...
Post A Reply
my profile
|
directory
login
|
register
|
search
|
faq
|
forum home
»
EgyptSearch Forums
»
Deshret
»
Ethnically: Who are the Arabs?
» Post A Reply
Post A Reply
Login Name:
Password:
Message Icon:
Message:
HTML is not enabled.
UBB Code™ is enabled.
[QUOTE]Originally posted by Mike111: [QB] PERSIA (Iran) Background The Persian capital of Persepolis falls to the Greek invaders in April 330 B.C, and Darius III, the last Achaemenid king, is murdered in the same year while fleeing the conquerors. Greece annexes the Persian Empire, and establishes the greatest Empire known to man. With the end of the Achaemenian Empire, southern Mesopotamia and Persia were partitioned by Alexander into the satrapy of Babylonia in the south, while the northern part of Mesopotamia was joined with Syria into another satrapy. One of his generals, Seleucus (later Seleucus I Nicator), received the satrapy of Babylonia to rule. Seleucus thus became the ruler of a large empire, stretching from modern Afghanistan to the Mediterranean Sea. He founded a number of cities, the most important of which were Seleucia on the Tigris, and Antioch on the Orontes River in Syria. The Parthian's It was during the reign of a later Seleucid king "Antiochus III", that one of the Caucasian tribes, which had earlier migrated in from the northeast - the Parthians - under their king Mithradates I, conquered Seleucid territory in Persia, and entered the city of Seleucia in 141 B.C. He established the kingdom of Parthia. In 224 A.D, the resurgent Persians, under their king "Ardašir", culminated the war with Parthia: that his father "Papak" had started. He defeated the last Parthian king "Artabanus V" in battle, and two years later, Ardašir took Ctesiphon. This meant the end of Parthia, and it also meant the beginning of the second Persian Empire, one ruled by the Sassanid kings. [IMG]http://www.realhistoryww.com/world_history/ancient/Images_Elam/Elam_Sassanian_king.jpg[/IMG] [IMG]http://www.realhistoryww.com/world_history/ancient/Images_Elam/Sassanian_plate.jpg[/IMG] Interestingly: The Sassanian Persians may be the first of the Black Empires to be made White. Note the now “White” Sassanian King Khosrau II (left), submitting to Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, from a plaque on a 12th century French cross. [IMG]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a7/Cherub_plaque_Louvre_MRR245_n2.jpg/685px-Cherub_plaque_Louvre_MRR245_n2.jpg[/IMG] King Khosrau II as he looks on his coin. [IMG]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/0/0d/Khosrau_II_Coin.jpg/800px-Khosrau_II_Coin.jpg[/IMG] The Arab invasion The Arab Lakhmid had been Sassanian Persian vassals and the Arab Ghassanids were vassals of the Byzantine Empire. They acted as frontier guardians of the two empires against fellow Arabs: While the Meccan and Medinese Arabs had established commercial connections with both the Byzantines and Sassanids. But Arab tribalism beyond urban fringes was deeply embedded in the desert tribes. After Mecca and Medina had become Muslim, it was essential that the Muslims win the desert Arabs' allegiance in order to secure the routes they depended on for trade and communication. In the process of doing this, wars over water holes, scanty pastures, men-at-arms, and camels were enlarged into international campaigns of expansion. The vulnerability of Sassanian Persia assisted the expansionist process. In 623 A.D. the Byzantine emperor Heraclius reversed previous Persian successes over the Roman army —namely, by capturing Jerusalem in 614 A.D. and winning at Chalcedon in 617 A.D. The Persian king Khosrow Parviz, died in 628 A.D. and left Persia prey to a succession of puppet rulers who were frequently deposed by a combination of nobles and Zoroastrian clergy. Thus, when Yazdegerd III, Persia's last Sassanid and Zoroastrian sovereign, came to the throne in 632 A.D, the year of Muhammad's death, he inherited an empire weakened by Byzantine wars and internal dissension. The former Arab vassals on the empire's southwestern border realized that their moment had arrived, and their raids into Sassanian territory were quickly joined by Muhammad's caliphs, or deputies, at Medina—Abu Bakr and 'Umar ibn al-Khattab—making it a Muslim, pan-Arab attack on Persia. An Arab victory at Al-Qadisiyyah in 636/637 A.D. was followed by the sack of the Sassanian winter capital at Ctesiphon on the Tigris. The Battle of Nahavand in 642 A.D. completed the Sassanids' vanquishment. Yazdegerd fled to the empire's northeastern outpost of Merv, whose Marzban, or March-lord, Mahuyeh, became soured by the