Bukhara after the Arabian conquest
In 625 AD, the Arabs captured Merv,
which became the capital of Khorasan, i.e. all the
eastern part of Caliphate. From the perspective of
Merv the territory of the Central Asia between the
rivers Amu-Darya and Syr-Darya (Transoxiana) was called
Maverannakhr (literally, "what is beyond the
river"). Arabian raids across the Djeykhun (the
Arab name for the Amu-Darya) started soon after Merv
was captured. It is a remarkable fact that the Muslim
traditional records say that the first campaign
Figures prior to dash indicate a year according to
the calendar of Hijra, those (blowing a dash indicate
a year acording to the Gregorian style to the Bukhara
oasis was undertaken in 54 Hijra (674 A.D.). One should,
however, notice that the famous orientalist V.V. Bartold,
who was distinguished with a rare gift of criticism
and astonishing intuition, doubted in the correctness
of this date.1 Whatever the truth, the only man, who
was able to establish the power of Arabs in Maverannakhr
including the area downstream of the Zarafshan River,
was Kuteiba b. Muslim, a vicegerent of Khorasan in
705-715.
Having vanquished Bukhara, Kuteiba concluded a treaty
with Bukhar-Khudat in either 88/707 or 90/709, according
to the various data. Clauses in this treaty obliged
Bukhara to pay a yearly tribute of 210,000 dirkhems
(silver coins); to give over to the conquerors half
the houses within the capital's shakhristan,-and,
to supply the conquerors with forage and fuel. Kuteiba
founded the first Friday (congregational) mosque in
Bukhara which was in the ark (citadel) of the city.
Mot far from the citadel, he arranged a place for
holiday prayers (musalla). The remarkable fact is
that Kuteiba b. Muslim ordered Muslims to come to
prayer on holidays bearing arms because of the risk
of infidel attacks (though generally Moslems prayed
unarmed). When he continued his conquests in Central
Asia, Kuteiba used Bukhara military forces regularly,
for example, in 712, during his Samarkand campaign.
Kuteiba retained the local dynasty in Bukhara, and
enthroned Takhshada the Bukhar-Khudat who adopted
Islam. However, the increasing popularity of the new
religion dated from the period when Ashras b. Abdulla
as-Sulami was appointed vice-regent in Khorasan (727-729).
He promised not to tax Muslims, causing a mass conversion
of the Soghdians to Islam. Because of this, tax income
nearly ceased coming into the coffers. Ashras had
to establish the previous practice of levying taxes,
which caused the Soghdian uprising in 728. They returned
to their previous religion, called upon the Turks
for help, and regained almost the whole of Soghd,
including the Bukhara oasis. The Arabs managed to
recapture Bukhara a year later.
In 747, the anti-Omeyads, a powerful movement headed
by Abu Muslim, was formed. This movement won a victory
in 749 that established a new dynasty — the
Abbasids — that rose to power in the Caliphate.
Almost at once, as soon as the new dynasty was founded,
Shariq b. Shaikh al-Makhri, supported by the Alids
(i.e., the descendants of Ali, the fourth "righteous"
caliph), rose up against the Abbasids. He gained the
support of 300,000 partisans, and the Bukhara citizens
generally supported him.
Abu Muslim sent a powerful army against Shariq under
the command of Ziyad b. Salikh assisted by Bukhar-Khudat
Kuteiba and some of the Bukhara aristocracy. They
besieged Bukhara for more than a month. Finally, the
city was set on fire; it burnt for three days, and
prisoners of war were hung on the city gates. Despite
taking an active part in suppressing the uprising,
Bukhar-Khudat Kuteiba was accused and, consequently,
found guilty of renouncing Islam. He was executed
by Abu Muslim's order.
As for Abu Muslim, he was killed soon afterwards,
in 755, when he was summoned to the court of the Caliph
and treacherously murdered. In Central Asia, however,
a good many of his successors were left, among whom
was Khashim b. Khakim, nicknamed Mukanna. He proclaimed
himself a prophet and an incarnation of God, found
many partisans in Maver-annakhr and led a mass movement
that covered the entirety of Soghdian by 776. In that
year, Mukhanna's supporters rose in I4um-ichkat (i.e.
in Bukhara itself). Bukhar-Khudat Bunyyat (a brother
and successor of Kuteiba) supported Mukanna and was
executed by the Arabs when the uprising was suppressed.
Then, the old local dynasty, from which Buniyyat came,
was stripped of political power, although it was not
destroyed.
In 806-810, the entire region of Maveran-nakhr came
under the rule of a mutinous emir, Rafi b. Lyais.
He was supported actively by Soghdians. The Soghdians
supported him because they were indignant about the
extortion of the vice-regent of Khorasan and the levies
he put on them. In 809 Caliph Harun ar-Rash-id sent
a large army to besiege Bukhara. Ba-shir, Rafi b.
