A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Kök Turks, Chinese expansion, and Arab conquest 57
jected against the fact that by the time the Arabs launched their conquests,
the Sasanian empire had long passed its prime and the dynasty
had lost its erstwhile vigor; had the confrontation occurred at an earlier
time, the centralization that became the kingdom’s liability could have
proved its strength and the outcome might have been different).There
were other contributing factors, such as the political, psychological, and
geostrategic ones.Khurasan was a Sasanian satrapy, and its conquest
meant the completion of the conquest of the Persian empire.At about
the same time Egypt had been conquered from the Byzantines (642),
and the caliphs, still residing in Medina, were faced with unprecedented
challenges of organizing their young empire.Finally the River Oxus,
although by no means impassable, acted both as a psychological and
strategic frontier.Significantly, the Persian empire, whether under the
Sasanians or under their predecessors, had more often extended its possessions
to the east of Khurasan, thus to the territories of southern
Tokharistan, than beyond the Oxus into Transoxania proper.
The sundry sovereigns who ruled their petty principalities in
Transoxania presented a sharp contrast to the sublime kings of kings of
Persia.They sported various titles, mostly of Iranian etymology, but it
seems that they were little more than primi inter pares, their peers being
the landowning gentry known as dihqans. Moreover, being a landowner
was not the sole title to distinction.Wealthy merchants of Sogdian cities
stood only a notch below the local nobility.
For over half a century after their establishment in Khurasan, the
Arab governors undertook forays into the “territories beyond the river”
without any apparent plan to extend the frontiers of the Dar al-Islam in
that direction.Their recompense was booty, which has led some historians
to downplay the role of Islam in the conquest of Central Asia.
Once the conquest was undertaken in earnest by Qutayba ibn Muslim,
however, implanting the new religion was an inseparable component of
the expansion.
Qutayba ibn Muslim was an Arab of the Bahila tribe, whose
members shunned the endemic internecine strife of Arab tribes in the
newly conquered territories such as Khurasan.This may have contributed
to his choice, by the famous viceroy of Iraq al-Hajjaj, as governor
of Khurasan.The viceroy and his deputy were staunchly supported by
the caliph al-Walid, and for a decade, between 705 and 715, Qutayba
set about laying the foundations of an Islamic Transoxania and
Khwarazm through a series of dramatic and often heroic campaigns
retold in fascinating (and no doubt often considerably embellished)
detail by Arab historians.Bukhara, the closest major principality to