A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

The Qarakhanids 89
or, in certain respects, Arabicized: it was Arab lexicographers and philologists
who served Mahmud Kashgari as inspiration and model.
The Diwan is primarily what it claims to be: a Turkic–Arabic dictionary,
with the Arabic part often expanded into a lengthy excursus.Besides
the fact that it is a treasure-trove of Turkic lexicography and ethnography,
the circumstances of its composition are also significant.The
author wrote the Diwan in Baghdad during the last three years of the
reign of the Abbasid caliph al-Qaim (1031–75) and the first two years of
that of al-Muqtadi (1075–94), dedicating it to the latter.In 1055, the
Seljukid sultan Tughril I had entered Baghdad and “freed” the Abbasid
caliph from the tutelage of the Shii and Persian Buwayhids; the grateful
caliph gave the Turk his daughter in marriage and bestowed upon him
the title Malik al-Mashriq wa-al-Maghrib, “King of the East and West,”
thus officially delegating temporal power to him.This act consecrated a
historic transformation in the Islamic Middle East, passage of effective
power from the Arabo-Persian elites and armies to those of the Turks.
The dynasty of the Seljukids, which was the trailblazer of this transformation,
will be discussed below; here we wish to point out that it
belonged to the ethnolinguistic group of Turkic tribes known as Oghuz,
whereas the Qarakhanids belonged to a less comprehensively defined
group whose most prominent tribes were the Qarluq, Tukhsi, Chigil,
and Yaghma.The official or court language at Kashgar and other
Qarakhanid centers, which Mahmud al-Kashgari often calls Khaqani,
“Royal,” was partly based on the dialects spoken by these tribes, while
also possessing the qualities of linear descent from Kök and Uighur
Turkic; the “Türk” script displayed in the introductory part of the
Diwan, for example, is that of the contemporary Uighur kingdom of
Qocho.The term Türk, as used by Mahmud Kashgari, thus appears to
have had two partly overlapping meanings.Türk, we have seen, was the
name of the core group that created the empire of the Kök Turks.This
suggests that the prestige of that empire had a lasting effect by spreading
the name of the chief constituent group throughout the world of its
ethnolinguistic kinsmen – as exemplified by the dictionary’s title.At the
same time, the author also uses it as an implicit eastern counterpart to
the western dialects, those of the Oghuz and Kipchak groups; in other
words, as a term that included the Qarakhanid “Khaqani” or court language
and the eastern dialects on which it was based.
It is not known why Mahmud Kashgari moved to Baghdad, thus
leaving his Turkic homeland and a kingdom ruled by his relatives, for an
alien land ruled by a Turkic but foreign dynasty.We may infer, however,