False Idols
Northern China
In the primordial legends of the Kitai people, Yaol Tuyubayan, Khan of the Kitai, was descended from the Sun itself. Regardless of the veracity of this outlandish claim, his star certainly would burn brightest on the steppe after the mass migration of the Uighur people southwards. The Yaol dynasty were somewhat more Sinicized than their Uighur cousins, and although they had married into the Jaylaqar Dynasty, and were its nominal subjects, in practice they controlled their own confederation, including the Ishih and Shiwei tribes, the latter of which were themselves of Uighur blood. Those among their civilization who were literate used the Uighur script to write their own language.
Accordingly, they had remarkable strength and also the trust of the Uighurs, who believed that the Yaol were loyal subjects without ambitions of their own. Accordingly, they actively encouraged the Kitai to assume greater authority on the steppe, and provide a shield against the peoples of Manchuria. Yaol Tuyubayan had been stymied in his attempts to sweep south against the province of You, despite large resources and his own capable but uninspired military acumen, by the clever schemes of Guo Yaoshi. However, with the collapse of the Qi regime, the Kitai benefitted immensely. The province of You and parts of Heibei were given to the Kitai to govern, as the overstretched Uighurs desperately needed the support of their allies.
Yaol Tuyubayan rose from strength to strength in the court of the Jaylaqar, being named after his victory in You the Satrap or Duke of that country and lavished with great gifts, arousing the anger of Eltemish's half-brother and viceroy, the Yabgu Hala, who had remained in Ordubeliq and saw firsthand the encroachment of the Kitan.
However, for the time being that anger would come to nothing. Hala had few options to make his discontent known, for Eltemish was greatly popular among his tribe, and had found himself believing the glorious epithets that his people lauded on him, that he was a god incarnate and the sovereign of all the rivers and streams beneath the clear blue sky. Settling in to rulership was distasteful to him, however. Even when he had made his residence in Ordubeliq, Eltemish had been accustomed to frequent movement and had rarely remained in the same part of his domain for more than a month. The notion of establishing himself in a single Chinese city and ruling as the North King was inconceivable to him.
Eltemish, having wrested most of northern China from its traditional rulers desired nothing more than a return to the old times, of sending embassies and making outrageous demands and watching the wealth pour northwards.
Furthermore, a mere four years after the conquest, a series of bitter winters drove his people ever more southwards. Yabgu Hala persuaded his half-brother to issue a series of decrees confiscating vast tracts of land in the north from their present owners, to allow his own people to settle it. Many Chinese landholders were stripped of their possessions without ceremony and their resentment of the new Uighur overlords only grew. Eltemish had only halfheartedly adopted the bureaucratic system of the Qi, and primarily used it as a machine of state oppression of the peasants, making increasingly impossible demands on the surviving bureaucracy but otherwise treating the long history and culture of conquered China with a casual disdain. The bureaucracy was turned, effectively, into a method of extracting wealth from native manufacturing and trade and distributing it amongst the unproductive aristocratic class.
The Uighur who settled the garrison cities, however, were generally not as incompetent or cruel as their central government would suggest. The settled or semi-settled life was not unknown to many of those who made up the first wave of migrants, and as such as a new aristocracy and occupying force they tended to be relatively fair, if socially and culturally distinct from their neighbors. Despite the common conception of the Uighur settlers as barbarians, many adapted quickly to the settled life and began learning the local language. It would be perhaps a decade before laws were passed banning the Uighurs from adopting Chinese dress and certain Chinese customs, and these would be only poorly enforced.
Rebellions were commonplace, however. The garrison towns were often immediate targets, as were bureaucratic offices at the village level. The bureaucracy now operated as agents of the northern king, and as such hatred for the scholar-bureaucrats among the peasantry grew rapidly. Attempts to regulate the activities of Daoist monks and other folk preachers tended to backfire and only spread their creeds faster. In this era, many intellectuals and native Chinese with means fled the north, either to the Goryeo Kingdom or to the war-torn south, depending on proximity.
These rebellions were rarely successful. Most rose up too quickly, without garnering more than local support and accordingly were forced into rough country to eke out a living as bandits or slaughtered as an example to others. Ironically, the one successful rebellion would come from the north. Eltemish was growing old. The "god incarnate" had been showing increasingly erratic behavior and his popularity was lessened. His victories were long past, and though he had long favored Hala to succeed him, he changed his mind after a particularly vicious argument and chose his son, Inantengin.
