Tahirid Dynasty

A reward for a civil war

Drafted from Bosworth, Encyclopaedia Iranica · sourceformation

Tahir ibn al-Husayn won al-Ma'mun's civil war. He commanded the Khurasani army that took Baghdad in 813 and killed the caliph al-Amin, and the man he had fought for became caliph on the strength of it.

The reward, eventually, was Khurasan: in 821 Tahir was made its governor. He held it for about a year before dying, and the manner of the death is the part worth keeping. In 822 he omitted the caliph's name from the Friday sermon at Merv. That is not a gesture. The khutba is where a polity states publicly whose authority it holds under, and dropping a name from it is a formal act with a formal meaning. He was dead within days, and no source can tell us whether the two facts are connected.

What happened next is the thing that makes the Tahirids the right place to start this thread. Al-Ma'mun did not reclaim the province. He appointed Tahir's son. Then that son's brother. Then that brother's son. The governorship stayed in the family for fifty years while remaining, formally and in every document, a governorship.

The Tahirids are the demonstration that a title and a power can come apart without either of them changing.

The march from Merv

Drafted from Khallikan, Ibn Khallikan's Biographical Dictionary (Wafayat al-A'yan) (1843)expansion

The man al-Ma'mun sent west in 811 was not a Khurasani grandee. Tahir ibn al-Husayn belonged to the tribe of Khuzaa by adoption rather than by blood: his great-grandfather Ruzayq had been a freed slave of a celebrated Khuzai patron, and the family rose as secretaries and small governors in the east. Tahir was born at Bushanj, and years later, at the height of everything, someone in Baghdad congratulated him on a rank no rival in Khurasan had ever reached. He answered that he could not enjoy it, because he could not see the old women of Bushanj climbing onto their roofs to watch him ride past.

Al-Amin sent Ali ibn Isa ibn Mahan out from Baghdad to stop him, and the two armies met at Rayy. Ali was killed. Ibn Khallikan spends a full page trying to fix the day and cannot: one authority puts the death on the seventh of Shaban, al-Tabari gives the same date for Ali's departure from Baghdad and says the news of the death reached the city on the fifteenth of Shawwal, and the likeliest reconstruction has a copyist writing one month for another. What survives the argument intact is the ride. Tahir's messenger covered the two hundred and fifty parasangs from Rayy to Merv between Friday evening and Sunday morning, and al-Ma'mun learned in two nights that his brother's army no longer existed.

After Rayy the campaign stopped being a battle and became an absorption. Tahir moved on Baghdad taking possession of every place he passed through, and then sat down in front of the capital. The siege was long enough that he ran out of money and had to write east for more; the banker al-Ma'mun directed him to refused the loan, and when the city fell Tahir had the man brought before him and promised him the worst of deaths, then let him go because he recited a good poem about a falcon sparing a sparrow. He was one-eyed, and a court poet got away with the line O thou ambidexter, thou hast an eye too little and a hand too much. Another he compelled to satirise him, read the result, warned the poet never to say it again, and tore up the paper.

Al-Amin was killed in Safar 198 — October 813. Tahir had written asking leave to do as he liked with his prisoner, and al-Ma'mun sent back a shirt with no opening for the head. The head went east to Khurasan, and its owner's brother was proclaimed caliph.

Then came the check that shaped everything after. Towards the end of 814 al-Ma'mun wrote from Merv instructing Tahir to hand over every country he had subdued — the two Iraqs, Fars, al-Ahwaz, the Hijaz and Yemen — to al-Hasan ibn Sahl, and to take himself off to Raqqa and govern Mosul, the Jazira, Syria and the west. The soldier who had won the empire was moved sideways out of it. The government of Khurasan, when it came seven years later, was what was left.

What Abdallah did with a province

Drafted from Bosworth, Encyclopaedia Iranica · sourcepeak

Abdallah ibn Tahir governed from 828 to 845 and is the reason the dynasty is remembered as more than a caretaker.

He moved the seat from Merv to Nishapur, which shifted the centre of Khurasan westward and made Nishapur the city it would be for the next three centuries — the place the Saffarids would have to take, and then the Samanids, and then the Seljuks. He is associated with a body of work on the regulation of irrigation rights, the Kitab al-quni, compiled by jurists at his direction: qanat water in Khurasan is a scarce resource whose division is the difference between a functioning province and a set of feuds, and codifying it is the least glamorous and most durable thing a government there can do.

He also remitted taxes to Baghdad reliably, which is why Baghdad kept reappointing his family.

That is the Tahirid settlement in one sentence: they were extremely good governors, and they were paid in the right to go on being governors hereditarily. It was a stable arrangement and it did not survive contact with someone who did not want a governorship.

The family that also policed Baghdad

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 4: From the Arab Invasion to the Saljuqs (1975)peak

The previous chapters describe a family governing Khurasan, two thousand kilometres from the capital, with increasing independence and unfailing punctuality about the tax. That is half of what the Tahirids were doing.

The other half was in Baghdad. From 820 a branch of the same family held the shurta — the security command of the capital: the policing, the prisons, the garrison, the maintenance of order in the largest city west of China. Ishaq ibn Ibrahim held it for over twenty-five years. His successors held it, with the Khurasan governorship running in parallel in the hands of cousins, until 891.

Set the two together and the arrangement is remarkable. One family simultaneously governed the empire's richest eastern province hereditarily and commanded the police of the caliph's own city, and did both for seventy years, and was never accused of disloyalty by anyone whose opinion mattered.

That is not the usual shape of provincial autonomy. The Tulunids in Egypt stopped remitting. The Saffarids took a province and asked for it afterwards. The Buyids occupied the capital and kept the caliph as an asset. The Tahirids held both ends of the empire and behaved.

Then the caliphate broke in the middle. When the guard at Samarra started raising and destroying caliphs, in the anarchy that begins in 861 — the man holding Baghdad was Muhammad ibn Abdallah ibn Tahir, and he turned out to be the only figure in Iraq with a city, a garrison and no stake in the Turkish factions. In 865 he sheltered the caliph al-Musta'in in Baghdad and defended it against the Samarra army through a siege lasting most of a year. Then he negotiated: al-Musta'in abdicated, al-Mu'tazz was recognised, and Muhammad kept his position.

That is a governor arbitrating a caliphal succession, and it is the high-water mark of what a Tahirid could do. It is also the last of it. The Khurasan branch lost Nishapur eight years later to a man with no appointment at all, and the Baghdad branch was replaced in 891 by a commander of the caliph's own.

The books Abdallah is said to have burned

Drafted from Bosworth, Encyclopaedia Iranica · sourceaside?What aside means

Abdallah ibn Tahir is reported to have ordered Persian books destroyed. The story attaches particularly to a romance called Vamiq u Adhra and to Zoroastrian material, and the reasoning attributed to him is that the Qur'an and the traditions of the Prophet are in Arabic and nothing else was needed.

The anecdote is late and there is no reason to believe the incident as told. What it marks is a real difference, and the difference is worth a chapter.

The Tahirids were a Persian family from Khurasan who were culturally as Arab as they could make themselves. They claimed connections to the old Arab nobility, patronised Arabic poetry, corresponded and administered in Arabic, and — on the evidence of what they paid for — regarded the Persian past as something to have emerged from rather than to cultivate. That was not eccentricity. It was the correct posture for a family whose entire position depended on being the caliph's most reliable servants, in a province the caliphate was nervous about, during a century when Iranian revolt was a live category and Babak was holding out in Azerbaijan.

Set that against what a court in the same country was doing a century later. At Bukhara the Samanids commissioned Rudaki, paid for a Persian version of Tabari, and funded the beginning of the Shahnama — the Iranian national epic, in Persian, in verse. The Saffarids in between are credited with the first Persian court poetry, on the argument, reported of Ya'qub, that he could not understand what was being recited at him in Arabic.

Three successive holders of the same province, then: one that suppressed Persian letters or is said to have, one that started them because its founder was not educated in Arabic, and one that turned them into a literature. The thread this region draws is usually about how power passed. This is the same sequence read for what each holder thought it was, and the answers are not continuous at all.

Someone who did not want a governorship

Drafted from Bosworth, The History of the Saffarids of Sistan and the Maliks of Nimruz (247/861 to 949/1542-3) (1994)end

In 873 Ya'qub ibn al-Layth, a coppersmith's apprentice turned warlord out of Sistan, marched on Nishapur and took it. Muhammad ibn Tahir, the last Tahirid governor, was captured. There was no significant battle.

Ya'qub had no appointment. He had asked for one, and Baghdad had refused, and he had taken the province anyway. Where the Tahirids had spent fifty years demonstrating that formal subordination could contain real independence, Ya'qub demonstrated in a season that it could also be dispensed with.

The Tahirid collapse is what opens the space this whole thread runs through. Khurasan was, from 873, a province with no settled claimant: the Saffarids held it by force without a title, the Samanids would take it from them and receive a title afterwards, and for the next three hundred years it would keep changing hands between houses that had each acquired it by some variation on the same move.

The family did not vanish. Tahirids held the governorship of Baghdad itself for some years after Nishapur fell, which is a strange coda: the dynasty outlived its own state as officials of the power it had spent fifty years quietly outgrowing.

Two couplets

Drafted from Browne, A Literary History of Persia, Volume I: From the Earliest Times until Firdawsi (1902)afterlife

The Tahirids governed Khurasan for half a century and policed Baghdad at the same time, and what survives of them in the language of the country they governed is four lines of verse by one man.

Hanzala of Badghis

When Muhammad Awfi compiled the first anthology of Persian poets in the thirteenth century, he could find exactly one belonging to the Tahirid period, and he quotes two couplets of him. Browne, going through the whole early material a century ago, could not improve on that.

Hanzala of Badghis appears to have lived more or less under Tahirid patronage. Here is a quarter of everything that is left of him, in Browne's rendering:

Though rue-seed in the fire my sweetheart threw Lest hurt should from the Evil Eye accrue, I fear nor fire nor rue can aught avail That face like fire and beauty-spot like rue!

Wild rue is burned as a fumigation against the evil eye, which is held to fall particularly on whatever is perfect of its kind. The poet's point is that his sweetheart is too perfect for the remedy to work, and that her bright face and dark beauty-spot are themselves the fire and the seed.

It is a good joke, well made, in a language that had not been written for two centuries. And it is the whole of the Tahirid contribution to it.

Why there is so little

The comparison that makes the point is not with some later golden age. It is with the dynasty that had the same province eighty years afterwards.

Awfi's chapter on the early poets lists three names from the Tahirid and Saffarid periods together. The remaining twenty-eight are Samanid. Something changed at Bukhara that had not changed at Nishapur, and it was not the availability of poets.

Browne's judgement is that the Tahirids, unlike the Saffarids and Samanids after them, cannot really be said to have sought to foster the Persian revival at all — and he cites, without vouching for it, the story Dawlatshah tells: a man brought Abdallah b. Tahir at Nishapur an old Persian book, the romance of Wamiq and Adhra, said to have been compiled by wise men for King Anushirvan. The amir answered that they were men who read the Qur'an, that the book was the work of Magians and accursed in their eyes, had it thrown into the water, and gave orders that any Persian book of Magian authorship found in his territories should be destroyed.

Browne will not attach much historical weight to the anecdote, and neither should anyone else. What he thinks it does represent, fairly, is the attitude.

The shape of the loss

So the record stands like this. A Persian family, ruling a Persian province, loyal to an Arab caliphate, whose court language was Arabic and whose surviving Persian is two couplets about a girl and a superstition.

There is no need to make them villains for it. Being a good governor of Khurasan in the ninth century meant being intelligible in Baghdad, and the Tahirids were better at that than anybody. But the thing the Iranian Intermezzo is remembered for did not begin with them, and Hanzala's four lines are the measure of how nearly it did not begin at all.