Turks and the Caliphate
On July 22, 838, the Byzantine emperor Theophilus clashed with the northern column of a two-pronged Abbasid invasion of Asia Minor outside of Dazimon.1 The fortress city guarded a strategic pass between the central Anatolian plateau and the northern coast of the Black Sea. Today it is the Turkish city of Tokat, renowned for its Ottoman baths and many shops in its beautiful bedestan. Theophilus planned to defeat the smaller Muslim army, and then swing southwest to intercept the main army under Caliph al-Mu’tasim. Initially, the battle went in favor of the Byzantines. On the wings, imperial heavy cavalry repelled and pursued a new foe, mounted Turkish horse archers. But the Byzantine cavalry lost formation, fell into an ambush, and was driven off the field in disorder. Theophilus bravely steadied his infantry. The Turkish cavalry surrounded and shot arrows into the densely packed Byzantine foot soldiers, who by late afternoon were on the verge of panic, when a thunderstorm suddenly broke. The Turkish bows were drenched by the downpour and lost their tension.2 The Turks fell back, and Theophilus withdrew to his camp as evening fell, and then retreated to Constantinople. The battle was a tactical draw. The caliph al-Mu’tasim, however, advanced unopposed across Anatolia and sacked the provincial capital Amorium, also the ancestral home of the imperial family. Then, under a relentless summer sun, the caliph withdrew, but many of his soldiers and captives died of thirst in the blistering heat.3 The battle was the first between a Byzantine army and Turkish cavalry. The near defeat so unnerved Theophilus that in the next year, the emperor sent envoys to Louis the Pious, the son of Charlemagne.4 Louis claimed to be the rightful Holy Roman Emperor, but Theophilus swallowed his pride, for he knew that he was the true Roman emperor. Theophilus appealed to Louis for aid on the basis of their common Christian faith. The alliance never happened. Fortunately for Theophilus, the caliph was satisfied to win prestige as the Sword of Islam and planned no future campaigns. But the appeal was not forgotten.
The Battle of Dazimon announced to the Christian world that Turkish cavalry, as the caliph’s allies or slave soldiers, was now the decisive arm in Muslim armies for the next millennium. Byzantine emperors and generals, who had faced such foes on their northern frontier, henceforth had to battle Turkish horse archers in the caliph’s employ along the eastern frontier to defend the imperial heartland of Anatolia. The caliph, however, and his military governors at Merv in Khurasan had long respected the valor of Turkish horse archers during the fighting for control of Transoxiana, which the Arabs called the same in their own language: Mawarannahr, “that which lies beyond the river.”5 For the Turkish peoples of the central Eurasian steppes, the distant clash at Dazimon was but one incident on their journey from dreaded barbarians, to convenient allies and slaves, to full members of the community of Islam (umma).
The Western Turkish tribes asserted their independence late in the reign of the empress Wu Zetian (690–705), but they failed to forge an imperial confederacy.6 The tribes on the far western steppes north of the Caspian Sea and stretching to the great bend of the River Don had already formed their own confederation.7 They were always beyond the reach of Chinese armies. Their kaghan Tong Yabgu, who may be the Ziebel named in Byzantine sources, concluded an alliance with Heraclius against the Sassanid shah Khusrau II in 630.8 The leading tribe of this confederation, the Khazars, asserted dominance soon after the mid-seventh century. To the immediate east of the Khazars, around the Aral Sea, dwelled Oghuz Turkish tribes.9 But on the central Eurasian steppes of Kazakhstan, Turkish-speaking tribes of the former Western kaghanate contended for supremacy. Rival rulers styled themselves as yabgu, and so deputies of whoever was kaghan of the eastern Turks and controlled the sacred heartland of the Orkhon valley. The Karluks proved the most successful. They held sway over a regional confederation of three tribes centered on Zhetysu, “the land of the seven rivers,” the grasslands watered by the River Ili and the six lesser tributaries of Lake Balkhash in southeastern Kazakhstan today.10 They pitched their tents at a summer encampment on the shores of Lake Issyk, near the thermal waters of the thousand springs. In winter, they encamped on the Talas River near the modern city of Taraz. They also roamed over the pastures of Ferghana, home to the finest steeds of Eurasia, and longed to extend their sway over all of Transoxiana. Many other Turkish-speaking tribes and clans had long settled on the grasslands surrounding the caravan cities of Transoxiana. They traded their horses, salted meat, dairy goods, hides, and woolens for foodstuffs and finished products of the Iranian-speaking agriculturists and urban dwellers. In Transoxiana, Turk and Iranian thus shared a distinct frontier way of life.11
