Central Asia in World History

by Peter B. Golden

  In 736–37, the Tang defeated the Türgesh and routed the Tibetans. The Arabs badly mauled Sulu in 737. According to the tenth-century Arab historian al-Tabarî, he was murdered in his sleep shortly thereafter by Bagha Tarqan Kül Chur, a rival, following a dispute over a game of backgammon. The next day, the Türks left Sulu’s stripped body, “scattered,” and began “making raids on one another.”23 Sulu’s demise splintered the Türgesh, ending their challenge to Arab control. Bagha Tarqan Kül Chur ran afoul of China and perished in 744, just as the Uighurs became the new masters of the eastern Türk lands. The Qarluqs, a Turkic tribal union hitherto allied with the Uighurs, broke with their overbearing new rulers the following year, fleeing into the western Türk lands where the Tang were again dominant.

  A clash between the Muslims and China, the two remaining empires with interests in Central Asia, was inevitable. A local power struggle in the Sogdian city-states provided the spark, bringing a Tang army and its Qarluq allies to face a Muslim army near the Talas River in Kazakhstan in 751. The defection of the Qarluqs, increasingly rivals of the western Türks-Türgesh, gave the victory to the Muslims. It has long been claimed that Chinese who knew how to make paper were among the captives taken to Samarkand, and from them paper was introduced to the larger Mediterranean world. Recent studies indicate that China had been exporting paper as early as the third century; it was already known in Xinjiang and Sogdia, carried there by merchants and Buddhist pilgrims, before Islam. Central Asia may have been the source for papermaking technology in the Muslim Middle East, but it was not necessarily connected with the events of 751.24

  The Arab victory, followed by China’s withdrawal from Central Asia because of civil wars (755–763), paved the way for Islam to become the dominant religion of Transoxiana. As Muslims strengthened their hold over the Sogdian city-states, some Sogdians fled eastward, joining communities of their kinsmen in the Central Asian-Chinese borderlands.

  In the Middle East, the Arabs carried out one of the most successful colonialist enterprises in history. Large numbers of Arabs settled in the conquered territories, including the Transoxanian-Persian borderlands. In the Semitic Middle East, Arabic largely replaced kindred Aramaic, spoken by local Christians and Jews. Islam was initially the religion of a conquest elite. Conversions took place gradually. Muslims did not constitute a majority in Mesopotamia until well into the ninth century. In Syria and Egypt it took even longer. Iran, however, one of the earliest of the conquered lands to achieve a Muslim majority (perhaps by the mid-to late-ninth century), retained its own tongue—Persian—and unique culture.

  In Central Asia, over the next few centuries, the bulk of the urban, Iranian-speaking population converted to Islam. As elsewhere, conversion emanated out of the cities where Muslims and non-Muslims interacted most directly. In some areas, the new faith blended with older beliefs. Converts were slow to give up old ways. Conquest provided the groundwork, but conversions, usually voluntary, often had a mix of motives, spiritual, political, social, and economic. The commerce-minded Sogdian and Khwarazmian merchants saw the advantages of being part of the growing Islamic world. The prominence of Persians and Central-Asian Iranians in the newly established ‘Abbâsid caliphate and the improved status of non-Arab Muslims in general in the ninth century were also contributing factors in conversion. Although the caliphs’ control weakened in the tenth century, local Islam, now firmly grounded in the cities, reached into the countryside. By the eleventh or twelfth century, it had become largely Muslim as well. The old land-holding gentry, the dihqân class, had faded, replaced by a new Muslim elite.

  The cities prospered and the government built forts and inns along the caravan routes, promoting long-distance trade. Persian, the “second language” of many people in the Iranian East, gradually supplanted its “kinsmen” Bactrian, Sogdian, and Khwarazmian—although there were still cities in which Sogdian predominated into the eleventh century. Al-Bîrûnî reports that the Arabs, after conquering Khwarazm, burned all the books and killed many of their scholars.25 Nonetheless, something beyond oral traditions must have survived, for he gives an invaluable account of his native region’s local customs, calendars, and religious beliefs. The Khwarazmian language seems to have continued to be spoken, perhaps into the fourteenth century. Persian expanded throughout the eastern Muslim world. Iranians called the Muslims Tâjîk or Tâzîk. In Central Asia, Tâjîk at first denoted Arab Muslims, but in time came to refer to all Muslims of Transoxiana who had adopted Persian speech.

