What kind of Muslims were in Central Asia before the Soviet Union? Were they integrated in the Muslim world or were they on the sidelines of the mainstream events? How much did they contribute to Muslim heritage? How hard was it for the soviet houses of culture to influence the Muslims of Central Asia? This paper attempts to explore these questions and these aspects of the history of Central Asia.
I begin by very briefly going over the history of Islamic expansion into Central Asia. The expansion in my view can be separated into two periods, the pre-Abbasid period and the Abbasid and post-Abbasid period. Pre-Abbasid period is the period before the Abbasid Empire took hold of expansion in Asia, and it can be characterized by fluctuation. Fluctuation in terms of which lands the Muslims had expanded into; many times the Muslims will defeat an army, the defeated armies regroup attack the Muslims and so on. The Post-Abbasid Empire period is characterized by stability and fruitfulness; the period after which turmoil had settled in the area and the people and land got a chance to flourish under the ruling of Islam. And while the beginnings of these effects does start in the Umayyad Empire before, the full results of Islam’s rule over Central Asia can be most clearly seen during the Abbasid era.
Expansion into Central Asia begins as early as the year 637 during the time of the Muslim Caliph Omar Ibn Al-Khattab. At the time, the Muslim army leader Al-Ahnaf Ibn Qays (1) in the battles with the Persian empire had pushed the last king of the Sasanian Empire Yazdegerd III all the way back to Amu River near Balkh at the Battle of Oxus River (4). The Amu River is in todays’ Turkmenistan and so is in the western side of Central Asia. The expans...
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Part One, “The Formation of Eurasian States” introduces the three major powers in central Eurasia, China, Russia, and the Zunghar State. Perdue describes central Eurasia as an “unbounded” land stretching from “the Ukrainian steppes in the west to the shores of the Pacific in the east, from the southern edge of the Siberian forests to the Tibetan plateau” populated by nomadic tribes who had no clearly defined national boundaries . Historical sources concerning Central Asia people in Central Eurasia are scares due to the lack of writing ability in the vast majority of the nomadic population. Writers from the “civilized” world such as China described these people as exclusively nomadic and “universally greedy, primitive, and poor” . Despite the lack of historical records in the area, the area has historically played an important role in linking the eastern civilizations to the western civilizations, which played a major part in global trade up until the sixteenth century . Although the nomads of the steppes in Central Eurasia has long been accused of constant raiding of “civilized” settlements such as in north western parts of China, Sechin Jagchid argues that peace was possible if the nomad’s needs were satisfied by trade, so that the they did not have to take supplies by force in order...
In the post-classical Indian society, there were many regional kingdoms (Lecture 16). Politically, both the Islamic and Indian society had strong influence on the how the neighboring societies were shaped during the post-classical era. During this period, there was a collapse of centralized political rule within the Indian society. There were also several internal wars and invasions in the Indian region, and led to a situation in which this the northern Indian region became politically fragmented and quite chaotic. There was a lack of political unification in both societies which made foreign incursion easy, and this probably led to Muslim conquests in the Northern region of India between 8th-13th c. C.E. (Lecture 16). In the Islamic world, two emissari...
?In the 8th century, the first Turkish-speaking tribes migrated westward from central Asia and began converting to Islam.? They became Sunni Muslims, who follow the most orthodox form of Islam.? Islam appealed to these nomads because it was a simple faith with straightforward requirements.? Many were so passionate about the faith that they became ghazis, ?warriors for the faith.?? Fighting the Byzantines, they began to conquer the lands of Anatolia in the name of Islam.? The Ottomans, one of the Turkish clans, became the dominant leaders of this new land and united the scattered Turkish tribes.? By the 12th century, a new wave of Turkish immigrants who followe...
1. What was the impact of the mongol conquest of Russia? Of the Islamic heartlands?
From the 18th century through the beginning of the 19th century, European influence was a significant force in various aspects of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Iran. Although the reforms, coined primarily by Gelvin as “defensive developmentalism,” were initially intended to centralize governmental control and strengthen the military, the actual effects were much broader. Based on varying pre-existing conditions and unique approaches to governorship, this process of modernization affected each region differently. This essay will explore the manners in which European influence shaped each territory, the primary areas of civilization, politics and culture that experienced reform, and the degree to which that influence was significant, or in the case of Iran, insignificant.
While some of the enormous discrepancies between Babur’s Islam and James Scurry’s Islam can be ascribed to differences in age and role, the strongest cause of such dissimilarities is a very similar political instability. Admittedly, Babur’s position as conqueror and Scurry’s status as prisoner are the obvious differences that inform their vastly different experiences. Although centuries lay between Babur’s victories and Scurry’s capture, both times were dominated by insecurity and warfare. Local rulers in both eras turned to Islam as a justifying cornerstone of their regimes, and as a tool and rallying cry against their enemies. It is this particular guise of Islam, as political instrument, that ultimately gives us Babur’s privileged piety and Scurry’s painful conversion.
From the emergence of Mongol military strength on the steppes of central Asia in the early decades of the 13th century to the demise of the Timur in 1405, the nomadic community of the central Asia played a major role on the center stage of the global history. The Mongol invasions interrupted and ended numerous great empires of the post classical period. There is association between the Mongol ascent the colossal social changes that made the preconditions for a development like the PR to occur in Europe a couple of centuries later.
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The Middle Eastern country of Afghanistan has been the center of a long history of heartless violence and political strife for quite sometime now. Russia’s interest in taking over the country and converting it into another member of it’s Communist entity was one very trying obstacle that Afghanistan has had...
In 1250 the Mamluk rebellion overthrew the Ayyubid house for control of Egypt and named Aybeg, one of the Mamluk regimental leaders, as Sultan. The Mamluks, being a military slave society, were able to defend Syria against the Mongols in 1260 and also subsume the remaining Syria principalities and expel the Crusaders by 1291.1 The unity between Egypy and Syria that the Mamluks were able to achieve was reason that the Mamluk state was the largest Islamic states between the time of the Abbasids and the Ottoman empire.2 Moreover, t...
Located in the province of Xianjing, the Uyghurs are isolated by massive mountains, deserts, Communist China, and extreme poverty. The Uyghurs are of Turkic origin, and were one of the 9 original tribes. One of these tribes, the Ottomans, sacked Constantinople in 1459, starting the rein of the Sultans for 400 years. The superpower carved a massive empire, from its roots in Turkey, to spread from the Russian steppes to the Alps to India, and stamping their name on history in blood. European history in the 1400‘s, 1500‘s, and 1600‘s centered on the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire and the Arabic people carved two massive empires in an extremely short time. They crushed the medieval christian kingdoms around Jerusalem, and quickly started attacking Christian kingdoms in Spain, Greece, and the Balkans. These conflicts between Muslims and Christians have been the longest and bloodiest in the history of the world, and still persist today. These Ottomans are, understandably, the most wel...
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