THE SPREAD OF ISLAM IN PERSIA AND CENTRAL ASIA.
In order to follow the course of the spread of Islam eastward into
Central Asia, we must retrace our steps to the period of the first Arab
conquests. By the middle of the seventh century, the great dynasty of
the Sāsānids had fallen, and the vast empire of Persia that for four
centuries had withstood the might of Rome and Byzantium, now became the
heritage of the Muslims. When the armies of the state had been routed,
the mass of the people offered little resistance; the reigns of the
last representatives of the Sāsānid dynasty had been marked by terrible
anarchy, and the sympathies of the people had been further alienated
from their rulers on account of the support they gave to the
persecuting policy of the state religion of Zoroastrianism. The
Zoroastrian priests had acquired an enormous influence in the state;
they were well-nigh all-powerful in the councils of the king and
arrogated to themselves a very large share in the civil administration.
They took advantage of their position to persecute all those religious
bodies—(and they were many)—that dissented from them. Besides the
numerous adherents of older forms of the Persian religion, there were
Christians, Jews, Sabæans and numerous sects in which the speculations
of Gnostics, Manichæans and Buddhists found expression. In all of
these, persecution had stirred up feelings of bitter hatred against the
established religion and the dynasty that supported its oppressions,
and so caused the Arab conquest to appear in the light of a
deliverance. [687] The followers of all these varied forms of faith
could breathe again under a rule that granted them religious freedom
and exemption from military service, on payment of a light tribute. For
the Muslim law granted toleration and the right of paying jizyah not
only to the Christians and Jews, but to Zoroastrians and Sabæans, to
worshippers of idols, of fire and of stone. [688] It was said that the
Prophet himself had distinctly given directions that the Zoroastrians
were to be treated exactly like “the people of the book,” i.e. the Jews
and Christians, and that jizyah might also be taken from them in return
for protection, [689]—a tradition that probably arose in the second
century of the Hijrah, when apostolic sanction was sought for the
toleration that had been extended to all the followers of the various
faiths that Arabs had found in the countries they had conquered,
whether such non-Muslims came under the category Ahl al-Kitāb or not.
[690]
To the distracted Christian Church in Persia the change of government
brought relief from the oppression of the Sāsānid kings, who had
fomented the bitter struggles of Jacobites and Nestorians and added to
the confusion of warring sects. Some reference has already [691] been
made to earlier persecutions, and even during the expiring agony of the
Sāsānid dynasty, Khusrau II, exasperated at the defeat he had suffered
at the hands of the Christian emperor, Heraclius, ordered a fresh
persecution of the Christians within his dominions, a persecution from
which all the various Christian sects alike had to suffer. These
terrible conditions may well have prepared men’s minds for that
revulsion of feeling that facilitates a change of faith. “Side by side
with the political chaos in the state was the moral confusion that
filled the minds of the Christians; distracted by such an accumulation
of disasters and by the moral agony wrought by the furious conflict of
so many warring doctrines among them, they tended towards that peculiar
frame of mind in which a new doctrine finds it easy to take root,
making a clean sweep of such a bewildering babel and striving to
reconstruct faith and society on a new basis. In other words the people
of Persia, and especially the Semitic races, were just in the very
mental condition calculated to make them welcome the Islamic revolution
and urge them on to enthusiastically embrace the new and rugged creed,
which with its complete and virile simplicity swept away at one stroke
all those dark mists, opened the soul to new, alluring and tangible
hopes, and promised immediate release from a miserable state of
servitude.” [692]
But the Muslim creed was most eagerly welcomed by the townsfolk, the
industrial classes and the artisans, whose occupations made them impure
according to the Zoroastrian creed, because in the pursuance of their
trade or occupations they defiled fire, earth or water, and who thus,
outcasts in the eyes of the law and treated with scant consideration in
consequence, embraced with eagerness a creed that made them at once
free men, and equal in a brotherhood of faith. [693] Nor were the
conversions from Zoroastrianism itself less striking: the fabric of the
National Church had fallen with a crash in the general ruin of the
dynasty that had before upheld it; having no other centre round which
to rally, the followers of this creed would find the transition to
Islam a simple and easy one, owing to the numerous points of similarity
in the old creed and the new. For the Persian could find in the Qurʼān
many of the fundamental doctrines of his old faith, though in a rather
different form: he would meet again Ahuramazda and Ahriman under the
names of Allāh and Iblīs; the creation of the world in six periods; the
angels and the demons; the story of the primitive innocence of man; the
resurrection of the body and the doctrine of heaven and hell. [694]
Even in the details of daily worship there were similarities to be
found and the followers of Zoroaster when they adopted Islam were
enjoined by their new faith to pray five times a day just as they had
been by the Avesta. [695] Those tribes in the north of Persia that had
stubbornly resisted the ecclesiastical organisation of the state
religion, on the ground that each man was a priest in his own household
and had no need of any other, and believing in a supreme being and the
immortality of the soul, taught that a man should love his neighbour,
conquer his passions, and strive patiently after a better life—such men
could have needed very little persuasion to induce them to accept the
faith of the Prophet. [696] Islam had still more points of contact with
some of the heretical sects of Persia, that had come under the
influence of Christianity.
