Islamic Conquest

In 637 A.D., only five years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, the Arab Muslims shattered the might of the Iranian Sassanians at the battle of Qadisiya, and the invaders began to reach into the lands east of Iran. The Muslim conquest was a prolonged struggle in the area that is now Afghanistan. Following the first Arab raid into Qandahar in about 700, local rulers, probably either Kushans or Western Turks, began to come under the control of Ummayid caliphs, who sent Arab military governors and tax collectors into the region. By the middle of the eighth century the rising Abbasid Dynasty was able to subdue the area. There was a period of peace under the rule of the caliph, Harun al Rashid (785-809), and his son, in which learning fluorished in such Central Asian cities as Samarkand, located in what is now the Soviet Union. Over the period of the seventh through the ninth centuries, most inhabitants of what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan, the southern parts of the Soviet Union, and some of northern India were converted to Sunni (see Glossary) Islam, which replaced the Zorastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and indigenous religions of previous empires (see Religion, ch. 2).

During the eighth and ninth centuries, partly to obtain better grazing land, ancestors of many of the Turkic-speaking groups now identifiable in Afghanistan settled in the Hindu Kush area. Some of these tribes settled in what are now Ghor, Ghazni, and Kabul provinces and began to assimilate much of the culture and language of the already present Pashtun (see Glossary) tribes (see Tribe, ch. 2).

By the middle of the ninth century, Abbasid rule had faltered, and semi-independent states began to emerge throughout the empire. In the Hindu Kush area three shortlived, local dynasties emerged. The best known of the three, the Sammanid, ruling out of Bukhara (in what is now the Soviet Union), extended its rule briefly as far east as India and west into Iran. Bukhara and neighboring Samarkand were centers of science, the arts, and Islamic studies. Although Arab Muslim intellectual life still centered on Baghdad, Iranian Muslim scholarship, i.e., Shia (see Glossary) Islam, at this time predominated in the Sammanid areas. By the mid-tenth century the Sammanid Dynasty crumbled in the face of attack from the Turkish tribes to the north and from a rising dynasty to the south, the Ghaznavids.

Ghaznavid and Ghorid Rule

Out of the Sammanid Dynasty came the first great Islamic empire in Afghanistan, the Ghaznavid, whose warriors raided deep into the Indian subcontinent and at the same time assured the domination of Sunni Islam in what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan, and parts of India. In the middle of the tenth century Alptigin, a Turkish slave warrior of the Sammanid garrison in Nishapur (in present-day Iran) failed in a coup attempt against his masters and fled with his followers to Ghazni, which became the capital of the empire ruled by his successors. The most renowned among them was Mahmud, who consolidated control over the areas south of the Amu Darya, then carried out devastating raids into India, looting Hindu temples and seeking converts to Islam. With his booty from India he built a great capital at Ghazni, founded universities, and patronized scholars, such as historians Al Biruni and Al Utbi, and the poet Firdawsi. Mahmud was recognized by the caliph in Baghdad as the temporal heir of the Sammanids. By the time of his death, Mahmud ruled all the Hindu Kush area and as far east as the Punjab, as well as territories well north of the Amu Darya.

As occurred so often in this region, the death of the military genius who extended the empire to its farthest extent was the death knell of the empire itself. Mahmud died in 1130, and the Seljuk Turks, also Muslims by this time, attacked the Ghaznavid empire from the north and west, while the rulers of the kingdom of Ghor, southeast of Herat, captured and burnt Ghazni, just as the Ghaznavids had once conquered Ghor. Not until 1186, however, was the last representative of the Ghaznavid Dynasty uprooted by the Ghorids from his holdout in the Punjab.

By 1200 Turkish dynasties were in power in all of the easternmost areas of the Abbasid empire, whose caliph was, by this time, a ruler in name only. The Ghorids controlled most of what is now Afghanistan, eastern Iran, and Pakistan, while parts of central and western Iran were ruled by Seljuk Turks (who would eventually sweep all the way to what is now Turkey). Around 1200 most Ghorid lands came into the hands of the Khwarazm Turks, who had invaded from Central Asia across the Amu Darya.

Mongol Rule, 1220-1506

In 1220 the Islamic lands of Central Asia were overrun by the armies of a Mongol invader, whom scholar Louis Dupree describes as "the atom bomb of his day" because of his widespread destruction of cities and people. Genghis Khan (ca. 1155-1227) laid waste to many civilizations and created an empire that stretched from China to the Caspian Sea, but he failed to destroy the strength of Islam in Central Asia. By the end of the thirteenth century, Genghis Khan's descendants were themselves Muslims.

In south central Asia the Mongols destroyed the Buddhist monuments and buildings in the ancient trading city of Balkh and sacked Herat, the old Buddhist centers in the Barman valley, and Peshawar. The European traveler, Marco Polo, traveling to the court of Genghis Khan's grandson toward the end of the thirteenth century, reported that Balkh was still a noble city, though ravaged. Sixty or more years later Ibn Batuta, a Moorish traveler, found Balkh destroyed and the cities that were probably Kapisa and Ghazni much diminished by the depredations of the invaders. Unlike other invaders before and after them, the Mongols never attempted to extend their control to India, although they conducted raids into the northern part of the subcontinent. From the death of Genghis Khan in 1227 until the rise of Timor (Tamerlane) in the 1380s, Central Asia went through a period of fragmentation. Although there were 11 Mongol rulers in the area during this period, a Tajik dynasty-the Karts-came to power in Herat and ruled almost independently until Timor destroyed their power in 1381.

