The Great Arab Conquests (43 page)
Read The Great Arab Conquests Online
Authors: Hugh Kennedy
Mūsā himself soon set out to the west. At Sajūma he allowed the sons of Uqba b. Nāfi to take revenge for their father’s death and 600 old men of the district were put to the sword. He then went on to subdue the great Berber tribes, Huwwāra, Zanāta and Kutāma, taking prisoners and appointing new chiefs who would be loyal to the Muslim conquerors. There was very little resistance from the settled people because, as the chronicler noted, ‘most of the cities of Africa were empty [
khālī
] because of the hostility of the Berbers towards them’.
39
Following in the footsteps of Uqba b. Nāfi, Mūsā pushed on to the west, pursuing Berber tribes who were fleeing before him. Unlike Uqba, however, he was not diverted from Tangier. He is said to have taken the city and installed his Berber freedman, Tāriq b. Ziyād, as governor, the first time, as far as we know, that a converted Berber enjoyed a position of command in the Muslim army. With him he left a garrison, mostly made up of newly converted Berbers with a few Arabs, ‘and he ordered the Arabs to teach the Berbers the Koran and to instruct them in the faith’. The garrison at Tangier were given lots to build on (
ikhtatta li’l-muslimīn
). The establishment of this Muslim outpost, just across the Straits of Gibraltar from the rich and inviting lands of southern Spain, was the prelude to invasion, and the garrison was to be the nucleus of the first Muslim force to invade the Iberian peninsula. Mūsā carried on to the south and west until eventually he reached Sūs and the Wadi Dra, taking hostages from the Masmūda tribe of the Atlas mountains. He then returned east to Qayrawān.
khālī
] because of the hostility of the Berbers towards them’.
39
Following in the footsteps of Uqba b. Nāfi, Mūsā pushed on to the west, pursuing Berber tribes who were fleeing before him. Unlike Uqba, however, he was not diverted from Tangier. He is said to have taken the city and installed his Berber freedman, Tāriq b. Ziyād, as governor, the first time, as far as we know, that a converted Berber enjoyed a position of command in the Muslim army. With him he left a garrison, mostly made up of newly converted Berbers with a few Arabs, ‘and he ordered the Arabs to teach the Berbers the Koran and to instruct them in the faith’. The garrison at Tangier were given lots to build on (
ikhtatta li’l-muslimīn
). The establishment of this Muslim outpost, just across the Straits of Gibraltar from the rich and inviting lands of southern Spain, was the prelude to invasion, and the garrison was to be the nucleus of the first Muslim force to invade the Iberian peninsula. Mūsā carried on to the south and west until eventually he reached Sūs and the Wadi Dra, taking hostages from the Masmūda tribe of the Atlas mountains. He then returned east to Qayrawān.
The Muslim conquest and settlement of Tangier was probably complete by 708. It was less than seventy years since the first Muslim troops had crossed from Egypt into Cyrenaica. During that time the war had ebbed and flowed in the most dramatic fashion. Throughout, the key had been the Arab control of Tunisia and their new capital at Qayrawān. By 708 there was a firmly established Arab administration in most of modern Tunisia. To the east both Cyrenaica and Tripolitania were under Muslim rule. The areas of modern Algeria and Morocco remained a real ‘wild west’. The only major Muslim presence in this area seems to have been the garrison at Tangier. In other areas, Muslim control depended on maintaining good relations with the Berber tribal leaders, who may have been converted to Islam, at least nominally. Muslim rule was to be challenged again, notably by great Berber rebellion in 740-41, but it was never to be overthrown.
7
CROSSING THE OXUS
The initial conquest of Iran had been completed by the year 651. Armies in pursuit of Yazdgard III had come as far as Merv.
1
From there it was only a few days’ journey north-east to the great River Oxus (modern Amu Darya). Beyond the river lay the lands of Transoxania, a world very different from Iran. Although many of the inhabitants were Persian speakers living in the towns and villages, the Sasanian Empire had never really controlled the area in any administrative sense. In place of a central imperial government there were numerous princely courts in city palaces and mountain castles and there were nomad encampments where great Turkish chieftans held sway. Far to the east lay the frontiers of China and Chinese emperors of the Tang dynasty had won the allegiance of the inhabitants of the area. It was a rich land, full of opportunities and wealth but defended by warlike men who valued their independence very highly. The lure of riches and the challenge of combat proved irresistible to the Arab warriors.
