There is a surprisingly limited number of surviving monuments from a dynasty that controlled dozens of major cities and ruled over thousands of square miles for more than two centuries. However, the evidence seen throughout this book shows that there was a rich and diverse tradition of building across Ma Wara’l-Nahr in the period from the late tenth to the early thirteenth centuries. Within that diversity, several trends and specific motifs can be found, and it is possible to determine a clear, if irregular, process of development. There was a slow but steady shift from an aesthetic based on the use of cut brick and incised stucco ornament towards one which had a greater reliance on terracotta and glazed tiles. The craftsmen responsible for building the monuments that have been examined in detail in the preceding chapters were well aware of the wider regional trends, and were capable of integrating some of these elements into their work, while still preserving and developing a unique and distinctive local style.

There remains a vast amount of literature and material resulting from over a century of both Russian and locally run archaeological excavations that has yet to be addressed by many western scholars and integrated into the available literature. This often hard to find, and in some cases unpublished archival material, coupled with the steady stream of data from new excavations, would be of great use in the process of developing an even deeper and more nuanced understanding of the scope and nature of urban and other architectural developments across Central Asia. The aim of this book has been to give as detailed an account as possible of the form and ornament found on the extant corpus of buildings. This has required occasional references to relevant archaeological material at times, in order to show that seemingly unique, or even entirely missing types of structure such as madrasas, were in fact part of a much broader process of architectural development.

There are clear signs of continuity from the surviving Samanid structures in a number of the subsequent Qarakhanid buildings. Two tombs, one in Bukhara and one in Tim, are examined here, alongside the archaeological remains of the Samanid palace in the citadel of Afrasiyab and other structures in Nishapur, with a view to establishing which elements remained in use in the following centuries. Numerous other earlier regional monuments are addressed throughout the book in reference to specific structures, and some of these are also briefly introduced here.

The sources of the limited corpus of Samanid monuments can be found, in part, in the pre-Islamic architecture of the Soghdians and have been examined in detail by Pugachenkova.1 This is particularly clear when the Samanid tomb in Bukhara is compared with the image of a structure in the Soghdian wall paintings uncovered in Penjikent and dated to the fifth–seventh centuries. Whilst it is to be expected that buildings in any one region are likely to have drawn on at least some elements of the pre-existing local architectural style, the extremely limited evidence for either Soghdian or Samanid architecture makes observations that go beyond the most general hard to support with reliable evidence. The following discussion is not an attempt to study the earlier monuments in close detail, as such a task falls outside the scope of this work. Instead, the intention is to provide a sense of the existing architectural milieu from which the Qarakhanid monuments emerged.

Whilst they form part of a wider regional trend, a number of distinctively Qarakhanid minarets survive across the region. This chronological study looks at the corpus in its entirety and demonstrates the connections between them, as well as links to the decoration of other contemporaneous structural typologies. Minarets in Samarkand, Balasagun, Uzgend, Termez, Bukhara and Vabkent are examined in order to demonstrate the different variants as well as unifying elements within the extant corpus.

A wide array of forms were employed for minaret construction and decoration across the wider region, including areas in which control overlapped or changed hands between different dynasties throughout the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. There are discernible links between some of the formal and decorative elements of Qarakhanid minarets and those of the Seljuqs to the west, as well as the Ghurids and Ghaznavids to the south. However, despite the broad similarities with minarets erected under Seljuq, Ghurid and Ghaznavid patronage, the minarets within the Qarakhanid corpus can be viewed as representatives of a unique and distinctive regional style.

Perhaps the single most striking architectural form developed in the lands under Qarakhanid control is the battered shaft minaret, often with a distinctive lantern structure covering the balcony. Numerous examples survive, in varying degrees of preservation and originality. Apart from a couple of structures built in the far off Rum Seljuq empire in Anatolia, this form is unique to the region and does not appear to have been adopted into the wider corpus Seljuq, Ghaznavid or Ghurid minarets in Iran and Afghanistan. The closest comparable structures are to be found in Dehistan, which is relatively close to the lands under the Qarakhanids, but located to the south of the Oxus River, which marked the southern boundary of their territory. Two damaged minarets survive in Dehistan.

If you will vote for those who join house to house and lay field to field, then mock not your God by praying ‘Thy will be done.’ As a preacher of truth and righteousness I warn you against advancing by your vote that tyranny and wrong which has ruined our land, and made our brethren to be the prey of evil beasts. Why will you honour, and give power to, your deadly enemies?

The HLLRA dominated political debate in the Highlands at the critical juncture when crofters were enfranchised in 1885. The combination of impassioned political argument, deeply held religious conviction, and exceptionally high turnout made the electioneering of that year memorable. Although the HLLRA movement itself has left little documentary evidence to posterity, an abundance of contemporary newspaper coverage affords us a wide view of the main developments and events. In particular, we notice the contribution of the man who – through statements such as the one quoted above – became the leading clerical proponent of land reform. But before examining the political campaign fought by the land reformers we must first consider more closely the relationship which existed between the HLLRA and the ministers.