It was a second freezing winter and subsequent famine on the steppe, in 876, that forced matters to the breaking point. Yaol Tuyubayan, now an elderly man, had several ambitious sons, and he sent them forth into the Uighur lands to raid, sensing their weakness and knowing his own more temperate lands had largely been spared the brutal famine. Betraying his alliance, he sacked Ordubeliq. Hala led what was effectively a mass of refugees southwards, and upon meeting his brother, Eltemish flew into a rage. Hala, Eltemish claimed, was responsible for their defeat and the Kitan betrayal.
Hala refused to accept any punishment, and pitched fighting broke out between the royal troops and the fleeing Uighur clans, which were, once all stragglers were accounted for, a large portion of those in the north, and indeed all those who had not chosen submission to the Kitai. The settled Uighurs had become soft, it is said, and offered a poor fight, but ultimately Hala would lead many of their people westward, into country subject to the Bod, where his people would thrive as mercenaries and warriors. Many still would carry on even further west, and signs of their distinctive culture can be seen as far west as the Caspian.
The remainder of these refugees demanded settlement rights, which Eltemish was forced to grant, carving out new garrison towns and reallocating land across the north. When his father died two years later, in 878, Inantengin would lead an indecisive war against the Kitai, recovering much of the old Uighur empire and allowing the refugees to reclaim their old homeland. However, the damage was done. Uighur prestige dropped to a low ebb, and by 900, when Inantengin died, their state seemed to be tottering on the brink of collapse.
False Idols and the Kurdish Empire
With the rise to power of Tarkhsigh Arslan in 903, after the tyrannical but nonetheless centralizing reign of his father Aghatsagh, the Aghatsaghid Empire seemed perhaps poised for a return to some of its former prominence. However, little could be further from the truth.
The slow territorial decline of the Aghatsaghid Empire had seen the growth of religious turmoil, simmering under the surface. Buddhism was the majority religion in the Aghatsaghid dominion, particularly among the urban populations and those of Turkish or Eftal ancestry. Baharas, or Buddhist temples and monasteries, were ubiquitous, and though the fire-temples endured among the rural population, their "low church" Zoroastrian faith had become very much enmeshed with the Buddhist tradition. The syncretic faith that emerged gradually lost its distinctions with Sogdian Buddhism to the point that by the tenth century the distinction was largely immaterial, though undoubtedly meaningful to those who observed the Zoroastrian faith.
The "Sogdian" Buddhism patronized and popularized by the Eftal remained the dominant form of Buddhism in Iran, and subscribed for the most part to the broader Mahayana tradition. A large pantheon of Indo-Iranian divinities existed and often competed with Arhats and Bodhisattvas for the affection of lay devotees. Most of these deities had some tangential connection to Buddhism - Mihir, for example, had been gradually recast as a defender of the religious community and a god of enlightened inspiration.
However, the decline of the Aghatsaghid state, much like the decline of the Eftal state several centuries earlier, brought about new uncertainties for the rural peasant community. Turkish raids, launched by both the Bajinak rulers of Azerbaijan and the Oghuz on the steppes left the countryside unsafe, despite the best efforts of the Aghatsaghid armies.
These uncertainties were compounded by a new religious movement, called the Nowbahar, or new temple faction. Beginning with the writings of an Ifthal-Iranian monk named Narseh circa 905, it spread rapidly and gained meteoric support among the lay community, and slowly among the more inertia-ridden monastic community as well. The Nowbahar movement began as a tract speaking against the luxury and excess in which the "pagan temple priests" lived. The Eftal had long given generously to temples and had special cultural prohibitions against harming them, even if they were not of their faith. The Turks had largely adopted these same prohibitions, and accordingly temples throughout post-Eftal history were likely to endure any raids or violence unscathed, with rare exceptions.
Pagan temples accordingly made an easy target - theirs priests tended to have a privileged position in society, and their temples tended to be opulent and laden with riches stockpiled during raids. In many senses during times of uncertainty the pagan temples became banks of a sort - places where wealth could often be kept safe.
