Battle of the Defile

The Battle of the Defile was fought over three days in July 731 CE. It halted or reversed Muslim expansion into Central Asia for a decade. The losses suffered by the Khurasani army also led to the transfer of reinforcements from the metropolitan regions of the Caliphate, which helped bring about its collapse.

About Battle of the Defile in brief

The Battle of the Defile was fought between the Umayyad Caliphate and the Turkic Türgesh khaganate over three days in July 731 CE. The battle halted or reversed Muslim expansion into Central Asia for a decade. The losses suffered by the Khurasani army also led to the transfer of reinforcements from the metropolitan regions of the Caliphate, which helped bring about its collapse twenty years later in the Abbasid Revolution. The region of Transoxiana had been conquered by the Muslim Arabs under Qutayba ibn Muslim in the reign of al-Walid I, following the Muslim conquest of Persia and of Khurasan in the mid-7th century. The loyalties of the region’s native Iranian and Turkic inhabitants and autonomous local rulers remained volatile, and in 719, they sent a petition to the Chinese and their vassals for military aid against the Muslims. In 728 a large-scale uprising, coupled with a Türge’s invasion, led to an abandonment of most of TransOxiana by the Cal caliphate’s forces, except for the region around Samarkand. In the hope of reversing the situation, in early 730 Caliph Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik appointed a new governor, Junayd ibn Abd al-Rahman al-Murri, who had been recently engaged in the pacification of Sindh. In early 731, the Türghesh laid siege to Samarksand, and when the Royal Persian army could not rescue it,Junayd resolved to march with less than 50,000 men to the city.

Despite the opinion of the army’s veteran Arab leaders who counselled him not to advance along the old route, he did so. The Muslim army followed, and scored a victory in a battle fought near the city, Junay d then retired with his troops to winter in Tokharistan, which had previously been under Muslim rule. Merv broke out south of the Oxus in the winter, forced to set out and there dispersed 28,000 of his men to quell a revolt. This left him seriously ill and he died in 731. The Battle of The Defile is one of the most detailed accounts of the entire UMayyad era survives in the History of al.Tabari, and it is published in a new edition of Al-Tabari’s History of the Islamic World, published by Oxford University Press, with an extract from the first edition. The second edition is published by the University of Oxford Press, and is available in hard copy for £16.99. The third edition is available for £14.99 and includes a free copy of the original Arabic version of the History of the Islamic World, as well as a free English translation of the Arabic edition of al Tabari’s History of the Islamic World with an extract from the second edition.

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