The Tahirids of Khorasan

The Tahirids were a Persian family who governed Khorasan and the eastern provinces of the Abbasid caliphate from 821 to 873, first from Merv and then from Nishapur, while a branch of the same family ran the police of Baghdad. They were governors loyal to the caliph, not independent kings, but by keeping the east in one family for half a century they showed how an Iranian dynasty could rule inside the caliphate, a model the Saffarids and Samanids took further.

Tahir’s own career, from his victory near Rey in 811 to his appointment as governor in 821, is told on Tahir ibn Husayn. This page follows the family after he reached Khorasan.

A sermon without the caliph’s name, 822

Tahir governed for less than two years. According to the chronicle of al-Tabari, in the autumn of 822 he gave the Friday sermon in Merv and left out the customary prayer for the caliph, the public sign of allegiance. The postmaster, whose duty was to report to Baghdad, sent word at once. A second report followed shortly after: Tahir had been found dead in his bed. Some accounts hint that an agent of al-Ma’mun had poisoned him.

Historians are not sure what to make of the story. Dropping the caliph’s name looks like rebellion, yet al-Ma’mun did not treat the family as rebels. He confirmed Tahir’s son Talha as governor, and the Tahirids kept Khorasan for another fifty years. Either the incident has been dramatised, or al-Ma’mun judged that he needed the family more than he distrusted it.

Talha and Abd Allah

Talha ibn Tahir (822–828) spent much of his rule fighting the Kharijites of Sistan, armed sectarians who had defied the caliphate in the south-east for decades. His brother Abd Allah, meanwhile, was making his name in the west, campaigning in Syria and restoring caliphal control over Egypt in 826 and 827. When Talha died, Abd Allah took over Khorasan and governed it until his death in Nishapur at the end of 844 or in 845.

Abd Allah moved the seat of government from Merv to Nishapur, which became one of the great cities of the eastern Islamic world, and the medieval geographers credit him with building its suburb of Shadyakh. He was also the caliphate’s chief agent in the north. In 839 his forces helped end the revolt of Maziyar, the prince of Tabaristan, who was sent to the caliph at Samarra and executed. The background to that mountain kingdom is on Iranian resistance in Tabaristan.

Care for the peasants

Abd Allah had a reputation for justice towards the cultivators. The eleventh-century historian Gardizi reports that he had the jurists of Khorasan and Iraq compile a book of rules on underground water channels (qanats), the Kitab al-Quniy, because disputes over water were endless; Gardizi says it was still in use in his own day. A letter of advice that Tahir wrote to Abd Allah, preserved by al-Tabari, presents good government as protection of the weak, and the family seems to have taken that image seriously.

The Baghdad branch

The Tahirids were also a power in the capital. Tahir’s nephew Ishaq ibn Ibrahim served as chief of police (sahib al-shurta) of Baghdad from 822 to 850, and in that role he carried out al-Ma’mun’s inquisition, the mihna, questioning scholars such as Ahmad ibn Hanbal on whether the Qur’an was created. Later Muhammad ibn Abd Allah ibn Tahir held Baghdad from 851 to 867 and defended it for the caliph al-Musta’in during the civil war of 865–866. Few other families held high office in both Khorasan and Iraq at the same time.

An Arabic court with Persian roots

The Tahirids were Persian by descent, from a family of clients settled at Bushanj near Herat, but their court culture was Arabic. Abd Allah wrote poetry in Arabic and his sons were famous for their Arabic learning. A late anecdote in Dawlatshah’s fifteenth-century biography of poets says Abd Allah had a Persian romance thrown into the water as unfit for Muslims; the source is late and the story is probably a later invention. Still, the first Persian court poet whose name survives, Hanzala of Badghis, is linked with the Tahirid period, as described on the birth of New Persian.

Decline and fall

Under Tahir II (844 or 845 to 862) the system still worked, but under his son Muhammad ibn Tahir (862–873) it came apart. In 864 the people of Ruyan and the Caspian lowlands rose against the Tahirid officials in Tabaristan and invited an Alid, Hasan ibn Zayd, to lead them; the result was the state described on the Zaydi Alavids of Tabaristan. In the south, Ya’qub ibn Layth of Sistan built an army that the governors could not match. In 873 Ya’qub entered Nishapur and took Muhammad ibn Tahir prisoner, ending Tahirid rule in Khorasan. The story continues on the Saffarids.

1. 821 Tahir ibn Husayn appointed governor of Khorasan
2. 822 Tahir omits the caliph’s name in the sermon and dies; Talha succeeds
3. 828 Abd Allah ibn Tahir governor; capital moves to Nishapur
4. 839 Revolt of Maziyar in Tabaristan suppressed
5. 864 Alid rising in Tabaristan
6. 873 Ya’qub ibn Layth takes Nishapur

How historians see the Tahirids

Older Iranian nationalist writing treated the Tahirids as the first step towards Iranian independence. Most historians now stress the opposite: C. E. Bosworth described them as an Abbasid ruling family that served the caliphate faithfully, and their power rested on caliphal appointment. What they did change was the practice of government in the east. Khorasan became a hereditary command run by a Persian family with its own court, army and tax system, and the Samanids, who started as Tahirid subordinates in Transoxiana, inherited that machinery. See the Samanid Empire.