Narseh's writings also condemned the over focus on gods. The worship of gods, he claimed, were a distraction from the pursuit of enlightenment, and more often the worship of them was a trick or a ruse designed to leave mankind in accursed ignorance. Were the Bodhisattvas insufficient? Worship of the gods would drive a person away from the pursuit of nirvana. When a man sacrificed to a god, he told the god his desires, and prayed that they would be fulfilled. The gods thus kept men in cruel and subtle chains of suffering.
The movement rapidly lost sight of its original author, as other monks took to writing similar polemics and incited mobs to frequently loot and destroy the "temples of deceit and ignorance." Despite the fact that this was not Narseh's intention, and later in life he wrote often condemning all who would resort to violence, he was ultimately blamed, arrested, and executed by the local Aghatsaghid Vayan. This would make a martyr of him, and exacerbate tensions.
Finally, Tarksigh Arslan intervened, holding a great religious debate in Kabul, in which the Sogdian school side came off looking worse, not the least because the debate was rigged in their favor in such a way as became obvious and humiliated the Shah as host. The Nowbahar only gained prestige, rallying around a new figure, a scholar by the name of Vankavadh of Darai, a rhetorical firebrand who lacked Narseh's moderation of tone. Tarksigh Arslan was finally forced in 926 to accommodate Vankavadh, coming to terms with the radical preacher and abandoning his patronage of many traditional temples, and ordering the destruction of several particular offenders.
While the Nowbahar movement consolidated its hold over the hearts and minds of the Buddhist community, it faced strong opposition from the rural Zoroastrian peasants, whose fire temples were the heart of their communities, and many of the Ifthal landholders whose culture prohibited the desecration of holy sites both true and false. Rightly, they pointed out that many Buddhist monasteries and stupas were equally decadent and ornate, and yet those were passed over, and many Bodhisattvas were worshipped in ways hardly distinct from their worship of Mihir and Ohrmazd. Violence broke out as the Ifthal, despite frequently being Buddhists, found themselves allied with the folk Zoroastrians to defend traditional sites of worship.
Into this breakdown of order came Husrava "the Great" Mughriyani (907-938) - the man who transformed the Kurdish state into an empire to rival that of the Aghatsaghids. Named after his less impressive father, he united the fracturing Kurdish states from Mosil, and then proceeded to conquer Syria after a series of brutal wars. After the destruction of the Padivayanate, he turned his attention eastward, to the crumbling Aghatsaghid Empire, where a cabal of Ifthal landowners invited him to restore order.
The first campaign was a disaster, but the Kurds learned from their defeat, learning to emulate the Turkish tactics which had outmatched them. Five years later another Kurdish invasion wrested most of western Iran from Turkish control. In 956, they would conquer Pars and Gurgan, and in 967, reduce the Aghatsaghids to their Afghani holdings. Husrava and his son Merxhas would over the course of their lives wage five great wars against the Aghatsaghids, with the help of the general Mitradharma, a half-Kurdish half-Eftal commander who finally took Kabul in 984. Merxhas would marry Mitradharma to his only child, a daughter, and it would be the general turned Shah who would first take the title of Padishah, or great king.
At first, the Kurds ruled largely through garrisoning soldiers - however, this was untenable in their clan based society, where soldiers expected to either return home and be rewarded at the end of any lengthy period of service. However, [as we will see], many of these soldiers had no home to return to. The Kurdish rulers in the Eftal style accordingly offered to grants of land to Kurdish and Ifthal veterans. The provinces were ruled by Satraps with local ties to the region and the Vayan system was abolished.
Like the Uighurs, the Kurds were a small culturally and religiously distinct ethnic group which found themselves in control of a large, heterogeneous empire which largely shared neither their language or religion. Unlike the Uighurs, the Kurds largely assimilated. Under Mitradharma, the Mughriyani dynasty claimed that they were merely a native Iranian dynasty with (totally fraudulent) ties to the Achaemenids. The Nowbahar movement had to some degree died down in its militancy by the ascension of Mitradharma, but one of the first acts of his reign was to sack several monasteries that were hotbeds of Nowbahar sentiment. As his wife and children worshiped the polytheist Yazdati gods, Mitradharma, though he himself was a Buddhist, could not allow their persecution to continue, and took harsh measures which pushed the Nowbahars underground.
[Next post covers southern China and also goes into more detail about the explosive Kurdish conquests and governance and the legacy of the Nowbahar movement. But I wanted to get this up first, to give a general overview of what happened and because I think that the Kurdish conquest of Iran will contrast nicely with the Uighur conquest of China.]