The Tang court, however, never renounced its claims to hegemony over the Karluks or the caravan cities of Transoxiana, but it had to fight off an even more deadly enemy, the Tibetans under the monarchs of the Tarlung dynasty. These Tibetan monarchs aspired to rule the cities of the Tarim Basin and to tax the caravans bound for China.12 Tang military governors of the Four Garrisons, who ruled as independent warlords, set policy, signed alliances, and hired Turkish horse archers. They battled the Tibetans for control of the oasis cities, and the routes over the Pamirs into Ferghana and Transoxiana. The Karluks repeatedly switched allegiances from Chinese vassal to Tibetan ally.13 The struggle became even more complicated as armies of the Umayyad caliphs steadily campaigned to reach the Jaxartes River.
Within a decade of the Prophet Muhammad’s death, his first two caliphs (“successors”) repeatedly defeated both Byzantine and Sassanid armies, and conquered a world empire stretching from Libya to western Iran.14 At the death of Muhammad and each of the first two rightly guided or Rashidun caliphs Abu Bakr (632–634) and Umar (634–644), the leading Muslims convened and elected a new caliph, passing over the Prophet’s cousin Ali, married to Fatima, Muhammad’s only daughter.15 In 656, the Arab army in Egypt mutinied, marched on Medina, and slew third caliph Uthman and his wife during their prayers. The unruly soldiers then offered the office of caliph to Ali. Ali was immediately opposed by the powerful governor of Damascus, Muawiya, a kinsman of Uthman. Muawiya won the civil war when extremist assassins who rejected both rival caliphs thrust a poisoned dagger into the skull of Ali as he prayed in the great mosque of Kufa, in lower Iraq. Ali’s partisans, the Shi’a, refused to accept as caliph Muawiya, who was recognized by the Muslim majority or Sunni.16 Muawiya founded a hereditary monarchy at Damascus, and so removed political power from the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina. He and his successors, the Umayyad caliphs, followed the commandment of the Prophet to conquer Rum, the Arabic name for the Byzantium Empire. Twice Umayyad armies failed to capture Constantinople by siege, and thereby fatally compromised the dynasty.17 Meanwhile, on the frontiers, Umayyad governors directed a second wave of conquests of North Africa and Spain in the West, and of Eastern Iran, the Sind, and Transoxiana in the East.
As soon as Arab armies reached the Oxus River in 671, the Umayyad governors at Merv found the cosmopolitan caravan cities filled with merchants and missionaries traveling the Silk Road a prize too tempting to resist. They repeatedly raided across the river to loot Buddhist, Zoroastrian, and Manichaean sanctuaries.18 These governors set policy, struck Sassanid-style silver coins in their own names, and waged campaigns in the name of holy war (jihad) to preoccupy their unruly regiments of Bedouins lest rival clans within each regiment settle ancestral vendettas among themselves.19 Umayyad governors recruited many Iranians from Khurasan, former heartland of the Parthians, to serve as infantry and engineers. These Iranian soldiers were among the first converts (mawali) to Islam, because the “people of the book” (dhimmi)—Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians—were tolerated but forbidden the use of arms and horses. Iranian soldiers proved more reliable than Arab Bedouins, because as converts, they gave their steadfast loyalty to the rightful caliph.20 Qutayba ibn Muslim (700–715), governor of Khurasan, shifted from raiding to conquering the lands south of the Jaxartes River.21 When Qutayba ordered conversion by the sword, he drove the Iranian urban populations to summon as their liberators Turgesh Turks dwelling on the steppes north of the Jaxartes River. The Turgesh Turks were foes of Karluks and nominal allies of the Tang emperor of China. For thirty years, Suluk, yabgu of the Turgesh, outfought the caliph’s governors.22 He inflicted the first humiliating defeats Arab horsemen suffered at the hands of a foe superior in their own tactics of scorched-earth. Suluk was never defeated in battle, and he was only felled by an aggrieved rival in 748. It had taken thirty years of relentless campaigning and conciliatory policies toward the indigenous populations to secure Muslim rule throughout Transoxiana.