In addition to the causes above enumerated of the rapid spread of Islam
in Persia, it should be remembered that the political and national
sympathies of the conquered race were also enlisted on behalf of the
new religion through the marriage of Ḥusayn, the son of ʻAlī with
Shāhbānū, one of the daughters of Yazdagird, the last monarch of the
Sāsānid dynasty. In the descendants of Shāhbānū and Ḥusayn the Persians
saw the heirs of their ancient kings and the inheritors of their
national traditions, and in this patriotic feeling may be found the
explanation of the intense devotion of the Persians to the ʻAlid
faction and the first beginnings of Shīʻism as a separate sect. [697]
That this widespread conversion was not due to force or violence is
evidenced by the toleration extended to those who still clung to their
ancient faith. Even to the present day there are some small communities
of fire-worshippers to be found in certain districts of Persia, and
though these have in later years often had to suffer persecution, [698]
their ancestors in the early centuries of the Hijrah enjoyed a
remarkable degree of toleration, their fire-temples were respected, and
we even read of a Muhammadan general (in the reign of al-Muʻtaṣim, A.D.
833–842), who ordered an imām and a muʼadhdhin to be flogged because
they had destroyed a fire-temple in Sughd and built a mosque in its
place. [699] In the tenth century, three centuries after the conquest
of the country, fire-temples were to be found in ʻIrāq, Fārs, Kirmān,
Sijistān, Khurāsān, Jibāl, Ādharbayjān and Arrān, i.e. in almost every
province of Persia. [700] In Fārs itself there were hardly any cities
or districts in which fire-temples and Magians were not to be found.
[701] Al-Shahrastānī also (writing as late as the twelfth century),
makes mention of a fire-temple at Isfīniyā, in the neighbourhood of
Baghdād itself. [702]
In the face of such facts, it is surely impossible to attribute the
decay of Zoroastrianism entirely to violent conversions made by the
Muslim conquerors. The number of Persians who embraced Islam in the
early days of the Arab rule was probably very large from the various
reasons given above, but the late survival of their ancient faith and
the occasional record of conversions in the course of successive
centuries, render it probable that the acceptance of Islam was both
peaceful and voluntary. About the close of the eighth century, Sāmān, a
noble of Balkh, having received assistance from Asad b. ʻAbd-Allāh, the
governor of Khurāsān, renounced Zoroastrianism, embraced Islam and
named his son Asad after his protector: it is from this convert that
the dynasty of the Sāmānids (A.D. 874–999) took its name. About the
beginning of the ninth century, Karīm b. Shahriyār was the first king
of the Qābūsiyyah dynasty who became a Musalman, and in 873 a large
number of fire-worshippers were converted to Islam in Daylam through
the influence of Nāṣir al-Ḥaqq Abū Muḥammad. In the following century,
about A.D. 912, Ḥasan b. ʻAlī, of the ʻAlid dynasty on the southern
shore of the Caspian Sea, who is said to have been a man of learning
and intelligence and well acquainted with the religious opinions of
different sects, invited the inhabitants of Ṭabaristān and Daylam, who
were partly idolaters and partly Magians, to accept Islam; many of them
responded to his call, while others persisted in their former state of
unbelief. [703] In the year A.H. 394 (A.D. 1003–1004), a famous poet,
Abu’l Ḥasan Mihyār, a native of Daylam, who had been a fire-worshipper,
was converted to Islam by a still more famous poet, the Sharīf al-Riḍā,
who was his master in the poetic art. [704]
It was probably about the same period that the grandfather of the great
geographer, Ibn Khūrdādbih, was converted through the influence of one
of the Barmecides, [705] whose ancestor had been likewise a Magian and
high priest of the great Fire Temple of Nawbahār at Balkh.