In the primordial legends of the Kitai people, Yaol Tuyubayan, Khan of the Kitai, was descended from the Sun itself. Regardless of the veracity of this outlandish claim, his star certainly would burn brightest on the steppe after the mass migration of the Uighur people southwards. The Yaol dynasty were somewhat more Sinicized than their Uighur cousins, and although they had married into the Jaylaqar Dynasty, and were its nominal subjects, in practice they controlled their own confederation, including the Ishih and Shiwei tribes, the latter of which were themselves of Uighur blood. Those among their civilization who were literate used the Uighur script to write their own language.
Accordingly, they had remarkable strength and also the trust of the Uighurs, who believed that the Yaol were loyal subjects without ambitions of their own. Accordingly, they actively encouraged the Kitai to assume greater authority on the steppe, and provide a shield against the peoples of Manchuria. Yaol Tuyubayan had been stymied in his attempts to sweep south against the province of You, despite large resources and his own capable but uninspired military acumen, by the clever schemes of Guo Yaoshi. However, with the collapse of the Qi regime, the Kitai benefitted immensely. The province of You and parts of Heibei were given to the Kitai to govern, as the overstretched Uighurs desperately needed the support of their allies.
Yaol Tuyubayan rose from strength to strength in the court of the Jaylaqar, being named after his victory in You the Satrap or Duke of that country and lavished with great gifts, arousing the anger of Eltemish's half-brother and viceroy, the Yabgu Hala, who had remained in Ordubeliq and saw firsthand the encroachment of the Kitan.
However, for the time being that anger would come to nothing. Hala had few options to make his discontent known, for Eltemish was greatly popular among his tribe, and had found himself believing the glorious epithets that his people lauded on him, that he was a god incarnate and the sovereign of all the rivers and streams beneath the clear blue sky. Settling in to rulership was distasteful to him, however. Even when he had made his residence in Ordubeliq, Eltemish had been accustomed to frequent movement and had rarely remained in the same part of his domain for more than a month. The notion of establishing himself in a single Chinese city and ruling as the North King was inconceivable to him.
Eltemish, having wrested most of northern China from its traditional rulers desired nothing more than a return to the old times, of sending embassies and making outrageous demands and watching the wealth pour northwards.
Furthermore, a mere four years after the conquest, a series of bitter winters drove his people ever more southwards. Yabgu Hala persuaded his half-brother to issue a series of decrees confiscating vast tracts of land in the north from their present owners, to allow his own people to settle it. Many Chinese landholders were stripped of their possessions without ceremony and their resentment of the new Uighur overlords only grew. Eltemish had only halfheartedly adopted the bureaucratic system of the Qi, and primarily used it as a machine of state oppression of the peasants, making increasingly impossible demands on the surviving bureaucracy but otherwise treating the long history and culture of conquered China with a casual disdain. The bureaucracy was turned, effectively, into a method of extracting wealth from native manufacturing and trade and distributing it amongst the unproductive aristocratic class.
The Uighur who settled the garrison cities, however, were generally not as incompetent or cruel as their central government would suggest. The settled or semi-settled life was not unknown to many of those who made up the first wave of migrants, and as such as a new aristocracy and occupying force they tended to be relatively fair, if socially and culturally distinct from their neighbors. Despite the common conception of the Uighur settlers as barbarians, many adapted quickly to the settled life and began learning the local language. It would be perhaps a decade before laws were passed banning the Uighurs from adopting Chinese dress and certain Chinese customs, and these would be only poorly enforced.
Rebellions were commonplace, however. The garrison towns were often immediate targets, as were bureaucratic offices at the village level. The bureaucracy now operated as agents of the northern king, and as such hatred for the scholar-bureaucrats among the peasantry grew rapidly. Attempts to regulate the activities of Daoist monks and other folk preachers tended to backfire and only spread their creeds faster. In this era, many intellectuals and native Chinese with means fled the north, either to the Goryeo Kingdom or to the war-torn south, depending on proximity.
These rebellions were rarely successful. Most rose up too quickly, without garnering more than local support and accordingly were forced into rough country to eke out a living as bandits or slaughtered as an example to others. Ironically, the one successful rebellion would come from the north. Eltemish was growing old. The "god incarnate" had been showing increasingly erratic behavior and his popularity was lessened. His victories were long past, and though he had long favored Hala to succeed him, he changed his mind after a particularly vicious argument and chose his son, Inantengin.
