CHAPTER VII.
THE SPREAD OF ISLAM IN
PERSIA AND CENTRAL ASIA.
In order to follow the course of the spread of Islam
westward 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.[1]
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.[2]
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,[3]
—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.[4]
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[5]
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."[6]
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.[7]
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 Qur'ān 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 Allah and Iblis; 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.[8]
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.[9]
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.[10]
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 'Alī 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 'Alid faction and the first beginnings of Shī’ism as a separate sect.[11]
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,[12]
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-Mu'taṣim, A.D. 833-842), who ordered an
imām and a mu'adhdhin to be flogged because they had destroyed a
fire-temple in Sughd and built a mosque in its place.[13]
In the tenth century, three centuries after the conquest of the country,
fire-temples were to be found in 'Irāq, Fārs, Kirmān, Sijistān, Khurāsān,
Jibāl, Ādharbayjān and Arrān, i. e. in almost every province of Persia.[14]
In Fārs itself there were hardly any cities or districts in which fire-temples
and Magians were not to be found.[15]
Al-Sharastānī also (writing as late as the twelfth century) , makes mention of
a fire-temple at Isfīniyā, in the neighbourhood of Baghdād itself.[16]
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. 'Abd-Allāh, the governor of Khurāsān, renounced Zoroastrianism,
embraced Islam and named his son Asad after his protector : it is from this
convert that 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-Haqq Abū Muḥammad. In the following century, about A.D. 912, Ḥasan b. Alī,
of the 'Alid 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.[17]
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.[18]
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,[19]
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
'Abbasid 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.[20]
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 Ismā'īlians. 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 'Abd Allāh b. Maymūn, who early in the ninth century
infused new life into the Ismā'īlians. He sent out his missionaries in all
directions under various guises, very frequently as ṣūfis 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 'Alī as the great deliverer. With the Shī'ah, the
Ismā'īlian missionary was to put himself forward as the zealous partisan of all
the Shī'ah doctrine, was to dwell upon the cruelty and injustice of the Sunnīs
towards 'Alī and his sons, and liberally abuse the Sunnī Khalīfahs;
having thus prepared the way, he was to insinuate, as the necessary completion
of the Shī'ah system of faith, the more esoteric doctrines of the Ismā'īlian
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 'Alī, the great Messiah of the Ismā'īlian 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 Ismā'īlian 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 'Alī that the
true Paraclete was to be found. Similarly the Ismā'īlian missionaries who made
their way into India endeavoured to make their doctrines acceptable to the
Hindus, by representing 'Alī 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 Ismā'īlians.[21]
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 'Abd 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.[22]
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.[23]
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,[24]
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 Qur'ān to be recited in Persian
instead of in Arabic, in order that it might be intelligible to all.[25]
The progress of Islam in Transoxania was certainly
very slow: some of the inhabitants accepted the invitation of 'Umar II (A.D.
717-720) to embrace Islam,[26]
and large numbers were converted through the preaching of a certain Abū Saydā
who commenced this mission in Samarqand in the reign of Hishām (724-743),[27]
but it was not until the reign of Al-Mu'taṣim (A.D. 833-842) that Islam was
generally adopted there,[28]
one of the reason 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.[29]
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.[30]
A strange legend is told of the conversion of Sātūq Bughrā
Khān, the founder of the Muhammadan dynasty of the Ilik-Khāns of
Kāshgar, about the middle of the tenth century. A prince of the Sāmānid house, Khwājah
Abu'1-Nasr Sāmāni, 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'1-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 Bugkrā Khān's kingdom, professed the faith of Islam.[31]
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.[32]
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.[33]
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[34]
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.[35]
The invasion of the Qarā Khitāy into Turkistan[36]
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.[37]
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.[38]
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.[39]
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.[40]
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-Ma'mūn.[41]
His successors, however, seem to have relapsed to Buddhism, for when Ya'qūb 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 Ya'qūb b. Layth,[42]
but it was not until after the conquests of Sabaktigīn and Mahmūd 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.
[11]
Les croyances Mazdéennes dans la
religion Chiite, par Ahmed-Bey Agaeff. (Transactions of the Ninth International
Congress of Orientalists, vol. ii. pp. 509-11. London, 1893.) For other points
of contact, see Goldziher: Islamisme et Parsisme. (Revue de l’Histoire des
Religions, xliii. p. i. sqq.)
[12]
Dosabhai Framji Karaka: History of the Parsis, vol. i. pp. 56-9,
62-7. (London, 1884.) Nicolas de Khanikoff says that there were
12,000 families of fire-worshippers in Kirmān at the end of the 18th century.
(Mémoire sur la partie méridionale de l'Asie centrale, p. 193. Paris, 1861.)
[20]
For a comprehensive sketch of
their condition under Muslim rule, see D. Menant: Les Zoroastriens de Perse.
(R. du M. M. iii. pp. 193 sqq., p. 421 sqq.)
[21]
Khojā Vrittānt, pp. 141-8.
For a further account of Ismā'īlian missionaries in India, see chap. ix.
[22]
Le
Bon Silvestre De Sacy: Exposé de la Religion des Druzes, tome i. pp.
lxvii-lxxvi, cxlviii-clxii.
[32]
Grenard, pp. 9-10. "D'une
guerre d'ambition [la tradition] fait une guerre sainte, elle attribue à Satoḳ
Boghra Khân une conquête qui a été accomplie réellement par son douzième
successeur; par une confusion absurde, elle donne le nom de ce dernier à
l'oncle infidèle de Satoḳ. Non contente de réduire deux personnages en un seul,
elle prête au même prince une marche sur Tourfân, c'est- à -dire contre les
Ouigour, qui est en effet l'œuvre d'un troisième." (Id. p. 50.)
[34]
This was the capital of the Khāns
of Turkistan during the tenth and eleventh centuries, but the exact site is
uncertain.
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