Islamic conquest of Afghanistan: Encyclopedia II - Islamic conquest of Afghanistan - The Islamic Conquest

Islamic conquest of Afghanistan - The Islamic Conquest

In 637, five years after the death of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad, Arab Muslims shattered the might of the Iranian Sassanians at the Battles of al-Qādisiyyah and Nahavand. The invaders began to move towards the lands east of Iran: Herat was captured in 652. By 709 all of Aryana came under Arab control and encountered pockets of resistance from local tribesmen for centuries. In addition, Tang China and Tibet mounted an opposition to the Arab invasion to prevent their incursions into Central Asia. Central Asia and eastern Iran were nominally under Chinese soverignty for five years in the early eighth century. Native Iranian-speaking Muslims and assimilated Khurasani Arabs took power from the Arab elites in Damascus and Baghdad, and helped the local languages and much of the pre-Islamic Iranic culture survive. The Persians then annexed the regions around Kabul from the Hindu Shahis as well. By the middle of the eighth century, the rising Abbasid Dynasty slowed Arab expansion and began a policy of consolidation. Peace prevailed under the rule of the Caliph Harun al-Rashid (785-809) and his successors and higher learning flourished in such Central Asian cities as Samarkand and Tashkent.

From the seventh through the ninth centuries, many inhabitants of what is present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, southern parts of the former Soviet Union, and areas of northern India were converted to Sunni Islam. However some small pockets of pre-Islamic peoples such as the Kafirs of Kafiristan (modern Nuristan) managed to remain untouched by the Muslim faith, and were not converted until 1896. It is surmised from the writings of Al Biruni that the Pashtuns and/or other local Afghans in eastern Afghanistan had not been completely converted. Al Biruni, writing in Tarikh al Hind, also alludes to the eastern Afghans as being neither Muslim nor Hindu, but simply Afghans which may mean that the local population of eastern Afghanistan were pagans and animists not unlike the Kafirs and Kalash prior to the coming of Islamic invaders.

In the eighth and ninth centuries ancestors of many of today's Turkic-speaking Afghans settled in northern Afghanistan (partly to obtain better grazing land) near the modern borders with Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and some may have begun to assimilate much of the Iranian culture and language of the Pashtun and Tajik tribes already present there (see Ghilzai for further details).

By the middle of the ninth century, Abbasid rule went into decline, and semi-independent states began to emerge throughout the former Arab empire. In Central Asia, three short-lived, local dynasties ascended to power. The best known of the three, the Samanid, extended its rule from Bukhara to as far south as the Indus and west into most of Iran. Although Arab Muslim intellectual life was still centered in Baghdad, Iranian Muslim scholarship, that is, Shi'a Islam, predominated in the Samanid areas at this time. By the mid-tenth century, the Samanid Dynasty had crumbled in the face of attacks from Turkish tribes to the north and from the Ghaznavids, a rising Turkic dynasty in Afghanistan.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The Islamic Conquest", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki