7

CROSSING THE OXUS

The initial conquest of Iran had been completed by the year 651. Armies in pursuit of Yazdgard III had come as far as Merv.¹ From there it was only a few days’ journey north-east to the great River Oxus (modern Amu Darya). Beyond the river lay the lands of Transoxania, a world very different from Iran. Although many of the inhabitants were Persian speakers living in the towns and villages, the Sasanian Empire had never really controlled the area in any administrative sense. In place of a central imperial government there were numerous princely courts in city palaces and mountain castles and there were nomad encampments where great Turkish chieftans held sway. Far to the east lay the frontiers of China and Chinese emperors of the Tang dynasty had won the allegiance of the inhabitants of the area. It was a rich land, full of opportunities and wealth but defended by warlike men who valued their independence very highly. The lure of riches and the challenge of combat proved irresistible to the Arab warriors.

Of all the campaigns of the early Arab conquests the fighting in Transoxania was the hardest fought and longest lasting. An entire century passed from the conquest of Merv (650-51) and the Arabs crossing the Oxus to the final battle of Talas, which ended the prospect of Chinese intervention in 751. The first phase of the conquests, lasting intermittently from the 650s to 705, saw Arab governors leading sporadic raids across the river but almost always returning to their base in Merv before the onset of winter and leaving no permanent presence in the territories. The second phase was the governorate of Qutayba b. Muslim from 705 to 715, when there were systematic attempts at conquest of Tukhāristan, Soghdia and Khwārazm, and Arab garrisons were established in major cities like Bukhara and Samarqand. The third phase from 716 to about 737 was marked by serious reverses for the Arabs at the hands of the resurgent Turks and their allies among the local princes. The fourth and final phase (737-51) saw two Arab governors, Asad b. Abd Allāh and above all Nasr b. Sayyār, reaching an accommodation with the local princes which left them acknowledging Arab overlordship in all of Transoxania but retaining much of their power and status.

The history of the Arab conquests in Central Asia is important for another reason. These campaigns are by far the most fully reported of all the expeditions of the early Islamic conquests. Rather than the vague and legendary accounts we have of earlier conquests, and indeed of the contemporary conquest of Spain, the battle narratives from Transoxania in the early eighth century are full of gritty and realistic detail. It is only here that we can hope to get some feeling for the harsh reality of conquest and destruction, of defeat and victory. We owe this material to a historian called Abū’l-Hasan al-Madā’inī. He was born in Basra in 753, just at the end of the era of the great conquests, but lived most of his life in Madā’in (Ctesiphon, whence his name) and Baghdad, where he died some time after 830.² He is said to have collected a vast number of history books, including histories of the invasion of Khurasan and biographies of individual governors, among them Qutayba b. Muslim and Nasr b. Sayyār. In around 900 this material was edited by Tabarī and incorporated, with full acknowledgements, into his own History, and it is from this that the material has been passed down to us.

Compared with the accounts of the early conquests of Syria, Iraq and Iran, chronology is more secure, though the narratives are still composites with different authors having developed their narratives for very different purposes.³ Some strands belong to tribal traditions, clearly glorifying the memory of their great chiefs and the role that they played in these stirring events. The tribe of Azd preserved the memory of the deeds and virtues of their great chief Muhallab and his son Yazīd, and the fame of the greatest of all the Muslim generals in these campaigns, Qutayba b. Muslim, was preserved by his own followers from the Bāhila tribe. In addition, we have a local, independent historical tradition preserved in Narshakhī’s History of Bukhara, which tells us much about how the conquest affected one city and the surrounding countryside.

The Oxus is an astonishing river. If you approach it along the ancient road to the east, travelling across the flat, bleak desert wastes from Merv to the traditional crossing point at Charjuiⁱ, you come upon it quite suddenly. It flows between the Kara Kum (Black Sands) to the west and the Kizil Kum (Red Sands) to the east, banked by low cliffs. There is little irrigation and few settlements; the river carves and meanders its way through a desolate and unpeopled land: here are no palm trees, fields and villages like those that make the banks of the Nile in Egypt such a delight to the eye. The river itself, its breadth and the strength of its current, seems an alien invader in this flat desert landscape.

The Victorian poet Matthew Arnold, at the end of his ‘Sohrab and Rustam’, based on one of the great stories of the Shahnāmah, apostrophizes the river. After Rustam has killed his only son in tragic error, the Persian and Turkish armies return to their camps, light their fires and start their cooking, leaving the hero alone with the corpse. The poet imagines the whole course of the mighty river:

 

But the majestic river floated on,
Out of the mist and hum of that low land,
Into the frosty starlight, and there moved,
Rejoicing, through the hushed Chorasmian waste,
Under solitary moon: he flowed
Right for the polar star, past Orgunje,
Brimming, and bright, and large: then sands begin
To hem his watery march, and dam his streams,
And split his currents; that for many a league
The shorn and parcelled Oxus strains along,
Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles -
Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had
In his high mountain-cradle in Pamere,
A foiled circuitous wanderer - till at last
The longed for dash of waves is heard, and wide
His luminous home of waters opens, bright
And tranquil, from whose floor the new bathed stars
Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.

The Oxus marked a real frontier. The Arabs referred to what lay beyond simply as mā warā al-nahr, ‘what is beyond the river’, and the name has continued in use down to the present day, long after the people of the area stopped speaking Arabic. Western scholars and travellers have long used the term Transoxania to describe the area. In the early Muslim period, these lands were considered to be part of Khurasan, the vast province that also included north-east Iran, and were ruled from the provincial capital at Merv, where the governor normally resided.

It is a land of many different environments which determined the aims and strategies of the Arab invaders. There are fertile river valleys where towns and villages clustered together. Close by, sometimes separated only by the wall around the oasis, were vast deserts, searingly hot in summer, bitterly cold in winter, where only the hardiest nomads could survive. Then there were the mountains, often rising with the abruptness of a wall from the plains, mountains that sheltered and protected ancient cultures and ways of life even centuries after the plains were dominated by alien invaders. Here lay another, different world, of remote mountain villages where people spoke incomprehensible dialects and worshipped their princes as gods.

The most basic divide between the people who lived in these contrasting landscapes was between the speakers of Iranian dialects and those who used one of the different Turkic languages. This is a distinction that persists to the present day between the Persian-speaking Tajiks and the Turkish-speaking Uzbeks. In the seventh century, when the Arabs first arrived, the linguistic differences were accompanied by marked cultural differences, the Persian speakers being, in general, the inhabitants of the towns and villages of the settled lands and the Turkish speakers being mostly nomads.

Politically and socially, the lands along the Oxus fell into four distinct and separate zones.⁴ Around the middle Oxus valley lay the land of Tukhāristan, bordered to the north by the Hissar and other mountain ranges, and to the south by the great Hindu Kush, which form the barrier with southern Afghanistan and the plains of India. Since the nineteenth century, the river has formed the border between Afghanistan to the south and the Russian-ruled land of Tajikistan to the north, but in the seventh and eighth centuries there was no such border and people on both sides of the river were part of the same community and cultures.

