The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

Transoxiana

“Transoxiana” (mā warā’ al-nahr) designates the territory between the rivers Oxus (Amu Darya) and the Jaxartes (Sir Darya), roughly equivalent of most of modern Uzbekistan and Tajikistan (but not including Khwarazm on the north and Farghana on the south). More generally, it sometimes refers to everything beyond the Oxus, all the way to China—that is, a general name for Central Asia.

Before the Muslim conquest, the region between the Oxus and the Jaxartes was not under direct imperial rule (although Turks and Chinese competed for nominal sovereignty) but was divided among city-states, most important of which were Bukhara and Samarqand, and nomads living in the deserts around these cities. The main income of the city-states came from long-distance trade along the Silk Roads, conducted mainly by Sogdian traders. The region was highly diverse religiously, ethnically, and linguistically, though most of the population spoke Iranian languages.

Muslim invasions into Transoxiana began in the seventh century, but the region was conquered by the Umayyad governor of Khurasan Qutayba b. Muslim (705–15). It has retained close connections with Khurasan, Khwarazm, and Farghana, also conquered by Qutayba, ever since. Conversion to Islam had begun already in Umayyad times (660–750), but the integration of Transoxiana into the Muslim empire began in earnest under the Abbasids (750–1258). In early Abbasid times several rebellions that united sectarian Islamic and non-Islamic religious dissent from politicosocial resentment at Arab domination took place in Transoxiana, the most renowned of which was the rebellion of Hashim b. Hakim (known as al-Muqanna‘, the Veiled One) in 777–79. Yet Transoxiana’s importance for Islamic political thought was mainly in two later periods: the Samanid (819–1005) and the Timurid (1370–1501).

The Samanid period, in most of which Transoxiana and Khurasan were ruled from Bukhara, was a time of economic and intellectual efflorescence. It saw the rise of New Persian to the status of literary language and the recording of Iranian literature and traditions that culminated in Abu al-Qasim Firdawsi’s Shahnama (Book of kings, completed under the dynasty after the Samanids, the Ghaznavids), an epic and Mirror for Princes that has remained significant for Iranian and Turkic Muslim rulers ever since. The Samanids also actively promoted the Islamization of the Turks, and the Turkic dynasties that replaced them (and that began the region’s Turkicization), mainly the Qarakhanids (ca. 950–1213) and Seljuqs (ca. 1055–1194), used Samanid models for their administration.

The Mongol period was the watershed in the history of Muslim Transoxiana, introducing into the region the Chingizid political tradition, which remained valid there until the 18th century. As one of the first regions to be conquered by the Mongols, in the 1220s, Transoxiana’s resources—human and material—were channeled to the needs of the ever-growing empire, thereby eliminating a considerable segment of the region’s elites, artisans, and soldiers. Marginalized under the rule of the Chaghatayid khanate (ca. 1260–1347, descendants of Chingiz Khan’s son, Chaghatay), Transoxiana came to full bloom under Tamerlane (r. 1370–1405), who replaced the decaying Chaghatayids, made Samarqand his capital, and strove to revive the Mongol Empire. Tamerlane created a new form of legitimation, which combined Chingizid, Muslim, and personal elements, and used monumental building and historiography to strengthen it. This legitimation became a model for future rulers in the region and beyond (the Timurids, the Mughals in India, Nadir Shah in Iran and Transoxiana, the Kokand Khanate in Farghana). With the political and economic decline of the region from the 18th century onward, Tamerlane also became Transoxiana’s popular hero and political symbol, a precedent to his prominent position in contemporary Uzbekistan. Another political tradition, developed mainly under the Timurids, was the leading role of Sufi shaykhs, especially of the Naqshbandi order, in the region’s economic and political life: in 15th-century Transoxiana the Naqshbandi Khwaja Ahrar became the factual ruler of the region, more powerful than the Timurid princes, whose capital had by then moved to Khurasan.

Under the Chingizid Uzbeks, who deposed the Timurids in 1501, Chingizid political concepts were revived. Thus only descendants of Chingiz Khan could become legitimate khans, and the Yasa, the collection of laws ascribed to Chingiz Khan, remained valid, especially in the fields of political and criminal matters and court etiquette, coexisting with the shari‘a. The decline of the Chingizid concepts throughout the 18th century led to the rise of non-Chingizid rulers; thus the Manghit emirate of Bukhara replaced the declining Chingizids in 1753. Yet only the Russian conquest of 1865 brought modern political concepts into the region.