The Age of the Seljuqs

Edmund Herzig, Sarah Stewart, Edmund Herzig, Sarah Stewart

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781780769479
• eBook ISBN: 9780857738110
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

From their ancestral heartland by the shores of the Aral Sea, the medieval Oghuz Turks marched westwards in search of dominion. Their conquests led to control of a Muslim empire that united the territories of the Eastern Islamic world, melded Turkic and Persian influences and transported Persian culture to Anatolia. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the new Turkic-Persian symbiosis that had earlier emerged under the Samanids, Ghaznavids and Qarakha-nids came to fruition in a period that, under the enlightened rule of the Seljuq dynasty, combined imperial grandeur with remarkable artistic achievement. This latest volume in The Idea of Iran series focuses on a system of government based on Turkic 'men of the sword' and Persian 'men of the pen' that the Seljuqs (famous foes of the Crusader Frankish knights) consolidated in a form that endured for centuries. The book further explores key topics relating to the innovative Seljuq era, including: conflicted Sunni-Shi'a relations between the Sunni Seljuq Empire and Ismaili Fatimid caliphate; architecture, art and culture; and politics and poetry.Istvan Vasary looks back in Chapter 1 to the early history of the Turks in the wider Iranian world, discussing the debates about the dating and distribution of the early Turkish presence in Central Asia, Iran and Afghanistan.
NizaAZm al-Mulk is the subject of Chapter 2, in which Carole Hillenbrand subjects this 'maverick vizier' to critical scrutiny. While paying due credit to his extraordinary achievements, she does not shy away from concluding that his career illustrates the maxim that 'power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely'. A fitting antagonist for NizaAZm al-Mulk is the subject of Chapter 3, in which Farhad Daftary follows the career of the remarkable revolutionary leader Hasan-i SabbaAZh and the history of the Ismaili state-within-a-state that he founded with his capture of the fortress of Alamt in 1090. In Chapter 4 David Durand-Guedy examines the Seljuq Empire from the viewpoint of its (western) capital, Isfahan. He concentrates on the distinction between the parts of Iran to the west of the great deserts (and in close connection to Iraq and Baghdad) and the parts to the east, notably Khorasan, with its ties to Transoxiana and Tokharestan.Vanessa Van Renterghem in Chapter 5 challenges the long-held view that the Seljuq takeover of Baghdad represented a liberation of the Abbasid caliphs from their burden-some subordination to the heretical Buyids.
Alexey Khismatulin in Chapter 6 presents a forensic examination of two important works of literature, casting doubt on the authorship of both the Siyar al-muluAZk attributed to NizaAZm al-Mulk and the NasAZhat al-muluAZk ascribed to al-GhazaAZlAZ. In Chapter 7 Asghar Seyed-Gohrab discusses the poetry of the Ghaznavid and Seljuq periods, demonstrating the poets' mastery of metaphor and of extended description and riddling to build suspense. The final chapter by Robert Hillenbrand shifts the focus from texts and literature to architecture and to that pre-eminent Seljuq masterpiece, the Friday Mosque of Isfaha

Notes

1 Two Patterns of Acculturation to Islam: The Qarakhanids versus the Ghaznavids and Seljuqs

1. R. N. Frye, The Golden Age of Persia (London, 1989), p. 236.

2. See Robert L. Canfield, ed., Turko-Persia in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, 1991); Éva M. Jeremiás, ed., Irano-Turkic Cultural Contacts in the 11th–17th Centuries, Acta et Studia 1 (Piliscsaba, 2002); Lars Johanson and Christiane Bulut, eds, Turkic–Iranian Contact Areas: Historical and Linguistic Aspects (Wiesbaden, 2006). For a good survey of the Turco-Mongol impact, see Yuri Bregel, ‘Turko-Mongol influences in Central Asia’, in Canfield, Turko-Persia in Historical Perspective, pp. 53–77.

3. Yusuf Khass Hajib, Wisdom of Royal Glory (Kutadgu Bilig), A Turko-Islamic Mirror for Princes, transl. Robert Dankoff, Publications of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies 16 (Chicago/London, 1983), p. 2.

