ABSTRACT
Turks and Turkishness are, on the whole, a minor topic in the poetry of Farrukhı-andMu‘izzı-, except in the context of erotic nası-bs, on which more will be said later. But the Turkish element in the society of their day, and, in particular, the relations between Turks and Persians, especially in the court circles in which the poets spent their lives, were of such importance that it has seemed appropriate to devote a chapter to this intriguing but rather neglected subject, as a prelude to the main body of the present study. The evidence for social relationships is admittedly scanty, mostly based on brief episodes or comments made in passing by various writers, and nearly always referring to contacts in the higher levels of society. With this in mind, four major Persian writers, all from Khura-sa-n, and all more or less contemporary with either Farrukhı-or Mu‘izzı-, have been picked out because their reaction to Turks represents a fairly wide, but probably characteristic, spectrum of views. On the Turkish side, the Dı-wa-n lugha-t al-Turk of Mah.mu-d Ka-shgharı-will be studied in some detail, as it provides a unique and fascinating insight into how educated Turks from the eastern Qarakha-nid kha-nates of Ka-shghar and Ba-la-saghu-n saw themselves and their Arab and Persian fellow-Muslims. The attitude to Turks of these Persian writers must have been governed by
the degree and type of contact they had with Turks, and the extent to which their lives were affected by the Turkish presence. They approach the subject from different angles and are very different in position, temperament and personality. Firdausı-was an obvious choice, both because of his enormous importance in Persian literature and history, and because he is the earliest major Persian poet whose work has survived. If, as seems likely, he spent much of his life in T.u-s, his birthplace, he probably had little day-to-day contact with Turks, and has not much to say about them in general in the Sha-hna-ma, apart from an occasional disparaging comment. However, his apparent dislike and distrust of Turks, and his concept of Iran and Tu-ra-n as two irreconcilable and mutually hostile elements (‘fire and water’, as he says on several occasions), was the mainspring of many of the most famous episodes in the Sha-hna-ma, which arise from the constant warfare between the
legendary figures of the Persian king Kay Ka-vu-s, aided by the Sı-sta-nı-hero Rostam, and the Turkic ruler Afra-sı-ya-b, and was probably related to the events of Firdausı-’s own lifetime. Some ten years before the completion of the Sha-hna-ma in 401/1010, the Sa-ma-nid empire had collapsed, and its lands in Transoxania, including the great cities of Bukha-ra-and Samarqand, were taken over by the Turkish Qarakha-nids; in the years that followed, the Ilig Nas.r made determined efforts to extend their realm beyond the Oxus, until Mah.mu-d’s victory at Katar in 399/1008 put a final end to his ambitions. As Kowalski (passim) points out, Firdausı-identified the ‘Turks’ of the period of the heroic and semi-mythical Kaya-nid kings with contemporary Turks, and their king Afra-sı-ya-b, the formidable, implacable and treacherous enemy of Ka-vu-s and Rostam, the murderer of Siya-vash, could have been seen as a forerunner of the Ilig Nas.r, though none of Firdausı-’s panegyrics to Mah.mu-d draw such parallels. Na-s.ir-i Khusrau, in some ways the most remarkable member of this
quartet of writers, and certainly the most extreme in his views on Turks, was a professional secretary (dabı-r) who worked for the Seljuq administration in Marv as a financial official (mutasarrif). In 437/1045-46 he gave up his job, abandoned worldly life and set out on a seven-year journey, recorded in his famous S. afarna-ma, in the course of which he made the pilgrimage to Mecca four times and spent three years in Cairo, the capital city of the Fa-timid caliph al-Mustans.ir. He had been converted to Ismailism, and on his return to Khura-sa-n in 444/1052-53 he began to work as an Isma-’ı-lı-da-’ı-. The persecution he suffered forced him into permanent exile in a remote corner of Badakhsha-n, where he died some 20-odd years later, and resentment and homesickness for Khura-sa-n evidently fuelled the almost pathological loathing and contempt for Turks and their sycophants, which is freely expressed in his poems.