  Central Asia pioneered the development of modern Persian as a literary tongue. It replaced its Aramaic alphabet with the Arabic script and borrowed a considerable number of Arabic words. Persian, however, was not the only language that was assimilating Sogdian-speaking peoples. Turkic, the language of the political overlords of much of Central Asia, had made substantial inroads as well. In the late eleventh century, Mahmûd al-Kâshgharî, a Turkic lexicographer writing in Arabic, could point to cities in which the population was bilingual, speaking both Turkic and Sogdian. Elsewhere, he notes that Turkic dominated in the cities and the local Iranian languages survived only in the surrounding villages.

  In Xinjiang, the scene of fierce Chinese-Tibetan struggles in the eighth to early ninth century, the situation was different in many respects. The Arab-Muslim armies had not reached here. Islam gained a foothold only by the later ninth and tenth centuries. Nonetheless, major and long-lasting ethnic and linguistic changes were occurring. The Tanguts (Chinese: Xixia), a people of Tibeto-Burmese affiliation from northwestern China, overran the Gansu Uighurs from 1028 to 1036, other Uighur statelets in Xinjiang preserved their independence in their drive to create their own state over the next two centuries. The Gansu Uighurs survived as an ethnic grouping, the Yellow Uighurs, one of the few remaining Buddhist communities among the Turkic peoples. The Xinjiang Uighurs preserved their independence. They shared a common faith with their Iranian and Tokharian subjects: Buddhism. Uighur Turkic gradually began to replace the local languages, a process largely completed by the time of the Mongol conquests. The Uighurs, having settled and intermarried with their subjects, were themselves transformed, becoming the middlemen of Chinese trade with the western regions. What is today called Xinjiang had indeed become eastern Turkistan.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Crescent over the Steppe: Islam and the Turkic Peoples

  The migrations touched off by the fall of the Türk Empire and Uighur seizure of power in Mongolia brought Turkic tribes westward to the borders of Irano-Islamic Transoxiana and occasionally into the Black Sea steppes. These tribes, now in direct and sustained contact with the Islamic and Byzantine empires, formed the ethnic building blocks of the Turkic peoples of modern Central Asia.

  The Qarluqs came in 745 to the Semirech’e region in southeastern Kazakhstan and in 766 supplanted the western Türks as the leading local power. For a brief time after the Uighur collapse in 840 they claimed leadership of the Turkic nomads, calling their ruler the “Qaghan of Qaghans.” The explosive Oghuz appeared in the neighboring Syr Darya region in the 770s, expelling the Pechenegs, another Turkic people, whom they disparagingly called the “Hairy Shaggy Dogs,”1 ultimately into the Black Sea steppes. Successive Pecheneg migrations, in turn, forced the ancestors of the Hungarians first from Bashkiria into the Black Sea steppes and then, in the late ninth century, into east-central Europe. Central Asian nomadic migrations not only reconfigured the steppe tribes, but also had an impact on Europe’s political and ethnic structure.

  In the last quarter of the eighth century, the sprawling Kimek qaghanate formed in western Siberia, a mix of Turks, Tatars, and other elements from the Mongol-Manchurian borderlands. The Kimeks effectively exploited the lucrative fur trade with the northern forests and the resultant long-distance trade with the Muslim world. In the first half of the eleventh century, their subjects, the Qïpchaqs, dismantled the Kimek Qaghanate, forming a stateless tribal union from the Danube to western Siberia.

  North and east of the
m were the Kyrgyz, whose ruler still bore the title of Qaghan and resided in a town, Kemijkath, named after the Kem (Yenisei) River. Muslim geographers held them in low regard. remarking that “these people have the nature of wild beasts . . . are lawless and merciless . . . [and] are at war and on hostile terms with all the people living round them.”2 Some of their tribes were accused of cannibalism. Such reports were a mix of fact and fantasy that was typical of accounts of distant peoples. Although remote and living in both the forest and steppe worlds, the Kyrgyz supplied musk, furs, lumber, and ivory to the Silk Road trade.

  These states and tribal confederations spoke more or less mutually intelligible dialects of Turkic and followed similar nomadic lifestyles. They were as likely to fight one another as they were to raid the settled lands. The Muslim oasis cities traded with them but also built forts to keep marauding bands at bay and to stage raids into the steppe.