imperious and expensive demands of Yazdegerd III. Mahuyeh turned against his emperor and defeated him with the help of Hephthalites from Badghis. The Hephthalites, an independent border power, had troubled the Sassanids since at least 590 A.D, when they had sided with Bahram Chubin, Khosrow Parviz's rebel general. A Miller near Merv murdered the fugitive Yazdegerd III for his purse. Hephthalites The Hephthalites were a powerful dynasty ruling a Central Asian nomadic confederation of Hua and White Huns whose precise origins and composition remain obscure. They were called Ephthalites by the Greeks, but known as simply Hunas among the Indians. Chinese chronicles considered they were originally a tribe living to the north of the Great Wall known as Hoa or Hoa-tun. Elsewhere they were called White Huns. They had no cities, lived in felt tents, and practiced polyandry. There is no definitive evidence that they were related to the European Huns - this is a term which has been used by outside observers to denote very different nomadic confederations. Furthermore, very little is known of their language. White Huns were an agricultural people with a developed set of laws. They were first mentioned by the Chinese, who described them as living in Dzungaria around AD 125. They displaced the Scythians and conquered Sogdiana and Khorasan before 425. After that, they crossed the Syr Darya (Jaxartes) River and invaded Persia. In Persia, they were initially held off by Bahram Gur but later around AD 483–85, they succeeded in making Persia a tributary state. After a series of wars in the period around AD 503-513, they were driven out of Persia and were completely defeated in AD 557 by Khosru I though their polity came under the Gokturks thereafter. The White Huns also invaded India and succeeded in extending their domain to include the Ganges valley. They temporarily overthrew the Gupta empire but were eventually driven out of India in 528 by a Hindu coalition. Gokturks The Göktürkler(s) or Köktürkler(s) were a Turkic people of ancient Central Asia. Known in medieval Chinese sources as Tujue (突厥 Tūjué), the Göktürks under the leadership of Bumin Khan (d. 552) and his sons succeeded the Xiongnu as the main Turkic power in the region and took hold of the lucrative Silk Road trade. The Göktürk rulers originated from the Ashina tribe, an Altaic people who lived in the northern corner of the area presently called Xinjiang. Under their leadership, the Göktürks rapidly expanded to rule huge territories in north-western China, North Asia and Eastern Europe (as far west as the Crimea). They were the first Turkic tribe known to use the name "Turk" as a political name. The Arabs Soon After their victory; factionalism was growing among Arabs, partly the result of the jealousies and rivalries that accompanied the acquisition of new territories and partly the result of the competition between first arrivals in Persia and those who followed. In Persia the first Arab conquerors had concluded treaties with local Persian magnates who had assumed authority when the Sassanian imperial government disintegrated. These notables—the marzbans and landlords (dehqans)—undertook to continue tax collection on behalf of the new Muslim power. The advent of Arab colonizers, who preferred to cultivate the land rather than campaign farther into Asia, produced a further complication. Once the Arabs had settled in Persian lands, they, like the Persian cultivators, were required to pay the kharaj, or land tax, which was collected by Persian notables for the Muslims in a system similar to that, which had predated the conquest. The system was ripe for abuse, and the Persian collectors extorted large sums, arousing the hostility of both Arabs and Persians. Another source of discontent was the jizyah, or head tax, which was applied to non-Muslims of the tolerated religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism. After they had converted to Islam, Persians expected to be exempt from this tax. But the Umayyad government, burdened with imperial expenses, often refused to exempt the Persian converts. The tax demands of the Damascus government were as distasteful to those urbanized Arabs and Persians in commerce as they were to those in agriculture, and hopes of easier conditions under the new rulers than under the Sassanids were not fully realized. The Umayyads ignored Persian agricultural conditions, which required constant reinvestment to maintain irrigation works and to halt the encroachment of the desert. This no doubt made the tax burden, from which no returns were visible, all the more