It was a second freezing winter and subsequent famine on the steppe, in 876, that forced matters to the breaking point. Yaol Tuyubayan, now an elderly man, had several ambitious sons, and he sent them forth into the Uighur lands to raid, sensing their weakness and knowing his own more temperate lands had largely been spared the brutal famine. Betraying his alliance, he sacked Ordubeliq. Hala led what was effectively a mass of refugees southwards, and upon meeting his brother, Eltemish flew into a rage. Hala, Eltemish claimed, was responsible for their defeat and the Kitan betrayal.
Hala refused to accept any punishment, and pitched fighting broke out between the royal troops and the fleeing Uighur clans, which were, once all stragglers were accounted for, a large portion of those in the north, and indeed all those who had not chosen submission to the Kitai. The settled Uighurs had become soft, it is said, and offered a poor fight, but ultimately Hala would lead many of their people westward, into country subject to the Bod, where his people would thrive as mercenaries and warriors. Many still would carry on even further west, and signs of their distinctive culture can be seen as far west as the Caspian.
The remainder of these refugees demanded settlement rights, which Eltemish was forced to grant, carving out new garrison towns and reallocating land across the north. When his father died two years later, in 878, Inantengin would lead an indecisive war against the Kitai, recovering much of the old Uighur empire and allowing the refugees to reclaim their old homeland. However, the damage was done. Uighur prestige dropped to a low ebb, and by 900, when Inantengin died, their state seemed to be tottering on the brink of collapse.
False Idols and the Kurdish Empire
With the rise to power of Tarkhsigh Arslan in 903, after the tyrannical but nonetheless centralizing reign of his father Aghatsagh, the Aghatsaghid Empire seemed perhaps poised for a return to some of its former prominence. However, little could be further from the truth.
The slow territorial decline of the Aghatsaghid Empire had seen the growth of religious turmoil, simmering under the surface. Buddhism was the majority religion in the Aghatsaghid dominion, particularly among the urban populations and those of Turkish or Eftal ancestry. Baharas, or Buddhist temples and monasteries, were ubiquitous, and though the fire-temples endured among the rural population, their "low church" Zoroastrian faith had become very much enmeshed with the Buddhist tradition. The syncretic faith that emerged gradually lost its distinctions with Sogdian Buddhism to the point that by the tenth century the distinction was largely immaterial, though undoubtedly meaningful to those who observed the Zoroastrian faith.
The "Sogdian" Buddhism patronized and popularized by the Eftal remained the dominant form of Buddhism in Iran, and subscribed for the most part to the broader Mahayana tradition. A large pantheon of Indo-Iranian divinities existed and often competed with Arhats and Bodhisattvas for the affection of lay devotees. Most of these deities had some tangential connection to Buddhism - Mihir, for example, had been gradually recast as a defender of the religious community and a god of enlightened inspiration.
However, the decline of the Aghatsaghid state, much like the decline of the Eftal state several centuries earlier, brought about new uncertainties for the rural peasant community. Turkish raids, launched by both the Bajinak rulers of Azerbaijan and the Oghuz on the steppes left the countryside unsafe, despite the best efforts of the Aghatsaghid armies.
These uncertainties were compounded by a new religious movement, called the Nowbahar, or new temple faction. Beginning with the writings of an Ifthal-Iranian monk named Narseh circa 905, it spread rapidly and gained meteoric support among the lay community, and slowly among the more inertia-ridden monastic community as well. The Nowbahar movement began as a tract speaking against the luxury and excess in which the "pagan temple priests" lived. The Eftal had long given generously to temples and had special cultural prohibitions against harming them, even if they were not of their faith. The Turks had largely adopted these same prohibitions, and accordingly temples throughout post-Eftal history were likely to endure any raids or violence unscathed, with rare exceptions.
Pagan temples accordingly made an easy target - theirs priests tended to have a privileged position in society, and their temples tended to be opulent and laden with riches stockpiled during raids. In many senses during times of uncertainty the pagan temples became banks of a sort - places where wealth could often be kept safe.
Narseh's writings also condemned the over focus on gods. The worship of gods, he claimed, were a distraction from the pursuit of enlightenment, and more often the worship of them was a trick or a ruse designed to leave mankind in accursed ignorance. Were the Bodhisattvas insufficient? Worship of the gods would drive a person away from the pursuit of nirvana. When a man sacrificed to a god, he told the god his desires, and prayed that they would be fulfilled. The gods thus kept men in cruel and subtle chains of suffering.
