Qutayba ibn Muslim conquers Transoxiana

Arab armies had reached the Oxus after the fall of the Sasanians, but for half a century they did little more than raid Transoxiana for booty and tribute, while feuds among the Arab tribes of Khurasan undermined every attempt at conquest. The principalities of Sogdiana, Khwarazm and Tokharistan quarrelled among themselves, and the Turks who had once protected them were at war with one another. In late 704 or early 705 al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, governor of Iraq and the East, had Qutayba ibn Muslim of the small Bahila tribe appointed governor of Khurasan. In the spring of 705 Qutayba recovered Balkh, and in 706 he took Paykand, the rich merchant town of the Bukhara oasis; when it rebelled, he sacked it, killing its men and enslaving its women and children. The Sogdian princes united against him, and only in 709 did he take Bukhara itself, after which the king of Samarkand agreed to pay tribute. In Bukhara Qutayba left a garrison and restored the young king Tughshada, and later built a mosque in the citadel, paying the townspeople to attend Friday prayers.

In the winter of 711/712 the king of Khwarazm, threatened by rebels, asked for his help; Qutayba crushed the revolt and made Khwarazm a tributary, and in 712 he turned suddenly on Samarkand, whose people had overthrown their pliant ruler in favour of Ghurak. An army marching to the city’s relief from Shash was ambushed, and when the siege engines had breached the wall Ghurak capitulated; Qutayba entered the city, garrisoned it and built a mosque. In 713–714 his armies, swelled by levies from Bukhara, Khwarazm and Sogdiana, campaigned towards Shash, Khujand and Ferghana. According to Chinese sources, an Arab embassy reached the Tang court in 713; the Old Book of Tang relates that the envoy refused to prostrate himself before the emperor, and that the chancellor Zhang Yue persuaded Xuanzong to excuse the foreigners’ custom. A tradition cited by Vasily Bartold says that al-Hajjaj promised the governorship of China to whichever of his generals, Qutayba or Muhammad ibn al-Qasim in Sind, should reach it first. Arab writers also tell of a raid on Kashgar in 715, which some historians reject and others accept.

The deaths of al-Hajjaj in 714 and of the caliph al-Walid I in 715 left Qutayba without protectors, and the new caliph, Sulayman, was his enemy. On the campaign in Ferghana Qutayba rebelled, but the Arab tribesmen of his army refused to follow him and killed him — in August 715 according to al-Tabari, in early 716 according to Ibn Qutayba. In the next two decades Sogdian revolts and the Türgesh undid most of his conquests; the Umayyads regained the line he had reached only under Nasr ibn Sayyar, after 738, and Muslim rule over Transoxiana became secure only after the battle of Talas.