Lyais's brother, led the defence of the city. In the
end, the city was seized, and Bashir was captured
and executed by the Caliph's order.
Unlike the Omeyads, the Abbasids relied to a larger
extent on the Caliphate's eastern domains and the
people from there. However, the need to reinvolve
the local, non-Arab, nobility in the ruling class
was a lesson the Abbasids learnt slowly. Permanent
outbreaks of rebellion were a direct result and forced
their hand. One of these local nobles was Takhir b.
Khusayn, a native of Pushang (Bushandj) — a
town near Herat. In 196/811-812 he took up arms against
a rebellious vice-regent of Akh-vaz (a region in the
south-west of Iran). At least two of the three best
generals came from Bukhara: Takhir and Bukhar-Khudat
Ab-
bas. The second Bukhara-Khudat, Mukhammad b. Akhmad
(Buniyyat's grandson), held a high position of military
commander of the troops and suppressed the Babek's
uprising (816-837).
Takhir Khusayn was appointed a vice-regent of Khorasan.
He was the first to establish the Takhirid Dynasty
(821-873) which reigned in Khorasan and Maverannakhr.
In 874, Khusan b. Takhir, the last Takhirid, invaded
the Burhkara oasis from Khorezm and seized the city
after a five-days siege. A large part of the city
was burnt because of his warriors' looting; the infuriated
citizens forced Khusayn to flee. Soon after this,
Ismail b. Akhmad became a ruler of Bukhara. This famous
emir of the Samanid House embodied the beginning of
a new age in the history of both Bukhara and the whole
of Central Asia.
The Arabian conquest appeared at a crucial moment
in the history of Central Asia, including Bukhara.
It was accompanied by plunder, fires, destruction,
death, or slavery for many Soghdians, as was normal
during any conquest. But, to make it worse, it was
a long-lasting conquest.
This conquest imported a new religion — Islam
— to Soghd, which had never had political nor
confessional unity before. Islam rooted itself more
and more deeply in Soghd irrespective of the resistance
and hostility the natives displayed to this religion.
By the late ninth century, an overwhelming majority
of the Soghdians had adopted Islam. Islam began to
play a key role in nearly the whole social life. At
the same time, many pre-lslam-ic traditions remained
valid for peoples, and some traditions have survived
until today.
A connecting link between the Islamic period and pre-lslamic
epoch in Bukhara is coinage. After the Arabs' conquest,
the mintage of silver coins, according to the Bukhar-Khudat
samples, continued with the only one difference: these
coins were renamed dirkhems, instead of drachmas,
and represented Arabian legends (normally, short ones
— or two words) along with Soghdian and Pekhlevi
ones. The ninth-tenth century manuscripts describe
three types of coins: musayyabi dirkhems, mukhamtnads,
and gitrifi. In E.A. Davydovi-ch's expert opinion
musayyabi dirkhems were high-grade three-layer coins
of nine or ten types, including those with inscriptions
"al-Makhdf'.n Eventually, the principal currency
consisted of gitrifi dirkhems. Payment of the religious
duty (kharadj) was made in these coins and amounted
about 1,200,000 dirkhems in the early ninth century.
In this period, other types of coins circulated in
Bukhara along with gitrifi. It is common to consider
the Bukhara felses (copper coins) the first coins
of a purely Muslim type that were minted in 138/755-756
in Bukhara . However, there was a group of felses
minted in 133-36/750-754 on behalf of Abu Muslim (written
as Abdurakhman Muslim in coin legends) without a mint
mark. Since many felses have been found in the Burhkara
oasis, these finds give reason to believe that Bukhara
was one, if not the only, place where these coins
were minted. Whether or not this was true, mintage
of the Islamic copper coins dates back to about the
mid-eighth century. The most ancient Islamic dirkhems
(silver coins) of Bukhara are dated 184/800. 1? Unlike
the Bukhar-Khudat's or bukhardatoid coins, the Islamic
ones were of monoepigraphic type, i.e., bearing only
inscriptions in the Arabic, created using the Kufi
script. (That is why they used to be called the Kufi
coins.) Similar coins bore excerpts from the Quran,
the symbol of faith (Kalima, or shahada), name of
a caliph and/or other persons, issue data that represented
a coin name, mint mark, and a date (in letters).
In the early ninth century, the Samanids came to power,
having replaced the Takhirids. According to different
sources, the Samanid aristocratic family came from
Samarkand or Termez, or from the region of Balkh.
Bukhara was not among the domains of Maverannakhr
granted to the grandsons of Saman-khudat — the
predecessor of this family — in 819. Only fifty
years later, the twenty-five-year old great-grandson
of Saman-khudat, Ismail. Akhmad, established his hold
over Bukhara, having exiled Khusayn from the city.
Ismail's power grew. By 892 he had conquered the entire
Maverannakhr and completed his victorious campaign
to Taraz (present-day Zhambyl in South Kazakhstan).