In 749, Abu al-Abbas, governor of Khurasan, raised the black flag of rebellion against the Umayyad caliph Marwan II.23 At the head of the eastern army, Abu al-Abbas swiftly marched across Iran and defeated Marwan at a battle on the banks of the Great Zab River in northern Iraq on January 25, 750. Marwan died an exile in Egypt eight months later, and Abu al-Abbas, who claimed descent from the youngest uncle of Muhammad, was hailed caliph of a new Abbasid dynasty. The victor lured the surviving Umayyad princes to a feast of reconciliation, but during the height of festivities, the new caliph ordered his guards to club the guests and throw carpets over the bleeding guests. He and his courtiers finished dining seated on the carpets over the bodies of the dying princes. Remains of the Umayyad caliphs, save for Umar the Pious, were exhumed and scattered to the four winds.24 Henceforth, the new caliph was known as as-Saffah, “the bloodthirsty.” A single Umayyad prince, Abd al-Rahman, escaped the massacre and found his way to Spain, where the Arab army there proclaimed him emir of Cordova.25 To his credit, Caliph as-Saffah opened the bureaucracy, army, and court to loyal Muslims of all backgrounds, and so the Caliphate was transformed from an Arabic into an Islamic Empire.26 His successor, al-Mansur, founded a new capital at Baghdad, the Muslim successor to Sassanid Ctesiphon, and henceforth the economic, political, and cultural axis of the Caliphate shifted to Iran, and the Abbasid court steadily adapted Persian rituals, institutions, and aesthetics.27 During the ninth century, Persian savants and artists at Baghdad pioneered the synthesizing of Islam with the learning of Persia, India, and Greece into the intellectual and artistic civilization of the eastern lands of the Caliphate.28
The new caliph faced not only a hostile Umayyad emir in Spain but also Alid pretenders and Shi’ite mystics.29 The former aspired only to put a descendant of Ali and Fatima on the throne, but Shi’ite sectarians elevated Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali to a spiritual authority second only to the Prophet himself. Ali and his descendants each was hailed mahdi, an enlightened one, who would herald the end of days and vindication of the true believers over both unbelievers and the impious.30 Caliph as-Saffah, in a bid for legitimacy, directed his governors on distant frontiers to take the initiative in pressing holy war. Meanwhile, the Tang emperor Xuanzong, also in a bid for popularity, instructed his frontier governors to do the same.31 In 749, an exiled Sogdian prince convinced Gao Xianzhi, the Tang governor general of the Western Regions, to expel the legitimate Ikhshid ruler in Shash (today Tashkent, Uzbekistan), capital of Ferghana. In the next year, a Chinese army captured Shash, beheaded the Ikhshid king, and looted the city. But the king’s son fled to Samarkand, where he appealed to Ziyad ibn Salih, the Abbasid governor of Transoxiana, to drive out the Chinese invaders.32 Gao Xianzhi and Ziyad ibn Salih, each a veteran commander, appreciated the heavenly horses of Ferghana. Each also valued Turkish allies.33 In 751, Ziyad ibn Salih at the head of an army of thirty-five thousand advanced north from Samarkand to expel the Chinese from Ferghana. Gao Xianzhi departed from the oasis city Kuchea in the Tarim Basin, crossed the Pamirs, and entered the Talas valley. He commanded ten thousand veteran Chinese infantry armed with pikes and crossbows and twenty thousand Karluk horse archers. Ziyad ibn Salih had slightly greater numbers, but Gao Xianzhi possessed the better officers and superior cavalry. In July, the two armies clashed along the banks of the Talas River at an unidentified site on the border between present Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Although