Tukhāristan was studded with ancient settlements. The most important of these was Balkh, whose mighty mud-brick walls still look out over the flat plain to the mountains to the south. Balkh, ruined and desolate since it was destroyed by the army of Genghis Khan in 1220, was once one of the great cities of Central Asia. It had been conquered by Alexander the Great and had become the capital of the Greek kingdom of Bactria. Here, in the heart of Asia on the banks of the Oxus, Alexander’s soldiers and their descendants established an outpost of Hellenic culture. They minted coins with images of their rulers, in the Greek fashion, as fine as any produced in the Greek world. The palace of the kings overlooking the Oxus at Ai Khanum was an architectural vision directly imported from Macedonia, laid out with broad straight streets, a palace with a peristyle courtyard and a gymnasium for athletes.

The Greek kingdom had withered by the second century BC and the Mediterranean Hellenism and Greek gods had been replaced by the Buddhist culture brought in by the Kushan kings. Balkh became a great centre of Buddhist culture and pilgrims came from as far away as China to visit the great Nawbahār stupa in the fields outside the town.

At the time when the Arabs first began to invade the area after 650, Tukhāristan was divided into numerous principalities, although the prince, who held the title of Jabghū, claimed a vague overlordship over the whole area. The rulers of these principalities were of Iranian or Turkish descent, Zoroastrian or Buddhist in religion. The most remote of them, way to the east on upper Oxus, was mountainous Badakhshān, where the rubies and lapis lazuli were mined, then came Khuttal, Kubadhiyan and Saghānān. To the south, deep in the jagged Hindu Kush mountains, lay Bamiyan, where the giant Buddhas presided benignly over the vivid green fields of the valley floor, while even beyond that lay distant Kabul.

After passing the fortified town of Tirmidh (modern Termez), one of the few settlements actually on the banks of the river, the Oxus turns north. Eventually it reaches the flat lands known as Khwārazm (the ‘w’ is silent), known nowadays as Khorezm, split between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.⁵ Here it is divided into the different streams and canals that form its delta. Remote, cut off by deserts on all sides, these fertile lands were inhabited from the fourth millennium BC by settled people with their own distinctive culture. They spoke their own Iranian language, which reminded one outsider of ‘the chatter of starlings and the croaking of frogs’,⁶ and which was written in a version of the old Aramaic script. This fertile land was ruled by a dynasty of kings, the shahs of the Afrīghid dynasty, who had held sway for three centuries before the coming of the Arab armies, building fortified palaces and defending the borders of their lands against hostile nomads.

Finally the river reaches, or used to reach, the Aral Sea. Alas, the ‘dash of waves’ imagined by the poet can no longer be heard, for the sea has dried out, so much water having been taken off to irrigate the cotton fields of Turkmenistan; now the fishing boats lie stranded where the shoreline used to be, surrounded by a desolate world of salt-laden dust and sand.

East of the Oxus and north of the Hissar mountains, in modern Uzbekistan, lay the land of Soghdia (Sughd), around the river nowadays known as the Zarafshan (the ‘Gold Scatterer’) but known more prosaically to the Arab conquerors as ‘the River of Soghdia’. The river flows from east to west, rising in the Turkestan mountains and flowing through the lowlands, past Samarqand and Bukhara, losing itself in the sands of the Kizil Kum before it can join the Oxus. The river created Soghdia as the Oxus created Khwārazm or the Nile created Egypt.

We know much more about Soghdia than the other areas. It was the centre of an ancient civilization which also had its own Iranian language, written, like the language of Khwārazm, in a variation of the Aramaic script. A substantial number of Soghdian documents have survived. It was also the scene of the most prolonged and hard fought of the Arab campaigns, and the Arab narratives tell us of the deeds of local kings, such as the stubborn and wily Ghūrak of Samarqand.

Soghdia was a land of princes, the most important of whom were based in the two great urban centres of Bukhara and Samarqand. These princes maintained a chivalrous and courtly culture, images of which survive on wall paintings discovered in Soghdian palaces in Old Samarqand and Penjikent. Something of the atmosphere of one of these princely courts can be glimpsed in the account that the local historian of Bukhara, Narshakhī, gives⁷ of the court of his native city shortly before the Arab conquest in the time of the lady Khātūn (c. 680-700), of whom it was said that ‘in her time there was no one more capable that she. She governed wisely and the people were obedient to her’. This tribute is particularly striking in contrast to the generally hostile attitude to female rule encountered in early Muslim historical sources. Every day she used to ride out of the gate of the great citadel of Bukhara to the sandy open ground known as the Registan. Here she would hold court, seated on a throne, surrounded by her courtiers and eunuchs. She had obliged the local landowners and princes (dehqānān ve malikzādegān) to send 200 youths every day, girded with gold belts and carrying swords on their shoulders. When she came out, they would stand in two rows while she enquired into affairs of state and issued orders, giving robes of honour to some and punishing others. At lunchtime she returned to the citadel and sent out trays of food to her retinue. In the evening she came out again and sat on her throne while the landowners and princes waited on her in two lines. Then she mounted her horse again, and returned to the palace while the guests returned to their villages. The next day another group would attend, and it was expected that each group would take their turn at court four times a year.

Soghdia was also a land of merchants. The period from the fifth to the eighth centuries saw the first great flowering of the overland ‘Silk Road’ between China and the west. The ‘Silk Road’ is a term loved by romantic historians and travel agents, conjuring a world of luxury goods, azure-tiled cities fragrant with spices and long photogenic caravan journeys through some of the bleakest landscapes on earth. The reality is rather more prosaic. The overland routes between China and the west were only intermittently used for trade, and for much of the Middle Ages the sea route from the Middle East through the Indian Ocean to China was a much more important highway of commerce. There were two main historical periods when the overland route came into its own and when the Silk Road became a major focus for world trade. The first of these was the period just before and during the Muslim conquests; the second was the period in the thirteenth century when the Mongol Empire provided a measure of security along the route, encouraging merchants like Marco Polo.

The emphasis on silk, however, is not just an empty cliché: it reflects an important reality. Though imperial China used a lot of bronze coinage, it had very little high-value coined money, silver or gold. Instead, silk, along with bushels of wheat, was used as an alternative currency. Much of this ‘money’ found its way to Central Asia. In the seventh century the Chinese authorities were attempting to consolidate their control in Sinkiang by expending massive resources in paying officials and soldiers. Some indication of how this worked can be gleaned from ancient documents recovered from the Gobi Desert near the great Buddhist shrine at Dunhuang. One example describes an army officer in 745 who was owed 160 kilograms of bronze coins by the central government for half a year’s salary.⁸ Only by paying him in light, easily transportable silk, instead of coins, could this system be practicable. The official would then be able to sell the silk to Soghdian merchants in exchange for silver or goods from the west. The Soghdians in turn would carry the silk to the markets of Iran and Byzantium. Control of this lucrative commerce was certainly one of the reasons why the Arabs were so determined to expand their power in this remote area.

The fourth, and most remote, part of Transoxania was the lands around the Jaxartes (modern Syr Darya) river, now part of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. These lay 160 kilometres north of Soghdia across the plains grimly known as the Hungry Steppe, where the trail across the desert was marked by the whitening bones of men and animals that had perished along the way. Smaller than the Oxus and fordable in many places, the Jaxartes watered the lands of the principality of Shāsh (modern Tashkent) and, further east, the open plains of the vast Farghāna valley. Beyond that, over the mountains, lay Kashgar and the lands of the Chinese Empire.

