In order to follow the course of the spread of Islam eastward into Central Asia, we must retrace our steps to the period of the first Arab conquests. By the middle of the seventh century, the great dynasty of the Sāsānids had fallen, and the vast empire of Persia that for four centuries had withstood the might of Rome and Byzantium, now became the heritage of the Muslims. When the armies of the state had been routed, the mass of the people offered little resistance; the reigns of the last representatives of the Sāsānid dynasty had been marked by terrible anarchy, and the sympathies of the people had been further alienated from their rulers on account of the support they gave to the persecuting policy of the state religion of Zoroastrianism. The Zoroastrian priests had acquired an enormous influence in the state; they were well-nigh all-powerful in the councils of the king and arrogated to themselves a very large share in the civil administration. They took advantage of their position to persecute all those religious bodies—(and they were many)—that dissented from them. Besides the numerous adherents of older forms of the Persian religion, there were Christians, Jews, Sabæans and numerous sects in which the speculations of Gnostics, Manichæans and Buddhists found expression. In all of these, persecution had stirred up feelings of bitter hatred against the established religion and the dynasty that supported its oppressions, and so caused the Arab conquest to appear in the light of a deliverance.1 The followers of all these varied forms of faith could breathe again under a rule that granted them religious freedom and exemption from military service, on [207]payment of a light tribute. For the Muslim law granted toleration and the right of paying jizyah not only to the Christians and Jews, but to Zoroastrians and Sabæans, to worshippers of idols, of fire and of stone.2 It was said that the Prophet himself had distinctly given directions that the Zoroastrians were to be treated exactly like “the people of the book,” i.e. the Jews and Christians, and that jizyah might also be taken from them in return for protection,3—a tradition that probably arose in the second century of the Hijrah, when apostolic sanction was sought for the toleration that had been extended to all the followers of the various faiths that Arabs had found in the countries they had conquered, whether such non-Muslims came under the category Ahl al-Kitāb or not.4

To the distracted Christian Church in Persia the change of government brought relief from the oppression of the Sāsānid kings, who had fomented the bitter struggles of Jacobites and Nestorians and added to the confusion of warring sects. Some reference has already5 been made to earlier persecutions, and even during the expiring agony of the Sāsānid dynasty, K͟husrau II, exasperated at the defeat he had suffered at the hands of the Christian emperor, Heraclius, ordered a fresh persecution of the Christians within his dominions, a persecution from which all the various Christian sects alike had to suffer. These terrible conditions may well have prepared men’s minds for that revulsion of feeling that facilitates a change of faith. “Side by side with the political chaos in the state was the moral confusion that filled the minds of the Christians; distracted by such an accumulation of disasters and by the moral agony wrought by the furious conflict of so many warring doctrines among them, they tended towards that peculiar frame of mind in which a new doctrine finds it easy to take root, making a clean sweep of such a bewildering babel and striving to reconstruct faith and society on a new basis. In other words the people of Persia, and especially the Semitic races, were just in the very mental condition calculated to make them [208]welcome the Islamic revolution and urge them on to enthusiastically embrace the new and rugged creed, which with its complete and virile simplicity swept away at one stroke all those dark mists, opened the soul to new, alluring and tangible hopes, and promised immediate release from a miserable state of servitude.”6

But the Muslim creed was most eagerly welcomed by the townsfolk, the industrial classes and the artisans, whose occupations made them impure according to the Zoroastrian creed, because in the pursuance of their trade or occupations they defiled fire, earth or water, and who thus, outcasts in the eyes of the law and treated with scant consideration in consequence, embraced with eagerness a creed that made them at once free men, and equal in a brotherhood of faith.7 Nor were the conversions from Zoroastrianism itself less striking: the fabric of the National Church had fallen with a crash in the general ruin of the dynasty that had before upheld it; having no other centre round which to rally, the followers of this creed would find the transition to Islam a simple and easy one, owing to the numerous points of similarity in the old creed and the new. For the Persian could find in the Qurʼān many of the fundamental doctrines of his old faith, though in a rather different form: he would meet again Ahuramazda and Ahriman under the names of Allāh and Iblīs; the creation of the world in six periods; the angels and the demons; the story of the primitive innocence of man; the resurrection of the body and the doctrine of heaven and hell.8 Even in the details of daily worship there were similarities to be found and the followers of Zoroaster when they adopted Islam were enjoined by their new faith to pray five times a day just as they had been by the Avesta.9 Those tribes in the north of Persia that had stubbornly resisted the ecclesiastical organisation of the state religion, on the ground that each man was a priest in his own household and had no need of any other, and believing in a supreme being and the immortality of the soul, taught that a man should love his neighbour, conquer his passions, and strive patiently after a better life—such [209]men could have needed very little persuasion to induce them to accept the faith of the Prophet.10 Islam had still more points of contact with some of the heretical sects of Persia, that had come under the influence of Christianity.

