Arabs themselves had finally reached into better-watered and more productive lands, places where their own food security was no longer in jeopardy from season to season. But they had also reached into foreign cultures with talents, skills, and imaginations that challenged their own. The more observant among these Arabs realized that they now had abundant incentives to merge their own culture with those of the Persians and Sogdians.11 So the most upwardly mobile Arabs in Asia Minor encouraged these Farsi-speaking communities to help them put their collective portfolio of intellectual, artistic, and commercial assets at the disposal of the entire umma, the Muslim community as a whole, in order to form a truly creative, if not lucrative, Islamic empire.
In less than a decade following the conversion of the Persians and Sogdians, the newly labeled Tajik storytellers, singers, oud players, architects, sculptors, and chefs of the Islamic world had unprecedented support for artistic expression and innovation. They now had access to the finest materials and mentors that money could buy, since it seemed that nearly everyone attracted to living in Damascus, not just the Banu Umayyah elite, was out for entertainment.
They had, in short order, gained access to the entire range of culinary ingredients and cooking utensils available in every trading hub for staples and spices for one thousand miles to the east, as well as all of the technical knowledge harbored in every artisans’ guild, school, and library. Muslim soldiers on the front line had already taken control of Merv and Herat by 650 and Balkh by 652. In the coming decades, they would voraciously consume whatever was available from Hind (India), southeast of them, and from Sin (China), northeast of them.
Cumin, Camels, and Caravans Page 18