A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

76 A history of Inner Asia
Ilig (also spelled Ilek) Khans, a family dynasty whose origins are sought
among the tribes of Qarluq, Yaghma, and Chigil toward the end of the
ninth century.The Qarakhanids thus made their appearance as slightly
later contemporaries of the Samanids and their immediate neighbors.
Their story will come in a later chapter, but a certain paradox should be
mentioned without delay.Once they entered the community of the Dar
al-Islam as Muslims, these Turks reversed the trend of actual conquest
and themselves conquered Transoxania.Turning against the Samanids,
by 999 – or by 1005, if a final attempt of the losing party is included –
they extinguished the last non-Turkic rule there and established themselves
in Samarkand and Bukhara.But even more crucial was the fact
that this Qarakhanid victory set in motion the eventually victorious
process of the Turkicization of Transoxania, and of the transformation
of the entire region into Turkestan – with the qualification that this
victory was never complete, for Islamic Persian culture remained firmly
entrenched in the entire area, and New Persian was the idiom of that
culture.On the other hand, the Turkicizing wave – represented there by
Oghuz Turkic tribes moving southward – eventually also crossed the
Amu Darya and engulfed the territory between it and the Persian border
to such an extent that this region, today’s Turkmenistan, is barely
remembered as once being a part of Khurasan but is felt to be inseparable
from Turkestan.
The turn of the millennium thus heralded a marked increase in the
presence of Turks in Central Asia, as well as their political and military
ascendancy over its Iranian populations.Some parts of this process
started as early as the beginning of the ninth century, but it was during
the second half of the tenth century that it quickened and finally burst
into the open.