The History of Bukhara stands as testimony to the emergence of the Tajiks as a distinct people—an Islamicized revival, in many respects, of the Sogdians.
Author: Richard Foltz — a Canadian Iranologist of American origin, specializing in the history of Greater Iran and the history of religion.
This book was inspired to a large extent by the work and vision of the late Harvard Iranologist Richard Nelson Frye. He was arguably the greatest scholar of Iranian languages and culture that North America has produced – not that there have been many. Most of the important experts in this field have been Europeans or Iranians. One should of course give credit to A.V. Williams-Jackson (1862–1937), a native New Yorker and specialist in the Zoroastrian sacred text, the Avesta, who laid the foundations for Iranian Studies at Columbia University following his appointment there as head of the newly created Department of Indo-Iranian Languages and Literatures in 1895. But it was Frye’s efforts at Harvard during the 1950s that firmly established Iranian Studies as a field of study in North America. Numerous scholars before and since have surpassed Frye’s depth in particular areas of their own specialization, but none has equalled the sheer breadth of his erudition in all matters pertaining to Iran, or his immense contribution to enhancing Westerners’ appreciation of Iranian culture. I do not know if he was the first to coin the term ‘Greater Iran’ – a welcome reminder that the influence of Iranian civilization extends far beyond the modern borders of the Islamic Republic – but certainly nothing better evokes the concept than his own long and illustrious career.
Although Frye studied both Persian and Turkish as a graduate student, it was the Tajiks, and not Central Asia’s Turkic-speaking peoples, that would occupy most of his attention. For his doctoral research he chose to prepare an English edition of the tenth-century Samanid historian Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. Ja‘far Narshakhī’s History of Bukhara (Tārīkh-i Bukhārā), a project that Frye initiated in 1941 but was interrupted when he was enlisted by the US government’s Office of Strategic Services – forerunner to the CIA – to serve in Afghanistan during the Second World War. Sadly, some seven decades later this wartime service was taken up by a small group of ignorant fanatics in Iran as a pretext for denying Frye the burial in Esfahan that had been his dream, despite its having been authorized by two successive Iranian presidents.
Narshakhī’s History of Bukhara can be considered as one of the principal surviving examples of Iranian reawakening during the Samanid period in tenth-century Central Asia. Although like most scholarly works of the time it was originally composed in Arabic, the lingua franca of educated Muslims everywhere, it no doubt served the Samanids’ aims by associating the former Sogdian lands (and, by extension, the Samanids themselves) with the muchadmired pre-Islamic Persian culture of the Sasanians.
Less than two centuries later, in 1128, another local scholar, Abū Naṣr Qubavī, translated Narshakhī’s History of Bukhara into Persian, making the comment in his introduction that ‘most people do not show a desire to read an Arabic book’.
The fact that no copy of Narshakhī’s Arabic original survives would seem to support such an assertion – Frye’s English translation was made from Qubavī’s heavily modified Persian edition, the Arabic version being unavailable. For Qubavī’s Persian rendition, meanwhile, Frye had access to no less than six different manuscripts, out of a total of thirty-eight that are currently known to exist.
Were it possible to compare the lost original version of the History of Bukhara with the Persian adaptation left to us by Qubavī, we might well perceive the two works as being so different as to hardly constitute the same book. Qubavī did not limit himself to the role of translator, but assumed those of editor and author as well. He deleted many passages from Narshakhī’s text that he found uninteresting, while adding copious information of his own filling in the two centuries between his time and Narshakhī’s, to such an extent that the Persian History of Bukhara as we now have it could rightly be considered a co-authored work. Qubavī was not exceptional in this regard. For example, Elton Daniel has noted that the Samanid-era Persian version of Ṭabarī’s encyclopaedic History of the Prophets and the Kings was ‘neither a translation nor an abridgment but a work in its own right with much material not found in Ṭabarī at all’.
It is curious that Frye doesn’t say more about the implications of Qubavī’s highly active role in giving the book its extant form. Since its overriding theme is the Islamization of Bukhara during the early to mid-eighth century, Narshakhī’s History can be considered on one level as marking the emergence of the Tajiks as a people – representing a kind of Islamicized rebirth of the Sogdians – and in this sense Frye can be said to have begun his academic career as an historian of the Tajiks. He would bring this connection full circle in the 1990s by writing a history of Central Asia which, as he explains in the introduction to that work, he first conceived while living in Tajikistan ‘as an attempt to give an ancient and medieval history of that land’.
Frye’s choice of the word ‘land’ is telling, since in fact Tajikistan did not become a political entity until 1924, achieving the status of independent state only as recently as 1991. Hence Frye’s work necessarily focused not on Tajikistan as such, but rather on the parts of Central Asia where Persian-speakers – the Tajiks – were numerically or culturally dominant during the region’s history.
In that sense these two books – one produced at the beginning of Frye’s career and the other at the end of it – can really be considered as ethnic histories of the Tajik people and their principal ancestors, the Sogdians.
Frye had travelled to Tajikistan upon retiring from his position at Harvard in 1990 and taught Tajik history to university students in Dushanbe for several terms. It was during this time that he was inspired to write his ‘history of Tajikistan’, but confronted with the conundrum that most of what could pass for Tajik history had in fact occurred outside the borders of the present-day republic, he elected instead to produce a work far broader in scope.
I never had the chance to study under Frye personally, since his retirement from Harvard in 1990 coincided with my arrival there to pursue my PhD. I did see him frequently, however, since he remained active on campus where he retained his office and participated in seminars and other activities. Having known Professor Frye in this informal capacity I looked forward with great enthusiasm to reading the fruits of his time in Tajikistan, but when The Heritage of Central Asia was finally published in 1996 I realized that a book devoted specifically to the history of the Tajiks was yet to appear, at least in English. Since the present work is in some sense an attempt to pick up where Professor Frye left off, it seems only appropriate to dedicate it to his memory.
Montréal, 15 September 2018
