A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

62 A history of Inner Asia
would have skirted Samarkand – may indeed have been connected with
such appeals.
Qutayba’s death put a halt to the Muslim expansion in Central Asia.
When the jihad was resumed over a century later, its leaders were no
longer the Arabs but the Ajam (a term often translated as “non-Arabs”
but which really meant Iranians, both before and after their conversion),
and its chief target was the lands beyond the other river, the Syr Darya.
The halt coincided with growing tensions in the senior province of
Khurasan, whose accounts may however also obscure the daunting challenge
of consolidating Islamic rule in Transoxania.The tensions
stemmed from a variety of factors, such as inter-tribal Arab rivalry (often
pitting the tribes of the Arabian south, lumped together under the name
of Kalb, against those of the north, called Qays), rebellions of local
commanders, and frequent apostasies of those Central Asian chieftains
who had converted to Islam when the turbulence seemed to offer them
a chance to promote their own interests.The last-named feature was a
symptom of a ferment on the popular level which caused a number of
uprisings, mostly cloaked in sectarian religious garb but which often had
deeper socio-economic as well as spiritual roots.
Toward the middle of the eighth century, Khurasan became the
staging area for a movement that eventually toppled the Umayyad
dynasty and replaced it with the Abbasids, who then founded a new
capital, Baghdad.The ostensible justification for the “Abbasid revolution”
was a desire of the umma, the Muslim community, to be ruled by
caliphs who belonged to the Prophet’s family, the concomitant assumption
being that they would more assiduously carry out the precepts of
Islam.This of course became the main theme of the Shii movements,
but it appears that in the early period direct descent through Ali and
Fatima was not absolutely indispensable.Other affiliations were staking
out their claims, and one of these was that of the Hashimiya.This
party’s dynastic candidates traced their eponym to al-Abbas, an uncle of
the Prophet, whose fourth generation descendants al-Saffah and al-
Mansur were the first Abbasid caliphs.The epithet of Hashimis had two
interpretations.One was the name of Hashim ibn Abd al-Manaf, the
father of Abd al-Muttalib and grandfather of al-Abbas; his name could
thus serve as proof of membership in the Prophet’s family, for Abd al-
Muttalib was Muhammad’s grandfather.In this case, however, the
common ancestry could be brought one generation closer to the
Prophet, and the question could be asked why not Abd al-Muttalib but
Hashim became the party’s eponym.The explanation can be found in