In al-Narshakhi’s accounts of the earliest Muslim raids against Bukhara, the author presents us with two related anecdotes in which the Bukharan Queen Khatun meets the Arab general `Abdallah b. Khazim. In the first, Khatun was asked to greet each of the Arab commanders as a stipulation of her surrender. When she was brought before Ibn Khazim, he had prepared a dramatic tableau. He sat in his tent behind a roaring fire which reflected off his eyes so they looked red, dressed in his armor with his unsheathed sword placed before him. Khatun fled in terror at the sight. In the second, following another successful attack on Bukhara, Khatun asked to see Ibn Khazim again for he had previously frightened her so, declaring that “It seems to me he is not human.” The image of Ibn Khazim as a skilled general with a flair for the dramatic appears elsewhere in our sources for the conquest of Khurasan and Transoxiana, alongside stories of his rebellious nature. During both the First and Second Fitnas, Ibn Khazim seized control of Khurasan with a mix of guile and force. In the latter instance, he is accused of killing up to one fifth of the Arab garrison in Khurasan as he consolidated his own authority. His son Musa is no less of a character, known for his adventures among the Sogdian lords of Transoxiana and his conquest of Tirmidh, which he ruled for fifteen years as his own private kingdom and a refuge for rebellious Arabs and Iranians. This paper examines the textual sources for Ibn Khazim’s adventures in Khurasan and how these accounts balance the image of a dramatic hero responsible for numerous Muslim victories including the conquests of Nishapur and Sarakhs and the defeat of the resistant Parthian general Qarin with the rebel who twice took the governorship of Khurasan for himself, refused to acknowledge Umayyad rule, and encouraged his son to join the Sogdians with the treasury of Marw. In these accounts, we can see division among the Arabs from the outset of the conquest of Iran and perhaps learn how historians not only dealt with divisiveness in the early conquests but also how they rehabilitated the problematic ancestors of families who maintained prominent positions centuries later.

Mainstream works of Arabic-Islamic historiography produced during the ninth and tenth centuries present the frontiers of the caliphate as a zone of persistent Islamic expansion enabled by conquering governors. Provincial accounts, however, often present a different story. For example, in the 13th-century Persian text from Sind called the Chachn?ma, we find that members of an Arab group with the nisba al-'Ilaf?, probably referring to the Banu Jarm tribe of Omani origin, was already in Makr?n and Sind and even allying with Sind's ruler against the invading Muslim armies led by Muhammad b. al-Q?sim. The Chachn?ma also contains brief contradictory accounts according to which Muhammad b. al-H?rith al-'Ilaf? either refused to fight the Muslims or reconciled with them before the end. They are also completely absent from accounts of the conquest of Sind produced elsewhere. This highlights the difficulty Islamic historiography had absorbing apparent Muslims whose behavior on the frontiers did not conform to the expectations set by the fut?? historiographic theme. Al-Muhallab b. Ab? Sufra's governorship of Khurasan is a variation on this theme. His major campaign was a three-year siege of Kish, and our extant sources report criticism of him for not acting more aggressively toward that city or pressing on into Sogdiana. They also contain views attributed to al-Muhallab, including a claim that he advised his sons not to conquer Tirmidh so as to continue justifying their own control over the province. His reputation as a conqueror, however, may have been passed on largely through panegyric poetry such as the elegy of Nah?r b. Tawsi'a al-Taym? which both al-Tabar? and Ibn 'As?kir place as a capstone on their discussions of al-Muhallab's career. Omani Arabs in Sind were almost certainly there because of trade connections, and evidence suggests the Muhallabids frequently found collecting taxes from their provinces more worthwhile than expanding their realms. However, insofar as the frontier was conceived as a zone of conquest such activities had to be marginalized, hidden, or denied in in order to center a narrative of conquering heroes.

In 751, in a battle near Samarqand on the frontier between the 'Abbasid caliphate and the Chinese T'ang dynasty, Muslim forces defeated the Chinese army. The Battle of Talas ended the westward expansion of the T'ang dynasty into Transoxiana; afterwards, Muslim powers ruled the region for centuries. While the Battle of Talas was geopolitically significant, it is most commonly associated with a legend that this battle caused the knowledge of paper-making technology to spread from China into the Islamic world. According to this story, 'Abbasid forces captured Chinese papermakers after the battle, thereby winning paper-making technology for Islamic civilization. The problem: almost no one thinks this story is true. The evidence is fairly convincing: paper was attested in Transoxiana before the Battle of Talas; no contemporary Arabic sources mention the captured papermakers; and Chinese and Central Asian papermakers were not even using the same materials to make paper in the eighth century. Rather, the story of the captured papermakers seems to originate in eleventh and twelfth-century Arabic sources, during the period when Turkic peoples rose to power and dominance in the central lands of the Islamic world. This paper analyzes the development of the myth of the Battle of Talas and the spread of papermaking technology. By examining how medieval authors, such as al-Tha'alibi (d. 1038), Ibn al-Athir (d. 1160), and al-Dhahabi (d. 1348) incorporated the legend of captured papermaking into stories of the Battle of Talas, I argue that this legend served as significant rhetorical purpose: the story of the battle and the transfer of technology from 'the East' became popular during the same period when Turkic peoples began to dominate the ruling structures of the Middle East. While the Seljuks, a Turkic tribe from Central Asia, began emigrating into the Middle East in the eighth century, they conquered Baghdad and the 'Abbasid caliph in the eleventh century. By circulating stories of advanced technology acquired from Central Asia, historians rhetorically argued for the power and significance of the Central Asian frontier.