Tahirid dynasty: A Visual History

The Tahirids were a Persian family from Herat whose founder Tahir ibn Husayn won the civil war for the caliph al-Mamun in 813 and was rewarded with the governorship of Khorasan in 821. He and his descendants ruled eastern Iran and Transoxiana from Nishapur as hereditary governors, nominally loyal to Baghdad, until the Saffarid coppersmith Yaqub ibn al-Layth seized Nishapur in 873. A branch governed Baghdad itself as chiefs of police. They are often counted as the first step in Iran's re-emergence from Arab rule.

When it existed: the era ribbon

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Tahirid territory

Timeline of the Tahirid dynasty

1. 811
   Tahir defeats al-Amin's army
2. 813
   Baghdad taken for al-Mamun
3. 821
   Tahir governor of Khorasan
4. 822
   Tahir omits the caliph's name and dies
5. 828
   Abdallah ibn Tahir
6. 845
   Abdallah dies
7. 873
   Yaqub the Saffarid takes Nishapur

Tahir the Ambidextrous

Tahir, a Khorasani commander, defeated the caliph al-Amin's army near Rayy in 811 and took Baghdad in 813, killing al-Amin. Al-Mamun made him governor of Khorasan in 821; a year later Tahir dropped the caliph's name from the Friday prayer, and died the same night, possibly poisoned. His son Talha was confirmed anyway, establishing the hereditary line.

Governors of the east

Abdallah ibn Tahir (828-845) was the ablest: he suppressed the Kharijite rebel Babak's allies, kept the Turks of the steppe at bay, encouraged agriculture and irrigation (his manual on qanats was used for centuries) and patronised Arabic and Persian letters. The Tahirids sent tax and tribute to Baghdad and appointed the Samanids as sub-governors of Transoxiana, unwittingly grooming their successors.

Fall to the coppersmith

Muhammad ibn Tahir was a weak ruler; the Saffarid Yaqub ibn al-Layth, a former coppersmith turned warlord of Sistan, marched on Nishapur in 873 and captured him. The Baghdad branch of the family remained influential for decades, and Tahirid rule was remembered as just and orderly compared with what followed.

Related empires and wars

Chosen automatically by overlap in time and geography, plus a few hand picked connections.

Empires of the same era and region

• Abbasid Caliphate (750 to 1258)
• Samanid Empire (819 to 999)
• Buyid dynasty (934 to 1062)
• Ghaznavid Empire (977 to 1186)
• Tang dynasty (618 to 907)
• Tibetan Empire (618 to 842)

8 surprising things about the Tahirid dynasty

1. Tahir was nicknamed Dhu'l-Yaminayn, 'the Ambidextrous', supposedly for killing an enemy with a sword in his left hand.
2. The Tahirids ruled Iran but wrote in Arabic; one Tahirid reportedly ordered Persian books destroyed, though the story is doubtful.
3. Abdallah ibn Tahir's ruling on water rights and qanats was the standard reference in Khorasan for 300 years.
4. The Tahirids appointed the four Samanid brothers to their governorships in 819-820, launching the next Persian dynasty.
5. The family's Baghdad branch policed the caliphal capital and their palace, the Harim al-Tahiri, was a landmark.
6. The Tahirids are sometimes called the first independent Iranian dynasty of Islam, though they never claimed independence.
7. Yaqub the Saffarid told the captured Tahirid that he would rather be a coppersmith who fought than a governor who feasted.
8. The dynasty ruled 52 years but four generations, a rare stability for a ninth-century Islamic province.

Sources

• Tahirid dynasty Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Tahirid dynasty Wikipedia
• Tahirids Encyclopaedia Iranica
• C. E. Bosworth, 'The Tahirids and Saffarids', in The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 4 (1975) Cambridge University Press

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