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A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

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Kök Turks, Chinese expansion, and Arab conquest 59<br />

Bukhara, here too the Arab viceroy allowed the local sovereign to retain<br />

his throne, under the supervision of an Arab governor.The first governor,<br />

Iyas ibn Abdallah, did not prove equal to the task, and could not<br />

prevent a revolt in which the Khwarazmians killed the vassal king.<br />

Curiously, the rebels attacked the Khwarazmshah but not the Arabs,<br />

and the action may indeed not have been meant to reject Arab suzerainty.This<br />

did not save them from a terrible retribution.After a<br />

“holding action” under another of Qutayba’s brothers, Abdallah ibn<br />

Muslim, an Arab army, triumphant after the conquest of Samarkand,<br />

carried out a reconquest which included a slaughter of most of the<br />

upper classes and destruction of much cultural heritage of the province.<br />

Samarkand’s turn came on the heels of the first Khwarazmian campaign,<br />

thus still in 712.By all counts, Qutayba should have been<br />

expected to return to Merv, and he exploited this stratagem to catch the<br />

Sogdians unprepared.One of our main sources for this period of<br />

Islamic history is the great chronicler Tabari (d. 923), and it may be<br />

worthwhile to let him narrate the salient events:<br />

Qutayba reached Sughd ...with twenty thousand men.He reached it accompanied<br />

by Khwarazmians and Bukharans ...and said: “When we light on a<br />

people’s courtyard, how evil will be the morning of them that are warned!” He<br />

besieged them for a month.In the course of being besieged, [the Sogdians]<br />

fought [the Muslims] several times.They wrote to the king of Shash and the<br />

ikhshad of Fergana: “If the Arabs vanquish us, they will visit upon you the like<br />

of what they brought us!” [The latter] agreed to set out [against the Arabs] and<br />

sent [word] to [the Sogdians]: “Send [against the Arabs] those who may distract<br />

them, so that we may make a night attack on their camp!” 4<br />

The author then narrates how Qutayba had been apprised through<br />

his spies of the planned attack, and how the Arabs had thwarted it<br />

through a stratagem but also thanks to their fighting valor; admiration<br />

was expressed for that of the enemy as well.According to a participant,<br />

I was present, and I have never seen people fighting more strongly or with more<br />

fortitude in adversity than the sons of those kings; only a few of them fled.We<br />

gathered their weapons, cut off their heads, and took prisoners.We asked them<br />

about those whom we had killed, and they said: “You have killed none other<br />

than a son of a king, or one of the nobles, or one of the heroes.You have killed<br />

men the equal of a hundred men.” In those cases we wrote [their names] on<br />

their ears.Then we entered the camp in the morning, and there was not a single<br />

4 Tarikh, published as Annales, ed.De Goeje, series 2, vol.II, pp.1243–53 (Arabic text); a cooperative<br />

translation project currently published as The History of al-Tabari (passages pertaining to this<br />

subject in vol.XXIII, pp.191–201, by M.Hinds).

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