1
From there it was only a few days’ journey north-east to the great River Oxus (modern Amu Darya). Beyond the river lay the lands of Transoxania, a world very different from Iran. Although many of the inhabitants were Persian speakers living in the towns and villages, the Sasanian Empire had never really controlled the area in any administrative sense. In place of a central imperial government there were numerous princely courts in city palaces and mountain castles and there were nomad encampments where great Turkish chieftans held sway. Far to the east lay the frontiers of China and Chinese emperors of the Tang dynasty had won the allegiance of the inhabitants of the area. It was a rich land, full of opportunities and wealth but defended by warlike men who valued their independence very highly. The lure of riches and the challenge of combat proved irresistible to the Arab warriors.
Of all the campaigns of the early Arab conquests the fighting in Transoxania was the hardest fought and longest lasting. An entire century passed from the conquest of Merv (650-51) and the Arabs crossing the Oxus to the final battle of Talas, which ended the prospect of Chinese intervention in 751. The first phase of the conquests, lasting intermittently from the 650s to 705, saw Arab governors leading sporadic raids across the river but almost always returning to their base in Merv before the onset of winter and leaving no permanent presence in the territories. The second phase was the governorate of Qutayba b. Muslim from 705 to 715, when there were systematic attempts at conquest of Tukhāristan, Soghdia and Khwārazm, and Arab garrisons were established in major cities like Bukhara and Samarqand. The third phase from 716 to about 737 was marked by serious reverses for the Arabs at the hands of the resurgent Turks and their allies among the local princes. The fourth and final phase (737-51) saw two Arab governors, Asad b. Abd Allāh and above all Nasr b. Sayyār, reaching an accommodation with the local princes which left them acknowledging Arab overlordship in all of Transoxania but retaining much of their power and status.
The history of the Arab conquests in Central Asia is important for another reason. These campaigns are by far the most fully reported of all the expeditions of the early Islamic conquests. Rather than the vague and legendary accounts we have of earlier conquests, and indeed of the contemporary conquest of Spain, the battle narratives from Transoxania in the early eighth century are full of gritty and realistic detail. It is only here that we can hope to get some feeling for the harsh reality of conquest and destruction, of defeat and victory. We owe this material to a historian called Abū’l-Hasan al-Madā’inī. He was born in Basra in 753, just at the end of the era of the great conquests, but lived most of his life in Madā’in (Ctesiphon, whence his name) and Baghdad, where he died some time after 830.
2
He is said to have collected a vast number of history books, including histories of the invasion of Khurasan and biographies of individual governors, among them Qutayba b. Muslim and Nasr b. Sayyār. In around 900 this material was edited by Tabarī and incorporated, with full acknowledgements, into his own
History
, and it is from this that the material has been passed down to us.
2
He is said to have collected a vast number of history books, including histories of the invasion of Khurasan and biographies of individual governors, among them Qutayba b. Muslim and Nasr b. Sayyār. In around 900 this material was edited by Tabarī and incorporated, with full acknowledgements, into his own
History
, and it is from this that the material has been passed down to us.
Compared with the accounts of the early conquests of Syria, Iraq and Iran, chronology is more secure, though the narratives are still composites with different authors having developed their narratives for very different purposes.
3
Some strands belong to tribal traditions, clearly glorifying the memory of their great chiefs and the role that they played in these stirring events. The tribe of Azd preserved the memory of the deeds and virtues of their great chief Muhallab and his son Yazīd, and the fame of the greatest of all the Muslim generals in these campaigns, Qutayba b. Muslim, was preserved by his own followers from the Bāhila tribe. In addition, we have a local, independent historical tradition preserved in Narshakhī’s
History of Bukhara
, which tells us much about how the conquest affected one city and the surrounding countryside.