In addition to the causes above enumerated of the rapid spread of Islam in Persia, it should be remembered that the political and national sympathies of the conquered race were also enlisted on behalf of the new religion through the marriage of Ḥusayn, the son of ʻAlī with Shāhbānū, one of the daughters of Yazdagird, the last monarch of the Sāsānid dynasty. In the descendants of Shāhbānū and Ḥusayn the Persians saw the heirs of their ancient kings and the inheritors of their national traditions, and in this patriotic feeling may be found the explanation of the intense devotion of the Persians to the ʻAlid faction and the first beginnings of Shīʻism as a separate sect.11

That this widespread conversion was not due to force or violence is evidenced by the toleration extended to those who still clung to their ancient faith. Even to the present day there are some small communities of fire-worshippers to be found in certain districts of Persia, and though these have in later years often had to suffer persecution,12 their ancestors in the early centuries of the Hijrah enjoyed a remarkable degree of toleration, their fire-temples were respected, and we even read of a Muhammadan general (in the reign of al-Muʻtaṣim, A.D. 833–842), who ordered an imām and a muʼad͟hd͟hin to be flogged because they had destroyed a fire-temple in Sug͟hd and built a mosque in its place.13 In the tenth century, three centuries after the conquest of the country, fire-temples were to be found in ʻIrāq, Fārs, Kirmān, Sijistān, K͟hurāsān, Jibāl, Ād͟harbayjān and Arrān, i.e. in almost every province of Persia.14 In Fārs [210]itself there were hardly any cities or districts in which fire-temples and Magians were not to be found.15 Al-Shahrastānī also (writing as late as the twelfth century), makes mention of a fire-temple at Isfīniyā, in the neighbourhood of Bag͟hdād itself.16

In the face of such facts, it is surely impossible to attribute the decay of Zoroastrianism entirely to violent conversions made by the Muslim conquerors. The number of Persians who embraced Islam in the early days of the Arab rule was probably very large from the various reasons given above, but the late survival of their ancient faith and the occasional record of conversions in the course of successive centuries, render it probable that the acceptance of Islam was both peaceful and voluntary. About the close of the eighth century, Sāmān, a noble of Balk͟h, having received assistance from Asad b. ʻAbd-Allāh, the governor of K͟hurāsān, renounced Zoroastrianism, embraced Islam and named his son Asad after his protector: it is from this convert that the dynasty of the Sāmānids (A.D. 874–999) took its name. About the beginning of the ninth century, Karīm b. Shahriyār was the first king of the Qābūsiyyah dynasty who became a Musalman, and in 873 a large number of fire-worshippers were converted to Islam in Daylam through the influence of Nāṣir al-Ḥaqq Abū Muḥammad. In the following century, about A.D. 912, Ḥasan b. ʻAlī, of the ʻAlid dynasty on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea, who is said to have been a man of learning and intelligence and well acquainted with the religious opinions of different sects, invited the inhabitants of Ṭabaristān and Daylam, who were partly idolaters and partly Magians, to accept Islam; many of them responded to his call, while others persisted in their former state of unbelief.17 In the year A.H. 394 (A.D. 1003–1004), a famous poet, Abu’l Ḥasan Mihyār, a native of Daylam, who had been a fire-worshipper, was converted to Islam by a still more famous poet, the Sharīf al-Riḍā, who was his master in the poetic art.18

It was probably about the same period that the grandfather [211]of the great geographer, Ibn K͟hūrdādbih, was converted through the influence of one of the Barmecides,19 whose ancestor had been likewise a Magian and high priest of the great Fire Temple of Nawbahār at Balk͟h.

