A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

72 A history of Inner Asia
Turkic ghulams, military slaves who were preferred by the rulers not only
for their prowess but also for their loyalty, which was unadulterated by
other allegiances.The ghulams were acquired through the slave trade
that flourished along the frontiers of the Dar al-Islam.Samarkand functioned
in the ninth and tenth centuries as an important slave market, and
Turkic slaves were the choicest part of the tribute which the governors
of Transoxania and later the Samanids regularly sent to Baghdad.Both
the Samanids and the caliphs themselves used these Turks in the same
manner: as praetorian guards at the center of the empire, and, increasingly,
as governors in the provinces.This process, also characteristic of
other parts of the Islamic world and of other periods, and drawing on
other ethnic groups, may seem contradictory or paradoxical to us; in
Islam, however, it played an at times crucial role, even to the point where
these slave soldiers seized power and formed their own ruling dynasties.
During the period under consideration, Turks and Slavs – the latter
mainly western Slavs acquired by the Umayyads of Spain and Fatimids
of Tunisia – were the two main sources of military slaves.
Nevertheless, at the cultural and linguistic level, Samanid rule in
Khurasan and Transoxania played a catalytic role in the rise of a new
Iranian identity, which was Islamic.A new language, Persian, came into
being and replaced the kindred Sogdian and Khwarazmian idioms as
the language of statecraft (besides Arabic) and literature.Its roots went
back to the official language of the last pre-Islamic dynasty, that of the
Sasanians, who in turn were heirs to predecessors of whom the earliest
historical dynasty, that of the Achaemenids, had its ceremonial capital
in Fars, a province in southern Iran.The prestige of this city and province,
known to the Greeks as Persepolis and Persis, throughout Iran’s
pre-Islamic past, reasserted itself after the Arab conquest less there than
in Central Asia; for through a special process of cultural shift, the now
Muslim Iranians from Fars joined the Arab conquerors to rule Khurasan
and Transoxania, and were in turn joined by those local Iranians who
proved to be fervent converts not only from Zoroastrianism to Islam but
also from Sogdian or other Central Asian idioms to Farsi, as the Persians
now call their language.Furthermore, the impact of the new religion
with its powerful Arabic text, the Koran, of the voluminous theological
literature in Arabic, and of the status Arabic had as the original ruling
elite’s language, effected a rapid transformation of Middle Persian into
New Persian, a lexically hybrid language molded through a fusion with
the conqueror’s speech not unlike the way English was molded through
a fusion of Anglo-Saxon with Latin and French after 1066.In the early