The Turks in Pre-Islamic times
Rumplestiltskin
Today we read in history that the Turks carried the Jihad into Europe,
China and India. The Turks besieged and sacked Constantinople. To many
of us, the Turks before Ataturk reformed Turkey into becoming the
Muslim world's first secular republic, were ruthless Jihadis, whose
king was the Caliph till 1924, when Ataturk abolished the Caliphate.
But we know little of the bloodied struggle that the Turks waged
against Islam for three hundred years from 650 up to 1050. The first
clash of the Turks with the Islamic Jihad took place when the Muslims
in their surge through Persia reached the borders of the Sassanid
Empire in Khorasan, near Central Asia. In those days the Turks lived
and ruled Central Asia. They have been referred to as Turanians by the
ancient Persians of Zoroaster's time. The Turks were so to say
multi-ethnic tribal cluster who were united with the bond of language.
Since ancient times the Turks used to attack settled people.
The Huns, Bulgars, Ughirs, Seljuks, Qarluqs were some of the different
tribes that made up the vast Turkish nation. Of these the Huns and the
Bulgars embraced Christianity and the rest of the Turkish clans
embraced Islam. Before embracing Islam or Christianity, in the 3rd and
4th centuries the Turks (Huns, also called White Huns) had attacked the
Roman empire, the Sassanid and Achemenian empires in Persia and had
also invaded India. They were a warlike race, who would not easily be
subjugated and led a nomadic life. They were hardy tribal race who had
strains of Caucasoid and Mongoloid blood.
Khan is a typical Turkish royal title and is, by default today,
considered to be a Muslim name. But Genghis Khan and Hulagu Khan were
not Muslims, they were non-Muslims and in fact were inveterate enemies
of the Muslims. They laid waste a large swathe of the Islamic crescent
in the 13th century, till their descendants were ultimately defeated by
the Muslims and were forced to convert to Islam. After this conversion,
till today we have come to believe that the name Khan ia Muslim name
and that the Turks and the Mughals (Mongols) have always been Muslims.
Deep in history neither the Mongols nor the Turks were Muslims, but in
fact had waged a bloodied struggle against Islam. The Turks and Mongols
were neighbors since antiquity and both held Central Asia between them
when the Arab Muslim invaders appeared on the scene, after over-running
the Persian Sassanid Empire in the year 751.
The Defeat of Sassanid Persia, opened up the Turkish domains of Central
Asia to the Jihadis
After clearing these pockets of Persian resistance, the Arabs made the
main Persian town of Merv the target of attack. Merv was the capital
of Khurasan and here the last Sassnid king Yazdjurd held sought refuge
with his courtiers who had being fleeing before the advancing Arab
Muslims, since they ha d invaded Persia in 637 at Qadisiyyah. The
Persian army was now in tatters and in no position to put up any
effective resistance to the invading Arabs. On hearing of the Muslim
advance, Yazdjurd left for Balkh. No resistance was offered at Merv,
and the Muslims occupied the capital of Khurasan without ligtin their
swords.
The Arab commander Ahnaf stayed at Merv for some time to reorganize the
administration and to await further reinforcements from Kufa. In the
meantime the Persian forces gathered in considerable strength at Balkh.
Yazdjurd sought aid from the neighboring Turksih state Farghana and
the Khan of Farghana personally led a Turkish contingent to Balkh.
Having received reinforcements, Ahnaf led the Muslim forces to Balkh.
The Muslims had experience of battling with the Persians but they had
little experience of war with the Turks. Ahnaf wanted to avoid war with
the Turks, and in this connection he thought of devious ways whereby
the Turks should abandon the cause of Yazdjurd. It was reported to
Ahnaf that the practice with the Turks were that in the morning three
heralds blew bugles and then the Turkish force marched to the battle.
One night Ahnaf hid himself in a safe place outside the Turkish camp.
As soon as the Turkish herald came out of the Turkish camp to blow the
bugle, Ahnaf overpowered him and killed the Turk with his sword. When
the second herald came he met the same fate. The third herald also met
the same fate. That day the bugles did not blow for the Turkish army.
When the bugles did not blow the Khan of Farghana came out of the camp
to see what had happened to the heralds. When he saw that all of them
were dead he regarded this as a bad omen. At the spur of the moment he
decided that the Turks should not involve themselves with the Muslims.
He ordered his force to withdraw and march back to Farghana.