odious. Furthermore, the regime failed to maintain the peace so necessary to trade. Damascus feared the breaking away of remote provinces where the Arab colonists were becoming assimilated with the local populations. The government, therefore, deliberately encouraged tribal factionalism in order to prevent a united opposition against it. In 750 A.D. Umayyad power was destroyed, and the revolution gave the caliphate to the 'Abbasids. Hejazi commercial interests had in a sense overcome the military party among leading Muslim Arabs. Greater concern for the east was manifested by the new caliphate's choice of Baghdad as its capital—situated on the Tigris a short distance north of Ctesiphon and designed as a new city, to be free of the factions of the old Umayyad garrison cities of Al-Kufah, Wasit, and Al-Basrah. Despite the development of a distinctive Islamic culture, the military problems of the empire were left unsolved. The 'Abbasids were under pressure from the infidel on several fronts—Turks in Central Asia, pagans in India and in the Hindu Kush, and Christians in Byzantium. War for the faith, or jihad, against these infidels was a Muslim duty. But, whereas the Umayyads had been expansionists and had seen themselves as heads of a military empire, the 'Abbasids were more pacific and saw themselves as the supporters of more than an Arab, conquering militia. Yet rebellions within the imperial frontiers had to be contained and the frontiers protected. Rebellion within the Arab empire took the form of peasant revolts in Azerbaijan and Khorasan, coalesced by popular religious appeals centered on men who assumed or were accorded mysterious powers. Abu Muslim — executed in 755 by the second 'Abbasid caliph, al-Mansur, who feared his influence — became one such messianic figure. Another was al-Muqanna' (Arabic: “the Veiled One”), who used Abu Muslim's mystique and whose movement lasted from 777 to 780. The Khorram-dinan (Persian: “Glad Religionists”), under the Azerbaijanian Babak (816–838), also necessitated vigorous military suppression. Babak eluded capture for two decades, defying the caliph in Azerbaijan and western Persia, before being caught and brought to Baghdad to be tortured and executed. These heresiarchs revived such creeds as that of the anti-Sassanid religious leader Mazdak (died 528 or 529), expressive of social and millenarian aspirations that were later canalized into Sufism on the one hand and into Shi'ism on the other. The Saffarids Over-exploitation of agriculture by Arab governors had debilitated rural life, and Kharijites (puritanical Arabs), who found refuge in Sistan (Persia's southeastern border area) from the Umayyads, organized or attracted bands of local peasants and vagabonds who had strayed south from Khorasan. Kharijite bands isolated the cities and threatened their supplies. Sistan needed an urban champion who could come to terms with the Kharijites and divert them to what could legitimately be termed jihad across the border, forming the gangsters into a well-disciplined loyal army. Such a man was Ya'qub ibn Layth, who founded the Saffarid dynasty, the first purely Persian dynasty of the Islamic era, and threatened the Muslim empire with the first resurgence of Persian independence. Ya'qub ibn Layth seized Baghdad's breadbaskets—Fars and Khuzestan—and drove the Tahirid emir from Neyshabur. His march on Baghdad itself was halted only by the stratagem devised by the caliph's commander in chief: who inundated Ya'qub's army by bursting dikes. Ya'qub died soon after, in 879. He had made an empire, minted his own coinage, fashioned a new style of army loyal to its leader rather than to any religious or doctrinal concept, and required that verses in his praise be put into his own language—Persian—from Arabic, which he did not understand. He began the Persian resurgence. The collapse of the Tahirid viceroyalty left Baghdad faced with a power vacuum in Khorasan and southern Persia. The caliph reluctantly confirmed Ya'qub's brother 'Amr as governor of Fars and Khorasan but withdrew his recognition on three occasions, and 'Amr's authority was disclaimed to the Khorasanian pilgrims to Mecca when they passed through Baghdad. But 'Amr remained useful to Baghdad so long as Khorasan was victimized by the rebels Ahmad al-Khujistani and, for longer, Rafi' ibn Harthama. After Rafi' had been finally defeated in 896, 'Amr's broader ambitions gave the caliph al-Mu'tadid his chance. 