4. R. N. Frye and M.S. Sayili, ‘Turks in the Middle East before the Seljuqs’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 63 (1943), pp. 194–207, at p. 195 (also in C. E. Bosworth, ed., The Turks in the Early Islamic World: The Formation of the Classical Islamic World 9 [Aldershot, Hants/Burlington, VT, 2007], pp. 179–92, at p. 180).

5. On this see also C. E. Bosworth, The Ghaznavids: Their Empire in Afghanistan and Eastern Iran 994–1040 (New Delhi, 1992 [1963]), pp. 35–6.

6. C. E. Bosworth, ‘The Turks in the Islamic Lands up to the Mid-11th Century’, in C. Cahen, ed., Philologiae Turcicae Fundamenta, III (Wiesbaden, 1970), pp. 1–20 (also in Bosworth, Turks in the Early Islamic World, pp. 193–212); C. E. Bosworth, ‘Barbarian Incursions: The Coming of the Turks into the Islamic World’, in D. S. Richard, ed., Islamic Civilisation 950–1150 (Oxford, 1973), pp. 1–16 (also in Bosworth, Turks in the Early Islamic World, pp. 213–28).

7. Tadeusz Kowalski, ‘The Turks in the Shāh-nāma’, in Bosworth, Turks in the Early Islamic World, pp. 121–34 (first published in French as ‘Les Turcs dans le Shāh-nāme’, Rocznik Orientalistyczny 15 [1939–49], pp. 84–99).

8. For the institution of ghulāms, with further literature, see H. Töllner, Die türkischen Garden am Kalifenhof vom Samarra: Beiträge zur Sprach- und Kulturgeschichte des Orients 21 (Walldorf-Hessen, 1971); Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (New York, 1980); Daniel Pipes, Slave Soldiers and Islam: The Genesis of a Military System (London, 1981); Matthew S. Gordon, The Breaking of a Thousand Swords: A History of the Turkish Military of Samarra (A.H. 200–275/815–889 CE) (Albany, 2001); Peter B. Golden, ‘Khazar Turkic Ghulâms in Caliphal Service’, Journal Asiatique 292 (2004), pp. 279–309 (also in Bosworth, Turks in the Early Islamic World, pp. 135–65).

9. Hubert Darke, transl., The Book of Government or Rules for Kings: The Siyar al-Muluk or Siyasat-nama of Nizam al-Mulk (Richmond, 2002 [1960]), p. 60. Al-Mu‘tasim’s praise of the Turks may be partly due to the fact that he himself was of Turkic origin on his maternal side, although this has not been satisfactorily demonstrated (see Töllner, Die türkischen Garden, pp. 20–1).

10. Darke, transl., Book of Government, p. 139.

11. Robert Dankoff, in collaboration with James Kelly, ed. and transl., Mahmād al-Kāšγarī, Compendium of the Turkic Dialects (Dīwān Lugāt at-Turk), 3 vols (Harvard University Printing Office, 1982–85), I, p. 176. Practically the same proverb is repeated under the heading tat (ibid., II, p. 407).

12. M. E. Subtelny, ‘The Symbiosis of Turk and Tajik’, in B. F. Manz, ed., Central Asia in Historical Perspective (Boulder, CO/Oxford, 1994), pp. 45–61, at p. 48.

13. Sir Gerard Clauson, An Etymological Dictionary of Pre-Thirteenth-Century Turkish (Oxford, 1972), 449.

14. al-Kāšγarī, Compendium of the Turkic Dialects, ed. R. Dankoff, II, pp. 406–7. See also Clauson, An Etymological Dictionary, p. 449.

15. For the Uighurs as infidels, see al-Kāšγarī, Compendium of the Turkic Dialects, ed. R. Dankoff, I, pp. 30, 243, and II, p. 413; for tatïq-: see ibid., II, p. 327; tatlaš-: ibid., II, p. 370.

16. Bosworth, Ghaznavids, pp. 37–9.

17. M. Nazim, ‘The Pand-Nāmah of Subuktigīn’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 3 (1933), pp. 605–28.

18. al-Kāšγarī, Compendium of the Turkic Dialects, ed. R. Dankoff, II, p. 625.

19. Vladimir Minorsky, ed. and transl., Hudūd al-‘Ālam, ‘The Regions of the World’: A Persian Geography 372 AH–982 AD, E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Series, New Series 11 (London, 1937), p. 98.

