Ghaznavid Empire: Conquerors Dynasty

Another region of Afghanistan, that of Kafiristan (modern Nuristan), which lies across the Hindu Kush and to the north of the Kabul River, did not become Muslim till the end of the 19th century, when the Afghan Amir Abd al-Rahman Khan led a force into Kafiristan and replaced the indigenous paganism by Islam. A raid by Mahmud is recorded in 411/1020 on the Nur and Qirat valleys, apparently lying in the eastern part of Kafiristan, but no permanent conquest was attempted.

Because of its distance from Bukhara, Sistan had slipped from direct Samanid control after the first decades of the 4th/10th century, and a line connected with the Saffarids Ya'qub and Amr b. al-Laith had reappeared there. When Sebiik-Tegin annexed Bust, his territories became contiguous with those of the Saffarid Khalaf b. Ahmad. In 376/986-7 Khalaf tried to take advantage of Sebiik-Tegin's involvement with the Hindushahi Raja Jaipal, and seized Bust for a time; later, he tried to set the Qarakhanids against Sebiik-Tegin. Whilst Mahmud was disputing with his brother Isma'il over the succession, Khalaf's forces seized the district of Pushang, to the north of Sistan, and in 390/999 Mahmud retaliated by an invasion of Sistan.

On numismatic evidence, Ghaznavid authority was first recognized there in 392/1002, although the literary sources state that it was not until the next year that Mahmud finally took over Sistan, after Khalaf had put to death his own son Tahir and provoked a civil war there. Khalaf was now deposed and the province placed under Mahmud's brother Abu'l-Muzaffar Nasr. Yet the Sagzis' attachment to their own local line and their hatred of the alien Turkish yoke remained constant, and Sistan was never quiet under the Ghaznavids; once the Saljuqs appeared on the fringes of Sistan during the sultanate of Maudud b. Mas'iid, the Sagzis joined with the Tiirkmens to expel the Ghaznavid officials.

Qusdar had apparently been allowed by Sebuk-Tegin to retain its local rulers, for in 402/1011 we hear of an expedition by Mahmud to restore the ruler to obedience and the customary payment of tribute; this ruler (who is nowhere named) had tried to establish relations with the hostile Qarakhanids. Makran, the coastal strip of which Baluchistan is the interior, also had its own line of rulers who had in the 4th/ioth century acknowledged the Buyids of Kirman as suzerains, but who had latterly transferred their allegiance to Sebiik-Tegin and Mahmud. When the ruler Ma'dan died in 416/1025-6, there was a dispute over the succession between his sons cIsa and Abu'l-Mu'askar, in which Mahmud in the end negotiated a settlement. Just before Mahmud's death in 420/1029, 'Isa tried to assert his independence of Ghazna; it was left to Mahmud's son Mas'ud to bring 'Isa to heel and replace him by Abu'l-Mu'askar.

The mountain principalities of Chaghaniyan and Khuttal, on the right bank of the upper Oxus, were of strategic importance to the Ghaznavids: they served as bridgeheads into the Qarakhanid dominions, and were the Ghaznavids' first line of defence against predatory peoples like the Kumijis of the Buttaman Mountains, and beyond them, Turkish peoples of Central Asia. In Samanid times, these principalities had been ruled by local dynasties, tributary to Bukhara and descended from indigenous Iranian or Arab families such as the Al-i Muhtaj in Chaghaniyan and the Abu Da'udids or Banijurids in Khuttal. It seems, in the absence of specific information to the contrary, that local lines survived in Ghaznavid times as the sultans' vassals; in Mahmud's reign, the Muhtajid Fakhr al-Daula Ahmad was amir of Chaghaniyan, and in Mas'ud's reign, the then amir was the sultan's son-in-law.

Ghaznavids: the Powerful Turkish Dynasty in Medieval Persia