Islam

Islam entered the world of Turkic Atlas from the south-west, as the religion of the armies that destroyed Sasanian Persia and then crossed the Oxus. By the time it reached the Turkic steppe it had been the religion of a settled empire for a century.

The arrival on the Oxus

The conquest of Iran was finished by the middle of the seventh century. The governor Qutayba ibn Muslim then crossed the Oxus between 705 and 715. He took Paikent, Bukhara, Samarkand and Khwarezm. Conversion followed the conquest slowly and unevenly. The Arab governors themselves disagreed about whether to encourage it, because a convert paid less tax.

The Sogdian cities were the point of contact. They were also the cities through which the Turkic steppe had done its trading for two hundred years. The road that had carried Manichaeism and Buddhism north now carried Islam.

The limit of the conquest

Every attempt to carry Arab armies north of the Jaxartes met Turkic armies coming south. The Türgesh under Sulu Khan fought the caliphate for twenty years on behalf of the Sogdian cities. The Khazars fought it across the Caucasus for most of a century. Later they took a different religion altogether. The steppe was not conquered.

The battle of the Talas in 751 changed the position on the other side. The Tang were gone from the west. Therefore the ground between the caliphate and the steppe belonged to Turkic powers, who now had one settled neighbour to trade with instead of two to play against.

Afterwards

The acceptance of the religion by Turkic ruling houses belongs to the tenth century and later, beyond the period of the khaganates. Turkic Atlas sets out what it displaced under the older religion. Turkic Atlas covers the two that had reached the steppe before it under Buddhism and Manichaeism.

By 1069–1070 Islam was the religion of the Karakhanid court. The Kutadgu Bilig, written there, has the counsellor Highly Praised tell the king to open a way for Islam and spread the Sharia. The king is to lead his army against the unbelievers but never against another Muslim, since Muslims are brothers.^[1] The poet sums up his book as the path of religion and the path of the world.^[2]

References

^ Kutadgu Bilig; Dankoff 1983, couplets 5484–5490
^ Kutadgu Bilig; Dankoff 1983, couplet 6498

Sources

Tabari
Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215 (after Jiu Tangshu)
Kutadgu Bilig

Literature

Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History (2005)
Theodor Nöldeke, Geschichte der Perser und Araber zur Zeit der Sasaniden. Aus der arabischen Chronik des Tabari übersetzt und mit ausführlichen Erläuterungen und Ergänzungen versehn (1879)