The nomads of Inner Asia are generally described in the Arab sources as Turks, and it was during their invasions that the Arabs first encountered these people, who were to have such a profound effect on the development of Muslim culture.⁹ The relationship between these Turks and the inhabitants of modern Turkey is not straightforward. At the time of the Muslim conquest, what is now Turkey was part of the Byzantine Empire, and was to remain so for the next four centuries. As far as we know, not a single Turk lived there. The origins of the Turks are to be found far to the east. In the mid sixth century, Chinese chronicles begin to refer to a people called the T’u-chüeh, who were establishing an empire in the vast grassy steppe lands north of the Great Wall which were later to be the home of the Mongols. The founder of this empire, according to the Chinese sources, seems to have been Bumin, who died in 553, with his brother Ishtemi. We have confirmation of this in a series of remarkable inscriptions in old Turkish, carved on stones found in the grassy valley of the Orkhon river in Mongolia. A later king recorded in stone the glory days of the founders of the dynasty:

 

When high above the blue sky and down below the brown earth had been created, betwixt the two were created the sons of men. And above all the sons of men stood my ancestors, the kaghans^j Bumin and Ishtemi. Having become masters of the Turk people, they installed and ruled its empire and fixed the law of the country. Many were their enemies, but, leading campaigns against them, they subjugated and pacified many nations in the four corners of the world. They caused them to bow their heads and bend their knees. These were wise kaghans, they were valiant kaghans: all their officers were wise and valiant; the nobles, all of them, the entire people were just. This was the reason why they were able to rule an empire so great, why, governing the empire, they could uphold the law.¹⁰

 

The power of the Turks was based on more than justice and individual valour. It was based on the skills of these hardy nomads as mounted warriors and, above all, as mounted archers. The early Turks were horse nomads; they lived on their horses, they drank the milk of the mares, they ate their horses and, in extremis, they would open their veins and drink the blood of the living animals. A young Turk could often ride before he could walk. In addition to being great riders, they were also unbelievably hardy. Brought up in the blistering heat and painful cold of Inner Asia, they were able to endure hardships that would destroy other people.

The fighting techniques of the Turks were described at the beginning of the seventh century by the author of the Strategikon, ascribed to the Byzantine emperor Maurice. He writes:

The nation of the Turks is very numerous and independent. They are not versatile or skilled in most human endeavours, nor have they trained themselves for anything else except to conduct themselves bravely against their enemies . . . They have a monarchical form of government and their rulers subject them to cruel punishments for their mistakes. Governed not by love but by fear, they steadfastly bear labours and hardships. They endure heat and cold and the want of many necessities, since they are nomadic peoples. They are very superstitious, treacherous, foul, faithless, possessed by an insatiate desire for riches. They scorn their oath, do not observe agreements, and are not satisfied by gifts. Even before they accept the gift, they are making plans for treachery and the betrayal of their agreements. They are clever at estimating suitable opportunities to do this and taking prompt advantage of them. They prefer to prevail over their enemies not so much by force as by deceit, surprise attacks and cutting off of supplies.

They are armed with mail, swords, bows and lances; lances slung over their shoulders and holding bows in their hands, they make use of both as need requires. Not only do they wear armour themselves but in addition the horses of their leaders are covered in front with iron or felt. They give special attention to training in archery on horseback.

A vast herd of male and female horses follows them, both to provide nourishment and give the impression of a huge army. They do not encamp inside earthworks, as the Persians and Romans do, but until the day of battle, spread about according to tribes and clans, they continuously graze their horses both summer and winter. They then take the horses they think necessary, hobbling them next to their tents, and guard them until it is time to form their battle line, which they begin to do under cover of night. They station their sentries at some distance, keeping them in contact with one another, so that it is not easy to catch them by surprise attack.

In combat they do not, as do the Romans and Persians, form their battle line in three parts, but in several units of irregular size, all closely joined together to give the appearance of one long battle line. Separate from their main force, they have an additional force which they can send out to ambush a careless adversary or hold in reserve to aid a hard-pressed section. They keep their spare horses close behind their main line and their baggage train to the right or left of the line about a mile or two away under a moderately sized guard. Frequently they tie the extra horses together to the rear of their battle line as a form of protection.

They prefer battles fought at long range, ambushes, encircling their adversaries, simulated retreats and sudden returns, and wedge shaped formations, that is, in scattered groups. When they make their enemies take to flight, they put everything else aside, and are not content, as the Persians, the Romans and other people are, with pursuing them a reasonable distance and plundering their goods, but they do not let up until they have achieved the complete destruction of their enemies, and they employ every means to this send. If some of the enemy they are pursuing take refuge in a fortress, they make continual and thorough efforts to discover any shortage of necessities for horses or men. They then wear their enemies down by such shortages and get them to accept terms favourable to themselves. Their first demands are fairly light, and when the enemy has agreed to these, they impose stricter terms.

They are vulnerable to shortages of fodder which can result from the huge number of horses they bring with them. Also in the event of battle, when opposed by an infantry force in close formation, they stay on their horses and do not dismount, for they do not last long fighting on foot. They have been brought up on horseback, and, owing to their lack of practice, they simply cannot walk about on their own feet.¹¹

 

It was these formidable warriors that the Arabs encountered when they crossed the great River Oxus, and they were impressed.

Between 557 and 561 the Turks, led by Bumin’s brother and successor Ishtemi, made an alliance with the Sasanian shah Chosroes I (531-79) to destroy a nomad people known to history as the Hepthalites, who had dominated the steppes of Transoxania for a century. This brought Turkish power right up to the borders of the Persian Empire. There was even a marriage alliance between the Sasanian shah and the daughter of the khagan Ishtemi. At the same time, direct diplomatic links were established between the Turks and the Byzantine authorities, with a view to establishing a trade in Central Asian silks through the steppe lands to the north of the Black Sea.

This first great Turkish empire was not destined to last. Disputes among the ruling family led to civil war and by 583 the western Turks had separated from their eastern cousins and a separate Turkish khaganate had been established in Transoxania. The Turkish khagan T’ung Yabghu was still a great ruler in 630 when a Chinese Buddhist pilgrim called Hsüng-tsang came through his territories and met him in person, but shortly after that he was murdered and the western khaganate began to fall apart. By the time the Arab armies arrived at the beginning of the eighth century the leader of the Turks, Türgesh Khagan, was a nomad chief acknowledging the overlordship of the Chinese emperor. Despite the break-up of their empire, when the nomad Turks of Transoxania allied with the local Iranian princes, they provided what was perhaps the fiercest opposition the early Muslim armies ever encountered.

It was into this mosaic of warlike peoples and cultures settled in a vast and variegated landscape that the first Arab military prospectors arrived in the early 650s.

The earliest Arab incursions across the river were simple raiding expeditions, designed to extort tribute. The Arabic sources often present such raids as real conquests and the subsequent resistance to more systematic attacks are presented as rebellions against Muslim authority. These first raids reached as far as Samarqand, but they encountered stiff resistance and the Arab armies withdrew before the onset of winter. This withdrawal allowed the local people some respite, and we are told that the ‘Kings of Khurasan’ met and joined forces, agreeing not to attack each other, but to exchange information and cooperate against the invaders.¹² Such cooperation was to prove rare in the years to come.

