Over in the far east of the Arab Empire, Qutayba ibn Muslim had conquered much of Central Asia in the course of the caliphate of Walid (705-715). When the latter died, Qutayba seemed to fear that the new ruler, Sulayman, would dismiss him, and so he asked his men to rebel with him. They refused outright and when he upbraided them, they fell upon him and killed him—a sad end for a great general. For the next five years there was a lull in campaigning in the region; Sulayman had concentrated all his resources on Constantinople and the failure of this venture made his successor, 'Umar II, wary of any further expansion. Sensing an opportunity and encouraged by rumors that Arab rule was destined to last only one century, a number of Transoxanian nobles wrote to the Chinese emperor pleading for military support. The most interesting is that from Ghurak, lord of Samarkand and king of Sogdia (710—37), since it also gives an account of the Arab capture of the city:
For thirty-five years we have been battling constantly against Arab (ta-shih) brigands; every year we have sent on campaign great armies of soldiers and cavalrymen without having had the good fortune to receive any military aid from the imperial majesty. Six years ago the chief general of the Arabs, the emir Qutayba, came here with a huge army; he fought against us and we suffered a great defeat at the hands of our enemies, and many of our men were killed or wounded. Since the infantry and cavalry of the Arabs were very numerous and our forces could not resist them, I withdrew into the fortress to protect myself. The Arabs then besieged the city: they set 300 catapults against the walls and breached them in three places. They wanted to destroy our city and our kingdom. I humbly request that the imperial majesty, being now informed, dispatch here a contingent of Chinese soldiers to help me in these difficult times.
The king of the Surkhab valley, southwest of Kabul, also sent an emissary to the Chinese court, complaining that “all that was in my treasury and my storehouses, all my precious objects and jewels, as well as the riches of the people who are my subjects, have been appropriated by the Arabs, who carried them off for themselves.” And the lord of Bukhara lamented that “every year we have suffered the incursions and ravages of the Arab brigands and our country has enjoyed no respite” and he asked for an imperial decree ordering the Turks to come to his aid.10
Whether in response to a Chinese decree or not, the western Turks did become actively involved in the resistance against the Arabs in Transoxania. Their fortunes were revived by the able leader Suluk (715—38), who was chief of one of their subgroups known as the Turgesh. He is referred to by Chinese sources as Sulu and described by them as a “diligent and moderate” man who “loved and governed his people well.” He had to fight on two fronts: the Eastern Turk confederation to the east and the Arabs to the west. By marrying the daughters of the Eastern Turk leader, as well as of the king of Tibet, he placated his east flank. In 720-21 he turned his attention to the west and dispatched an army to campaign alongside some Sogdian nobles; together they engaged an Arab contingent northeast of Samarkand and though nothing decisive was achieved, it is clear that the Arabs were pushed onto the defensive. Emboldened by the entry into the fray of the Turgesh, some Sogdians rebelled against the Arabs, led by a certain Dewashtich, the ruler of Panjikent (Figure 6.5), whom we know of thanks to the chance survival of a portion of his correspondence. There he refers to himself as, and is addressed as, “lord of Samarkand, king of Sogdia,” challenging the current holder of that title, Ghurak, who had been nervous of overtly going against the Arabs. We see Dewashtich writing to a number of authorities, especially the Turks and the lords of Ferghana and Shash, beseeching them to support his struggle.
