2. An Azd-Rabīʿa tradition, centred on Muhallab and hostile
to _H_ajjāj. This became the most popular tradition among the
Arabs, and is followed by Balādhurī, but opposed by Yaʿqūbī:
3. A Bāhilite tradition, centred on the tribal hero, Qutayba b.
Muslim. In general it found little favour but is occasionally
quoted somewhat sarcastically by _T_abarī.
4. A local Bukhārā tradition, followed by Yaʿqūbī, Balādhurī
and Narshakhī. It presents the early conquests under the form
of an historical romance, centred on the Queen Khātūn in the
part of a national Boadicea. Other local traditions, which are
frequently utilised by _T_abarī, seem to be much more free from
serious exaggeration:
5. The few notices in Dīnawarī follow an entirely divergent and
extremely garbled tradition from unknown sources, which may for
the most part be neglected:
6. The quotations made by Balādhurī (_e.g._ 422. 10) from Abū
ʿUbayda show the influence of a rewriting of episodes with an
anti-Arab bias, directed to the interests of the Shuʿūbīya
movement, in which Abū ʿUbayda was a prominent figure[18].
7. In the later period, there appears also the fragments of a
tradition of which Nasr b. Sayyār is the hero.
Some, if not all, of these traditions developed in some detail, and
where they are not balanced by other versions they present a distorted
narrative of events, verging in some cases on the fictitious. The most
noteworthy examples of this are the Khātūn legend (see below p. 18) and
the typical story of the exploits of Mūsā b. Khāzim in Transoxania in a
style not unworthy of Bedouin romance[19]. It is therefore most important
to disentangle these variant traditions and assign its proper value to
each. The Bāhilite accounts of Qutayba’s conquests, for instance, contain
wild exaggerations of fact, which, nevertheless, have sometimes been
utilised in all seriousness by modern historians, amongst other purposes
to establish synchronisms with the Turkish inscriptions[20].
With these precautions, it is possible to follow up and reconstruct, with
comparative certainty and completeness, that progress of the Arab arms
in Central Asia whose vicissitudes are outlined in the following pages.