Scanty as these notices of conversion are, they appear to have been
voluntary, and the Zoroastrians would seem to have enjoyed on the whole
toleration for the exercise of their religion up to the close of the
ʻAbbāsid period. With the Mongol invasion a darker period in their
history begins, and the miseries which the Persian Muslims themselves
suffered seems to have generated in them a spirit of fanatical
intolerance which exposed the Zoroastrians at times to cruel
sufferings. [706]
In the middle of the eighth century, Persia gave birth to a movement
that is of interest in the missionary history of Islam, viz. the sect
of the Ismāʻīlians. This is not the place to enter into a history of
this sect or of the theological position taken up by its followers, or
of the social and political factors that lent it strength, but it
demands attention here on account of the marvellous missionary
organisation whereby it was propagated. The founder of this
organisation—which rivals that of the Jesuits for the keen insight into
human nature it displays and the consummate skill with which the
doctrines of the sect were accommodated to varying capacities and
prejudices—was a certain ʻAbd Allāh b. Maymūn, who early in the ninth
century infused new life into the Ismāʻīlians. He sent out his
missionaries in all directions under various guises, very frequently as
ṣūfīs but also as merchants and traders and the like; they were
instructed to be all things to all men and to win over different
classes of men to allegiance to the grandmaster of their sect, by
speaking to each man, as it were, in his own language, and
accommodating their teaching to the varying capacities and opinions of
their hearers. They captivated the ignorant multitude by the
performance of marvels that were taken for miracles and by mysterious
utterances that excited their curiosity. To the devout they appeared as
models of virtue and religious zeal; to the mystics they revealed the
hidden meaning of popular teachings and initiated them into various
grades of occultism according to their capacity. Taking advantage of
the eager looking-forward to a deliverer that was common to so many
faiths of the time, they declared to the Musalmans the approaching
advent of the Imām Mahdī, to the Jews that of the Messiah, and to the
Christians that of the Comforter, but taught that the aspirations of
each could alone be realised in the coming of ʻAlī as the great
deliverer. With the Shīʻah, the Ismāʻīlian missionary was to put
himself forward as the zealous partisan of all the Shīʻah doctrine, was
to dwell upon the cruelty and injustice of the Sunnīs towards ʻAlī and
his sons, and liberally abuse the Sunnī Khalīfahs; having thus prepared
the way, he was to insinuate, as the necessary completion of the Shīʻah
system of faith, the more esoteric doctrines of the Ismāʻīlian sect. In
dealing with the Jew, he was to speak with contempt of both Christians
and Muslims and agree with his intended convert in still looking
forward to a promised Messiah, but gradually lead him to believe that
this promised Messiah could be none other than ʻAlī, the great Messiah
of the Ismāʻīlian system. If he sought to win over the Christian, he
was to dwell upon the obstinacy of the Jews and the ignorance of the
Muslims, to profess reverence for the chief articles of the Christian
creed, but gently hint that they were symbolic and pointed to a deeper
meaning, to which the Ismāʻīlian system alone could supply the key; he
was also cautiously to suggest that the Christians had somewhat
misinterpreted the doctrine of the Paraclete and that it was in ʻAlī
that the true Paraclete was to be found. Similarly the Ismāʻīlian
missionaries who made their way into India endeavoured to make their
doctrines acceptable to the Hindus, by representing ʻAlī as the
promised tenth Avatār of Viṣṇu who was to come from the West, i.e.
(they averred) from Alamūt. They also wrote a Mahdī Purāṇa and composed
hymns in imitation of those of the Vāmācārins or left-hand Śāktas,
whose mysticism already predisposed their minds to the acceptance of
the esoteric doctrines of the Ismāʻīlians. [707]
By such means as these an enormous number of persons of different
faiths were united together to push forward an enterprise, the real aim
of which was known to very few. The aspirations of ʻAbd Allāh b. Maymūn
seem to have been entirely political, but as the means he adopted were
religious and the one common bond—if any—that bound his followers
together was the devout expectation of the coming of the Imām Mahdī,
the missionary activity connected with the history of this sect
deserves this brief mention in these pages. [708]
The history of the spread of Islam in the countries of Central Asia to
the north of Persia presents little in the way of missionary activity.