Ministers and the HLLRA

By 1884 the question of whether ministers should encourage their congregations to join and form branches of the land reform associations was a pressing one. In Glenelg, Inverness-shire, for example, the close formal links between Christians and land reformers during the height of the agitation were apparent

GLOSSARY

abdāl, one of the degrees in the Sufi hierarchical order of saints who, unknown by the masses, participate by means of their powerful infl uence in the preservation of the order of the universe. According to the most generally accept ed opinion, the abdāl hold the fifth place in the ten-place hierarchy of the saints. Goldziher 1960.

adab, manners; etiquette; culture; refi nement; cultivation; the sum of the literary and general knowledge which makes a person courteous and “urbane”; profane culture (as opposed to religious knowledge, ʿilm, q.v.).

abjad, the fi rst of the eight mnemotechnical terms into which the twenty-eight consonants of the Arabic alphabet were divided. The order of the fi rst six terms corresponds to the order of the “Phoenician” alphabet and reveals the origin of the series. The tradition given in FB – that they derive from the names of the days of the week – is one of several origin legends. Weil 1979.

ʿajam, non-Arab, especially Persian (lands). Bosworth 1984.

akhbār, sing. khabar, discrete reports varying in length from a line to several pages.

ʿālim, see ʿulamāʾ (ulama).

amālī, lit. dictations; a record of a set of scholarly information dictated orally by a senior shaykh to a junior scholar acting as kātib (q.v.) or mustamlī (q.v.). The record of the dictations serves as an aid to memorization and may subsequently be read out during the senior shaykh's lectures, not infrequently repeated by the mustamlī to ensure the audibility of the content. The mustamlī, also called muʿīd, is the “repetitor.” Amālī works were circulated amongst scholars. Sezgin 1967, I: 32.

The standing monuments and their decoration are the primary focus of this book, and they provide the evidence for the architectural aesthetic employed in the monumental architecture built in lands under Qarakhanid control. However, there is increasing archaeological evidence for the vast scale of the broader urban development across the region from the late tenth century onwards. The compilation and synthesis of all of the published archaeological reports which address Qarakhanid sites of all kinds, from the nineteenth century until today, is a vast undertaking that extends far beyond the scope of this book. Having said that, in order to provide some context for the very limited corpus of surviving monuments, some of the developments in the major cities, as well as some of the more out of the way urban centres that are known only from archaeological or textual sources, are examined below. Increasing numbers of sites are being either re-examined or re-discovered by archaeologists working in the various modern states encompassing the territory formerly ruled by members of the Qarakhanid dynasty.

The vast scale of construction and urban expansion that took place across the areas of Central Asia under Qarakhanid rule remains very poorly understood. With such a small corpus of standing monuments spread across the region, it is possible to determine only a limited amount of information concerning the process of change in the period from the late tenth century to the early thirteenth century. In order to gain a clear understanding of the bigger picture it is to the textual and archaeological evidence that attention must turn. The major cities, as well as some of the recently excavated smaller urban centres, are examined below in order to demonstrate a sense of what is known to have been built and to gain as wide an understanding as is possible, with the limited evidence, of urban development under Qarakhanid rule.

They were all deeply interested in the welfare of their countrymen. They might not see their way to adopt all the measures that were proposed, but he protested against the accusation that they the ministers of the F.C. were indifferent.

The Crofters’ Act

The bill which finally reached the statute book as the Crofters’ Holdings (Scotland) Act in June 1886 was essentially based on the Irish Land Act of 1881. The only significant piece of legislation passed by Gladstone's short-lived third administration, the bill was introduced to the House of Commons in early 1886 by G. O. Trevelyan, Gladstone's Scottish Secretary, and was modelled on an earlier bill which had failed to gain Parliamentary assent the previous year. The legislation was predicated on the concept of ‘dual ownership’, which was at the heart of the Liberal land policy. Under this system the tenant owned the improvements and the security of the tenancy while the proprietor retained the actual ownership of the land. The new Act granted security of tenure and compensation for improvements, and gave an independent statutory Crofters’ Commission the power to set rents and cancel arrears. The Liberal leadership was swayed by the historical argument that the crofters had been unfairly deprived of their ancestral lands and they used this to justify legislating for only one particular region of the country. But in his criticisms of the bill in the Commons, the Tory spokesman, Arthur J. Balfour, attacked Trevelyan for holding the ‘erroneous and utterly unfounded theory that the crofter in the Highlands had some kind of prescriptive and hereditary right to fixity of tenure’.