the Chinese heavy infantry held fast in the center, their Karluk allies deserted at the decisive moment and delivered victory to the Muslims. The Tang army was annihilated, but the Muslims sustained heavy casualties.34 Abbasid caliph and Tang emperor chose not to renew this distant frontier war. For the emperor Xuanzong, the defeat was the second such debacle in the same year, and it fueled popular resentment that exploded in the An Lushan Rebellion. Later Tang emperors entrusted the defense of the Tarim Basin to Turkish allies and steadily withdrew to the Jade Gate. The Chinese emperor’s armies did not return to the Western Regions until the Ming emperors. For the caliph as-Saffah, the battle netted him immense prestige as the defender of Dar-al-Islam. Later Muslim historians exaggerated the scale of the victory and reported an implausible legend that Chinese captives were put to work manufacturing the first paper in the Islamic world.35 Yet the Abbasid caliphs accepted the Jaxartes River as the northeastern limit of the Islamic world for the next two centuries. The true victors, however, were the Turks, who henceforth were rid of Muslim and Chinese interference, and so they could gleefully battle each other over blood feuds, grazing rights, and caravan routes.36 Far more important, the Turks could encounter Islamic civilization on their own terms, whereby they could embrace Islam and still retain their language and way of life. In so doing, they forged a distinct Turkish Muslim identity that is still shared by Turkish speakers today.
The Abbasid caliphs pursued the frontier policy similar to that of their distant Achaemenid and Sassanid predecessors. Therefore, Muslim governors along the same frontier stretching from the Caucasus to the Pamirs launched military demonstrations, courted favorable Turkish kaghans, and manipulated tribal rivalries, but they added a new twist to the frontier policy. They incited intertribal warfare among the Turks so that the losers would be sold off as slaves to Muslim merchants, who supplied an ever-expanding demand for labor within the Caliphate between the seventh and tenth centuries. By 800, Baghdad boasted over one million residents, and populations in cities across Iraq, Iran, and Transoxiana soared as Eurasia recovered from the devastation of two centuries of pandemic.37 Under the peace of the caliphs, irrigation systems in Iraq and Egypt, commercial farming, and trade in foodstuffs rose to feed the growing population.38 For the next three centuries, the demand for laborers by the Islamic world fueled the slave trade across the Eurasian steppes39 and Eastern Europe, whereas, in contrast, today the European Union draws many laborers, either as immigrants and guest workers, from the Islamic world. Tens of thousands of Turks were sold in the slave markets of Bukhara, Samarkand, Merv, and Balkh each year. Many Slavs, sold off by the Rus to the Khazars, left Atil for the cities and plantations of Iraq and northern Iran. Bantu-speaking slaves from East Africa were prized as agricultural laborers who turned the malarial marshes of lower Iraq into arable grain fields, orchards, and cotton plantations.40 In 869, many maltreated black slaves, called Zanj in Arabic, joined a popular uprising of varying dissidents under a former Abbasid official, Ali ibn Muhammad, who proclaimed an egalitarian vision of Islam. This rebellion raged on for nearly fourteen years and disrupted the supply of foodstuffs to Baghdad. Turkish slaves, however, were valued primarily as soldiers, especially adolescent males, who were circumcised, given Muslim names, and enrolled into a ruler’s elite units. While these slave soldiers faithfully served their masters, most of them retained their Turkish speech and martial ethos.