When Qutaybah b. Muslim went to Samarqand, he found many idols there,
whose worshippers maintained that any man who dared outrage them would
perish; the Muslim conqueror, undeterred by such superstitious fears,
set fire to the idols; whereupon a number of persons embraced Islam.
[709] There is, however, but scanty record of such conversions in the
early history of the Muslim advance into Central Asia; moreover the
people of this country seem often to have pretended to embrace Islam
for a time and then to have thrown off the mask and renounced their
allegiance to the caliph as soon as the conquering armies were
withdrawn, [710] and it was not until Qutaybah had forcibly occupied
Bukhārā for the fourth time that he succeeded in compelling the
inhabitants to conform to the faith of their conquerors.
In Bukhārā and Samarqand the opposition to the new faith was so violent
and obstinate that none but those who had embraced Islam were allowed
to carry arms, and for many years the Muslims dared not appear unarmed
in the mosques or other public places, while spies had to be set to
keep a watch on the new converts. The conquerors made various efforts
to gain proselytes, and even tried to encourage attendance at the
Friday prayers in the mosques by rewards of money, and allowed the
Qurʼān to be recited in Persian instead of in Arabic, in order that it
might be intelligible to all. [711]
The progress of Islam in Transoxania was certainly very slow: some of
the inhabitants accepted the invitation of ʻUmar II (A.D. 717–720) to
embrace Islam, [712] and large numbers were converted through the
preaching of a certain Abū Ṣaydā who commenced this mission in
Samarqand in the reign of Hishām (724–743), [713] but it was not until
the reign of Al-Muʻtaṣim (A.D. 833–842) that Islam was generally
adopted there, [714] one of the reasons probably being the more
intimate relations established at this time with the then capital of
the Muhammadan world, Baghdād, through the enormous numbers of Turks
that had flocked in thousands to join the army of the caliph. [715]
Islam having thus gained a footing among the Turkish tribes seems to
have made but slow progress until the middle of the tenth century, when
the conversion of some of their chieftains to Islam, like that of
Clovis and other barbarian kings of Northern Europe to Christianity,
led their clansmen to follow their example in a body.
Pious legends have grown up to supply the lack of sober historical
record of such conversions. The city of Khīva reveres as its national
saint a Muslim wrestler—Pahlavān—who was in the service of a heathen
king of Khwārizm. The king of India, hearing of the fame of this
Pahlavān, sent his own court wrestler with a challenge to the king of
Khwārizm. A day was fixed for the trial of strength and the nobles and
people of Khīva were summoned to view the spectacle; the vanquished man
was to have his head cut off. On the day before, the saintly Pahlavān
was praying in the mosque when he overheard the prayer of an old woman:
“O God, suffer not my son to be beaten by this invincible Pahlavān, for
I have no other child.” Touched with compassion for the mother,
Pahlavān lets the Indian wrestler win the day; the enraged king orders
his head to be cut off, but at that very moment the horse on which the
king is sitting, bolts, carrying his master straight towards a
dangerous precipice. Pahlavān springs forward, catches the horse and
rescues the king from a horrible death. In gratitude the king embraces
the true faith, and the saintly wrestler, full of joy, goes away into
the desert and becomes a hermit. [716]
A strange legend is told of the conversion of Sātūq Bughrā Khān, the
founder of the Muhammadan dynasty of the Īlik-Khāns of Kāshgar, about
the middle of the tenth century. A prince of the Sāmānid house, Khwājah
Abu’l-Naṣr Sāmānī, a man of great piety and humility of character,
finding no scope for the exercise of his talent for administration,
resolved to become a merchant, with the purpose of spreading the true
faith in the lands of the unbelievers. Instead of trying to acquire a
fortune by his commercial enterprises, he devoted all his gains to the
furtherance of his proselytising efforts. One night the Prophet
appeared to him in a dream, saying: “Arise, and go into Turkistan where
the prince Sātūq Bughrā Khān only awaits your coming to be converted to
Islam.” The young prince had in a similar manner been warned in a
vision to expect the arrival of an instructor in the faith, and when
some days later he met Abu’l-Naṣr Sāmānī he was prepared to accept his
teaching and become a Musalman. This legend would appear to have been
based on the historic fact that Islam made its way from the Sāmānid
kingdom into the neighbouring country of Turkistan, and the example of
