SIXTEEN

Afghanistan and the Indian Subcontinent

158

The Ghaznawids

366–582/977–1186

Afghanistan, Khurasan, Baluchistan and north-western India

On the death in 350/961 of the Sāmānid Amīr ‘Abd al-Malik (see above, no. 83), the Turkish slave commander of the Sāmānid army in Khurasan, Alptigin, attempted to manipulate the succession at Bukhara in his own favour. He failed, and was obliged to withdraw with some of his troops to Ghazna in what is now eastern Afghanistan. Here on the periphery of the Sāmānid empire, and facing the pagan subcontinent of India, a series of Turkish commanders followed Alptigin, governing nominally for the Sāmānids, until in 366/977 Sebüktigin came to power. Under him, the Ghaznawid tradition of raiding the plains of India in search of treasure and slaves was established, but it was his son Maḥmüd who became fully independent and who achieved a reputation throughout the eastern Islamic world as hammer of the infidels, penetrating down the Ganges valley to Muttra (Mat‘hurā) and Kanawj and into the Kathiawar (Kāt́lāār) peninsula to attack the famous idol temple there of Somnath (Sūmanāt). In the north, he set up the Oxus as his frontier with the rival power of the Qarakhanids (see above, no. 90), and annexed Khwārazm. The former Sāmānid province of Khurasan was taken over and, towards the end of his life, Maḥmüd’s armies marched into northern and western Persia and overthrew the Būyid amirate there (see above, no. 75, 1).

Maḥmūd’s empire at his death was thus the most extensive and imposing edifice in eastern Islam since the time of the Ṣaffārids (see above, no. 84), and his army the most effective military machine of the age. With the adoption of Persian administrative and cultural ways, the Ghaznawids threw off their original Turkish steppe background and became largely integrated with the Perso-Islamic tradition. But under his son Mas‘ūd I, Maḥmūd’s empire – essentially a personal creation – could not be maintained in the west against the Seljuqs (see above, no. 91), and Khwārazm, Khurasan and northern Persia were lost to the incomers. The middle years of the eleventh century were largely spent in warfare with the Seljuqs over possession of Sistan and western Afghanistan. At the accession of Ibrahim b. Mas‘ūd in 451/1059, a modus vivendi was worked out with the Seljuqs, and peace reigned substantially for over half a century.

Reduced as it now was to eastern Afghanistan, Baluchistan and north-western India, the Ghaznawid empire was still an imposing and powerful one. It inevitably acquired a more pronounced orientation towards India, but the courts of the sultans of the twelfth century were centres of a splendid Persian culture, with such luminaries as the mystical poet Sanā‘ī. In the early part of that century, the Ghaznawid Bahrām Shāh became tributary to the Seljuqs, for Sanjar had helped Bahrām Shāh secure his throne. Towards the end of the latter’s reign, the capital Ghazna suffered a frightful sacking by the ‘World Incendiary’, the Ghūrid ‘Alā’ al-Dīn Husayn (see below, no. 159). The rise of the Ghūrids in fact reduced the power of the last Ghaznawids, and their rule was latterly confined to the Punjab (Panjāb) until the Ghūrid Mu‘izz al-Dīn Muḥammad finally extinguished the line in 582/1186.

Justi, 444; Lane-Poole, 285–90; Zambaur, 282–3; Album, 36–7.

EI² ‘Ghaznawids’ (B. Spuler); EIr ‘Ghaznavids’ (C. E. Bosworth).

C. E. Bosworth, The titulature of the early Ghaznavids’, Oriens, 15 (1962), 210–33. idem, The Ghaznavids. Their Empire in Afghanistan and Eastern Iran 994:1040, Edinburgh 1963.

idem, The early Ghaznavids’, in The Cambridge History of Iran, IV, 162–97.

idem, The Later Ghaznavids: Splendour and Decay. The Dynasty in Afghanistan and Northern India 1040–1186, Edinburgh 1977.