Merchant princes first employed Turkish slaves, called ghilman (singular ghulam) or mamluks, as military escorts for their caravans traversing the Silk Road.41 The Abbasid caliphs at Baghdad, their military governors, and their hereditary regional deputies or emirs quickly adopted the practice. In 836, the caliph al-Mu’tasim switched his residence to Samarra, a city nearly eighty miles north of Baghdad.42 Today, Shi’ites revere the city where the last visible imam disappeared in 873 and has been followed by a succession of hidden imams, the last of whom will announce the end of days.43 Caliph al-Mu’tasim also reformed his Turkish slave soldiers into an elite bodyguard of ten thousand (haras).44 Two years later they proved their worth in the campaign against the Byzantine emperor Theophilus, but the Turkish soldiery soon terrorized Samarra, and, with the death of Caliph al-Mutawakkil in 861, dominated the court politics.45 The caliph’s bodyguard surpassed the better-known Praetorian Guard of Rome as kingmakers, deposing and executing no less than four caliphs in eight years. Meanwhile, hereditary emirs outside of Iraq asserted their independence, collecting revenues, administering justice, and hiring their own Turkish slave soldiers during the ninth century.46 Sunni emirs professed loyalty to an Abbasid caliph, who reigned solely as a religious authority of Sunni Islam. They included the caliph’s name on their coins and documents and at high Friday prayers. In turn, the caliph issued fatwas, empowering emirs with powers to act as his deputies. Foremost were the Samanid emirs of Bukhara, descended from a distinguished family of Persian converts, who ruled Transoxiana and eastern Iran from the late tenth century. The Samanid emirs organized massive raids north of the Jaxartes, enslaving thousands of Turks.47 They entrusted frontier defense and distant provinces to loyal mamluk officers of Turkish origin, who, in time, asserted their independence. The situation on the central Eurasian steppes grew ever more chaotic after the fall of the Uyghur kaghanate, because many vassal tribes migrated west and clashed with their kinsmen, Karluks, Turgesh, and Oghuz Turkish tribes dwelling on the central Eurasian steppes. Brutal tribal wars peaked between the mid-ninth and mid-tenth centuries, and the defeated invariably ended up as slaves in the Islamic world.48 Yet despite, or perhaps because of, the misery, atrocities, and deaths from the slave trade, many Turkish nomads learned of Islam.
Many Muslim merchants settled in the caravan cities of the Tarim Basin, and the principal settlements on the Eurasian steppes, especially around the Aral Sea, the well-watered region of Zhetysu between Lakes Balkhash and Issyk.49 They intermarried with Turks, and brought silks, spices, fine cottons and linens, and well-wrought material goods. Their success in commerce must have impressed their Turkish hosts as the blessing of the God of Islam. Turkish warriors returning from service in the armies of the caliph or his emirs likewise brought silver coins, weapons, fine cottons and linens, and well-wrought household goods that enriched the lives of their kin and clan. They also brought home tales of the awesome Muslim cities, the power of the caliph, and plunder and honor won from defeating the caliph’s foes. For these veterans, the God of Islam, invoked before battle, was the god of victory. Fighting as ghazi, holy warriors in the name of jihad, came naturally to Turkish warriors bred on the harsh conditions and warfare of the Eurasian steppes.