  By the early ninth century, the Muslims had developed a brisk trade in slaves coming from the Eurasian northlands and steppe zone. The Khazar Qaghanate (mid-seventh century to between 965 and 969) on the Volga was one of the two main suppliers of slaves. The Sâmânid amîrs (819–1005), a dynasty of governors of Transoxiana, nominally subject to the ‘Abbâsids, were the other. They drew on two sources: Turkic nomads captured in warfare and the Slavs of the eastern European forests and agricultural zones, taken in slave raids. The name “Slav” became so closely associated with this dreadful commerce that our word “slave” comes from it.

  The Turkic slaves were mainly sold to the ‘Abbâsid caliphs who sought human military machines that would follow orders and as aliens would not be subverted by the competing political and ethnic factions in the caliphate. The Turks, non-natives of the Middle East and famed for their martial skills and endurance, were ideal for such a purpose. The Arabs called a military slave ghulâm (plural ghilmân, literally “boys”) or later mamlûk (“slave, one who is owned”). Al-Jâhiz, an Arabic essayist of possible Ethiopian descent, who wrote about ethnic questions and the Turks in particular, extolling the Turks’ hardiness, said that they spent “many more of their days on the back of a horse than on the ground.”3 Once brought into the caliphate, a ghulâm received further training and was inducted into special forces.

  Central Asian models, such as the Sogdian châkar, may have influenced the shaping of the ghulâm institution. In addition, a number of Sogdian and Turkic nobles from Central Asia voluntarily entered caliphal service. Many of the Turks rose to very high military and court posts and in time came to control the caliphate. Indeed, one prominent ghulâm of ninth-century Baghdad was Itakh, a Khazar, who began his career as a slave-cook in a wealthy Baghdad home. Ultimately, the military slave institution weakened ‘Abbâsid authority as caliphs were made and unmade by the powerful Turkic commanders. This was hardly what the caliphs had hoped for.

  The ruling house of the Khazars appears to have been of western Türk Ashina origin. It broke away around 630–650 and formed a state in the North Caucasian, Ukrainian, and south Russian steppes. Prolonged warfare with the Arabian caliphate (between the 640s and 737) for control of the Caucasus ended with a border established in the North Caucasus. The Khazars also defeated the Bulghar union in the Ukrainian steppes, forcing some Bulghars into the Balkans around 679. These Bulghars conquered Slavic tribes that had earlier migrated to what became Bulgaria. In 864, the Balkan Bulghars, who were already assimilating with the Slavs, converted to Christianity, producing the Bulgarian people of today. Elements of Central Asian culture continued nonetheless. For example, a Bulgarian king list (going up to the ninth century) uses a mixed Bulghar Turkic-Slavic tongue and gives the regnal years according to the Twelve-Year Animal Cycle calendar, still widely employed in East Asia and previously widespread among the Turkic peoples.4

  The Khazar Qaghanate, controlling the Volga route, a major thoroughfare for goods coming from the Baltic and the northern European forests to the Islamic world through the Caspian Sea, became one of the great trading emporia of the medieval world. Khazaria, often—but not always—allied with Byzantium, interacted politically and economically with Constantinople and Baghdad in a complex triangular relationship. A Khazar princess even married a Byzantine ruler. Byzantine emperors rarely married foreign women. Atil, the Khazar capital on the lower Volga, bustled with foreign merchants as well as representatives of the twenty-five subject peoples of the Khazar Qaghans. Muslims (most probably the majority of the resident foreign merchants), Christians, Jews, and pagans were found there. Each group had the right to be judged by the laws of its own religion. The Khazar Qaghan converted to Judaism between the late eighth and early ninth centuries, and many of the Khazar ruling clans followed him. Others remained pagan, continuing the shamanist practices that were typical of the Turkic peoples of that era. Yet others converted to Islam or Christianity. They continued to regard the Qaghan as a nearly divine figure who was a talisman for the good fortune of the state. A sub-Qaghan was entrusted with the day-to-day governance of the realm. The local Muslims included the chief minister of state. He and the personal guard of the holy qaghans were of Khwârazmian descent and had long been resident in Khazaria.

  The Sâmânids were even more important in the slave trade. They were Iranians, probably from Tokharistan (in Afghanistan). Descended from local lords who converted to Islam during the Umayyad era, they had achieved local prominence in the early ninth century. Their raids into the Turkic steppe netted some of the early Turkic slave-soldiers. The Sâmânids turned this into a business, even founding schools to train the slaves for service. Expeditions such as that of 893, led by the Sâmânid Ismâ’îl, who called himself “the wall of the district of Bukhara,”5 brought in some 10,000 to 15,000 captives, including the wife of the Qarluq chieftain.

  From their capital in Bukhara, the Sâmânid amîrs became patrons of a brilliant revival of Persian literature. Central Asian scholars from the Sâmânid orbit were major contributors to Islamic and world culture. The mathematician Abu Ja’far Muhammad al-Khwârazmî (ca. 780–850), a native of Khwarazm, became one of the astrologers at the court of the caliph al-Ma’mun. The English word “algorithm” is a distortion of his name. In addition to his contributions to the development of algebra, he wrote on geography and astronomy.

  The mausoleum in Bukhara was built in the tenth century for the remains of Ismâ’îl ibn Ahmad, whom the ‘Abbâsid caliphate rewarded with the governorship of Khurâsân for his suppression of rebels in the east. His power extended into Transoxiana and the Turkic world, where he actively propagated Islam. Bridgeman-Giraudon / Art Resource, New York

  Muhammad al-Farâbî, from the Syr Darya region, became one of the great polymaths of his era. Schooled in Sogdian and Persian, he published his works in Arabic. After teaching in Bukhara, he later settled in Iran and eventually in Baghdad and Damascus. Such mobility was not uncommon among Muslim scholars of his era. His works dealt with a wide range of subjects: philosophy, political theory, ethics, the natural sciences, medicine, mathematics, literature, linguistics, and music. He had much to say about ancient Greek thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle and Euclid. Some of his studies, for example Fusûl al-Hikam (The Judgments of Wisdom), were widely used as textbooks in schools of higher learning throughout the Muslim world. His Kitâb al-Mûsîqî al-Kabîr (Great Book of Music) dealt with the acoustics and mathematics of music as well as composition. Al-Farâbî’s ideas were still influencing European musicologists in the nineteenth century.

  Ibn Sina (known as Avicenna in Europe), who came from the area around Bukhara, somewhat overshadowed al-Farâbî. Son of a Sâmânid bureaucrat, a brilliant student in virtually all fields of knowledge, Ibn Sina as a young man gained access to the ruler’s library after having cured the Sâmânid amîr, Nûh ibn Mansûr. As the Sâmânid regime began to crumble, he left Bukhara and traveled widely, finding shelter with the Khwârazmshâh and ultimately in Iran. He was frequently persecuted for his unorthodox religious beliefs and even accused of atheism, a charge that cou
ld bring the death penalty. He earned his living as a medical doctor, sometimes at the courts of various rulers, taught and wrote on everything from medicine (more than 40 books) to cosmography, philosophy (some 185 studies), theology, music, and botany. He, like other scholars of his age, took the Graeco-Roman heritage that had been translated into Arabic, systematized and reworked it, and added his own interpretations. Ibn Sina placed a great emphasis on experiments and acquiring empirical knowledge rather than relying on theory and tradition alone. His al-Qânûn fi at-Tibb (Canon of Medicine) was translated into Latin and other languages and widely used in Europe.

  The Sâmânid role in spreading Islam was no less significant. Islam, now the dominant faith of urban Central Asia, was expanding into the steppe. The Sâmânids developed madrasas, Islamic colleges, based perhaps on Buddhist models, as well as bureaucratic structures and traditions of governance that Islamized Turkic peoples subsequently brought into the Near East. In theory, the Sâmânid amîr was supreme. His chief minister oversaw the government, which consisted of the court and ministries that handled finances, foreign affairs, internal security and other matters. The lines between the ministries and the court were often blurred. Similarly, the power of the amîr could vary from time to time and place to place. The Sâmânids were the principal figures of the eastern Islamic world, the heirs of the mercantile traditions of the Sogdian trading cities and major players in transcontinental commerce. Sâmânid coins (or their imitations) have been found in considerable numbers in Russia and Scandinavia, attesting to the scope of their commercial importance.

  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