Conquests in Central Asia
The Arabs had reached Central Asia in the decade after their decisive victory in the Battle of Nihavend in 642, when they completed their completed their conquest of the former Sassanid Empire by seizing Sistan and Khurasan. The first Arab attacks across the Oxus ranged as far as Shash (Tashkent) and Khwarizm, but they were little more than raids aiming at seizing booty and extracting tribute, and were interrupted by the inter-tribal warfare that broke out in Khurasan during the Second Islamic Civil War (683–692). Subsequent governors, most notably Sa'id ibn Uthman and al-Muhallab ibn Abi Suffrah, made attempts to conquer territory across the river, but they failed. The native princes, for their part, tried to exploit the Arabs' rivalries, and with the aid of the Arab renegade Musa ibn Abdallah ibn Khazim, who in 689 seized the fortress of Tirmidh for his own domain, they managed to eject the Arabs from their holdings. Nevertheless, the Transoxianian princes remained riven by their own feuds, and failed to unite in the face of the Arab conquest, a fact which would be suitably exploited by Qutayba after 705.
Read more about this topic: Qutayba Ibn Muslim
Famous quotes containing the words conquests, central and/or asia:
“The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.”
—Jean Genet (1910–1986)
“But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking?—the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world—a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“Incarnate devil in a talking snake,
The central plains of Asia in his garden,
In shaping-time the circle stung awake,
In shapes of sin forked out the bearded apple....”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)