20. Bosworth, Ghaznavids, p. 39.

21. W. Barthold, Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion, E. J. W. Gibbs Memorial Series, New Series 5 (London, 1928), p. 24.

22. Bosworth, Ghaznavids, p. 40.

23. Zeki Velidî Togan, Umumî Türk tarihi’ne giriş (Istanbul, 1981 [1946]), p. 152; Bosworth, Ghaznavids, pp. 40–1.

24. Bosworth, Ghaznavids, pp. 129–30.

25. Mehmed Fuad Köprülüzade, in his ‘Gazneliler devrinde Türk si’ri’, in Mehmed Fuad Köprülüzade, Türk dili ve edebiyati hakkinda araştirmalar (Istanbul, 1934), pp. 26–32, analyses a couplet (bayt) of Manūchihrī, Persian poet of Mas‘ūd Ghaznavī’s court, in which the poet refers to a person who can recite Turkic and Oghuz verses (ši’r-i turkī, ši’r-i ghuzzī). See A. de Biberstein-Kazimirsky, Menoutchehri, poète persan du onzième siècle (Paris, 1887), pp. 148, 261, 395. Köprülüzade grossly exaggerates the significance of Manūchihrī’s bayt, on the basis of which he erroneously infers the existence of a written literature in Turkic during the early Ghaznavid period.

26. Robert Dankoff, ‘Qarakhanid Literature and the Beginnings of Turco-Islamic Culture’, in Hasan B. Paksoy, ed., Central Asian Monuments (Istanbul, 1992), pp. 73–80, at p. 74.

27. For an overview of Qarakhanid literary culture, see Ahmet Caferoğlu, ‘La littérature turque de l’epoque des Karakhanides’, in Louis Bazin, Pertev Naili Boratav, Alessio Bombaci, Tayyib Gökbilgin, Fahir İz, eds, Philologiae Turcicae Fundamenta II (Wiesbaden, 1964), pp. 267–75.

28. For Kāshgharī and the editions of his work, see Mecdut Mansuroğlu, ‘Das Karakhanidische’, in Jean Deny, Kaare Grønbech, Helmuth Scheel, Zeki Velidi Togan, eds, Philologiae Turcicae Fundamenta, I (Wiesbaden, 1959), pp. 87–108, at p. 88. For the latest and best English translation, see al-Kāšγarī, Compendium of the Turkic Dialects, 3 vols (see note 11, above).

29. al-Kāšγarī, Compendium of the Turkic Dialects, ed. R. Dankoff, I, p. 2.

30. Publius Vergilius Maro, Aeneid, VI, lines 851–2, available at the latinlibrary.com.

31. al-Kāšγarī, Compendium of the Turkic Dialects, ed. R. Dankoff, I, p. 176.

32. Ibid., p. 2.

33. Dankoff, ‘Qarakhanid Literature and the Beginnings of Turco-Islamic Culture’, p. 77.

34. For the best edition of the Qutadghu Bilig, together with a Turkish translation and index, see Reşid Rahmeti Arat, ed., Kutadgu Bilig I: Metin (Ankara, 1991 [1947]); II: Çeviri (Ankara, 1985 [1959]); III: İndeks (Istanbul, 1979). For the English translation, see Yusuf Khass Hajib, Wisdom of Royal Glory (tr. R. Dankoff). Some of the major contributions from among the ample literature concerning the Qutadghu Bilig include: A. Bombaci, ‘Kutadgu Bilig hakkinda bazi mülâha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Two Patterns of Acculturation to Islam: The Qarakhanids versus the Ghaznavids and Seljuqs
• Nizām al-Mulk: A Maverick Vizier?
• Ismaili–Seljuq Relations: Conflict and Stalemate
• What does the History of Isfahan tell us about Iranian Society during the Seljuq Period?
• Baghdad: A View from the Edge on the Seljuq Empire
• Two Mirrors for Princes Fabricated at the Seljuq Court: Nizām al-Mulk’s Siyar al-mulūk and al-Ghazālī’s Nasīhat al-mulūk
• Stylistic Continuities in Classical Persian Poetry: Reflections on Manuchehri from Dāmghān and Amir Mo‘ezzi
• Architecture and Politics: The North and South Dome Chambers of the Isfahan Jāmi‘
• Bibliography
• Notes