FIGURE 6.5 Wall painting from a palace in Panjikent, mid-eighth century, showing a local nobleman in typical Hu attire. © State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
Unfortunately for Dewashtich, the new governor of Khurasan was the implacable Sa'id al-Harashi (722—24). Having received intelligence of the vulnerability of Arab rule in the region, Sa'id crossed the river Oxus as soon as he received his posting in late June 722. The Sogdian nobles were divided as to what to do: one group wanted to make a stand and sided with Dewashtich, whereas the majority opted to seek asylum with the king of Ferghana. However, the queen mother of Ferghana was not well disposed to these refugees and informed Sa'id that the Sogdians had already left their land and established themselves at Khojand, which lies 150 miles northeast of Samarkand as the crow flies and is the gateway to the fertile valley of Ferghana. Sa'id advanced upon it at full speed and, after a brief siege, the city's inhabitants surrendered. A postmaster sent Dewashtich a short message about the conclusion of the affair: “Here is the news: Khojand is finished and all the people have left on the guarantee of the emir; whatever nobles, merchants and farmers there were, some 14,000, they have evacuated.” If this is a reference just to the Sogdians, and not the locals, then they had evidently undertaken a major exodus to escape from the avenging Arab force. Their fears were justified, for though Sa'id had promised them safe passage, he subsequently executed them, the nobles among them at least. A month later, in the late summer of 722, an Arab contingent dispatched by Sa'id caught up with Dewashtich in his mountain stronghold to the east of Panjikent and brought to an end the revolt of this would-be king of Soghdia.11
This was the last Arab success in the region for a while, as Suluk stepped up his offensive; in 724 his forces surrounded an Arab army invading Ferghana and annihilated all bar a few in a battle known to Muslim sources as the Day of Thirst. This prompted a major uprising against the Arabs right across Transoxania, and by 730 only Samarkand and a couple of fortresses were left in Arab hands. In 731 Suluk besieged Samarkand itself. The commander of the Arab garrison in the city sent an impassioned plea for help to the governor of Khurasan, Junayd al-Murri, who was at that time in Balkh. He marched to Kish and then paused to consider whether to take the long way round to Samarkand, via the plains to the west, or to follow the more direct route, which involved crossing a steep ridge of mountains through the Tashtakaracha Pass. He opted for the latter, but as luck would have it he encountered a Turgesh unit in the vicinity of the pass. Junayd’s men held out, but it was clear that they would not escape alive without reinforcements. The only option was to turn for help to those they were meant to be helping, that is, to call upon the commander of the Arab garrison in Samarkand to come to their aid. Reluctantly its commander set out with 12,000 soldiers and managed to relieve Junayd, though in the process lost all but 1,000 of his men. Junayd and the remnants of his army made it into Samarkand where they were able to hold out long enough for the Turks to get tired and leave. This Battle of the Defile, as it came to be known, marks a low point in the rule of the Arabs in Transoxania. Had they not managed to hold Samarkand, they might have lost control of the entire region to the Turgesh.
Thwarted in their expansion plans to the west, the Turgesh turned to the east; but this proved no more fruitful for them and in 736 Suluk was soundly defeated by the Chinese in the Tarim basin. He resolved to try one last time to dislodge the Arabs and in 737 he crossed the Oxus accompanied by allies from Sogdia and Tukharistan; their target was the city of Balkh, which the current governor of Khurasan, Asad ibn 'Abdallah, was using as his headquarters. Suluk divided up his troops and dispatched them to raid in different directions. It turned out to be a bad decision, for Asad came out with a very large force and encountered the khagan with only a relatively small retinue. Suluk was obliged to flee, and with this second defeat his reputation was fatally damaged; the next year a rival Turgesh faction hunted him down and slew him. With this threat removed, the new Arab governor of Khurasan, Nasr ibn Sayyar (738-48), was well placed to reassert Arab control of the region. Previous appointees had generally come from the west, with little or no knowledge of this complex land, but Nasr had spent most of his adult life there, in the staff of previous governors and as governor of Balkh. He had some appreciation of the local culture and politics and was sensitive to the fact that there had been more than three decades of continual campaigning, which had caused huge loss of life on both sides. He therefore adopted a conciliatory stance upon taking up office. He wrote to the Sogdian nobles inviting them to return home and promising to fulfill their previous requests, namely: “those who had been Muslims and then apostatised should not be punished, no excessive demands for repayment of debts should be imposed on any of the people, they should not be required to pay any tax arrears which they owed to the treasury, and they should not have to return Muslim prisoners except at the decree of a judge backed up by the testimony of trustworthy witnesses.”12 Many regarded Nasr as weak for caving in to such demands, but his policy of accommodation certainly lowered the tensions in this volatile frontier region and extended Umayyad rule there by a decade or so.
