Iran’s political and cultural links with Central Asia encompasses a long and complex history, which stokes a fervent sense of nationalist pride among Iranians to the present day. It is generally agreed among scholars that Iranians constituted Central Asia’s first sedentary inhabitants, speaking eastern variations of the Iranian language group.2 Early Iranian peoples developed primitive forms of state organisation revolving around oases and irrigated areas, with the establishment of cities at key intersections of trade. The establishment of these cities gradually took place throughout the sixth century B.C.E., mostly in the southern rim of Central Asia—or Transoxiana—eventually leading to the foundation of some of the world’s most powerful medieval empires.3 Within Central Asia, the Iranian Achaemenid (550-331 B.C.E.), Arsacid (247 B.C.E. - 224 C.E.), and Sassanian (224-641 C.E.) empires ruled over vast swathes of land and peoples. However, Iran’s political rule and cultural influence in Central Asia declined dramatically following the waves of nomadic Turkic and Mongol tribes and confederations that entered the region from the northern steppes beginning in the sixth century.
These heterogeneous Turkic and Mongol cultural and political entities dominated the region’s political history without exception until the late nineteenth century.4 However, Iranian culture survived and was in many respects reinvigorated by the Muslim Arab invasions of the seventh century.5 The Muslim Arab invasions introduced an Iranian literary and linguistic renaissance, particularly within Transoxiana. It was in this region that the modern Iranian language developed in the form of Farsi-e Dari, and superseded
2 Muriel Atkin, "Tajik National Identity," Iranian Studies 26, no. 1/2 (1993): 151-158. 3 Shirin Akiner, Islamic Peoples of the Soviet Union (London: Kegan Paul, 1983), 293.
4 Maria Eva Subtelny, "The Symbiosis of Turk and Tajik," in Central Asia in Historical Perspective,
ed. Beatrice F. Manz (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994): 45-61
5 Shireen T. Hunter, Iran and the World – Continuity in a Revolutionary Decade, (Bloomington: Indiana
104 older Iranian languages and eastern vernaculars.6 This process of Iranian cultural ascendency was aided by the fact that Iranians took over the administration and governorship of the new provinces placed under Arab control, and over time much of the populace of the region we now know as Tajikistan adopted Farsi-e Dari.7 Tajiks trace their origins to the pre-Islamic eastern Iranian-speaking populations, who had converted to Islam and adopted the Western Iranian idiom of Persian following the Arab conquests of the seventh century.8
Iranian cultural and linguistic dominance within the territories of modern Tajikistan was solidified in the ninth century, during the rule of the Samanid dynasty (819-999 C.E.). The Samanids owed their allegiance to the Abbasid caliph located in Baghdad, and from their capital, Bukhara, the Samanids established a strong centralised state over the lands of Tajikistan and the surrounding region. The Samanids oversaw the flourishing of art, culture, and science, and the continuation and extension of Iranian linguistic and cultural influence in the Central Asian region following the introduction of Islam.9 The Samanid dynasty ended with their defeat at the hands of the Karakhanids, a Turkic tribal confederacy, in 999C.E. This defeat re-instigated Turkic political ascendency, and weakened the Iranian ethnic element in Transoxiania and Central Asia.10 The process of Turkicisation reached its zenith with the Uzbek Turks, who entered the region from the Kipchak Steppe in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and dominated
6 Ibid.
7 Paul Bergne, The Birth of Tajikistan: National Identity and the Origins of the Republic (London: I.B.
Tauris, 2009), 5.
8 Svat Soucek, A History of Inner Asia, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 71.
9 Furthermore, Samanid rule can be considered a critical juncture in broader Iranian history due to the
success the Samanids had in reviving older pre-Islamic forms of Iranian rule and administration, and in the link this dynasty provided to later Iranian dynasties, which re-emerged in the sixteenth century Middle East. See Gene R. Garthwaite, The Persians, (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 125
105 Transoxiana until the encroachment into the region of the Tsarist Russian Empire beginning in the nineteenth century.11
The modern importance of Samanid rule is clear in the sense that many Tajiks view this comparatively short period of history as Tajikistan’s golden age, and the beginning of Tajik “nationhood”. The Samanids are seen not only as the Tajik nation’s golden age, but also, according to contemporary Tajik historians, as the pinnacle of greater Islamic civilisation. As set out by Horák, according to Tajik academicians, the Samanids are “the source of all the cultural acquisitions of early modern Europe. In addition, in its time this state was regarded as the strongest on earth. In contemporary Tajik historiography the empire of the Samanids appears also as a model of governance—as an effective, well- ordered, and simple state structure. Thus, the destruction of the Samanid state by the Turko-Mongols meant the destruction of the “most advanced culture of Turanian (Aryan) civilization.”12 A number of popular historians, and even Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rahmon, openly postulate the idea that the Samanid dynasty constitutes the first Tajik state.13 Just as the Samanid period is Tajikistan’s golden age, in a similar manner Iranians also view the Samanids through a nationalist prism, considering this dynasty to be saviours of Persian culture and literature, and more importantly as strong opponents of Arab rule and overlordship.14 However, these nationalist and thoroughly modern characterisations brush over what is a complicated history, and the Samanids should neither be treated as the progenitors of the Tajik nation, or an example of Iranian cultural superiority over the “inferior” Turks. Rather, this period should be considered as the last
11 Subtelny, “The Symbiosis of Turk and Tajik,” 49.
12 Slavomír Horák, "In Search of the History of Tajikistan: What Are Tajik and Uzbek Historians
Arguing About?," Russian Politics and Law 48, no. 5 (2010): 69-70.
13Kirill Nourzhanov and Christian Bleuer, Tajikistan: A Political and Social History (Canberra: The
Australian National University E-Press, 2013), 28.
14 Homa Katouzian, The Persians: Ancient, Medieval and Modern Iran (New Haven: Yale University
106 period of Iranian cultural, political and social dominance in Central Asia, and one in which the growing symbiosis and unity of Islamic and Iranian culture took place.15