This is how the Arab Muslims deceived the Turks into retreating. The
Islamic Jihad had drawn the first Turkish blood thru subterfuge. The
next three hundred years witnessed the untold story of the Turkish
resistance to Islam. Ironically the Turks had to struggle with Islam
which came to them through the medium of the Muslim Persians who had
been newly converted to Islam at the point of the sword by the Arabs.
The Persianized Muslims overthrow the Arab Umayyad Caliphs and replace
them with the Persianized Abbasid Caliphs
In the space of 650-1050 AD a numbers of events of importance
transpired in Central Asia. These four hundred years were the fiercest
in the Turkish struggle against the Jihad. The next four hundred years
were to see the gradual transformations of the pagan Turks into
Muslims. The Turks shed their blood fighting the Jihad for four hundred
years and finally gave up and embraced Islam, to later become the
tormentors to carry the bloodied tradition of Jihad into Anatolia
(modern Turkey) and Balkans up to Austria.
In the year 750, an important event transformed Central Asia. This
event ws the overthrow of the Umayyads Calphate and its replacement by
the Abbasid Caliphate. While Umayyads of Damascus were Arabs who had
descended from Abu Sufyan the Chieftain of Mecca at the time of
Mohammed. The newly converted Zoroastrian Persians wanted to regain
their pre-eminent power in Persia. They organized themselves and
marched against the Umayyad army. The two armies met at a place called
Zab. Here the Persianized Abbasids defeated the Umayyads and
established a new caliphate near Ctesiphon the site of the ancient
capital of the Sassanid Persians. They named this city Baghdad which
was to be the capital of the Abbasids from 750 up to its sack by the
Mongols in 1258.
A leading commander of the Abbasid army was a Zoroastrian convert to
Islam who had assumed the name Abu Muslim. He played a leading role in
the war and deposed the Umayyad caliph placing the Persianized Abbasids
as Caliphs and as the head of the Moslem world. With this revolution
the leadership of the uslim world had passed back from Arab hands into
Persian hands, a leadership which they had lost a century earlier, when
the Arabs had destroyed the Sassanid Persian empire. An important
change now was that the Persians who as Zoroastrians a century earlier
were victims of Islam had now embraced Islam and had become the new
vanguard of the bloodied creed of Islam. Their victims were the Turks
of Central Asia.
Abu Muslim a Zoroastrian Persian Convert to Islam, attacked and
Islamized the Turks
Shortly after victory at the battle of Zab, and the establishment of
the Abbasid Caliphate at Baghdad, Abu Muslim was commissioned to
conduct Jihad in Central Asia to exterminate the Kaffirs once and for
all. It was a great low point for the Western branch of the Blue Turks.
Their great Khan Su'lu who was a bulwark against the Moslems and the
Chinese in the wars of 720 and 723, was assassinated by the Arabs. The
pagan Turkic rulers of Samarqand and Bokhara came under a heavy assault
from the ghazis after the fall of Su'lu when the Arabs with 300 giant
trebuchets stormed the cities and forcibly imposed Islam with the
destruction of the pagan places of worship.
Defeat of the Chinese at the Battle of the Talas River with the
invading Muslims sealed the fate of the Turkish resistance to Islam
Archaeological evidence shows that these Turkic cities were
cosmopolitan with Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and the Tengri
cults of the Altaics being practiced. The Arabs under Abu Muslim
savagely crushed, the last attempt made by the populations of Samarqand
and Bokhara to rid themselves of the murderous Muslim Ghazis. Abu
Muslim sent his victorious commander of these wars, Ziyad ibn Salih,
with a band of 40000 ghazis, to wage a Jihad on the Chinese. The Arab
army marched from the south towards Talas. The Chinese general Kao (of
Korean origin), decided to resist the Muslim invasion and marched
towards Aulie-Ata on the Talas river with 100,000 Chinese troops in
cavalry and infantry divisions.
In the Battle of the Talas river, the Qarluq Betrayal led to the defeat
of the Chinese at Arab hands
On July 10th 751 AD the Arab and Chinese armies took to the field in
Aulie-Ata on the backs of the Talas river. The Chinese cavalry seemed
to initially overwhelm the Arab cavalry, but the Arabs had worked out a
deal with one of the many Turkish contingents of the Chinese army viz.,
the Qarluq Turks, by promising them wealth and freedom in return for
embracing Islam and betraying their Chinese masters. The Qarluqs who
held a grudge against the Chinese for having reduced them to vassalage,
viewed this as an opportunity to throw off the Chinese yoke by using
the Arabs and had planned to later throwing off the Arab yoke as well
and regaining their freedom from both the Chinese and the Arabs. The
Qarluqs later played the main role in converting other Turkish tribes
notably the Seljuks to Islam.
At the battle of the Talas river where the Arab and the Chinese armies
clashed, the Qarluqs who were a part of the Chinese army, opened a
breach in their own ranks and allowed the Arabs to ford the river and
helped them to encircle a part of the Chinese infantry butchering it to
man. The Qarluq archers then surrounded their paymaster the general of
the Chinese army Kao and shot down. Now the Arabs followed their
heinous practice of sticking the d\severe head of an enemy and parading
it before the enemy army. The Chinese not being used to such grisly war
tactics, fell into confusion and disarray, not knowing who had betrayed
them, and their General Kao. They broke ranks and fell into confusion,
shaking the Chinese center, which was rapidly assaulted by the Arab
heavy cavalry and destroyed. Thus due to Muslim subterfuge and savagery
the infallible Chinese war machine gave way under combined assault of
the Arabs and the traitor Qarluqs, and they faced a heavy rout. From
behind the treacherous Qarluqs fell upon the Chinese animals, baggage
trains and supplies carrying away all they could and receded back into
the steppe.
The Arabs rounded up tens of thousands of Chinese and their non-Qarluq
Turk allies and took them to Samarqand from where Abu Muslim sent them
to Baghdad and Damascus to be sold as slaves, each worth a dirham. One
Chinese survivor mentions being kept as cattle in the Arab prison
camps. Abu Muslim and Ziyad made huge financial gains out of this slave
trade and used it to pay their armies. More importantly the Arabs
forced the Turk and Chinese prisoners to teach them the art of making
siege trains and catapult machines, which the Islamized Turks were to
use successfully in their attacks on the Byzantine cities.
The Qarluq Turks aimed at playing the Chinese and the Muslims against
each other to gain their own independence
The Qarluq Turks wanted independence from the Chinese so they made a
pretence of embracing Islam to obtain Arab support to defeat the
Chinese. The Qarluqs had planned to later throw off the Arab yoke as
well by repudiating Islam and regaining their freedom from both the
Chinese and the Arabs. But little did the Qarluqs realize that in
working out a deal with the Arabs, while they would succeed in throwing
off the Chinese yoke, they would have to bring themselves into the fold
of Islam, from which there was no escape. The Qarluqs were forced to
remain Muslim and whenever any of them reneged their Islamic faith,
they were put to death while the luckier among them were enslaved by
the Arabs and Persian Muslims.
The later history of the Qarluqs was as Muslims who resigned themselves
to remaining as satellites of the Arabs after having thrown off the
Chinese yoke and with it also the only possibility of liberating
themselves from the grip of Islam. It was this devious conversion of
the Quarluqs that was actually a pretense to throw off the Chinese yoke
on the Turks, that led to the conversion of the greater Turkish nation
to Islam in the next three centuries from 750 to 1050.
The Turks who had retained aggressively their freedom from their
neighbors the Chinese, and the Zoroastrian Persians for more than a
millennium, finally began succumbing to Islam due to a tactical
pretense of the Qarluqs, one of their important clans to pretend to
embrace Islam for securing Arabs support and throwing off Chinese
suzerainty. A deal that proved costly for Turkish independence that was
now permanently enslaved into the prison of Islam. The Turks henceforth
would remain satellites of the Arabs, a position they sought to
reverse, by themselves becoming more aggressive champions of Islam, and
reducing their Arabs masters to vassalage status when they established
their Seljuk and later Uthman (Ottoman) dynasties.
Turkish Resistance to Islam
But before they would finally resign to their fate as Muslims the Turks
waged a bloodied war against the Muslim incursion of their homeland in
Central Asia. After the Battle of the Talas river, the Arabs captured
many of the non-Qarluq Turks who were allies of the Chinese and
deported them as salves to Baghdad. They are reported to have totaled
up to seventy thousand. Not only were these enslaved Turks were forced
to become Muslims, but enslavement was the tactic used by the Islamized
Turks to convert the non-Muslim Turks to Islam. The next Turkish clan
to be converted to Islam was the Seljuks. They were a proud imperial
clan among the Turks, and after the conversion of the Qarluqs to Islam,
it was the Seljuks who held the banner of Turkish resistance to Islam.
The Seljuks remain unsubdued for another century and half . But the
Arabs, Persian and Islamized Turks mounted many bloodied campaigns
against them and other non-Muslim Turks who were allied to the Seljuks.