3
Some strands belong to tribal traditions, clearly glorifying the memory of their great chiefs and the role that they played in these stirring events. The tribe of Azd preserved the memory of the deeds and virtues of their great chief Muhallab and his son Yazīd, and the fame of the greatest of all the Muslim generals in these campaigns, Qutayba b. Muslim, was preserved by his own followers from the Bāhila tribe. In addition, we have a local, independent historical tradition preserved in Narshakhī’s
History of Bukhara
, which tells us much about how the conquest affected one city and the surrounding countryside.
The Oxus is an astonishing river. If you approach it along the ancient road to the east, travelling across the flat, bleak desert wastes from Merv to the traditional crossing point at Charjui
i
, you come upon it quite suddenly. It flows between the Kara Kum (Black Sands) to the west and the Kizil Kum (Red Sands) to the east, banked by low cliffs. There is little irrigation and few settlements; the river carves and meanders its way through a desolate and unpeopled land: here are no palm trees, fields and villages like those that make the banks of the Nile in Egypt such a delight to the eye. The river itself, its breadth and the strength of its current, seems an alien invader in this flat desert landscape.
i
, you come upon it quite suddenly. It flows between the Kara Kum (Black Sands) to the west and the Kizil Kum (Red Sands) to the east, banked by low cliffs. There is little irrigation and few settlements; the river carves and meanders its way through a desolate and unpeopled land: here are no palm trees, fields and villages like those that make the banks of the Nile in Egypt such a delight to the eye. The river itself, its breadth and the strength of its current, seems an alien invader in this flat desert landscape.
The Victorian poet Matthew Arnold, at the end of his ‘Sohrab and Rustam’, based on one of the great stories of the
Shahnāmah
, apostrophizes the river. After Rustam has killed his only son in tragic error, the Persian and Turkish armies return to their camps, light their fires and start their cooking, leaving the hero alone with the corpse. The poet imagines the whole course of the mighty river:
Shahnāmah
, apostrophizes the river. After Rustam has killed his only son in tragic error, the Persian and Turkish armies return to their camps, light their fires and start their cooking, leaving the hero alone with the corpse. The poet imagines the whole course of the mighty river:
But the majestic river floated on,
Out of the mist and hum of that low land,
Into the frosty starlight, and there moved,
Rejoicing, through the hushed Chorasmian waste,
Under solitary moon: he flowed
Right for the polar star, past Orgunje,
Brimming, and bright, and large: then sands begin
To hem his watery march, and dam his streams,
And split his currents; that for many a league
The shorn and parcelled Oxus strains along,
Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles -
Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had
In his high mountain-cradle in Pamere,
A foiled circuitous wanderer - till at last
The longed for dash of waves is heard, and wide
His luminous home of waters opens, bright
And tranquil, from whose floor the new bathed stars
Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.
The Oxus marked a real frontier. The Arabs referred to what lay beyond simply as
mā warā al-nahr
, ‘what is beyond the river’, and the name has continued in use down to the present day, long after the people of the area stopped speaking Arabic. Western scholars and travellers have long used the term Transoxania to describe the area. In the early Muslim period, these lands were considered to be part of Khurasan, the vast province that also included north-east Iran, and were ruled from the provincial capital at Merv, where the governor normally resided.
mā warā al-nahr
, ‘what is beyond the river’, and the name has continued in use down to the present day, long after the people of the area stopped speaking Arabic. Western scholars and travellers have long used the term Transoxania to describe the area. In the early Muslim period, these lands were considered to be part of Khurasan, the vast province that also included north-east Iran, and were ruled from the provincial capital at Merv, where the governor normally resided.
It is a land of many different environments which determined the aims and strategies of the Arab invaders. There are fertile river valleys where towns and villages clustered together. Close by, sometimes separated only by the wall around the oasis, were vast deserts, searingly hot in summer, bitterly cold in winter, where only the hardiest nomads could survive. Then there were the mountains, often rising with the abruptness of a wall from the plains, mountains that sheltered and protected ancient cultures and ways of life even centuries after the plains were dominated by alien invaders. Here lay another, different world, of remote mountain villages where people spoke incomprehensible dialects and worshipped their princes as gods.
The most basic divide between the people who lived in these contrasting landscapes was between the speakers of Iranian dialects and those who used one of the different Turkic languages. This is a distinction that persists to the present day between the Persian-speaking Tajiks and the Turkish-speaking Uzbeks. In the seventh century, when the Arabs first arrived, the linguistic differences were accompanied by marked cultural differences, the Persian speakers being, in general, the inhabitants of the towns and villages of the settled lands and the Turkish speakers being mostly nomads.