In Islam, the believer has immediate and direct access to God by prayer and accepting Muhammad’s five pillars of the faith.50 Muslim worship, public or private, needs only an appropriate space to pray. Turkish warriors would have seen their Muslim comrades place their kilims on the ground, turn in the direction of Mecca, and solemnly bow and rise to offer their prayers to the sky above in submission to Allah. A mosque constitutes such a space oriented in the direction of Mecca, and offering a glimpse of the beauty of paradise, but it is not, in itself, sacred like a Christian church. Worship does not require a mosque; it can be performed anywhere, for faith resides in the heart of the believer. Turkish nomads observing Muslim merchants or warriors at prayer, especially in the early morning or late evening, instinctively felt the same deep spirituality whenever they themselves offered prayers to Tengri, lord of the eternal blue sky. Today the powerful spirituality of early Islam is still evoked in the great summer mosques when the roof is rolled away so that all within the mosque have a clear vision of the firmament during evening prayer. While prayer is offered communally, it is mystical and personal at the same time as each individual enters his own communion with God. Upon completing communion, each worshipper may then rise and serenely depart. I have witnessed this beautiful spiritual experience at a summer mosque of the Sufi order Naqishbandi at Menzil in eastern Turkey. Even though a nonbeliever, I too was enraptured by the moment, and felt whisked off to the dawn of Islam, when the Prophet Muhammad, a merchant and warrior, directed his first followers to behold the evening stars and pray to Allah, creator of the universe.51
In the company of Muslim merchants, many Sufi mystics arrived at Turkish encampments and settlements along the Silk Road. Sufis, whose name designated their simple woolen garment (suf), would have awed Turks as Muslim shamans. Sufis preached a mystical personal union with God through dance, poetry, and song so that Turkish shamans could readily adapt their rituals and folk traditions to the glorification of Allah.52 Sufis, just like shamans, attained ecstatic experiences in trances (sometimes induced by the smoking of hashish) to ascend to the other world. Shamans, however, induced trances so that they could enter the spirit world, confront demons, and effect cures of the sick.53 Shamans ascended to the heavens to glimpse the incomprehensible power of the eternal God. Even so, for Turkish nomads, Sufi and shaman were but two different types of mentors, or hoca; each communicated with the divine in his own way. Muslim geographers and chroniclers, however, were often scandalized when they reported how Muslim Turks after conversion regularly consulted their shamans, who were believed to shape-shift into wolves or birds of prey to battle demonic spirits of disease. Only Turkish tribes or clans settling in the vicinity of the cities of Transoxiana acquired over time the conventional beliefs and practices of Islam of the medresse. Even today, many Muslim nomads of the steppes still cherish their ancestral practices and trust their shamans. When Tsarina Catherine the Great (1762–1796) ordered her officials to classify her nomadic subjects by religion, her officials were frustrated because they found few Turkish nomads practiced Islam as they had learned it from textbooks.54 Instead, they classified nomads by language and ethnicity, and so drew the boundaries of the future Soviet, and then modern republics of Inner Asia.
By the early tenth century, Muslim historians report the first mass conversions of Turkish tribes on the western and central Eurasian steppes. Shortly before 921/2, the kaghan of the Bulgars and his nation on the middle Volga embraced Islam en masse, and he sent envoys to Caliph al-Muqtadir, requesting alliance and Muslim imams to instruct him in the new faith.55 The Bulgars, vassals of the Khazars, had learned of Islam from merchants settled among their encampment for over a century. The caliph sent his accomplished diplomat Ahmad ibn Fadlan, who penned an insightful account of the mores of the Khazars, Bulgars, and Rus living in the northern lands of darkness. Ibn Fadlan’s travels, along with the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, inspired the novel of Michael Crichton and the movie spectacle “The Thirteenth Warrior” (1999).56 In 956, Oghuz tribes on the steppes of Kazakhstan, including the ancestors of the Seljuk Turks, embraced Islam. Many of their warriors had served as allies or mercenaries in the armies of the Samanid emirs of Bukhara.57 Four years later, Satuk Bughra Khan compelled two hundred thousand tents (or yurt) of the Karakhanid confederacy, which then dominated the old Karluk heartland of Zhetysu and Ferghana, to convert en masse.58 Satuk, when a boy of twelve, had been converted by a Sufi mystic, and he concealed his faith until six years later, when he overthrew his father. For two decades, he zealously promoted Islam, obtained a fatwa from the caliph, and built the first mosque in his capital of Kashgar. The later Ottoman historians hailed Satuk as the first Muslim ruler of the steppes, who waged jihad and forged a Turkish state. Therefore, by year 1000, Islam had spread across the western and central Eurasian steppes and was no longer the religion of the majority of the inhabitants within the boundaries of the Caliphate under Harun al-Rashid (786–809), who in his own day and ever since has been revered as presiding over the Golden Age of Classical Islam.
