Islamic conquest of Afghanistan: Encyclopedia II - Islamic conquest of Afghanistan - Mughal-Safavid Rivalry ca. 1500-1747

Islamic conquest of Afghanistan - Mughal-Safavid Rivalry ca. 1500-1747

Early in the sixteenth century, Babur, who was descended from Timur on his father's side and from Genghis Khan on his mother's, was driven out of his father's kingdom in the Ferghana Valley (which straddles contemporary Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan) by the Shaybani Uzbeks, who had wrested Samarkand from the Timurids. After several unsuccessful attempts to regain Ferghana and Samarkand, Babur crossed the Amu Darya and captured Kabul from the last of its Mongol rulers in 1504. In his invasion of Delhi Sultanate 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 forty-five kilometers northwest of Delhi. The Delhi Sultanate was itself ruled by ex-patriot Afghan/Pashtun rulers, the Lodhi dynasty. Although the Mughal Empire would shift largely to India, Babur's memoirs, as related in the Baburnameh stressed his love for Kabul - both as a commercial strategic center as well as a beautiful highland city with an "extremely delightful" climate and was the Mughal Empire's first capital until being moved to Lahore and Delhi by later emperors.

Although Mughal rule technically lasted in parts of Afghanistan until the early 18th century, it came under constant challenge from local Pashtun tribesmen. The Mughals originally had come from Central Asia, but once they had taken India, the area that is now southeastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan was relegated to a mere outpost of the empire as even the name of a prominent Afghan city, Peshawar literally translates from Persian to City on the Frontier. Indeed, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, much of Afghanistan was hotly contested between the Mughals of India and the Safavids of Iran. The Safavids had held Herat and much of western and northern Afghanistan during the same time period that the Mughals controlled Kabul, Kandahar, and Peshawar. Just as Kabul dominates the high road from Central Asia into India, Kandahar commands the only approach towards India that skirts the Hindu Kush. The strategically important Kabul-Kandahar axis was the primary focus of competition between the Mughals and the Safavids, and Kandahar itself changed hands several times during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Safavids and the Mughals were not the only contenders, however. Less powerful but closer at hand were the Uzbeks of Central Asia, who fought for control of Herat in western Afghanistan and for the northern regions as well where neither the Mughals nor the Safavids were able to effectively challenge them. Many of the Uzbeks of Afghanistan arrived during this phase of northern Afghanistan's history.

The Mughals sought not only to block the historical western invasion routes into India but also to control the fiercely independent Pashtun tribes who accepted only nominal control from Delhi in their mountain strongholds between the Kabul-Kandahar axis and the Indus River - especially in the Pashtun area of the Suleiman Range. As the area around Kandahar changed hands back and forth between the two great empires on either side, the local Pashtun tribes exploited the situation to their advantage by 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 1622 they lost Kandahar to the Safavids for the third and final time.

Toward the end of the seventeenth century, as the power of the Safavids waned, native groups began to assert themselves in Afghanistan. Early in the eighteenth century, a clan of the Ghilzai Pashtuns, later known as the Hotaki dynasty, overturned Safavid rule in Kandahar by 1708, and subsequently took-over and ruled most of Safavid Persia and Afghanistan from 1722 until 1736. The Ghilzai Pashtuns managed to briefly hold the Safavid capital of Isfahan, and two members of this tribe ascended the throne before the Ghilzai were evicted from Iran by the Turko-Iranian conqueror, Nadir Shah, who became known by some in the West as the "Persian Napoleon."

Nadir Shah conquered Kandahar and Kabul in 1738 along with defeating a formidable Mughal army in India, plundering Delhi, and massacring thousands of its people. He returned home with vast treasures, including the Peacock Throne, which thereafter served as a symbol of Iranian imperial might. Nadir Shah, as a Sunni Muslim, had surrounded himself with other Sunnis most notably those of Turkic and Pashtun background. One notable military officer was Ahmad Shah Abdali, an ethnic Pashtun who would come to shape the modern history of Afghanistan following the end of Nadir Shah's reign.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Mughal-Safavid Rivalry ca. 1500-1747", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki