by Sarah Chayes
But whenever tribal factionalism or religious disputes broke out among the garrison Arabs, or during the ragged transitions from one Muslim governor to the next, the non-Muslim people of Zabulistan were quick to throw off their allegiance, sometimes even attacking westward into Muslim lands.
Thus did Bosworth, bless him, set the scene for me. But now I was getting hungry for a primary source. I wanted to know how this chronic confrontation on the Muslim frontier had actually gone down, since their protracted rebellion was such a key feature of Afghans’ self-consciousness.
This time I didn’t have to hunt in the back reaches of the Kabul library. Several early Muslim historians chronicled the Arab conquests year by year. I had read some of them in the text in Arabic class long before. Muhammad ibn Jarir at-Tabari was the greatest of these historians, who were often legal scholars as well. He died in 923. Tabari, like his colleagues, is careful to trace back the version of events he describes through a scrutinized chain of transmitters to an original eyewitness—roughly in the fashion of modern footnoting. Now an excellent translation of Tabari has been published in multiple volumes, each one edited by a different scholar, all working simultaneously, so the work did not take a lifetime to complete.
In the pages of this history I found yearly updates on the status of the Arabs’ never-ending war against the zunbils of Zabulistan.
The following series of episodes, disastrous for the Arabs, took place at the very end of the seventh century. This was when the whole Muslim east was ruled by one of the most formidable characters in the history of Islam, al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf. This viceroy to two caliphs—brilliant general, ruthless decision maker, and assiduous nation builder—almost single-handedly held the vast empire together for a quarter century.
“Zunbil had been under a truce, with the Arabs collecting land taxes from him,” writes Tabari, in his History of the Prophets and Kings.24 “But he had several times…refused to pay.” (The yaghestan principle.) The terrible Hajjaj, from headquarters back in Iraq, dispatched orders to his Zaranj garrison commander to inflict an exemplary punishment on the zunbil. “Take the field against him…and do not return until you have plundered his land, pulled down his fortresses, killed his fighting men, and enslaved his women.”
The commander set out from Zaranj and did rather well—at first. He “penetrated into the lands of Zunbil, seizing cattle, sheep, and other property as he wished, and razing strongholds and castles. He conquered a great deal of their territory, as Zunbil’s forces fell back from one land after another.”25
It is not hard to imagine what the Muslim camp must have looked like by this time, with flocks of sheep and goats trailing from its flanks, tents gaudily decorated with booty and frightened women, the Arab tribesmen heady with their easy victory.
And then things go wrong. Having lured the Arabs deep into hostile territory, the zunbil’s forces deftly skirt them and take up positions along the highland “passes and defiles” behind them, cutting them off. This trick, which worked against the Soviets more than a millennium later, was a classic element of steppe warfare that the rump Hephthalites had apparently brought with them from their northern grasslands.
Like his predecessor who had fallen into the same trap, the beleaguered Muslim commander was ready to sue for peace. He even offered to pay the zunbil good money “in exchange for safe passage out of here.” There followed a shouting match with his deputy, who argued that any ransom paid to the zunbil would be docked from all their wages, and that surrendering would weaken Islam on the frontier.
The mutinous deputy calls out to tribesmen wishing for martyrdom to join him. His commander snorts: “You are an old man and have gone senile.” A few of the Arab ghazis do follow the deputy, and are cut to pieces by the zunbil’s army.
And so the Muslims are forced to beat an ignominious retreat back across that rock-hard land to Zaranj. It was, like the British retreat over some of that ground in 1880, hell. The Arabs must have been starving, for some accounts have them eating their horses, and Tabari describes their friends riding out from the garrison to meet them with provisions, but “when one of them ate his fill of the food, he would perish.”26
The commandant-governor of Zaranj dies of grief, no doubt fortunately for him. One can only imagine the temper of al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf when he got wind of this latest disaster in Zabulistan. He fires off a letter to the caliph in Damascus. “I want to send out against them a massive force of men from the two garrisons,” he writes. For otherwise, “I fear that Zunbil and his infidels will overrun the entire frontier.”27
The caliph replies that Hajjaj is to follow his own judgment. The terrible viceroy appoints a new commandant-governor to Zaranj, ‘Abd ar-Rahman ibn al-Ash’ath, whose abilities must have been hard to match, for Hajjaj is said to detest him. The bare sight of this man entering a room is enough to make Hajjaj whisper to a subordinate: “Look at the way he walks! By God, I would like to cut off his head!” Nevertheless, Hajjaj hires him.
Then the viceroy turns his prodigious energies to readying troops for the offensive, “devoting himself to this task with great zeal.” The men get full pay up front and are ordered to muster with the very best in horses and accoutrements. Hajjaj reviews the troops with ibn al-Ash’ath, and pays out bonuses to fighters who have not stinted on their equipment. So dazzling is this huge force, the men decked out in gorgeous cloth, the sun glinting off stirrups and spear points, that it is dubbed the Peacock Army.
Ibn al-Ash’ath handles the campaign with rather more skill and foresight than his predecessors. When the zunbil of Zabulistan withdraws before him, as usual, ibn al-Ash’ath decides to occupy the vacated land, “sending out a tax official over it, accompanied by armed attendants. He also set up a postal service between the various areas, positioned lookouts in the passes and ravines, and stationed advance parties in every dangerous spot.” In other words, ibn al-Ash’ath plans to annex Zabulistan, not just raid it for booty.
He understands that the effort to bring the denizens of this yaghestan into the fold of the Muslim empire will take time. Once his army has mastered a fair chunk of ground—probably extending to Kandahar—he halts, saying, “We will content ourselves with the territory we have conquered this year until we get to know it and we can collect the taxes, and Muslims can boldly travel its roads.” And only then, he says, will the army push farther. He writes to al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, explaining this sensible course.28
This course, alone, has proven effective in modern instances of postconflict nation building.
Hajjaj, however, hits the ceiling. He fires back no fewer than three letters, vilifying ibn al-Ash’ath, and his “weakness and confused judgment.”29 Heaping on further scorn in this vein, Hajjaj commands ibn al-Ash’ath to renew his attack on the zunbil, or see himself sent back to the ranks and forced to fight as a simple soldier.
And that, for a highborn Arab chieftain, is mortal insult. Ibn al-Ash’ath musters his Peacock Army and calls on his ghazis to join him in a revolt against the viceroy. He reminds them how he consulted with their delegates about halting the offensive, how he took account of their views. And Hajjaj, he thunders, “charged me with incompetence and weakness and ordered me to hasten the business of taking you far into the territory of the enemy—that being the territory in which your brethren perished but yesterday.”
In rousing words, ibn al-Ash’ath tells his soldiers: “I am one of you. I go forth when you go forth, and I balk when you balk.” Then he asks his men to “disavow Hajjaj, the enemy of God, and fight against him until God expels him from the land of Iraq.” To a man, the fighters shout an oath of allegiance to ibn al-Ash’ath.
The ensuing Revolt of the Peacock Army almost brought down the Muslim Arab empire.
One of the reasons the troops were so willing to rise up is that Hajjaj was a relentless hard-ass and they had had it with his authoritarianism. Another reason is that the nature of the garrison cities was changing. Arab civilians had been migrating eastward to fill up
the lands the Muslim armies had been capturing. Some soldiers began bringing their families to settle in the garrisons; others were arranging for local brides. Zaranj was turning into an ordinary Muslim town. And so the fighters were unhappy at the prospect of a prolonged campaign in murderous territory against the zunbil of Zabulistan. They had more to lose. They were less convinced of the point of the war.
The leaders of the revolt appealed directly to these sentiments. The tyrannical Hajjaj, one of them shouted, “does not care that he is taking chances with you.” Another rebel predicted, “He will keep you out in the field in the manner of Pharaoh”—the pharaoh of ancient Egypt being the archetype, in the Qur’an, of the unjust ruler. “I think most of you will be dead before seeing your loved ones.”
Before leaving Zabulistan, ibn al-Ash’ath sealed a pact with his erstwhile foe the zunbil. If the revolt succeeded, ibn al-Ash’ath promised, the zunbil’s lands would be excused from tribute for the rest of his life. And if ibn al-Ash’ath was defeated and had to flee, the zunbil would give him refuge.
And that is what eventually happened. But it was a near thing. Ibn al-Ash’ath beat the great Hajjaj in a pitched battle in central Iran, then actually captured Basra and Kufa, the two tent poles of the Muslim empire. The caliph offered generous peace terms. Ibn al-Ash’ath would have accepted them, but his rebels, fired up, refused.
When they finally were overcome, it still took more than a year for the caliph’s armies to force ibn al-Ash’ath back, in a fighting retreat, to the eastern frontier. There, the friend he had left in charge of Zaranj slammed the city gates in his face. Ibn al-Ash’ath pushed farther eastward to Bost on the road to Kandahar—now Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province. His deputy at Bost did worse: he welcomed ibn al-Ash’ath inside and then “pounced on him and put him in bonds,” hoping thus to curry favor with Hajjaj.
It was the zunbil of Zabulistan who kept faith. He descended on Bost, besieged it, and demanded ibn al-Ash’ath’s freedom. “By God,” Tabari has the zunbil warn, “if you cause him so much harm as a speck of dust in his eye, or deprive his head of a single hair, I shall not leave the battlefield until I bring you down and kill all who are with you, take your offspring captive, and divide your property among my troops.”30 Ibn al-Ash’ath’s treacherous deputy is sufficiently cowed, and releases the rebel.
The zunbil escorted ibn al-Ash’ath to Zabulistan, where he graciously “lodged him and did him honor”—him and the hundreds or perhaps thousands of defeated fighters clinging to his stirrup leathers.
It was not until 704, about five years after the revolt, that the zunbil finally gave ibn al-Ash’ath’s head to al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf. And the mighty viceroy paid a high price for it. Depending on the versions, Hajjaj agreed not to attack Zabulistan for a decade, or not to take tribute from it for some years. The Muslim empire was saved.
But so was the independence of Kandahar and surrounding Zabulistan. For the next 150 years, the best the Muslims could do was send the occasional load of plunder or string of slaves back from its border.31
It took a local boy to bring Islam to Zabulistan.
By the mid-850s, a century and a half later, the Muslim garrison town of Zaranj and its surrounding region had settled into the turbulent life of a perpetual frontier. This is C. E. Bosworth’s domain, so I relied on him for a picture.
Far from the center of caliphal power in Damascus and later Baghdad, the eastern province of the Muslim empire never sent taxes back to the capital very graciously; it often did not send them at all. It became a proving ground for rowdy young sons bent on adventure, and a refuge for upstarts and insurgents driven out of the heart of the empire—much the way the American West harbored rebels-turned-bandit like Jesse James.
The most stubborn of these insurgents was a group of wooly-haired extremists called the Kharijis. The roots of their movement went all the way back to a struggle for leadership of the young Muslim community two hundred years before, between the Prophet Muhammad’s brother-in-law Mu’awiya, and his cousin and son-in-law ‘Ali. This is the same dispute that led to the greatest split within Islam, between the Sunnis and the Shi’is. The original Kharijis—many of them the pious Qur’an readers sent out to the garrisons to instruct the troops—had backed ‘Ali. But they withdrew their support during the quarrel, feeling that he had violated their shared principles by negotiating a settlement and that all he was really after was power.
Most of these Kharijis were killed then and there, but a few escaped and collected in little bands and communities of fighters, set apart from the main body of Muslims. They developed an extreme, inflexible interpretation of their faith, rejecting urban influences and looking back to the Bedouin lifestyle. Living largely off plunder and booty, they insisted that only their reading of Islam was true: anyone who disagreed was an infidel.
The lines of transmission may not be direct, but their attitude resembles that of Usama bin Laden and his Afghan hosts, the Taliban. The Kharijis would cause trouble for the Muslim empire for hundreds of years.
By the ninth century they had been mostly cleared out of the heartlands and parts of the Persian Gulf where they had established colonies. They hung on along the eastern frontier of the empire, on the border with Zabulistan. There they were to be found in the countryside, preying on travelers and villages. Zaranj remained a garrison town manned by troops, so the Kharijis could not stray too near. Still, they did often raid, and sometimes concluded agreements with the commandant-governors of Zaranj or Bost to the east.32
Often they would join forces with their peasant neighbors and victims in revolt against the Zaranj tax gatherers, or with other displaced people who fetched up on the frontier. They also raided farther eastward, across the border of the empire into Zabulistan. Some evidence indicates they may have set down roots there, perhaps taking over the town of Gardez, to the east of Ghazni.33 But by this time, it is unclear the degree to which the Kharijis were animated by questions of religious doctrine, or by the marauding lifestyle they had adopted.
Despite constant efforts, the commandant-governors of Zaranj were not able to eradicate them. The days when al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf could extend his iron fist all the way to the border of the Muslim empire were long gone; the caliphate was beset by local risings everywhere, and could no longer supply the combination of supervision and support that a central government owes its provinces.
And so some townsmen of Zaranj and Bost began organizing ad hoc self-defense teams, taking upon themselves the task of battling the heretical Kharijis. But the name that has stuck to these posses—ayyars—translates roughly to “brigands.” It appears that in choosing to live by the sword, these ayyars succumbed in turn to the lifestyle, and the fight against the Kharijis became an excuse for their own brand of marauding.
Into this swashbuckling atmosphere was born, somewhere around 835, to a coppersmith in a village off the Zaranj-to-Bost road, Ya’qub ibn Layth. It was he who would finally defeat the zunbil for the Muslims and bring Islam to Zabulistan.
True to local custom, stories pin the start of Ya’qub ibn Layth’s career to a highway robbery. A great caravan, in one version, is approaching Zaranj from Iraq; its representatives send ahead to the governor for an escort through Khariji-infested country. Ya’qub and his band of ayyars find out; they hide in a tower and ambush the escort on its way to meet the caravan. Helping themselves to arms and horses, the brigands ride ahead to fall upon the caravan—whooping the Khariji war cry to confuse their victims.
Like Ahmad Shah Durrani nine hundred years later, if on a smaller scale, Ya’qub thus demonstrated to his companions that they had something to gain by riding with him.
Ya’qub and his followers joined another band of ayyars, and together they fought and faked their way to Zaranj, the provincial capital, which they captured and then quarreled over. In 861, Ya’qub ibn Layth had won out and was recognized by the people of Zaranj as their commander. But he still had to defeat his former ayyar chief, who had fallen back
on Bost.
This he did in 864. The battle took place in Kandahar, where Ya’qub’s ayyar opponent had joined forces with the zunbil of Zabulistan. The zunbil was killed in the fray, unhorsed, it is said, by Ya’qub himself.
The full annexation of the region and its conversion to Islam took many more years—Ya’qub waged another major campaign against Zabulistan in 870, and Kandahar proved especially hard for the Muslim invaders to reduce. But the determination of Ya’qub, a truly local Muslim ruler, who was schooled in the tricks of banditry and who enjoyed the support of the turbulent frontier folk from whom he sprang, would gradually break down the independence of Zabulistan.34
Like the poetic folk heroes Rustam and Garshasp, Ya’qub ibn Layth never forgot to send back a share of plunder to the liege lord of all Muslims, the commander of the faithful, the caliph of Baghdad. According to the chronicles, the capital was agog at the four-armed copper idol of a female deity, girt with two silver belts set with jewels, which arrived from near Kabul.35
But, again like Rustam and Garshasp, Ya’qub’s submission to Baghdad was only token. At last he turned his armies westward, and pushed his conquests well into the lands of his nominal overlord. In 876, he was advancing on the capital, Baghdad.
For fifty years, Ya’qub’s family, called the Saffarids,36 ruled much of the Muslim empire. Their domain, bordered by Kandahar and Kabul in the east, reached westward across most of Iran. Then the tables were turned, and Ya’qub ibn Layth’s successors were pushed back to their native Zaranj, where the Saffarids carried on as local rulers for almost a century.
The Saffarid conquests are seen as one of the first real breaches in the territorial integrity of the Muslim empire. After the turn of the tenth century, no one could ever again claim to unite the disparate Muslim communities under a single government. And so in a sense, the eastern yaghestan—including the Kandahar region—remained unfettered even after its conversion to Islam.