One Arab death in these early years of Arab incursions across the river had unexpected but lasting consequences. It is said that among the Muslims killed at Samarqand in the first raids was Quthm, son of al-Abbās, the Prophet Muhammad’s uncle.¹³ Quthm not only had the coveted status of Companion of the Prophet but he was also his first cousin. Despite his lineage and exalted connections, he was remembered for his humility and his refusal to accept more than a normal share of the spoils for himself and his horse. His memory has been revered among the Muslims of Central Asia and, however modest his real achievements, he is seen as having brought something of the charisma of the Prophet’s immediate circle to these far-off lands, a direct link between Muhammad and the Muslims of Transoxania. The legend arose that he had not died but lived on in his tomb, deep in the ancient mud-brick walls of Samarqand. He was called the Shāhi Zinda, the ‘Living King’, and in the Timurid period (late fourteenth and early fifteenth century) his grave became the centre of a complex of tombs where the princes and above all the princesses of Tamerlane’s court were buried. Their mausoleums with their turquoise and blue-tiled domes remain among the most refined and exquisite examples of Persian architecture and decoration to be found anywhere.

In 671 Ziyād b. Abī Sufyān, governor of Iraq and all the East, arranged that 50,000 men from Iraq, mostly from Basra, should move to Merv to relieve pressure on resources. Until this time, Arab armies had come to Khurasan on an annual basis, returning to Iraq each winter, leaving only a small force to defend the city. The arrival of this large number of Arabs as permanent residents transformed the Muslim presence in the area. There may well have been more Arabs settled in Merv and the surrounding small towns and villages than in the whole of the rest of Iran. They were hungry and ambitious for wealth and adventure: these men were to form the core of the Muslim armies invading Transoxania.

The appointment of Salm b. Ziyād as governor of Khurasan in 681 meant the incursions across the Oxus became more frequent and deliberate. He set about his preparations in a methodical fashion, raising an army of several thousand men from the Arab settlers. Many of these were volunteers who wanted to take part in the jihād but not all were overwhelmed by enthusiasm: one man¹⁴ told later of how he went to the dīwan (register of troops) to enlist for a forthcoming expedition but when the clerk asked whether he wanted his name put down, ‘for it is a mission in which there will be holy war and spiritual merit’, he lost his nerve and replied that he would seek the decision of God and wait. He was still waiting when the list closed and his wife asked him whether he was going. Once more he replied that he was waiting for God to decide, but that night he had a dream in which a man came to him and said that he should join up for he would be prosperous and successful, which proved more enticing than the spiritual benefits. The next morning he went to the clerk and found a way to enlist.

We have few details about the expedition apart from the fact that Salm was the first man to winter across the river, probably in Samarqand, with his men. The army attacked Khwārazm and extracted tribute before crossing into Soghdia, where they made peace. According to the Bukhara tradition, Salm attacked the city and obliged the queen, Khātūn, to sue for peace, but the details are very confused.¹⁵ Salm had taken his wife with him and in Samarqand she gave birth to a son whom she called Sughdī (Soghdian) in memory of his birthplace. She sent to the wife of the lord (sāhib) of Soghdia asking to borrow some trinkets for the baby and she sent her her crown. When the Muslim army retreated, Salm’s wife took the crown with her.¹⁶ This shows that relations between the Arab and Iranian upper classes were not always hostile and that the wives of the enemies saw themselves as equals, though history does not preserve the Soghdian queen’s reaction to the permanent loss of her crown.

Any plans Salm may have had to continue the conquest were brought to an abrupt halt by the chaos that engulfed the caliphate after the death of Yazīd I in 683. Salm’s family had been leading supporters of the dead caliph, and he now abandoned Khurasan to make his way back west, wanting to join in the discussions about the succession. The Arabs in Khurasan were left with no official leader and the tribal rivalries, which had been contained by the governors, flared up with astonishing ferocity. Three main tribal groups were represented in Khurasan - Mudar, Rabī^ca and Bakr b. Wā’il - and they now began a fierce struggle for control of the province. Abd Allāh b. Khāzim of Mudar took power in Merv. He ordered the death of two of the leaders of Rabī^ca. Now there was blood between the groups and war was inevitable. All the rivalries of tribal Arabia during the jhiliya reap peared in this distant outpost of the Muslim world, given added intensity by the competition for the wealth of the conquered lands. These seventh-century conquistadors began to slug it out among themselves.

Rabī^ca and Bakr fled from Merv south to Herat and established themselves in this ancient city, pursued by Abd Allāh. The fugitive tribesmen swore there was no place in Khurasan for Mudar. For a full year they confronted Abd Allāh’s forces. When Abd Allāh finally broke through their lines, there was a massacre. He swore that he would execute all prisoners brought to him before sunset, and he was as good as his word. It was said that 8,000 Rabī^ca and Bakr were slain. Things in Khurasan would never be the same¹⁷ and feuds between Arab tribes were fought out with unremitting ferocity, even as Muslim armies were conquering new areas. When news of the massacre reached distant Basra, the original home of many of these men, it provoked a new round of inter-tribal violence in the city.¹⁸

Abd Allāh was now master of Khurasan, responsible to no one but himself, but trouble was brewing. He felt he could dispense with the support of the powerful tribe of Tamīm: members of the tribe and their allies were humiliated, and two were flogged to death. In revenge they captured Abd Allāh’s son Muhammad, who had been put in charge in Herat. As he lay bound in their camp that night, they sat about drinking, and whenever one of them wanted to urinate, they did it over their prisoner. They killed him before dawn.¹⁹

Humiliated and vengeful, Abd Allāh struck back and the inter-Arab war was renewed with added intensity. There was still room, however, for some of the old chivalry. Abd Allāh was a man around whom stories grew. In one of these he agreed to single combat with one of the opposition leaders called Harīsh.²⁰ ‘They skirmished with each other like a pair of stallions’ until Abd Allāh was butted by his enemy’s head. It was only the fact that his opponent’s stirrup snapped and he dropped his sword, which enabled Abd Allāh to escape, galloping back to his own lines, clinging on to the neck of his horse.²¹ In the general fighting that followed, Abd Allāh’s men were victorious and he caught up with his opponent, now deserted by all but twelve of his men, holed up in a ruined fortress, determined to defend themselves. Abd Allāh offered peace. His enemy was to leave Khurasan, and was to be given 40,000 dirhams and have his debts paid. As they discussed the terms, the bandage around Abd Allāh’s head, which protected the wound inflicted on him in the single combat, blew off. Harīsh bent down to pick it up and replace it. ‘Your touch is much more gentle than your touch yesterday,’ joked Abd Allāh, to which Harīsh retorted that if only his stirrup had not broken, his sword would have made a fine mess of Abd Allāh’s teeth. So, laughing, they parted and, like any good Bedouin, Harīsh composed a poem about his lonely struggle.

 

Carrying a spear all night and all day
Has kept the bone of my right hand out of joint.
For two years my eyes have not closed at any resting place,
Unless my fist made a pillow for me upon a stone.
My coat is of iron, and when night brings sleep,
My covering is the saddle of a full-grown stallion.²²

 

That is how the Bedouin liked to remember their heroes: tough, solitary, self-reliant, brave. It was this spirit which was to take Arab armies to the frontiers of China.