Scanty as these notices of conversion are, they appear to have been voluntary, and the Zoroastrians would seem to have enjoyed on the whole toleration for the exercise of their religion up to the close of the ʻAbbāsid period. With the Mongol invasion a darker period in their history begins, and the miseries which the Persian Muslims themselves suffered seems to have generated in them a spirit of fanatical intolerance which exposed the Zoroastrians at times to cruel sufferings.20

In the middle of the eighth century, Persia gave birth to a movement that is of interest in the missionary history of Islam, viz. the sect of the Ismāʻīlians. This is not the place to enter into a history of this sect or of the theological position taken up by its followers, or of the social and political factors that lent it strength, but it demands attention here on account of the marvellous missionary organisation whereby it was propagated. The founder of this organisation—which rivals that of the Jesuits for the keen insight into human nature it displays and the consummate skill with which the doctrines of the sect were accommodated to varying capacities and prejudices—was a certain ʻAbd Allāh b. Maymūn, who early in the ninth century infused new life into the Ismāʻīlians. He sent out his missionaries in all directions under various guises, very frequently as ṣūfīs but also as merchants and traders and the like; they were instructed to be all things to all men and to win over different classes of men to allegiance to the grandmaster of their sect, by speaking to each man, as it were, in his own language, and accommodating their teaching to the varying capacities and opinions of their hearers. They captivated the ignorant multitude by the performance of marvels that were taken for miracles and by mysterious utterances that excited their curiosity. To the devout they appeared as [212]models of virtue and religious zeal; to the mystics they revealed the hidden meaning of popular teachings and initiated them into various grades of occultism according to their capacity. Taking advantage of the eager looking-forward to a deliverer that was common to so many faiths of the time, they declared to the Musalmans the approaching advent of the Imām Mahdī, to the Jews that of the Messiah, and to the Christians that of the Comforter, but taught that the aspirations of each could alone be realised in the coming of ʻAlī as the great deliverer. With the Shīʻah, the Ismāʻīlian missionary was to put himself forward as the zealous partisan of all the Shīʻah doctrine, was to dwell upon the cruelty and injustice of the Sunnīs towards ʻAlī and his sons, and liberally abuse the Sunnī K͟halīfahs; having thus prepared the way, he was to insinuate, as the necessary completion of the Shīʻah system of faith, the more esoteric doctrines of the Ismāʻīlian sect. In dealing with the Jew, he was to speak with contempt of both Christians and Muslims and agree with his intended convert in still looking forward to a promised Messiah, but gradually lead him to believe that this promised Messiah could be none other than ʻAlī, the great Messiah of the Ismāʻīlian system. If he sought to win over the Christian, he was to dwell upon the obstinacy of the Jews and the ignorance of the Muslims, to profess reverence for the chief articles of the Christian creed, but gently hint that they were symbolic and pointed to a deeper meaning, to which the Ismāʻīlian system alone could supply the key; he was also cautiously to suggest that the Christians had somewhat misinterpreted the doctrine of the Paraclete and that it was in ʻAlī that the true Paraclete was to be found. Similarly the Ismāʻīlian missionaries who made their way into India endeavoured to make their doctrines acceptable to the Hindus, by representing ʻAlī as the promised tenth Avatār of Viṣṇu who was to come from the West, i.e. (they averred) from Alamūt. They also wrote a Mahdī Purāṇa and composed hymns in imitation of those of the Vāmācārins or left-hand Śāktas, whose mysticism already predisposed their minds to the acceptance of the esoteric doctrines of the Ismāʻīlians.21 [213]

By such means as these an enormous number of persons of different faiths were united together to push forward an enterprise, the real aim of which was known to very few. The aspirations of ʻAbd Allāh b. Maymūn seem to have been entirely political, but as the means he adopted were religious and the one common bond—if any—that bound his followers together was the devout expectation of the coming of the Imām Mahdī, the missionary activity connected with the history of this sect deserves this brief mention in these pages.22

