A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Kök Turks, Chinese expansion, and Arab conquest 61
hand, stepped forward, proclaimed “God is great!,” set fire to them, and they
burned fiercely.In the remains of the gold and silver nails that had been in
them, they found fifty thousand mithqals.
Qutayba finally returned to Merv, and here is what Tabari tells us
about the final measures he took before leaving Samarkand:
Then Qutayba set off, returning to Merv.He deputed [his brother] Abdallah
ibn Muslim over Samarkand, and left with him massive [numbers of] troops and
much war matériel, saying to him: “Do not let a [non-resident] polytheist
(mushrik) enter any of Samarkand’s gates without having a seal on his hand.If
the clay has dried before he goes out, kill him! If you find on him a piece of iron,
or a knife, or anything else, kill him! If you close the gate at night and find any
one of them inside, kill him!”
Qutayba ibn Muslim can thus rightly be considered the founder or consolidator
of Arab and Islamic power in three crucial segments of Central
Asia: Tokharistan, Sogdia, and Khwarazm.He was in his early fifties at
the time of the abovementioned campaigns, thus still in the active phase
of his life, and seemed ready to undertake new ones into Turkestan of
that time, the territories beyond the Syr Darya toward Shash (Tashkent).
All that was thwarted by events which took place in the Arab homeland,
first in Iraq and then at the center of the empire in Damascus.Qutayba’s
powerful sponsor, the governor of Iraq (in fact, the viceroy of the entire
Islamic east) Hajjaj, died in Kufa, and then the caliph Walid died in
Damascus.The throne passed to Walid’s brother Sulayman (715–17),
who was hostile to Qutayba (because the latter had supported the candidacy
of another member of the Umayyad family for the caliphate),
and promptly dismissed him from the governorship of Khurasan.
Qutayba tried to challenge the new caliph’s authority and carry on independently,
but found no support among the Muslim troops and was
killed, still in 715, in Fergana.
Qutayba’s campaigns coincided with the last and most impressive
stage of Kök Turkic power in Inner Asia.The expeditionary forces of
the qaghan invaded Sogdia several times between 689 and 712.In one
of the versions of the war between the Arabs and the Sogdians, Tabari
states that Ghurak also wrote the “Turkish khaqan” requesting help.It
seems that the Eastern Turks were chiefly eager to bring under control
their junior partners the Western Turks, but the mention on the Kül
Tegin inscription that “Together with my uncle, the qaghan, we went on
campaigns ...westward as far as the Iron Gate” 5 – a campaign that
5 Kül Tegin stele, E18; Tekin, Grammar, pp.234 (Turkic text) and 266 (English translation).