There could be no joking, however, with the men who had killed his son, and Abd Allāh pursued them with relentless ferocity. They took refuge in a mud-brick fortress in the little town of Mervrūd, on the banks of the Murghab river. The defence was led by one Zuhayr, who was bold and adventurous, leading sorties along dried-up river beds to launch surprise attacks on Abd Allāh’s men, swearing that he would divorce his wife if he did not break Abd Allāh’s lines. On one occasion Abd Allāh had ordered his men to put hooks on their spears to catch in Zuhayr’s chain mail and pull him down. Four spears duly hooked on to his armour but he was too strong for them; pulling away, he wrenched the spears from their grasp and returned to his fortress, the captured spears dangling from his armour as trophies.²³

The year-long siege took its toll and the fugitives were on the point of surrender. Zuhayr urged them to come out fighting and break through Abd Allāh’s siege lines, then, he said, their way would be as clear as the Mirbad, the great open square in the centre of their home town of Basra, a thousand kilometres away. But he could not drum up enough support among the defenders, who chose rather to surrender and put their trust in Abd Allāh’s mercy. They opened the gates and came down. Their hands were bound and they were brought before Abd Allāh. The story goes that even now he was prepared to be merciful, but his surviving son Mūsā, standing beside him, was relentless: ‘if you pardon them,’ he told his father, ‘I will fall on my sword so that it comes out of my back!’ So one by one the prisoners were killed in the traditional Arab form of execution; a swift, hard sword-blow on the back of the neck was all it took. Only three were spared when some of Abd Allāh’s men interceded for them.

When it was Zuhayr’s turn, Abd Allāh wanted to spare him and even give him an estate to live on. ‘How can we kill a man like Zuhayr? Who will there be to fight the enemies of the Muslims? Who to protect the women of the Arabs?’ But again Mūsā showed his ruthlessness, asking how his father could kill the female hyena and leave the male, kill the lioness and leave the lion. The demands of vengeance were more important than the safety of the Arabs in this remote, hostile land; he would even kill his own father if he had participated in his brother’s death. So once again, Abd Allāh was swayed by his implacable son. Zuhayr had one last request, that he should be killed separately from the rest of the defenders. ‘I commanded them to die as honourable men and come out against you with drawn swords. By God, had they done so they would have given this little son of yours a fright and made him too worried about his own life to seek vengeance. ’ So he was taken aside and executed separately.

As long as civil war raged in Syria and Iraq, the heart of the caliphate, Abd Allāh ruled Khurasan as his private dominion, but by 691 the Umayyad caliph, Abd al-Malik (685-705), was firmly in control in Damascus and determined to restore the power of the central government. Part of his plan was to establish effective rule over Khurasan and its unruly Arab warriors. He began to negotiate, writing to Abd Allāh, offering very reasonable terms: for seven years he would enjoy the revenues of the province as his ‘food’ (tu^cma). But Abd Allāh was too proud to accept terms, ordering the messenger to eat the caliph’s letter as a gesture of contempt. At the same time, the caliph began to make contact with possible rivals in the province. They were encouraged to rise up against the tyrant. Abd Allāh began to panic and left the capital at Merv to try to join his son Mūsā in Tirmidh. On the way he was intercepted by his enemies. The battle was over by midday. Abd Allāh was pinned to the ground by a spear point while a man sat on his chest and prepared to kill him, in revenge for the death of his brother. Abd Allāh was not quite finished yet. He spat at his assailant, hissing that the man’s brother had been a mere peasant, not worth a handful of date stones, while he, Abd Allāh, was the leader of the tribe of Mudar. Defiant to the last, he was killed and his head cut off. A local man reported seeing his body, tied on to the side of a mule, with a stone on the other side to balance it. The head was sent to the caliph. Many certainly rejoiced in his death but his own tribesmen mourned him sadly as a brave and generous chief. ‘Now only barking dogs remain,’ one of their poets said. ‘After you, there is no lion’s roar on earth.’²⁴

By 696 there was a new governor, Umayya, appointed by Abd al-Malik. He was a member of the ruling Umayyad family, easygoing, generous, peace-loving and, his enemies alleged, pompous and effeminate. He was to have a hard struggle keeping the unruly Arabs of Khurasan in order. The most effective way of doing this was to lead them in campaign across the river, to fill their minds with thoughts of Holy War and booty rather than tribal feuding and vengeance. Preparations were made for a major campaign against Bukhara. Umayya spent a vast amount of money on horses and weapons, money that he is said to have borrowed from Soghdian merchants.²⁵ The process reveals how complex relations were between the Arabs and the local people. Bukhara was situated in Soghdia, yet at least some Soghdian merchants were prepared to lend money to the Arabs who were trying to conquer their Soghdian homeland! For many Arabs too, the expedition was a speculative venture: we know of one man who borrowed money to equip himself to join the expedition but, when he decided not to go, was put in prison by his creditors and had to be bailed out by a rich friend.²⁶ Many of the Arabs in fact seem to have found themselves in financial difficulties, and they complained that the local landowners were left in charge of the tax-collecting, giving the conquered a certain authority over the conquerors.²⁷ For impoverished and discontented Arabs, a raid across the river with the prospect of serious booty was a very attractive proposition.

In the event, Umayya does not seem to have commanded the respect and confidence of his troops and the expedition was a fiasco. After he and his men had crossed the bridge of boats over the Oxus at Amul, his second-in-command refused to follow him any further, crossing back over the river with some of his men, burning the boats and heading back to take over Merv and establish himself as governor. Appeals to Muslim solidarity failed to move him and he shrugged off concerns about the fate of the Muslim forces under Umayya’s command, now cut off beyond the river, saying that they had numbers, weapons and courage and that they could go as far as China if they wished.²⁸ Umayya’s forces were surrounded and in desperate straits and he was obliged to make peace with the Bukharans ‘for a small payment’²⁹ and return to take control. Power politics and rivalries among the Arabs had clearly become more important than Holy War and the spread of Islam. And events showed clearly that the north-east frontier was no place for easygoing and peace-loving leaders: Umayya was soon withdrawn from the province.

Khurasan, and with it the command of the north-east frontier, was now given to the caliph’s right-hand man, the ruthless and effective Hajjāj b. Yūsuf, governor of Iraq and all the east and one of the architects of the early Islamic state. He in turn appointed a man called Muhallab to take command in Khurasan. Muhallab was a figure of almost legendary prowess on the battlefield and a man with a great reputation as a commander. His tribe of Azd, one of the most important and numerous in the east, revered him and his family as their greatest leaders and took care to keep his memory alive in myth and song. He had made his reputation fighting an Arab guerrilla insurgency in southern Iran, hard, unrewarding campaigning in difficult country. He was also credited with the introduction of metal stirrups into the Muslim armies.

Muhallab brought with him his son Yazīd. It was of course expected that the new governor would launch an expedition to Transoxania to provide an opportunity for plunder: neither the Azdi tribesmen he had brought with him from Iraq nor the longer-established Arabs in the province would expect anything less. He chose Kish as his objective. Kish, known since the fifteenth century as Shāhri Sabz, ‘the Green City’, was later famous as the birthplace of Tamerlane, the great conqueror. It lies in a fertile plain at the foot of the mountains that rise to the north and east. It was not one of the most important cities of Transoxania, but it was still a significant prize. Muhallab seems to have acted very cautiously. For two years he blockaded the city, refusing advice to bypass it and push further into Soghdia. In the end, he withdrew in exchange for a payment of tribute.³⁰ The cities of Soghdia were not going to be taken over easily.