Politically and socially, the lands along the Oxus fell into four distinct and separate zones.
4
Around the middle Oxus valley lay the land of Tukhāristan, bordered to the north by the Hissar and other mountain ranges, and to the south by the great Hindu Kush, which form the barrier with southern Afghanistan and the plains of India. Since the nineteenth century, the river has formed the border between Afghanistan to the south and the Russian-ruled land of Tajikistan to the north, but in the seventh and eighth centuries there was no such border and people on both sides of the river were part of the same community and cultures.
4
Around the middle Oxus valley lay the land of Tukhāristan, bordered to the north by the Hissar and other mountain ranges, and to the south by the great Hindu Kush, which form the barrier with southern Afghanistan and the plains of India. Since the nineteenth century, the river has formed the border between Afghanistan to the south and the Russian-ruled land of Tajikistan to the north, but in the seventh and eighth centuries there was no such border and people on both sides of the river were part of the same community and cultures.
Tukhāristan was studded with ancient settlements. The most important of these was Balkh, whose mighty mud-brick walls still look out over the flat plain to the mountains to the south. Balkh, ruined and desolate since it was destroyed by the army of Genghis Khan in 1220, was once one of the great cities of Central Asia. It had been conquered by Alexander the Great and had become the capital of the Greek kingdom of Bactria. Here, in the heart of Asia on the banks of the Oxus, Alexander’s soldiers and their descendants established an outpost of Hellenic culture. They minted coins with images of their rulers, in the Greek fashion, as fine as any produced in the Greek world. The palace of the kings overlooking the Oxus at Ai Khanum was an architectural vision directly imported from Macedonia, laid out with broad straight streets, a palace with a peristyle courtyard and a gymnasium for athletes.
The Greek kingdom had withered by the second century BC and the Mediterranean Hellenism and Greek gods had been replaced by the Buddhist culture brought in by the Kushan kings. Balkh became a great centre of Buddhist culture and pilgrims came from as far away as China to visit the great Nawbahār stupa in the fields outside the town.
At the time when the Arabs first began to invade the area after 650, Tukhāristan was divided into numerous principalities, although the prince, who held the title of Jabghū, claimed a vague overlordship over the whole area. The rulers of these principalities were of Iranian or Turkish descent, Zoroastrian or Buddhist in religion. The most remote of them, way to the east on upper Oxus, was mountainous Badakhshān, where the rubies and lapis lazuli were mined, then came Khuttal, Kubadhiyan and Saghānān. To the south, deep in the jagged Hindu Kush mountains, lay Bamiyan, where the giant Buddhas presided benignly over the vivid green fields of the valley floor, while even beyond that lay distant Kabul.
After passing the fortified town of Tirmidh (modern Termez), one of the few settlements actually on the banks of the river, the Oxus turns north. Eventually it reaches the flat lands known as Khwārazm (the ‘w’ is silent), known nowadays as Khorezm, split between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
5
Here it is divided into the different streams and canals that form its delta. Remote, cut off by deserts on all sides, these fertile lands were inhabited from the fourth millennium BC by settled people with their own distinctive culture. They spoke their own Iranian language, which reminded one outsider of ‘the chatter of starlings and the croaking of frogs’,
6
and which was written in a version of the old Aramaic script. This fertile land was ruled by a dynasty of kings, the shahs of the Afrīghid dynasty, who had held sway for three centuries before the coming of the Arab armies, building fortified palaces and defending the borders of their lands against hostile nomads.
5
Here it is divided into the different streams and canals that form its delta. Remote, cut off by deserts on all sides, these fertile lands were inhabited from the fourth millennium BC by settled people with their own distinctive culture. They spoke their own Iranian language, which reminded one outsider of ‘the chatter of starlings and the croaking of frogs’,
6
and which was written in a version of the old Aramaic script. This fertile land was ruled by a dynasty of kings, the shahs of the Afrīghid dynasty, who had held sway for three centuries before the coming of the Arab armies, building fortified palaces and defending the borders of their lands against hostile nomads.
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