In the end, though, this policy of moderation came too late to save the Umayyads, who faced a number of challenges from the east. Most significant was the insurgency masterminded by the shadowy figure of Abu Muslim, a native of east Iran/Transoxania, who recruited a large army from his homeland, comprising both Arabs and non-Arabs, and dispatched it westward to overthrow the Umayyads. Less reported is the Chinese attempt to reassert their authority in these lands in the wake of the enfeeblement of the Turgesh in 738 and of the collapse of the eastern Turk confederation in 744. This initiative was spearheaded by the celebrated Tang general Gao xianzhi (also written Kao Hsien-chih), of Korean origin, who scored a number of victories in the Pamir-Himalaya mountain region, particularly against the Tibetan Empire, from which he wrested control of the Buddhist kingdom of Gilgit, in modern north Pakistan, in 747. And when a couple of years later the kings of Ferghana and Shash clashed and sought the backing of their imperial overlords, the Chinese and the Muslims respectively, Gao acted decisively, subjugating the capital of Shash after a short siege and taking many prisoners, including the king himself. Confrontation between the two empires seemed now inevitable. The Muslim garrison at Samarkand was alerted by refugees from Shash and its commander, one Ziyad ibn Salih, marched eastward once he had received reinforcements from Tukharistan, determined to teach the Chinese a lesson. Some 300 miles northeast of Samarkand, at Talas on the modern Kazak-Kyrgyz border, he encountered Gao xianzhi, who was supported by men of Ferghana and Karluk Turks. The fighting took place over five days in July 751 without any breakthrough for either party, but then the Karluk contingent switched sides and the Tang troops were quickly routed.13
Like the Battle of Poitiers/Tours, the Battle of Talas has acquired legendary status, in this case in the Arabs’ favor. The great Sinologist Carrington Goodrich ranked it as “one of the decisive battles of history,” and the renowned Russian Orientalist Vasily Barthold regarded the Tang defeat as the decisive factor in determining “which of the two civilizations, the Chinese or the Muslim, should predominate” in Central Asia. In reality, as with the Battle of Poitiers/Tours, too much credit has been assigned to a single event. It may have slowed the Chinese advance, but it certainly did not stop it; indeed, only two years later the Chinese successfully dislodged the Tibetans from the Pamir region. The halt to Tang ambitions to the west was actually brought about by the rebellion of An Lushan, commander of all the armies of northeast China, which took seven years to quash (755-63) and caused irreparable damage to the Tang Empire. Provincial governors seceded, distant territories were lost, and the Tibetans and Uighur Turks grabbed most of the western half of modern China and divided it up among themselves. The History of An Lushan, composed some fifty years after the uprising, emphasizes the Hu (east Iranian/Transoxanian) background of its subject: his father was Hu, he wore Hu dress, and his close followers were Hu. It also accords him a cult-like status: “He was seated on a double bed while incense was burned before him and precious objects were arranged. . . . The crowd of Hu around him prostrated themselves at his feet to implore the blessings of Heaven, and he had the animals prepared and arrayed for sacrifice, while the sorceresses beat the drums, danced and sang.”14 There are many similarities between An Lushan and Abu Muslim: both hailed from the wealthy, cosmopolitan, mercantile region of east Iran/Transoxania, both proved to be masters of strategy in the planning of their respective insurgencies, and both inspired such fierce devotion in their supporters that they became the object of cults after their death. But whereas An Lushan failed in his aim of promoting Hu ascendancy in the Chinese Empire, Abu Muslim succeeded in winning a bigger role for the inhabitants of east Iran/Transoxania in the future direction of the Islamic Empire.
World History