Timor was of both Turkish and Mongol descent and claimed Genghis Khan as an ancestor. From his capital of Samarkand, Timor created an empire that by the late fourteenth century extended from India to Turkey. In 1398 he invaded India and plundered Delhi with a ferocity that matched that of Genghis Khan or Mahmud of Ghazni. His successors, however, became supporters of Islamic art, culture, and the sciences. A grandson of Timor built an observatory outside of Samarkand, and under the rule of the last of Timor's successors in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, artists-like the poet Jami and the artist Behzad-and scholars flourished under royal patronage in the capital at Herat. The end of the Timurid Empire came around the turn of the sixteenth century when another Mongol-Turkish ruler overwhelmed the vitiated Timurid ruler in Herat. Muhammad Shaybani (also a descendant of Genghis Khan) and his successors ruled the area around the Amu Darya for about a century, but in the south and west of what is now Afghanistan two powerful dynasties began to compete for influence.

Mughal-Safavid Rivalry, ca. 1500-1747

Early in the sixteenth century Babur, who was descended from Timor on his father's side and Genghis Khan on his mother's, was driven out of his father's kingdom in Ferghana (now in the Soviet Union) by the Shaybani Uzbeks who had taken Samarkand from the Timurids. After several attempts to regain Ferghana and Samarkand, Babur crossed the Amu Darya and captured Kabul from the last of its Mongol rulers. In an invasion of India in 1526, Babur's army of 12,000 defeated a less mobile force of 100,000 at the First Battle of Panipat, about 45 kilometers northwest of Delhi. Although the seat of the great Mughal Empire that Babur founded was in India, in his memoirs he stressed his love for Kabul, which was not only a commercial and strategic center but also a beautiful highland city with a climate that Babur's memoirs call "extremely delightful."

Although Mughal rule lasted technically until the nineteenth century in India, its days of power were from 1526 until the death in 1707 of Babur's great-great-grandson, Aurangzeb. Although the Mughals came originally from Central Asia, once they had taken India the area that is now Afghanistan became only an outpost of the empire. Indeed, most of the Hindu Kush area during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a major bone of contention between the Mughals of India on the one hand and the powerful Safavi Dynasty of Iran on the other. Just as Kabul commands the high road from Central Asia into India, Qandahar commands the only approach to the Indian subcontinent that skirts the Hindu Kush. The strategically important Kabul-Qandahar axis was the main area of competition between the Mughals and Safavis, and Qandahar itself changed hands many times during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Safavis and the Mughals were not the only contenders, however. Less powerful but closer at hand were the Uzbeks of Central Asia, who contended for control of Herat and the northern regions where neither the Mughals nor the Safavis were powerful.

The Mughals desired not only to block the historic western invasion routes into India but also to control the fiercely independent tribes who accepted only nominal control from Delhi in their mountain strongholds between the Kabul-Qandahar axis and the Indus River-especially in the Pashtun area of the Suleiman mountain range. As the area around Qandahar shifted back and forth between the two great empires on either side, the local Pashtun tribes were able to exploit the situation to their advantage, extracting concessions from both sides. By the middle of the seventeenth century the Mughals had abandoned the Hindu Kush north of Kabul to the Uzbeks, and in 1748 they lost Qandahar to the Safavis for the third and last time.

Toward the end of the seventeenth century, as the power of both the Safavis and the Mughals waned, new groups began to assert themselves in the Hindu Kush area, beginning in 1667 with a Pakhtun tribe, the Yusufzais. Although the tribal revolts were successful, they were not linked, and there was no hint of unified action by their leaders. Early in the eighteenth century one of the Pashtun tribes, the Hotaki, took Qandahar from the Safavis, and a group of Ghilzai Pashtuns made even greater inroads into Safavi territory. The Ghilzai Pashtuns even managed to hold briefly the Safavi capital of Isfahan, and two members of this tribe ascended the throne before the Ghilzai were evicted from Iran by a man who became one of the great conquerers of his time, Nadir Shah.

Qandahar and Kabul were conquered in 1738 by Nadir Shah, who was called the Napoleon of Persia. He defeated a great Mughal army in India, plundered Delhi and massacred thousands of its people. He returned home with vast treasures, including the Peacock Throne, which served as a symbol of Iranian imperial might almost to the end of the twentieth century.

The peoples of the Hindu Kush region fought fiercely, and during the battles the usually hostile Pashtun tribes banded together to face a common enemy. After defeating the tribes Nadir Shah displaced some of them from their homelands. The present location of some Pashtun tribes results from Nadir Shah's efforts to disperse an enemy of which he was both admiring and wary.

This page maintained by Luke Griffin and last updated on 01/14/2002 .