Persianate Dynastic Period/Later Caliphate (c. 800–1000)

Abstract

The Persianate dynastic period of Islamic history refers to the ninth to tenth centuries in the lands stretching eastward from Iraq to Central Asia. By the ninth century, the power of the Abbasid caliphate (750–1258) was starting to wane, and in the eastern parts of the Islamic world was increasingly supplanted by dynasties that were either of or purported to be of Iranian origins. This transfer of power started with the civil war between the Abbasid caliph al-Maʾmun (r. 813–833) and his brother al-Amin, in which al-Maʾmun’s victorious armies were led by a general of origins in the Iranian gentry, Tahir b. al-Husayn (d. 822). Tahir was rewarded with the governorship of the great province of Khurasan (approximately modern eastern Iran, Turkmenistan and northern Afghanistan), a position which his successors, known as the Tahirids, succeeded in making both hereditary and effectively autonomous for the next fifty years. Further east, similar processes were at work; in 819, in Transoxiana (roughly modern Uzbekistan and Tajikistan), the descendants of another member of the Iranian gentry class, Saman, were appointed to governorships as a reward for military service, marking the beginnings of the Samanid dynasty (819–999) that would dominate the region for nearly two hundred years and ultimately supplant the Tahirids in Khurasan. Slightly later, another ethnically Iranian dynasty of more humble origins, the Saffarids (861–1003), built up an empire that briefly threatened Abbasid control of Baghdad, but by the beginning of the eleventh century had again been reduced to the status of local rulers of their powerbase, Sistan. Other dynasties arose from the Caspian, a remote area where Islam had spread only rather late and in the form of Shiʿism rather than Sunnism. The Ziyarids briefly managed to seize control of much of Iran, while their military followers, the Buyids, managed to establish a more lasting state that seized Baghdad in 945, enduring until the takeover by the Seljuk Turks in 1055. The degree to which these dynasties actively promoted Persian language and culture varied greatly. Despite the devolution of power to these dynasties, the Abbasid caliphs remained in office. Even if largely shorn of effective power, they remained useful to legitimize upstart rulers through granting them titles that justified their rule as appointees of the caliph.