The confusion and lack of direction left open opportunities to the more adventurous and unscrupulous and none was more adventurous or more unscrupulous than Mūsā, son of the old governor Abd Allāh b. Khāzim. He carved out a position for himself on the frontiers of the Muslim world, in the borderlands between the two worlds of the Arab conquerors and the old princes of the area. In some ways he resembles El Cid in eleventh-century Spain, operating on the margins, happy to make alliances with anyone who could help him, greedy for money and generous to his followers. Like El Cid as well, Mūsā inspired a biography, or rather a record of heroic deeds, and so his reputation has come down to us.

The saga of Mūsā b. Abd Allāh b. Khāzim was edited in the form we have it now by the great Madā’inī more than a century after the events. He obviously used earlier sources but he does not give the names of his authorities.³¹ The story clearly has a basis in fact but there are many elements which seem to be fanciful, even mythical, but even these give us an insight into the frontier mentalities of the time and place. Unlike many early Arabic historical texts, the story is a linear narrative, uninterrupted by isnāds or alternative versions. It tells the tale of the adventures of Mūsā, his rule of the city of Tirmidh, his relations with Arabs and non-Arabs alike and his eventual downfall. Mūsā’s faults, especially the way in which he bowed to pressure from his Arab followers against his own better judgement, are not glossed over, but he clearly emerges as the roguish hero of the whole narrative. The saga makes it clear that Mūsā was supported by Arabs and non-Arabs, Muslims and non-Muslims alike and, at the same time, that many of his fiercest opponents were Arabs. The politics of his meteoric career are explained in terms of ethnic identities (Arabs, non-Arabs, Turks) and tribal rivalries. Religion is never mentioned. This was no jihād and Mūsā never claimed it as such. He may have built a mosque in Tirmidh and he may have worshipped in it, but, if so, it is never mentioned in the sources. In contrast to many narratives of the early conquests, enthusiasm for Islam and the rewards of the afterlife never figure. The values extolled are those of bravery in battle, of loyalty to kin and companions, of endurance and of cunning. This frontier world was a complex environment where alliances and allegiances shifted rapidly, where Muslims and non-Muslims made alliances against other Muslims and non-Muslims and where the jihād took second place to personal ambition and the desire for wealth and power.

Mūsā had taken over the fortress town of Tirmidh during his father’s lifetime. Tirmidh, where the swift-flowing Oxus swirls around the low cliffs and tawny mud-brick walls of the fortress, lay opposite an island in the river which made it an easy crossing place. Along with the impressive rectangular citadel³² there was a walled town (rabad) outside. The Greeks had called it Alexandria on the Oxus and later under the Kushans a number of Buddhist stupas had been constructed around it. The site of the old town has been deserted since the Mongol invasions of the 1220s.

It was probably the strength of the citadel and the strategic position at the Oxus crossing which attracted Mūsā to the site. Here he established himself and defied all comers. He is portrayed as a flamboyant, larger-than-life figure who went into battle with a red silk bandana around his helmet, topped by a blue sapphire.³³

He had originally come to Tirmidh almost by accident. When his father’s fortunes were on the wane and he was losing support among the Arabs of Merv, his father had told Mūsā to take all his baggage and find a safe place for them. He was to cross the Oxus and take refuge with one of the local princes or find a suitable fortress and occupy it. He set off with 200 horsemen, but as he went on his party grew. By the time he reached the river crossing at Āmul he had been joined by a group of bandits (sa‘ālīk: it is not clear whether these were Arabs or Iranians) and some men of his own tribe. The band was now over four hundred. He now needed a base where he could settle with his men.

The first place he tried was Bukhara, but the prince of the city was, rightly, very suspicious of him and his intentions. ‘He is a murderer,’ he said, ‘and his companions are like him, people given to war and evil; I do not feel safe with him around.’ So he gave him some money, riding animals and a robe and sent him on his way. Next Mūsā tried the lord (dehqān) of a small town near Bukhara. Again he got a frosty reception, the lord saying that the local people were frightened of him and would not accept him. Nevertheless, he stayed for a few months before setting off once more to find a suitable prince or fortress.

He had more luck in Samarqand, where the local king, Tarkhūn, honoured him and allowed him to stay, presumably hoping to use his military abilities against his enemies. It was too good to last long. The story goes that in Soghdia there was a local custom according to which, on one particular day of the year, a table was set with a meat dish, bread and a jug of something to drink. This was the food of the ‘Knight of Soghdia’, and he was the only person who was allowed to eat it. If anyone else dared to take any of the food, he would have to fight the knight, and the table, and thereby the title, would belong to whichever of them killed the other. Needless to say, this was an invitation these tough and reckless Arabs could not resist, and one of Mūsā’s companions came and sat at the table, saying that he would fight the knight and himself become the new ‘Knight of Soghdia’. When the knight came he challenged him, ‘O Arab, fight a duel with me.’ The Arab readily agreed and slew the knight. At this point, however, the rules changed; it seems there could not be an Arab Knight of Soghdia. The king was furious and told Mūsā and his men to get out, adding that if he had not previously granted them safe conduct, he would have had them all killed.³⁴

Mūsā and his men were now complete outlaws and every man’s hand was against them. They crossed the mountains south to Kish. Here the local king took up arms against them and appealed to Tarkhūn of Samarqand for help. Mūsā and his 700 companions fought the kings for a whole day and many of his men were wounded. In the evening they began negotiations. One of Mūsā’s followers argued with Tarkhūn that killing Mūsā would be of no advantage to him; he would inevitably lose many of his own best men in the fighting and, besides, Mūsā was a man of high standing among the Arabs (a debatable point by this stage) and that if he killed him, the Arabs would certainly try to avenge him. For his part Tarkhūn said he was not prepared to allow Mūsā to remain in Kish, which was too close for comfort. So it was agreed that Mūsā and his men should set off on their travels once more.³⁵

In 689 they marched south to Tirmidh on the Oxus, which was to be Mūsā’s base for the rest of his life. Here he met one of the dehqāns of the Tirmidh shāh, who was on bad terms with his master and was prepared to give Mūsā advice on how to approach him. He told him that the shāh was a generous and extremely shy monarch and if he was treated kindly and given presents, he would let Mūsā into his citadel, ‘for’, he added, ‘he is weak’. At first, when Mūsā arrived at the citadel, he ignored the advice and simply demanded to be let in, but when this was refused he resorted to guile. He invited the unsuspecting shāh to come out hunting with him and went to great lengths to treat him kindly. When they got back to the city the shāh prepared a banquet and invited Mūsā and a hundred of his followers to have lunch (ghadā). When Mūsā and his men rode into the city, their horses started to neigh to each other and the people of the city saw this as an evil omen. Worried, they told Mūsā and his men to dismount. Then they entered the palace and had their meal. When they had finished, Mūsā reclined and settled in but the shāh and his men, now increasingly anxious, asked them to leave. Mūsā simply refused, saying that he would never find another palace (manzil) as nice as this and it would either be his home or his grave. Fighting broke out in the city. A number of the inhabitants were killed and others fled. Mūsā took control of the city and told the shāh that he could leave and he would not stand in his way. So the shāh left and went to seek support from the Turkish nomads. They dismissed him with contempt, mocking him for allowing a hundred men to expel him from his homeland. ‘Besides,’ they said, ‘we have already fought these men at Kish and we don’t want to fight them again.’ History does not record the fate of the shāh, now an exile, but Transoxania in the eighth century was clearly no place for a naive and trusting ruler like him.

Mūsā was now established as ruler of the fortress and the city, owing allegiance to no one. He already had 700 men with him and when his father, Abd Allāh, was ignominiously killed in battle as he attempted to come to join him there, 400 of his followers survived to join Mūsā. With this small band, he set out to acquire more followers and wealth and defend himself against his enemies.

There were plenty of those. Against the Turks he is said to have used a mixture of wit and bluff to avoid conflict. Some of the stories seem to belong to a genre of folklore in which one ethnic group is terribly clever and another terribly stupid, in this case ‘smart Arabs, dim Turks’. They may reflect jokes that were in circulation at the time. In one improbable anecdote a deputation of Turks arrives in the height of summer (when temperatures in Tirmidh can reach 50 degrees Celsius), to find Mūsā and his companions sitting round a fire in all their winter clothes. When asked what they were doing they explained that they found it cold in the summer and hot in the winter. The Turks concluded that they must be jinn, spirits, not ordinary men, and so they left the Arabs without fighting them.³⁶ In another tale the Turkish chiefs sent Mūsā a gift of arrows (to signify war) or the valuable perfume musk (to signify peace) and asked him to choose. Typically, Mūsā responded by breaking the arrows and throwing the musk away. At this the Turks concluded that they would not take on a man who was so clearly out of his mind.

When Umayya became governor of Khurasan in 691, he decided to send an expedition to root Mūsā out. The people of Tirmidh, too, had had enough of Mūsā and his gang and approached the Turks proposing that they ally together against him. Mūsā found himself besieged by an Arab army on one side and a Turkish one on the other. We are told of one of those advice-giving sessions that the Arab narrators employ when they want to discuss military strategy. In the end it was decided that Mūsā should launch a night attack on the Turks as the Arabs were better at night fighting. The raid was a success and they fell upon the unsuspecting Turks and took possession of their camp and weapons and money. Against the Arabs, Mūsā and his men decided to use a stratagem. One of Mūsā’s officers volunteered to be beaten by his master so that he could go to the Arab commander as a defector. When Mūsā remonstrated that he would certainly be flogged and probably killed, the man replied that he risked being killed every day anyhow and that being beaten was much easier than the rest of his plan. The stripes on his back must have made his case plausible for he was accepted as a defector and admitted into the Arab commander’s inner circle. One day he found the commander alone and unarmed. He remonstrated that he thought it unwise to be so defenceless but the commander pulled back his bedding (farsh) to reveal an unsheathed sword - whereupon Mūsā’s man seized it and killed him. He galloped back to Mūsā’s lines before anyone knew what had happened. After the death of their commander, the attacking Arab army broke up, some fleeing across the river, others appealing to Mūsā for safe conduct, which he readily granted.³⁷

After this triumph against Turks and Arabs allied together, Mūsā’s position became much stronger. The Arab governors who succeeded Umayya made no attempt to dislodge him from his riverside domain. On the contrary, he became a focus for all those who resented the Arab presence in Transoxania.

Among these were two brothers, Hurayth and Thābit b. Qutba. They were local men, probably of upper-class Iranian stock, who had converted to Islam and attached themselves as mawli (clients) to the Arab tribe of Khuzā^ca. This connection brought them Arab allies from the tribe. They had made themselves useful to the Arab governors and tax collectors and intermediaries, since they knew the local languages and conditions. Thābit was especially popular among the non-Arabs (ajam), enjoying great reputation and honour. It was said that if someone wished to swear a binding oath, they would do so on the life of Thābit and would never break their word.³⁸ They were rich and powerful but were still not fully accepted as equals by the Arabs. At one point Hurayth did a favour to the king of Kish, allowing the return of hostages taken in exchange for tribute. This was against the express orders of the governor of Khurasan, Yazīd b. al-Muhallab, who clearly suspected that Hurayth’s sympathies lay with the king. Hurayth compounded the offence by appearing to cast doubt on Yazīd’s ancestry. A band of Turks intercepted him and demanded a ransom, boasting that they had already extracted one from Yazīd. Hurayth defied them and defeated them saying, ‘Do you imagine that Yazīd’s mother gave birth to me?’ If there was one sure way of incurring an Arab’s wrath it was to insult his mother, and Hurayth’s incautious words reached Yazīd, who arrested him, had him stripped naked and given thirty lashes. The beating was bad enough, but the shame of being stripped naked in public was worse: Hurayth said he would rather have had 300 lashes and kept his modesty intact.³⁹

After this Hurayth and his brother decided to get away from the governor while they could. They left with 300 of their shakiriya^k and some Arabs. They rode first to Tarkhūn, the king of Samarqand, who had let Mūsā go free some time before. He took up their cause and gathered support from the people of Bukhara and Saghanian and two other princes, Nayzak and the Sabal of Khuttal. Together they set out to join Mūsā in Tirmidh.

At the same time Mūsā was joined by a large number of fugitive Arab tribesmen. Further south in Sistan, the Arab army had mutinied, fed up with long and difficult campaigns in harsh and unrewarding country. Under the leadership of Abd al-Rahmān b. al-Ash^cath they had marched west to Iraq to challenge Umayyad rule. The caliph Abd al-Malik and his right-hand man Hajjāj were too powerful for them, the rebels were defeated and the survivors now fled to the east. Eight thousand of them now came to Tirmidh to join Mūsā.

Mūsā’s forces were now much larger, but they were united only in their hatred of the Umayyad regime. Relations between the Arabs and non-Arabs were likely to be strained, and Mūsā seems to have realized that he had to act very carefully and diplomatically in the handling of his troops. Hurayth and the Iranian princes were ambitious. They suggested that Mūsā should cross the Oxus, drive out the Umayyad governor and take over the whole province of Khurasan. They thought that Mūsā would essentially become their puppet and half a century of Arab-Muslim conquest would have been reversed. The Arabs in Mūsā’s army were suspicious, seeing nothing in it for them: either the Umayyads would counter-attack, for they could not simply let all of Khurasan go, or the Iranians would rule the province in their own interests. They were able to persuade Mūsā to adopt a more limited objective, the expulsion of Umayyad governors from all of Transoxania so that, as they put it, ‘the region will be ours to devour’.⁴⁰

This seems to have been achieved without any great difficulty and the Transoxanian princes now went home, hoping, no doubt, that they had finally put an end to the Arab threat to their homelands. Mūsā ruled Tirmidh with Hurayth and Thābit as his chief ministers. Revenues flowed in and Mūsā became powerful. Many of his Arab supporters, however, resented the influence of the Iranian administrators, telling Mūsā that they were treacherous and urging him to kill them. At first he refused these blandishments, saying that he would not betray men who had done so much for him, but gradually they managed to convince him.