The movement rapidly lost sight of its original author, as other monks took to writing similar polemics and incited mobs to frequently loot and destroy the "temples of deceit and ignorance." Despite the fact that this was not Narseh's intention, and later in life he wrote often condemning all who would resort to violence, he was ultimately blamed, arrested, and executed by the local Aghatsaghid Vayan. This would make a martyr of him, and exacerbate tensions.
Finally, Tarksigh Arslan intervened, holding a great religious debate in Kabul, in which the Sogdian school side came off looking worse, not the least because the debate was rigged in their favor in such a way as became obvious and humiliated the Shah as host. The Nowbahar only gained prestige, rallying around a new figure, a scholar by the name of Vankavadh of Darai, a rhetorical firebrand who lacked Narseh's moderation of tone. Tarksigh Arslan was finally forced in 926 to accommodate Vankavadh, coming to terms with the radical preacher and abandoning his patronage of many traditional temples, and ordering the destruction of several particular offenders.
While the Nowbahar movement consolidated its hold over the hearts and minds of the Buddhist community, it faced strong opposition from the rural Zoroastrian peasants, whose fire temples were the heart of their communities, and many of the Ifthal landholders whose culture prohibited the desecration of holy sites both true and false. Rightly, they pointed out that many Buddhist monasteries and stupas were equally decadent and ornate, and yet those were passed over, and many Bodhisattvas were worshipped in ways hardly distinct from their worship of Mihir and Ohrmazd. Violence broke out as the Ifthal, despite frequently being Buddhists, found themselves allied with the folk Zoroastrians to defend traditional sites of worship.
Into this breakdown of order came Husrava "the Great" Mughriyani (907-938) - the man who transformed the Kurdish state into an empire to rival that of the Aghatsaghids. Named after his less impressive father, he united the fracturing Kurdish states from Mosil, and then proceeded to conquer Syria after a series of brutal wars. After the destruction of the Padivayanate, he turned his attention eastward, to the crumbling Aghatsaghid Empire, where a cabal of Ifthal landowners invited him to restore order.
The first campaign was a disaster, but the Kurds learned from their defeat, learning to emulate the Turkish tactics which had outmatched them. Five years later another Kurdish invasion wrested most of western Iran from Turkish control. In 956, they would conquer Pars and Gurgan, and in 967, reduce the Aghatsaghids to their Afghani holdings. Husrava and his son Merxhas would over the course of their lives wage five great wars against the Aghatsaghids, with the help of the general Mitradharma, a half-Kurdish half-Eftal commander who finally took Kabul in 984. Merxhas would marry Mitradharma to his only child, a daughter, and it would be the general turned Shah who would first take the title of Padishah, or great king.
At first, the Kurds ruled largely through garrisoning soldiers - however, this was untenable in their clan based society, where soldiers expected to either return home and be rewarded at the end of any lengthy period of service. However, [as we will see], many of these soldiers had no home to return to. The Kurdish rulers in the Eftal style accordingly offered to grants of land to Kurdish and Ifthal veterans. The provinces were ruled by Satraps with local ties to the region and the Vayan system was abolished.
Like the Uighurs, the Kurds were a small culturally and religiously distinct ethnic group which found themselves in control of a large, heterogeneous empire which largely shared neither their language or religion. Unlike the Uighurs, the Kurds largely assimilated. Under Mitradharma, the Mughriyani dynasty claimed that they were merely a native Iranian dynasty with (totally fraudulent) ties to the Achaemenids. The Nowbahar movement had to some degree died down in its militancy by the ascension of Mitradharma, but one of the first acts of his reign was to sack several monasteries that were hotbeds of Nowbahar sentiment. As his wife and children worshiped the polytheist Yazdati gods, Mitradharma, though he himself was a Buddhist, could not allow their persecution to continue, and took harsh measures which pushed the Nowbahars underground.
[Next post covers southern China and also goes into more detail about the explosive Kurdish conquests and governance and the legacy of the Nowbahar movement. But I wanted to get this up first, to give a general overview of what happened and because I think that the Kurdish conquest of Iran will contrast nicely with the Uighur conquest of China.]
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