'Amr conceived designs on Transoxania, but there the Samanids held the caliph's license to rule, after having nominally been Tahirid deputies. When 'Amr demanded and obtained the former Tahirid tutelage over the Samanids in 898, Baghdad could leave the Saffarid and Samanid to fight each other, and the Samanid Isma'il (reigned 892–907) won. 'Amr was sent to Baghdad, where he was put to death in 902. His family survived as Samanid vassals in Sistan and were heard of until the 16th century. Ya'qub remains a popular hero in Persian history. The Samanids There was nothing of the popular hero in the Samanids' origin. Their eponym was Saman-Khoda, a landlord in the district of Balkh and, according to the dynasty's claims, a descendant of Bahram Chubin, the Sassanian general. Saman became Muslim. His four grandsons were rewarded for services to the caliph al-Ma'mun (reigned 813–833) and received the caliph's investiture for areas that included Samarkand and Herat. They thus gained wealthy Transoxanian and east Khorasanian entry-port cities, where they could profit from trade that reached across Asia, even as far as Scandinavia, and from providing Turkish slaves—much in demand in Baghdad as royal troops—while they protected the frontiers and provided security for merchants in Bukhara, Samarkand, Khujand, and Herat. With one transitory exception, they upheld Sunnism and at each new accession to power paid a tribute to Baghdad for the tokens of investiture from the caliph whereby their rule represented lawful authority. The Turks Thus, legal transactions in Samanid realms would be valid, and Baghdad received tribute in return for the insignia prayed over and signed by the caliph. This tribute took the place of regular revenue, so that it represented a solution of the taxation problems and consequent resentments that had bedeviled the Umayyad regime. In modern assessments of imperial power, Baghdad may seem to have been politically the weaker for this type of arrangement, but ensuring the reign of Islam in peripheral provinces was important to the caliphs. To insure Islam's portals to East Asia were adequately guarded, the supply of Turkish slaves essential for the caliph's bodyguard was maintained, and Turkish pagan tribes were converted to Islam under the Samanids. The Ghaznavids (Islamic Dynasty of Turkish slave origin) Rudaki, in a poem about the Samanid emir's court, describes how “row upon row” of Turkish slave guards were part of its adornment. From these guards' ranks two military families arose—the Simjurids and Ghaznavids—who ultimately proved disastrous to the Samanids. The Simjurids received an appendage in the Kuhestan region of southern Khorasan. Alp Tigin founded the Ghaznavid fortunes when he established himself at Ghazna (modern Ghazni, Afghanistan) in 962. He and Abu al-Hasan Simjuri, as Samanid generals, competed with each other for the governorship of Khorasan and control of the Samanid Empire by placing on the throne emirs they could dominate. Abu al-Hasan died in 961, but a court party instigated by men of the scribal class—civilian ministers as contrasted with Turkish generals—rejected Alp Tigin's candidate for the Samanid throne. Mansur I was installed, and Alp Tigin prudently retired to his fief of Ghazna. The Simjurids enjoyed control of Khorasan south of the Oxus but were hard-pressed by a third great Persian dynasty, the Buyids, and were unable to survive the collapse of the Samanids and the rise of the Ghaznavids. The struggles of the Turkish slave generals for mastery of the throne with the help of shifting allegiance from the court's ministerial leaders both demonstrated and accelerated the Samanid decline. Samanid weakness attracted into Transoxania the Qarluq Turks, who had recently converted to Islam. They occupied Bukhara in 992 to establish in Transoxania the Qarakhanid, or Ilek Khanid, dynasty. Alp Tigin had been succeeded at Ghazna by Sebüktigin (died 997). Sebüktigin's son Mahmud made an agreement with the Qarakhanids whereby the Oxus was recognized as their mutual boundary. Thus the Samanids' dominion was divided and Mahmud was freed to advance westward into Khorasan to meet the Buyids. The Buyids The homeland of the Buyids was Daylam, in the Gilan uplands in northern Persia. There, at the end of the 9th century, hardy valley dwellers had been stirred into martial activity by a number of factors, among them the rebel Rafi' ibn Harthama's attempt to penetrate the region, ostensibly with Samanid support. 