The history of the spread of Islam in the countries of Central Asia to the north of Persia presents little in the way of missionary activity. When Qutaybah b. Muslim went to Samarqand, he found many idols there, whose worshippers maintained that any man who dared outrage them would perish; the Muslim conqueror, undeterred by such superstitious fears, set fire to the idols; whereupon a number of persons embraced Islam.23 There is, however, but scanty record of such conversions in the early history of the Muslim advance into Central Asia; moreover the people of this country seem often to have pretended to embrace Islam for a time and then to have thrown off the mask and renounced their allegiance to the caliph as soon as the conquering armies were withdrawn,24 and it was not until Qutaybah had forcibly occupied Buk͟hārā for the fourth time that he succeeded in compelling the inhabitants to conform to the faith of their conquerors.

In Buk͟hārā and Samarqand the opposition to the new faith was so violent and obstinate that none but those who had embraced Islam were allowed to carry arms, and for many years the Muslims dared not appear unarmed in the mosques or other public places, while spies had to be set to keep a watch on the new converts. The conquerors made various efforts to gain proselytes, and even tried to encourage attendance at the Friday prayers in the mosques by rewards of money, and allowed the Qurʼān to be recited in Persian instead of in Arabic, in order that it might be intelligible to all.25 [214]

The progress of Islam in Transoxania was certainly very slow: some of the inhabitants accepted the invitation of ʻUmar II (A.D. 717–720) to embrace Islam,26 and large numbers were converted through the preaching of a certain Abū Ṣaydā who commenced this mission in Samarqand in the reign of Hishām (724–743),27 but it was not until the reign of Al-Muʻtaṣim (A.D. 833–842) that Islam was generally adopted there,28 one of the reasons probably being the more intimate relations established at this time with the then capital of the Muhammadan world, Bag͟hdād, through the enormous numbers of Turks that had flocked in thousands to join the army of the caliph.29 Islam having thus gained a footing among the Turkish tribes seems to have made but slow progress until the middle of the tenth century, when the conversion of some of their chieftains to Islam, like that of Clovis and other barbarian kings of Northern Europe to Christianity, led their clansmen to follow their example in a body.

Pious legends have grown up to supply the lack of sober historical record of such conversions. The city of Khīva reveres as its national saint a Muslim wrestler—Pahlavān—who was in the service of a heathen king of K͟hwārizm. The king of India, hearing of the fame of this Pahlavān, sent his own court wrestler with a challenge to the king of K͟hwārizm. A day was fixed for the trial of strength and the nobles and people of Khīva were summoned to view the spectacle; the vanquished man was to have his head cut off. On the day before, the saintly Pahlavān was praying in the mosque when he overheard the prayer of an old woman: “O God, suffer not my son to be beaten by this invincible Pahlavān, for I have no other child.” Touched with compassion for the mother, Pahlavān lets the Indian wrestler win the day; the enraged king orders his head to be cut off, but at that very moment the horse on which the king is sitting, bolts, carrying his master straight towards a dangerous precipice. Pahlavān springs forward, catches the horse and rescues the king from a horrible death. In gratitude the king embraces the true faith, and the saintly [215]wrestler, full of joy, goes away into the desert and becomes a hermit.30

