The Samanid dynasty was the most important political power of the eastern Islamic world between the years 900 and 999. The Samanid family originated with their eponymous eighth-century founder, Saman-khuda, who was apparently one of the local landowning gentry of the Balkh region in northeastern Khurasan. The family first rose to political prominence in the early ninth century, when the four grandsons of Saman, having won the caliph Ma’mun’s favor, were appointed to senior governorships, three of which were located in the neighboring Central Asian border province of Transoxania.
It was in Transoxania during the following generation that the founder of the dynasty emerged as a major power: Isma‘il b. Ahmad (r. 892–907), great-grandson of Saman and a noted ghāzī (border warrior against the infidels), unified the entire province under his rule. In the year 900 Isma‘il conquered the Saffarids, which until that time had been the major power of the eastern Islamic world, and subsequently incorporated virtually all the Islamic lands of that time from Khurasan eastward into his realm. The dynasty continued to dominate the eastern Islamic world until the dismembering of its realm in 999 at the hands of the ethnically Turkic Qarakhanids and Ghaznavids.
The Samanid dynasty occupies a critical place in Islamic history and political thought. First, the Samanids presided over the revival of the Persian language, culture, and political tradition and their incorporation into Islamic political discourse. Thus the Samanids were responsible not only for the literary and administrative revival of the Persian language but also for having made it into one of the classical Islamic languages, alongside Arabic, and the primary language of government in the Islamic world from Iran eastward. The Samanids also revived pre-Islamic Persian political ideals and concepts, adapting them to the new Islamic norms and culture. Thus, for example, it was the Samanids who imparted Islamic respectability to ancient Iranian regal titles such as shāhānshāh (king of kings), the title of the ancient pre-Islamic Iranian monarchs.
Second, the Samanids established the model of Islamic governance and political legitimization for every succeeding premodern Muslim polity that arose in the wake of Abbasid political dissolution, particularly the precedent of establishing one’s legitimacy as ruler through assuming and executing the dual core duties of a ruler in Islamic political thought: namely, “commanding right and forbidding wrong” within the borders of the Islamic world and waging jihad against the non-Muslims, both inside and outside of those borders. In the Samanid case, this jihad was directed primarily against the Turkic peoples to their north and east. As a result, the Samanid model of government became paradigmatic in Islamic political thought. Isma‘il b. Ahmad is portrayed as the ideal Muslim ruler in many classic medieval Islamic literary works, including Nizam al-Mulk’s famous Mirror for Princes.
Third, the dynasty is, correctly, viewed as a bulwark of political Sunnism—in fact, virtually the only significant Sunni dynasty in the entire Middle East at this time—in an age of Shi‘i political ascendancy. Throughout much of the tenth century, the other major Muslim political powers were the Shi‘i Buyid and Fatimid dynasties. Moreover, the Samanid realm was the bastion not only of Sunnism but also of autochthonous Iranian political rule; its downfall inaugurated a millennium of Turkic domination of the eastern Islamic world.
Finally, the Samanid dynasty played a leading role in the Islamization of Central Asia—an effort that was crowned with success in the mid-tenth century when a mass conversion of the Turkic peoples bordering the Samanid lands occurred. This enduring Samanid legacy secured the dominance of Islam in the Central Asian steppes and ensured that the first invading waves of Turco-Mongol nomads, beginning with the Qarakhanids and then the Seljuqs, entered the Islamic world as Muslims.
See also Abbasids (750–1258); commanding right and forbidding wrong; ghāzī; Seljuqs (1055–1194); shāhānshāh
Further Reading
Vasilii Vladimirovitch Barthold, Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion, 1968; Richard N. Frye, Bukhara: The Medieval Achievement, 1965; Idem, “The Sāmānids,” in The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 4, edited by R. N. Frye, 1975; Numan N. Negmatov, “The Samanid State,” in History of Civilizations of Central Asia IV, Part One: The Historical, Social, and Economic Setting, edited by M. S. Asimov and C. E. Bosworth, 1999; Jürgen Paul, “The State and the Military: The Samanid Case,” Papers on Inner Asia 26 (1994); Deborah G. Tor, “The Islamization of Central Asia in the Sāmānid Era and the Reshaping of the Muslim World,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 72, no. 3 (2009); Eadem, “The Mamlūks in the Military of the Pre-Seljūq Persianate Dynasties,” IRAN: Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies 46 (2008); W. Luke Treadwell, “Shāhānshāh and al-Malik al-Mu’ayyad: The Legitimation of Power in Sāmānid and Būyid Iran,” in Culture and Memory in Medieval Islam: Essays in Honour of Wilferd Madelung, edited by Farhad Daftary and Josef W. Meri, 2003.
D. G. TOR