'Amr ibn Layth had pursued the rebel into the region. Other factors had been the formation of Shi'ite principalities in the area and continued Samanid attempts to subjugate them. After the Tahirid collapse, the lack of stability in northern Persia south of the Elburz Mountains attracted many Daylamite mercenaries into the area on military adventures. Among them Makan ibn Kaki served the Samanids with his compatriots, the sons of Buyeh, and their allies the Ziyarids under Mardavij. Mardavij introduced the three Buyid brothers to the Persian plateau, where he established an empire reaching as far south as Esfahan and Hamadan. He was murdered in 935, but his Ziyarid descendants sought Samanid protection. They adhered to Sunnism and maintained themselves in the region southeast of the Caspian Sea. Mardavij's expansionism south of the Elburz was taken up by his Buyid lieutenants: the eldest brother, 'Ali, consolidated power for himself in Esfahan and Fars and obtained the caliph's recognition; another brother, Hasan, occupied Rayy and Hamadan; and the youngest brother, Ahmad, took Kerman in the southeast and Khuzestan in the southwest. The caliphs al-Muttaqi and al-Mustakfi of the 940s were at the mercy of the Turkish slaves in their palace guard. The generals of the guard competed with each other for the office of amir al-umara' (commander in chief), who virtually ruled Iraq on behalf of the caliphs. When Ahmad gained Khuzestan, he was close to the scene of the amir al-umara' contests, which he chose to settle by himself. The other Turks Although the Buyids were careful to avoid sectarian strife, family quarrels weakened them sufficiently for Mahmud of Ghazna to gain Rayy in 1029. But Mahmud (reigned 998–1030) went no farther: his dynasty paid great deference to the caliphate's legitimating power, and he made no bid to contest the Buyids' role as its protectors. Mahmud's agreement with the Samanids' Ilek Khanid successors, that the Oxus should be their mutual boundary, held, but south of the river the Ghaznavids had to contend with their own distant relatives, the Oguz Turks. Contrary to the sage counsel of Persian ministers, Mahmud and his successor Mas'ud (reigned 1031–41) permitted these tribesmen to use Khorasanian grazing grounds, which they entered from north of the Oxus. United under descendants of an Oguz leader named Seljuq, between 1038 and 1040 these nomads drove the Ghaznavids out of northeastern Persia. The final encounter was at Dandanqan in 1040. After their defeat by the Seljuqs, the Ghaznavids, patrons of Islamic culture and letters, were deflected eastward into India, where Mahmud had already conducted successful raids. The raids took the form of jihad (or holy war), and the Ghaznavids carried Islam and Persian Muslim art to the Indian subcontinent. In Persia it was the Seljuqs' turn to create a new imperial synthesis with the 'Abbasid caliphs. Toghril Beg, the Seljuq sultan, entered Baghdad in 1055, and Buyid power was terminated, thus ending what Vladimir Minorsky, the great Persiaologist, called the “Persian intermezzo.” Turkish Rule The Seljuqs Toghril I had proclaimed himself sultan at Neyshabur in 1038 and had espoused strict Sunnism, by which he gained the caliph's confidence and undermined the Buyid position in Baghdad. The Oguz Turks had accepted Islam late in the 10th century, and their leaders displayed a convert's zeal in their efforts to restore a Muslim polity along orthodox lines. Their efforts were made all the more urgent by the spread of Fatimid Isma'ili propaganda (Arabic da'wah) in the eastern Caliphate by means of an underground network of propagandists, or da'is, intent on undermining the Buyid regime, and by the threat posed by the Christian Crusaders. The Buyids' usurpation of the caliph's secular power had given rise to a new theory of state formulated by al-Mawardi (died 1058). Al-Mawardi's treatise partly prepared the theoretical ground for Toghril's attempt to establish an orthodox Muslim state in which conflict between the caliph-imam's spiritual-juridical authority on the one side and the secular power of the sultan on the other could be resolved, or at least regulated, by convention. Al-Mawardi reminded the Muslim world of the necessity of the imamate; but the treatise realistically admitted the existence of, and thus accommodated, the fact of military usurpation of power. The Seljuqs' own political theorist al-Ghazali (died 1111) carried this admission further by explaining that the position of a powerless caliph, overshadowed by a strong Seljuq master, was one in which the latter's presence guaranteed the former's capacity to defend and extend Islam. [/QB][/QUOTE]
Instant Graemlins
Instant UBB Code™
What is UBB Code™?
Options
Disable Graemlins in this post.
*** Click here to review this topic. ***
Contact Us
|
EgyptSearch!
(c) 2015 EgyptSearch.com
Powered by UBB.classic™ 6.7.3