Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane by S. Frederick Starr

Author:S. Frederick Starr [Starr, S. Frederick]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

TURKIC VICTORY TOWERS

Specialists have long known that such tall, cylindrical towers or minarets originated in Central Asia and Afghanistan, and that they spread from there to India in the East and to the later Persian and Ottoman empires in the West. Earlier, mullahs issued the call to prayer either from the rooftops (as in Arabia in the early days); from towers based on Roman or Byzantine prototypes (as the Umayyad rulers did in Damascus); from prayer towers built into the outer walls of mosques (again, as did the Umayyads and North Africans); or, in the unique case of the Abbasid capital of Samarra north of Baghdad, from a weird spiral structure copied from ancient Persian ziggurats.

Beginning just before the rise of the Karakhanids and flowering under their rule, Central Asians followed a bolder course, constructing free-standing and slender columnar minarets. Scholars have catalogued no fewer than sixty such edifices in the region. By far the best known of them is the proud and sinister Kalyan minaret (built 1127) in Bukhara, known also as the “Minaret of Death” because the local authorities hurled condemned criminals to their deaths from its pinnacle.

What has not been adequately acknowledged is that most of the earliest of these appeared under the Karakhanids, and that nearly all the others were sponsored either by the Karakhanids or by other Turkic regimes, whether the Ghazni rulers in Afghanistan and India or the Seljuks in the western part of Central Asia and Iran.37 The Karakhanid origins of the towers in Bukhara, Vabkent, Uzbend and Balasagun are certain, as are many others. The other Turkic dynasties that appeared soon after the Karakhanids seem to have zealously taken up the construction of such towers. One of the few major cylindrical towers of the century not to have been constructed under a Turkic regime is the amazing the 213 foot tall Jam minaret in Afghanistan, which somehow escaped the notice of the outside world until 1886. In this case, though, the local Persianate Ghorids who constructed it had just defeated a Turkic army from Ghazni, Afghanistan. They celebrated their victory over the minaret-building Ghaznis by erecting a giant one of their own.38

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