In this series of battles the fortunes fluctuated from one side to the
other, at times the Muslims were victorious and at others the Turks
emerged victorious.
Tactics used by the Muslims to convert the Turks to Islam
In this unwritten chapter of the Turkish resistance to Islam, the
Muslims (who in this case were mainly the Zoroastrian Persian converts
to Islam), devised new tactics and subterfuge to enslave a proud and
fiercely independent people which characterized the Turkish clan. In
this battle the Turks did not lack in bravery, as they were born
warriors and spent a large part of their lives on horseback. But
whenever the non-Muslim Turks were victorious, they destroyed the
Muslim camps, slaughtered their armies, destroyed their cities, and
torched their fields, but it did not cross their minds, to enforce any
religion on the defeated Muslims. Those of the Muslims that the Turks
set free, either went back to the Muslim controlled cities, or stayed
on in the Turkish areas and attempted to spread Islam. A mindset that
was totally absent among the non-Muslim Turks. (It was only when the
Christians of Europe liberated Muslim lands, did they attempt to
re-convert the Muslims to Christianity.) But the pre-Islamic Turks knew
of no such tactic and they made no attempt to roll back the tide of
Islam. So while the Christens of Europe succeed in turning back the
tide of Islam in the middle ages, the Turks failed to resist Islam.
Herein lies an important factor in defeating Islam, seeking
reconversion of the defeated Muslims out of Islam. If the defeated
Muslims are allowed to retain their faith (which is nothing but a cult
of death and murder), they poison of Islam will become powerful once
again to overwhelm the non-Muslim victors and ultimately defeat the, So
whenever the Muslims are defeated and subjugated they need to made to
give up Islam, at the pain of death if necessary. But Islam has to be
wiped out of peoples minds. A Muslim is an ever present danger to any
non-Islamic (civilized) way of life.
Muslims held Turkish princes as captives to be brought up as Muslims
In their struggle with the pre-Islamic Turks the tactic of the Muslims
was to use every victory to press Islam on the defeated Turks. At every
negotiation with the Turks, when the Turks faced a defeat, the Muslims
would ask for custody of the princes and princesses of the Turkish
royal family on the excise of holding them as a guarantee that the
Turks would keep their word given during the negotiations. These royal
captives would be brought up in the Islamic tradition and their minds
jaundiced in favor of Islam. In many cases when their Muslim captors
were satisfied that the royal captives had mentally accepted Islam, the
Shahada (declaration of the acceptance of Islam) was pronounced to
them, and they were released to go back to their kingdoms, whenever
they had to ascend the throne in their clans and tribes. With a Muslim
at the helm in a non-Muslim Turkish clan, the conversion of the rest of
the clan to Islam was only a matter of time. This was one of the tactic
used by the Muslims to infiltrate Islam into the Turkish nation. By the
middle of the eleventh century, most of the Turks had embraced Islam,
and thenceforth it was they who became the vanguard of the Jihad to
carry the bloodied trial of Islam into Anatolia and the Balkans. It was
these Islamized Seljuk Turks who kept up a constant pressure on the
Byzantine Empire inflicting on the Byzantines a string of defeats
starting from the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 in Eastern Anantolia. It
was these steady attacks and migration of the Seljuk Turks into
Anatolia which gave the present Turkish character to Anatolia making it
the Turkey of today. The Seljuk (and later the Ottoman) Turks also
carried with them the tradition of taking child hostages and bringing
them up as Muslims, a tactic of which they had earlier been victims at
the hands of the Arab and Persian Muslims. This led to the institution
of the Turkish Jannisaries The Jannisaries (Mercenaries from Jani =
Life and Nisar = given away) were Christian children taken captive by
the Turks when they invaded Anatolia and the Balkans. This is a
practice derived by the Turks from the Arab and Persian Muslims tactics
used against them (the Turks) during their pre-Islamic days.
But the irony of history is that the Islamization of the Turks and the
Mongols also started their migration from the traditional homelands in
the Steppes of Central Asia into Anatolia and onwards in the Balkans.
Today the word Turk is not mainly identified with the Turkic peoples of
Central Asia who make up the Kazakh, Uzbek, Khirgiz and Tajik people
(all of whom were called the Turanians in ancient times). Today the
word Turk implies an inhabitant of Anatolia which is called Turkey. But
in ancient times the inhabitants of Anatolia were not the Turks, they
were Hittites (and Indo-European people) and later the Greek speaking
inhabitants who built the Hellenized kingdoms of Sardis and Troy.