The next year, Ismail's military actions beyond Djeykhun
(the Amu-Darya) were equally successful. By 902 he
had occupied the lands of West Afghanistan, and East
and Central Iran. In this the way the vast state of
the Samanids was founded. This state existed until
the late tenth century with almost all its original
territory. Bukhara — Is-mail was most fond of
it among all his cities — became the capital
of a great empire for the first time in its history.
Data of manuscripts, including Narshakhi's History
of Bukhara written in 332/943-944, leave us in no
doubt about the fact that it was Ismail b. Akhmad
who selected Bukhara for the Sama-nid capital, nevertheless,
none of the Ismail's coins minted in Bukhara have
survived, whereas his Samanid dinars (golden coins),
dirkhems and felses are known widely and found in
large excavations. The Samanid felses used to be found
frequently during archaeological excavations. These
felses were current until the first quarter of the
eleventh century. It appears that Ismail never used
the very important and prestigious right of every
sovereign ruler to mint coins in his own name. From
the time when he came to power in Maverannakhr, he
minted his coins only in Samarkand. Taking into consideration
that Samarkand exceeded Bukhara in both size and richness14,
then, one may assume that under Ismail Samarkand functioned
as an official capital in some way, while Bukhara
was the actual capital. So, the coinage expressed
Samarkand's status as the official capital. After
Is-mail's reign, regular coinage was implemented in
Bukhara which became then, apparently, an official
capital of the Samanid state.
For both the population of Bukhara and the settled
population throughout Maverannakhr the most important
thing was security from raiders. Ismail managed to
stop the raids of nomads who previously had frequently
invaded the Central Asian oases. Before Ismail's reign,
the Bukhara oasis was encircled with a long wall for
protection. It took a lot of resources to keep the
wall in good condition. Ismail b. Akhmad had radically
changed the situation and was able to proclaim with
deserved pride: "While I am alive, I am the wall
of Bukhara."
None of Ismail's descendants and successors could
match his talents and power, though during the first
decades after Ismail's death (907) the Samanids continued
to rule. Even so, the state began to decline. The
leaders of the gulams — Turkic guardsmen recruited
from among the slave population — achieved a
great influence. Akhmad, the son and successor of
Ismail, was killed by insurgent gulams. In about 930,
Abu Bakr Isfakhani began an uprising against Hasr
b. Akhmad, a grandson of Ismail. The government troops
managed to set free three brothers of Hasr who were
confined in the citadel. One of these brothers, Yakhya
was declared emir. The insurgents were routed and
the uprising was suppressed.
By the end of his reign, Hasr had adopted Shiism,
and his Turkic guardsmen plotted against him. Mukh,
Nasr's son, uncovered the plot, made his father abdicate
and massacred the Shiites in Bukhara and all over
the country (942). There were two other noteworthy
events during the reign of Dasr — fires in 929
and 937; Narshakhi mentions that the last fire destroyed
all the buildings north from the Sha-khrud stream.
During the reign of Nukh (943-954) dynastic feuds
continued to trouble Bukhara; in 947, the capital
was seized by Ibrahim b. Akhmad, Nukh's uncle, with
support by a rebellious vice-regent of Khorasan. But
Ibrahim b. Akhmad possessed Bukhara for only a short
period. By the end of Mansur b. Hukh's reign, the
real power was held by the Turkic guard leaders. In
961 after the sudden death of Mansur, Bukhara was
submerged in riots, during which insurgents plundered
and burnt down the palace.
By the end of the century the Samanid state had completed
its decline, and the mutinous military commanders
did not obey the king. In 992, a ruler of the Turkic
dynasty — the Karakhanids — Bugra-khan
Kharun (Khasan) b. Musa invaded Soghd. He easily vanquished
two Turkic military commanders, including one Faik,
who was suspected of treachery, and came to the capital
of the Samanids. After several months circumstances
forced Bugra-khan to leave Maverannakhr, enabling
the Samanid emir Hukh b. Mansur to come back to Bukhara.
Some years later another Karakha-nid, riasr b. AH,
led troops to attack the Samanids' domains again.
In 997 he reached Samarkand and seized Bukhara with
Faik's support. Emir Mansur b. Mukh was out of Bukhara
at the time. Soon, Faik concluded peace with Mansur,
but in 999 he turned on him and blinded Mansur and
handed him over to Abdulmalik, Mansur's brother. In
the same year nasr the Karakhanid occupied the capital
of the Samanids without striking a blow: Abdulmalik
had not enough military forces, and the citizens of
Bukhara refused to support him. The irony of fate
is that the last Samanid bore the name of Ismail,
like the founder of the dynasty. The last Samanid
struggled against the Karakhanids for some years more.
At times he achieved significant successes and even
captured Bukhara several times, but finally he died
in 1005.
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