The Sāmānids

The Sāmānid dynasty (819–999) stemmed from a local family appointed by the ʿAbbāsids to govern at Bukhara and Samarkand. Gradually the Sāmānids had absorbed the domains of the rebellious Ṭāhirids and Ṣaffārids in northeastern Iran and reduced the Ṣaffārids to a small state in Sīstān. The Sāmānids, relying on Turkic slave troops, also managed to contain the migratory pastoralist Turkic tribes who continually pressed on Iran from across the Oxus River. In the 950s they even managed to convert some of these Turkic tribes to Islam.

The Sāmānid court at Bukhara attracted leading scholars, such as the philosophers Abū Bakr al-Rāzī (died 925 or 935) and Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā; 980–1037), who later worked for the Būyids; and the poet Ferdowsī (died c. 1020). Though not Shīʿites, the Sāmānids expressed an interest in Shīʿite thought, especially in its Ismāʿīlī form, which was then the locus of so much intellectual vitality. The Sāmānids also fostered the development of a second Islamicate language of high culture, New Persian. It combined the grammatical structure and vocabulary of spoken Persian with vocabulary from Arabic, the existing language of high culture in Iran. A landmark of this “Persianizing” of Iran was Ferdowsī’s epic poem, the Shāh-nāmeh (“Book of Kings”), written entirely in New Persian in a long-couplet form (masnavi) derived from Arabic. Covering several thousand years of detailed mythic Iranian history, Ferdowsī brought Iran’s ancient heroic lore, and its hero Rustam, into Islamicate literature and into the identity of self-consciously Iranian Muslims. He began to compose the poem under the rule of the Sāmānids; but he dedicated the finished work to a dynasty that had meanwhile replaced them, the Ghaznavids.

The Ghaznavids

The Ghaznavid dynasty was born in a way that had become routine for Islamicate polities. Sebüktigin (ruled 977–997), a Sāmānid Turkic slave governor in Ghazna (now Ghaznī), in the Afghan mountains, made himself independent of his masters as their central power declined. His eldest son, Maḥmūd, expanded into Būyid territory in western Iran, identifying himself staunchly with Sunni Islam. Presenting himself as a frontier warrior against the pagans, Maḥmūd invaded and plundered northwestern India, establishing a permanent rule in the Punjab, but it was through ruling Iran, which gave a Muslim ruler true prestige, that Maḥmūd sought to establish himself. He declared his loyalty to the ʿAbbāsid caliph, whose “investiture” he sought, and expressed his intention to defend Sunni Islam against the Shīʿite Būyids. Although he and his regime were proud of their Turkic descent, Maḥmūd encouraged the use of New Persian, with its echoes of pre-Islamic Iranian glory, for administration and for prose as well as poetry. This combination of Turkic identity and Persian language would characterize and empower many other Muslim rulers.

To Ghazna Maḥmūd brought, sometimes by force, writers and artisans who could adorn his court. Among these was al-Bīrūnī (973–c. 1050), whose scholarly achievements no contemporary could rival. Before being brought to Ghazna, al-Bīrūnī had served the Sāmānids and the Khwārazm-Shāhs, a local dynasty situated just west of the Oxus River. Al-Bīrūnī’s works included studies of astronomy (he even suggested a heliocentric universe), gems, drugs, mathematics, and physics, but his most famous book, inspired by accompanying Maḥmūd on his Indian campaigns, was a survey of Indian life, language, religion, and culture.

Like most other rulers of the day, Maḥmūd styled himself an emir and emphasized his loyalty to the caliph in Baghdad, but he and later Ghaznavid rulers also called themselves by the Arabic word sulṭān. Over the next five centuries the office of sultan would become an alternative to caliph. The Ghaznavid state presaged other changes as well, especially by stressing the cleavage between ruler and ruled and by drawing into the ruling class not only the military but also the bureaucracy and the learned establishment. So tied was the ruling establishment to the ruler that it even moved with him on campaign. Ghaznavid “political theory” shared with other states the concept of the circle of justice or circle of power—i.e., that justice is best preserved by an absolute monarch completely outside society; that such a ruler needs an absolutely loyal army; and that maintaining such an army requires prosperity, which in turn depends on the good management of an absolute ruler.

Abū al-Faḍl Bayhaqī (995–1077) worked in the Ghaznavid chancery and wrote a remarkable history of the Ghaznavids, the first major prose work in New Persian. He exhibited the broad learning of even a relatively minor figure at court; in his history he combined the effective writing skills of the chancery employee, the special knowledge of Qurʾān and Hadith, and the sophisticated and entertaining literature—history, poetry, and folklore—that characterized the adīb. He provided a vivid picture of life at court, graphically portraying the pitfalls of military absolutism—the dependence of the monarch on a fractious military and a large circle of assistants and advisors, who could mislead him and affect his decision making through internecine maneuvering and competition. In the reign of Maḥmūd’s son, Masʿūd I, the weaknesses in the system had already become glaringly apparent. At the Battle of Dandānqān (1040), Masʿūd lost control of Khorāsān, his main holding in Iran, to the pastoralist Seljuq Turks; he then decided to withdraw to Lahore in his Indian domains, from which his successors ruled until overtaken by the Ghūrids in 1186.