124 DESTINY DISRUPTED
waste to crops. The highways grew unsafe, small-time banditry became
rife, trade declined, poverty spread. Turkish mamluks fought bitterly with
Turkish nomads-it was Turks in power everywhere. This is part of why
anxiety permeated the empire in Ghazali's day.
A light did shine at the edges, however, under a Persian dynasty called
the Samanids. Their kingdom radiated from cities on either side of the
Oxus River, which now forms the northern border of Afghanistan. Here,
in the great urban centers ofBalkh and Bokhara, the literary culture of an-
cient Persia revived, and Persian began to compete with Arabic as the lan-
guage of learning.
But the Samanids, too, had mamluks, and one of their mamluk gener-
als decided he would rather give orders than take them. Goodbye,
Samanids; hello, Ghaznavids. The new rulers were called Ghaznavids be-
cause they moved their capital to the city of Ghazni, southeast of Kabul.
The Ghaznavid dynasty peaked with a long-lived conqueror named Mah-
mud, a Charlemagne of the Islamic East. By the time this man was done,
his empire sprawled from the Caspian to the Indus. Just as Charlemagne
saw himself as a "most Christian emperor," Mahmud considered himself a
most Muslim monarch. He appointed himself coruler of the Muslim
world, giving himself the brand new title of sultan, which means some-
thing like "sword arm." As he saw it, the Arab khalifa was still the spiritual
father of the Islamic community, but he, Mahmud, was the equally im-
portant military leader, the Enforcer. From his day until the twentieth cen-
tury, there was always at least one sultan in the Muslim world.
Sultan Mahmud was bright enough to staff his imperial service with
educated Persians who could read and write. He announced handsome re-
wards for men of learning, offers that attracted some nine hundred poets,
historians, theologians, philosophers, and other literati to his court, which
added to his prestige.
One of these literati was the poet Firdausi, who was writing Shahnama
(The Book of Kings), an epic history of the Persian nation from the begin-
ning of time to the birth of Islam, all in rhyming couplets. In the Middle
World he has a stature comparable to Dante. Mahmud extravagantly
promised this man one piece of gold for each couplet of his finished epic.
He was shocked when Firdausi finally presented him with the longest
poem ever penned by a single man: The Book of Kings has over sixty thou-