A strange legend is told of the conversion of Sātūq Bug͟hrā K͟hān, the founder of the Muhammadan dynasty of the Īlik-K͟hāns of Kāshgar, about the middle of the tenth century. A prince of the Sāmānid house, K͟hwājah Abu’l-Naṣr Sāmānī, a man of great piety and humility of character, finding no scope for the exercise of his talent for administration, resolved to become a merchant, with the purpose of spreading the true faith in the lands of the unbelievers. Instead of trying to acquire a fortune by his commercial enterprises, he devoted all his gains to the furtherance of his proselytising efforts. One night the Prophet appeared to him in a dream, saying: “Arise, and go into Turkistan where the prince Sātūq Bug͟hrā K͟hān only awaits your coming to be converted to Islam.” The young prince had in a similar manner been warned in a vision to expect the arrival of an instructor in the faith, and when some days later he met Abu’l-Naṣr Sāmānī he was prepared to accept his teaching and become a Musalman. This legend would appear to have been based on the historic fact that Islam made its way from the Sāmānid kingdom into the neighbouring country of Turkistan, and the example of the ruler seems to have been followed by his subjects, for in A.D. 960 as many as 200,000 tents of the Turks, i.e. probably the greater part of the Turkish population of Bug͟hrā K͟hān’s kingdom, professed the faith of Islam.31 Legend credits him with miraculous powers in his wars against the heathen, when a devouring flame would issue from his mouth and the sword that he brandished would become forty feet long. By the time he had reached the age of ninety-six, the terror of his sword is said to have converted the unbelievers from the banks of the Oxus in the south to Qurāquram in the north, and just before his death he is said to have led his victorious army into China, and spread Islam as far as Turfan.32 This picturesque account of [216]a dynastic struggle with the Buddhist kingdom of Khotan credits the hero with a measure of success which was not really achieved until the fourteenth century. How limited the success of Sātūq Bug͟hrā K͟hān really was, may be judged from the fact that when his successors among the Īlik-K͟hāns sought in 1026 to contract matrimonial alliances with princesses of the house of Maḥmūd of Ghazna, Maḥmūd replied that he was a Musalman, while they were unbelievers, and that it was not the custom to give the sisters and daughters of Musalmans in marriage to unbelievers, but that, if they would embrace Islam, the matter would be considered.33 A few years later, in 1041–1042, a number of Turks who were still heathen and living in Tibetan territory sought permission from Arslān K͟hān b. Qadr K͟hān to settle in his dominions, having heard of the justice and mildness of his rule; when they arrived in the neighbourhood of Bālāsāg͟hūn34 he sent a message to them urging them to accept Islam; but they refused, and as he found them to be peaceable and obedient subjects, he left them alone. There is no record of their conversion, which probably ensued in course of time; but they can hardly be identified with the group of ten thousand tents of infidel Turks who embraced Islam in the following year, as these latter are expressly stated to have harried and plundered the Musalmans before their conversion.35 The invasion of the Qarā K͟hitāy into Turkistan36 dealt a severe blow to the power of Islam, and as late as the thirteenth century the reports of European travellers show that there were still important groups of Buddhists, Manichæans and Christians in these parts.37

Of supreme importance to Islam was the conversion of the Saljūq Turks, but no record of their conversion remains beyond the statement that in A.D. 956 Saljūq migrated from Turkistan with his clan to the province of Buk͟hārā, where he and his people enthusiastically embraced Islam.38 This [217]was the origin of the famous Saljūq Turks, whose wars and conquests revived the fading glory of the Muhammadan arms and united into one empire the Muslim kingdoms of Western Asia.

When at the close of the twelfth century, the Saljūq empire had lost all power except in Asia Minor, and when Muḥammad G͟hūrī was extending his empire from K͟hurāsān eastward across the north of India, there was a great revival of the Muslim faith among the Afg͟hāns and their country was overrun by Arab preachers and converts from India, who set about the task of proselytising with remarkable energy and boldness.39 The traditions of the Afg͟hāns represent Islam as having been peaceably introduced among them. They say that in the first century of the Hijrah they occupied the G͟hūr country to the east of Herāt, and that K͟hālid b. Walīd came to them there with the tidings of Islam and invited them to join the standard of the Prophet; he returned to Muḥammad accompanied by a deputation of six or seven representative men of the Afghan people, with their followers, and these, when they went back to their own country, set to work to convert their fellow-tribesmen.40 This tradition is, however, devoid of any historical foundation, and the earliest authentic record of conversion to Islam from among the Afghans seems to be that of a king of Kābul in the reign of al-Maʼmūn.41 His successors, however, seem to have relapsed to Buddhism, for when Yaʻqūb b. Layt͟h, the founder of the Ṣaffārid dynasty, extended his conquests as far as Kābul in 871, he found the ruler of the land to be an “idolater,” and Kābul now became really Muhammadan for the first time, the Afghans probably being quite willing to take service in the army of so redoubtable a conqueror as Yaʻqūb b. Layt͟h,42 but it was not until after the conquests of Sabaktigīn and Maḥmūd of Ghazna that Islam became established throughout Afghanistan.

Of the further history of Islam in Persia and Central Asia some details will be found in the following chapter. [218]