Meanwhile Mūsā faced a more pressing threat. The Iranian princes may have seen him as an ally but the nomad Turks did not. They now assembled an army which the Arab sources said, no doubt with some exaggeration, numbered 70,000 ‘men with tapering helmets [bayda dht qunis]’,⁴¹ the characteristic pointed helmets of Central Asia as distinct from the more rounded helmets favoured by the Arabs. This massive Turkish attack, if indeed it ever happened, gave the author of the saga another opportunity to show Mūsā’s military skill and cunning. Mūsā, like many of his contemporaries, commanded the battle seated on a chair (kursī), with an escort of 300 heavily armoured horsemen. He allowed the Turks to breach the walls of the suburb of Tirmidh and sat there calmly, playing with the axe in his hand until he saw the moment to fall upon them and drive them out. He joined the battle and then returned to his chair. The intimidated Turks, according to our narrator, compared him to the great Iranian hero (and legendary opponent of the Turks) Rustam and withdrew.

In the next episode the Turks captured some of Mūsā’s grazing livestock. Mūsā was very depressed by the insult to his prestige; he refused to eat and ‘played with his beard’, contemplating his revenge. Then he decided on another night attack. With 700 men he followed a dry river bed, hidden by the vegetation on each side, until he reached the earthwork of the Turkish encampment. Here they waited until the livestock were driven out to pasture in the morning. Then they rounded them up, killing anyone who objected, and led the beasts home.

The next morning the Turks renewed the fighting. Their king stood on a hill surrounded by 10,000 of his best-equipped soldiers (again the numbers must be taken with a grain of salt). Mūsā encouraged his followers, saying that if they defeated this group, the rest would be easy. Hurayth led the attack but was wounded by an arrow in the head. He died two days later and was buried in his yurt (qubba). Meanwhile, in yet another night attack, Mūsā’s brother wounded the king and his horse, which galloped off to the river. Here the king, weighed down by his heavy chain mail, was drowned.⁴² The heads of the slain enemy were taken back to Tirmidh and made into two pyramids.^l

After this victory, the tensions between the Arabs and Hurayth’s surviving brother Thābit intensified. Mūsā was under constant pressure to get rid of him but he steadfastly refused, so the Arabs decided to take matters into their own hands. Thābit, however, was aware that something was up. He found a young Arab from the tribe of Khuzā^ca, the tribe he was affiliated to, and prevailed upon him to act as an informer. The youth was to play the role of a humble servant who was a captive from distant Bamyan in the heart of the Hindu Kush mountains. He was to pretend he knew no Arabic. Thābit remained on the alert, with his shakiriya guarding him every night. Meanwhile Mūsā still refused to allow the killing of Thābit because there was no justification for it and it would lead to disaster for all of them. In the end, one of his brothers, with some Arab friends, decided to take the initiative. They wore Mūsā down so that he weakly accepted their suggestion that they should waylay Thābit as he came in the next day, take him to a nearby house and execute him. Mūsā was very reluctant and warned them again that it would be the end of them.

Thābit’s young agent, of course, heard all this and immediately informed his master, who gathered twenty horsemen and slipped away that night. When morning came and Thābit had disappeared the group of Arabs did not at first realize how they had been outmanoeuvred, but when they noticed that the young man was no longer with them, they understood the ruse.

Thābit and his men fortified themselves in a nearby town,⁴³ where he was joined by Tarkhūn and the people of Kish, Nasaf and Bukhara, who had supported him when he originally came to Tirmidh. It had become a straight conflict between the Arabs and the locals. Now that open conflict was inevitable, Mūsā wanted to finish it off as quickly as possible, and he led his men to attack Thābit. He and his men soon found themselves surrounded and in dire straits. Once more treachery would have to be used where force was failing. Yazīd, one of Mūsā’s Arab supporters, decided that being killed was better than death by hunger and came to Thābit pretending to be a defector. Unfortunately for him, he had a cousin called Zuhayr, who was a close adviser to Thābit and knew Yazīd only too well: political allegiances in Transoxania often cut across racial and even kinship boundaries. He warned Thābit against Yazīd. Yazīd in turn said that he was a man who had already suffered enough, having been forced by the Umayyad authorities to leave Iraq and come to Khurasan with his family and, anyhow, Zuhayr was only acting out of spite. So he was allowed to stay as long as he left his two young sons as hostages.

Yazīd bided his time and waited for his opportunity. One day news came from Merv that the son of one of Thābit’s Arab supporters had died, and so with a small entourage he went to offer his condolences. By the time they were returning it was dark, and in a moment when Thābit was separated from his other companions, Yazīd seized his chance and gave Thābit a mighty blow to the head with his sword. He lingered for a couple of weeks before dying. With his two accomplices Yazīd fled, but his unfortunate children were left to pay the price of their father’s crime. Zuhayr brought them to Tarkhūn, who seems to have taken command after Thābit’s death. One was executed immediately, his corpse and his head being thrown into the river. The second turned aside at the moment when the blow was being struck and was injured in the chest. Severely wounded, he was thrown into the river, where he drowned.

With the death of Thābit, his followers and allies lost heart. Leadership of the army was assumed by Tarkhūn. When warned that Mūsā was about to attempt a night attack on his camp, he was full of scorn: ‘Mūsā couldn’t even enter his own privy without help,’ he told his followers. It was never a wise move to underestimate Mūsā. The night attack duly came and there was fierce fighting in and around the camp. At one stage one of Mūsā’s Arab followers reached Tarkhūn’s own tent, finding him sitting on a chair in front of the fire his shakiriya had lit. His shākiriya, who should have been protecting him, fled, but he fought off the attacker himself and in the counter-attack he succeeded in killing one of Mūsā’s own brothers. He sent a message to Mūsā, who, of course, he knew quite well, asking him to call off his men if he agreed to withdraw. The next day, the non-Arabs packed up and went home to their own lands.⁴⁴

On the surface, this seemed like a famous victory for Mūsā, but in fact it marked the beginning of the end. He had been able to maintain his independence because he enjoyed the support of his Arab followers and the non-Arabs led by Hurayth and then by Thābit. When Mūsā had only a thousand or so Arab followers, they seem to have been able to cooperate, but with the arrival of many more Arabs from the defeated rebel armies, the pressures proved too great. Without the support of the non-Arabs of Transoxania, Mūsā’s dream of independence perished. To his credit, he himself seems to have understood this and made considerable efforts to keep his coalition together. But in the end blood was thicker than water and he sided with the Arabs against the rest.

The end came in 704 when the new Umayyad governor of Khurasan ⁴⁵ allied with the Iranian princes sent an army against him in Tirmidh and Mūsā was killed when his horse stumbled as he tried to escape. He had enjoyed fifteen years of effective independence, king of his riverside stronghold and magnet for the restless and disaffected, Arab and Iranian alike. He was a man whose reputation had spread far and wide. In the little provincial town of Qūmis in northern Iran, 800 kilometres from Tirmidh, there was a man called Abd Allāh, at whose house the young men of the district would gather, no doubt telling stories and generally shooting the breeze. His hospitality cost Abd Allāh dear, and when his debts mounted up it was all the way to Mūsā that he went for help. He was not disappointed and was rewarded with a gift of 4,000 silver dirhams. It was among men like Abd Allāh that Mūsā’s memory was kept green, celebrated in poetry, and it must have been they who remembered the stories that form the basis of his saga as it has come down to us.