About

Currently, I am a final year PhD researcher on an ERC-funded project ‘Embedding Conquest: Naturalising Muslim Rule in the Early Islamic Empire (600-1000),’ supervised by Petra Sijpesteijn at Leiden University. My dissertation entitled “Framing the Conquests: Early Muslim Domination of Bactria 652-750 CE” discusses the process of the conquests and the naturalization of early Muslim rule in Bactria. Unlike the previous researches that are mostly based on the Arabic historical narratives, I utilise an inclusive methodology, in which all the relevant documents written in Bactrian, Sogdian, Middle Persian and Arabic have been used alongside coins, inscriptions, seals, and sealings discovered from the region, in light of archeological reports, and the literary sources (Chinese, Arabic and Persian).

Based on a systematic analysis of these sources, my dissertation argues that the early Muslim conquests of Bactria was not simply the result of a series of military operations initiated by early Muslims. In contrast, the conquests became possible because the local politics provide space for early Muslim to function. Bactria was a place where political fragmentation, ethno-linguistic and religious diversity were the established social-political phenomenon. The fragmentation and the diversity were the outcomes of Bactria being part of the Frontier Zone between contesting sedentary and nomadic empires of the Sasanians, the Chionites, the Hephthalites and the Western Turk, and its Shatter Zone geographical characteristics. The local political elites tried to use early Muslim forces for their own political agenda, but that provide space for expansion and consolidation of early Muslim authority in the region. Though, the local political elites pulled early Muslims to their own politics, at the end, they became part of the Islamic empire and the agencies behind the expansion of Islam further into south and central Asia.