A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

The Samanids 73
stage of this process contemporary Islamic authors called this new language
Dari (a name retained or resurrected in modern Afghanistan),
probably because they associated it with the royal court (dar) of the
Sasanians.It was in the final decades of Samanid rule that the process
reached its definitive consecration with the appearance of major poets
writing in this language, above all Rudaki (d.ca.941) and Firdawsi (d.
ca.1020).Rudaki was born near Samarkand and spent much of his life
as a court poet in Bukhara.Firdawsi (“the paradisiac one,” a pen-name
derived from firdaws, “paradise,” adaptation of an ancient Iranian word
which also entered Greek and thence other European languages with
this connotation) hailed from the Kurasanian city of Tus, near modern
Meshed.He composed his great epic, the Shahname, probably by 999,
and subsequently spent some time at the court of Mahmud of Ghazna
in Afghanistan before returning to his hometown.We cannot but be
bemused by history’s unpredictable whims: the first great flowering of
Islamic Iranian culture occurred in Central Asia, a region whose major
segment would soon embark on a process that would turn it into
Turkestan; only after this process had run its normative course in
Central Asia and the Caucasus, did this new Persian return to its erstwhile
home province, where the city of Shiraz, near the ruins of
Persepolis, attained deserved fame with such poets as Sadi (1210–91)
and Hafiz (1327–90).
The Samanid dynasty’s power and glory peaked under the reign of
three great amirs: Ismail (892–907), Ahmad (907–13), and Nasr
(913–43).It was during their rule that Transoxania emancipated itself
from the role of being Khurasan’s subordinate province and moved to
the forefront of Islamic Central Asia.At the same time, however, the
Samanids, content with the relatively modest title of amirs, never ceased
acknowledging the Abbasid caliphs as their suzerains in the khutba
(Friday sermon) and sikka (minting process in which the legends struck
on coins included the names of the amirs’ suzerains).They continued to
send regular tribute to the caliphs, and to suppress any Shii and Khariji
attempts to challenge Sunni Islam and thus the caliph’s authority.
Prosperity based on agriculture, handicrafts, and trade made their realm
the envy of visitors from other parts of the Islamic world, as we can infer
from reports by visitors like the aforementioned diplomatic envoy Ibn
Fadlan and the geographer Ibn Hawqal, a native of Nusaybin in what
is today southeastern Turkey.Ibn Hawqal came to the Samanid domains
in 969 after having visited much of the Islamic world in the course of
journeys that began in 943 and first took him all the way to Spain and