Hulagu's invasion - The Turko-Mongol attack on Muslim Iran and Middle
East was similar to the Crusades, in that it was a Non-Muslim
Counterattack on Islam
Returning to pre-Islamic Central Asia, we need to bring attention to
another curious fact that today not many historians have pointed out
that the subterfuge, savage cruelty and other foul tactics which the
Muslims used to convert the Turks to Islam, had led to a gradual
accumulation of bitterness and a desire for revenge against the Muslims
in the Turks and their related clans the Mongols. Over the centuries
many Persian Zoroastrians, the Persian Nestorian Christians, the Turks,
Chinese and the Mongols had nursed within themselves a grievance
against the Muslims expansion into Persia and Central Asia. It is this
accumulation of grievances that led to the burst of the Mongol attack
on Islamdom from 1200 that culminated in the sack and slaughter of
Baghdad in 1258 under Hulagu Khan who was egged on to this path by his
Nestorian Persian Christian wife. Historians have failed to interpret
the attack of the Mongols on Muslim Persia, and the Middle East as the
Turko-Mongol counterattack on Islam as were the Crusades, which were
the Christian counterattack against Islam in the 11th century, We shall
examine this in detail the chapter on the Mongol resistance to Islam,
before some of the Mongols succumbed to the subterfuge and savagery of
Islam. Suffice it to note here that Hulagu's attack on Islamdom was a
collective expression of resistance to Islam from the pre-Islamic
Persians who had settled in China and Mongolia, and the Turks who had
been waging a struggle against Islam in the 8th to the 10th centuries.
It was a result of historical wrongs committed by the Arab Muslims on
the Zoroastrian Persians, and by the Arab Muslims along with the
Islamized Persians on the Turks, and in turn, by the Arabs with the
Islamized Persians and the Islamized Turks on non-Islamic Turks and
Mongols and Chinese
http://www.historyofjihad.org/turkey.html?syf=contact
vjp...@at.biostrategist.dot.dot.com
Movement, 1902-3 Princeton lect, NY 1908
p165 letters of Ishuyabh soon after the Arab conquest, he reproaches the
Christians of fars and Khurasan for having accepted Islam in large numbers,
partly to avoid the loss of property entailed by steadfastness in the faith
[footnote: This is true of several tribe son the border of Turkey and Parsia
near Urumia. In the regions of Bohtan, Midyat and Sassun thare are Muhammadan
Kurds who are said by tradition to hav eonce been Christian. Those in Sassun
are called the "Cross deniers"]
p170 At Pishpek in Russian Turkestan, near the Chinese border and about
three hundred miles east of the city of Taskend, is a cemetary of Christian
graves, eight acres in extent, with Syriac inscriptions on the stones. Here
Christians were buried for about five hundred years, from AD 850 to AD 1330,
some with Turkish and some with Syriac names
p173 In the lists of the Nestorian dioceses of the twelfth century and in
the later history the metropolitan see of Tangut is mentioned. The evidence
is barely summarized here, but it is clear that Nestorian Christianity was
widely extended among Turks and Mongols of the Uighur and Kerait tribes from
the regions adjoining Samarkand to Northern China and Manchuria. It may be
that the Christians in China were all Mongols or Turks rather than Chinese
Obolensky [Oxford], ByzCommonwealth, svots.edu 1982 orig
Weidenfield 1971 ISBN 0-913836-98-2
p224-5 [568-76 Turk-Byz alliance] artless candour and simple moral values
of their nomadic dupes.. sixth century Turks adorned their Central Asian
capital with a luxury that surprised even the Byzantine ambassadors; yet they
were capable of rejecting what they regarded as the evils of civilization..
sheer distance between Constantinople and Central Asia made the exchange of
embassies a strenuous and costly business.. Turkish alliance would have
almost certainly involved the Byzantines in a war on two fronts - against the
Avars in Europe and the Persians in Asia.. Byzantines missed something of an
opportunity.. By the second half of the sixth century, Christianity,
admittedly in Nestorian garb, had made many converts in several regions of
the Turkish Empire, notably in Khorasan, Afghanisan and the area round
Bokhara and Samarkand.. when the Byzantines and the Turks next met each
other face to face it was on the eleventh century battle-fields of Asia Minor
- = -
Vasos-Peter John Panagiotopoulos II, Columbia'81+, Bio$trategist
BachMozart ReaganQuayle EvrytanoKastorian
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/vjp2/vasos.htm
---{Nothing herein constitutes advice. Everything fully disclaimed.}---
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