By converting to Islam, the Turkish nomads also gained access to the high civilization of Eastern Islam created by the Samanid emirs. Nasr ibn Ahmad (864–892) united eastern Iran and Transoxiana, and waged war against Turkish nomads north of the Jaxartes River.59 In 875, he received a fatwa from the Caliph al-Mutamid, for his family, descended from an early Iranian convert Saman Choba of Balkh, had long loyally served the Abbasid court. He and his heirs were not the first, but they were the most important patrons who made Persian letters, arts, and architecture the high culture of Eastern Islam. They built the skylines of Merv, Bukhara, Samarkand, and Balkh with the towering minarets of medresses and mosques that transformed these cities into Muslim ones. Unfortunately, few Samanid monuments have survived, but the family mausoleum at Bukhara escaped destruction by the Mongols. Built by Nasr’s brother and successor Ismail, the mausoleum is the oldest and among the finest examples of Islamic architecture of Inner Asia.60 The building measures over thirty feet in height, and tapers in the form of the cube resembling the Kaaba of Mecca. It is mounted by an octagonal squinch dome measuring twenty-three feet in diameter, flanked by four smaller decorative domes. The decorative patterns of the bricks are an eclectic synthesis of styles from across Western and Inner Asia. Any Turkish nomad visiting Bukhara in the ninth century would have gazed upward in awe at the mausoleum’s dome. At the opening of the tenth century, Turkish visitors would have encountered comparable architecture in every caravan city of Transoxiana. Families of merchants and craftsmen organized in guilds, and even peasants of the surrounding villages had embraced Islam for generations. Medresses replaced Buddhist and Christian monasteries as schools of learning, and provided soup kitchens for the poor. Everywhere, Turkish visitors would have seen the rich social and cultural life of Muslim cities.61
The Samanid court also sponsored the creation of a distinctly Persian literature in the tenth century. Scribes and scholars adapted Persian, an Indo-European language enriched with many Arabic loan words, to the Arabic script. Persian quickly emerged as the language of poetry and belles lettres, while Arabic was reserved for religious and scholarly works.62 Sir Richard Burton, the volatile and brilliant explorer, linguist, and rogue, declared Persian the Italian of the Middle East, which one could learn in an evening.63 The greatest of Persian poets, Hakim Abu’l-Qasim Ferdowsi Tusi, composed the national epic of the heroes of Iran before the Arabic conquest, the Shah-nameh or the “Book of Kings.”64 Simultaneously, scholars translated into Persian Arabic medical, mathematical, and scientific texts.
Hence, Turkish khans of Kashgar aspired not only to the political but also to the cultural legacy of the Samanid emirs. These khans learned from the Samanid emirs how to promote a distinctly Turkish Islamic culture throughout their confederacy in the tenth and eleventh centuries. They built the first medresses and domed mosques beyond the borders of the Caliphate. The khans patronized poets and scholars writing works in Turkish recorded in the Arabic script. Foremost was the meticulous polymath Mahmud ibn Hussayn al-Kashgari, whose life spanned virtually the entire eleventh century; he died at the age of ninety-seven in 1102.65 He composed the first comprehensive dictionary of the Turkish language, in which he recorded numerous verses of traditional lyric poems and epics. Mahmud also drew the first map of the Turkic tribes, today housed in the National Library in Istanbul. Mahmud laid the foundation for all future writers to create a literature that in diversity and beauty would match Arabic and Persian. His writings delighted later Ottoman scholars who assiduously collected, edited, and transmitted his works. They were also inspired to follow his example, composing compendiums summarizing and cataloging all knowledge. The Turkish literary and visual arts promoted by the khans of Kashgar thus provided a model for all future Turkish conquerors of the steppes who aspired to forge a Muslim state and culture.
The spiritual and cultural lives of the Turkish nomads were forever transformed, because no matter how heterodox their beliefs and practices, they were members of the umma, the Muslim community of believers. When the Seljuk Turks burst into the Islamic world in the mid-eleventh century, they were perceived not as hordes of Gog and Magog but rather as Muslim warriors waging the steppe way of war in the name of the Sunni Caliph of Baghdad. The horsemen of the Seljuk Turks did not herald the Apocalypse. Instead, they revived Muslim power, dominated the battlefield for the next millennium, and changed the world from Britain to India.