A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

chapter five
The Qarakhanids
The turn of the millennium, as we have said, coincided in Central Asia
with the collapse of the Samanids and their replacement by the
Qarakhanids.To their contemporaries, this change was probably less
revealing than to a historian pondering its impact.The Qarakhanids
were by then Muslims like the Samanids, and the fervor of some khans
seems to have surpassed that of their predecessors.Religion continued
to be based on the Holy Book in Arabic, and the linguistic and cultural
physiognomy of Samarkand, Bukhara, and other cities and towns as
well as of the agricultural population of the countryside remained
Iranian, though with an increasing shift from the Sogdian and
Khwarazmian variants to Persian.
The Qarakhanids were Turks, however, and their arrival signaled a
definitive shift from Iranian to Turkic predominance in Central Asia.
The rule of the Turks over Transoxania was not unprecedented: we have
seen that in its periods of strength, the steppe empire of the Kök Turks
claimed suzerainty over the petty rulers of Central Asia.That relationship
was, however, marginal and intermittent, for those Turks were
nomads whose lifestyle and psychological orientation had remained
immersed in the steppes of Inner Asia.The Islamization of their descendants
or kinsmen changed this orientation.The Qarakhanids, who
replaced the Samanids at the turn of the millennium, looked up to the
caliph in Baghdad and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina as their ultimate
spiritual authority, and Transoxania became part of their permanent
home.
“Qarakhanid” is a name devised by European Orientalists in the
nineteenth century and applied both to the dynasty and to the Turks
ruled by it.Arabic Muslim sources called this dynasty al-Khaqaniya,
“That of the [Turkic] Khaqans,” while Persian sources often preferred
the name Al-i Afrasiyab, “The Family of Afrasiyab,” on the basis of the
legendary kings of pre-Islamic Transoxania.The Qarakhanids ruled a
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