The Eastern Frontier by Robert Haug;

Author:Robert Haug;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788317221
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Chapter 7

Unifying the Frontier: The Formation of Greater Khurāsān

The Ṭāhirids, the Sāmānids and the frontier process

In 1953, Vladimir Minorsky coined the term Iranian Intermezzo to describe the period of Iranian history that fell between the era of direct rule by the Arab caliphs of the Rāshidūn, Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates and the era of Turko-Mongol rule that began with the invasion of the Seljuq Turks in the eleventh century and lasted until the fall of the Turkmen Qājār Dynasty (r. 1789–1925) in the twentieth century.1 Implicit in this phrase and its application to the history of ninth- and tenth-century Iran is the idea that, somehow, the Iranian Intermezzo was a return to ‘native rule’. In such thinking Khurāsān and the eastern frontier were central to this process. It was in Khurāsān that the Ṭāhirids – an Iranian dynasty who ruled autonomously as vassals of the Abbasid caliphs from 821 until 873 – emerged as the first independent local dynasty of Iran when the Caliph Ma’mūn granted Ṭāhir b. al-Ḥusayn (ca. 776–822) virtual independence as governor and the right to bequeath his title to his sons. It was in Transoxiana that the Sāmānids – first ruling as vassals of the Ṭāhirids and then establishing their own dynasty and becoming the rulers of Greater Khurāsān for most of the tenth century – pushed the idea of ‘native’ rule further by reintroducing Persian as the language of court and administration, patronizing New Persian written in the Arabic script with great influence from the language of Islam, all while encouraging a mode of kingship modelled on and inspired by the pre-Islamic rulers of Iran.

Modern historians most often portray this as the story of the rise and triumph of nationalist local Persian dynasties, groups driven away from the imperial centre by centrifugal forces to seize power for themselves as the strength and reach of the caliphate waned during the ninth century.2 Such arguments promote the idea that somehow the Sāmānids – and to a lesser extent their Ṭāhirid forbearers – represented a return to an older, local model of kingship based largely in the Sasanian past and that by developing an independent state across both banks of the Oxus the Sāmānids, in some manner, undid the long Arab conquests. There are several problems with such an analysis. First, by this point we hopefully understand that the eastern frontier was a complicated space and that Khurāsān, Ṭukhāristān and Transoxiana – the regions that were united in the ninth century into a Greater Khurāsān under the Ṭāhirids and Sāmānids – did not have a shared history or identity they could collectively fall back upon, nor was their history particularly tied to a singularly Sasanian or even Iranian past. During the Ṭāhirid and Sāmānid periods, Greater Khurāsān coalesced into a recognizable autonomous unit under a shared administrative structure and, eventually, an independent state of its own. For example, Rocco Rante pointed to the spread of uniform Ṭāhirid coinage – most importantly copper fulūs, the currency of daily life

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