The Eclipse of Khurasan in the Twelfth Century

The province of Khurasan constituted the centre of political, cultural, and religious life in the Sunni Islamic world from the ninth until the mid-twelfth century, after which Khurasan was completely eclipsed. The question of how this occurred has remained almost completely unstudied; and the one study that there is does not consult the key primary literary sources for the time. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to re-examine what the primary sources reveal about the catastrophic cultural and political eclipse of Khurasan in the mid-twelfth century, in order to demonstrate that this catastrophe was not due to "climate, cotton and camels" - in fact, Khurasan was doing very well until the 1150s - but to concrete human agency and action: namely, the province's destruction by the rampaging Oghuz Turkmens after Sultan Sanjar had been taken captive by them in 1153, thus leading directly to the downfall of the Great Seljuq Sultanate.