the ruler seems to have been followed by his subjects, for in A.D. 960
as many as 200,000 tents of the Turks, i.e. probably the greater part
of the Turkish population of Bughrā Khān’s kingdom, professed the faith
of Islam. [717] Legend credits him with miraculous powers in his wars
against the heathen, when a devouring flame would issue from his mouth
and the sword that he brandished would become forty feet long. By the
time he had reached the age of ninety-six, the terror of his sword is
said to have converted the unbelievers from the banks of the Oxus in
the south to Qurāquram in the north, and just before his death he is
said to have led his victorious army into China, and spread Islam as
far as Turfan. [718] This picturesque account of a dynastic struggle
with the Buddhist kingdom of Khotan credits the hero with a measure of
success which was not really achieved until the fourteenth century. How
limited the success of Sātūq Bughrā Khān really was, may be judged from
the fact that when his successors among the Īlik-Khāns sought in 1026
to contract matrimonial alliances with princesses of the house of
Maḥmūd of Ghazna, Maḥmūd replied that he was a Musalman, while they
were unbelievers, and that it was not the custom to give the sisters
and daughters of Musalmans in marriage to unbelievers, but that, if
they would embrace Islam, the matter would be considered. [719] A few
years later, in 1041–1042, a number of Turks who were still heathen and
living in Tibetan territory sought permission from Arslān Khān b. Qadr
Khān to settle in his dominions, having heard of the justice and
mildness of his rule; when they arrived in the neighbourhood of
Bālāsāghūn [720] he sent a message to them urging them to accept Islam;
but they refused, and as he found them to be peaceable and obedient
subjects, he left them alone. There is no record of their conversion,
which probably ensued in course of time; but they can hardly be
identified with the group of ten thousand tents of infidel Turks who
embraced Islam in the following year, as these latter are expressly
stated to have harried and plundered the Musalmans before their
conversion. [721] The invasion of the Qarā Khitāy into Turkistan [722]
dealt a severe blow to the power of Islam, and as late as the
thirteenth century the reports of European travellers show that there
were still important groups of Buddhists, Manichæans and Christians in
these parts. [723]
Of supreme importance to Islam was the conversion of the Saljūq Turks,
but no record of their conversion remains beyond the statement that in
A.D. 956 Saljūq migrated from Turkistan with his clan to the province
of Bukhārā, where he and his people enthusiastically embraced Islam.
[724] This was the origin of the famous Saljūq Turks, whose wars and
conquests revived the fading glory of the Muhammadan arms and united
into one empire the Muslim kingdoms of Western Asia.
When at the close of the twelfth century, the Saljūq empire had lost
all power except in Asia Minor, and when Muḥammad Ghūrī was extending
his empire from Khurāsān eastward across the north of India, there was
a great revival of the Muslim faith among the Afghāns and their country
was overrun by Arab preachers and converts from India, who set about
the task of proselytising with remarkable energy and boldness. [725]
The traditions of the Afghāns represent Islam as having been peaceably
introduced among them. They say that in the first century of the Hijrah
they occupied the Ghūr country to the east of Herāt, and that Khālid b.
Walīd came to them there with the tidings of Islam and invited them to
join the standard of the Prophet; he returned to Muḥammad accompanied
by a deputation of six or seven representative men of the Afghan
people, with their followers, and these, when they went back to their
own country, set to work to convert their fellow-tribesmen. [726] This
tradition is, however, devoid of any historical foundation, and the
earliest authentic record of conversion to Islam from among the Afghans
seems to be that of a king of Kābul in the reign of al-Maʼmūn. [727]
His successors, however, seem to have relapsed to Buddhism, for when
Yaʻqūb b. Layth, the founder of the Ṣaffārid dynasty, extended his
conquests as far as Kābul in 871, he found the ruler of the land to be
an “idolater,” and Kābul now became really Muhammadan for the first
time, the Afghans probably being quite willing to take service in the
army of so redoubtable a conqueror as Yaʻqūb b. Layth, [728] but it was
not until after the conquests of Sabaktigīn and Maḥmūd of Ghazna that
Islam became established throughout Afghanistan.
Of the further history of Islam in Persia and Central Asia some details
will be found in the following chapter.