A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

56 A history of Inner Asia
that eventually transformed them into fairly monolithic societies whose
principal language was to be Turkic, and principal religion, Islam.The
process was complex and displayed a variety of forms and patterns of
progress or quiescence, but there were two decisive and related aspects.
One was the inspired dynamism of the Islamic religion that ignited the
drive of Muslim armies, initially led by the Arabs, then by the Iranians,
and ultimately by the Turkic converts themselves; the other was the military
dynamism of the nomads, by then mostly Turks, who only needed
an additional trigger to move in the opposite, southwesterly direction,
and start the second part of the aforementioned process of
Turkicization.Here we would point to a certain analogy between the
Arab hosts inspired by their new creed, and the Turkic ones driven by
their paramilitary way of life; between the inspired force of the Islamic
holy book, and the poetic beauty of the Orkhon inscriptions relating the
military campaigns east and west.Neither of these dimensions existed
among the sedentary populations of the area.Significantly, the two giant
neighbors to the southeast and northwest – China and, a millennium
later, Russia – would remain unable to change the effects of the two catalytic
factors – Islamization and Turkicization – despite their recurrent
or eventual domination of the area.
the arab conquest
The Arabs entered Central Asia after their rapid conquest of Persia,
whose last Sasanian ruler, Yazdgird III, fled before the advancing
Muslims to Khurasan and was killed near Merv by the province’s
marzban (warden of the marches), Mahuyi, in 651.Khurasan then
became for several decades the northeasternmost segment of the Islamic
empire, with Merv as the governor’s residence.
Compared with the conquest of the Sasanian empire of Persia (which
took at most twenty years, from the battle of Qadisiya near the
Euphrates in 635 to the establishment of Arab rule in Merv during the
650s), that of Transoxania proved to be a laborious and protracted affair.
The Arabs needed here almost a full century to bring the province
beyond the river firmly into the Islamic fold.The explanation has been
sought by some in the structural difference between the Iranian polities
of Persia and Central Asia.The former was a monolithic state ruled by
an imperial center; once this center fell, the whole empire surrendered
to the conqueror, whereas the latter, a mosaic of principalities, could not
be felled by a single blow (while this argument, proposed by R.Frye in
his Heritage of Central Asia, sounds convincing, its validity should be pro-