A Chʼi-tan prince of the Liao dynasty in China once caught a servant reading a book. It was an embarrassing moment, for needless to say the book was Chinese; hurriedly, the prince hid the book in his sleeve and cautioned the servant in future to do his reading in secret. Similarly, ‘Umar I once caught an Arab copying the book of Daniel. It was not, however, an embarrassing but a frightening moment, for ‘Umar thrashed the man repeatedly to the accompaniment of the verse ‘we have revealed to you an Arabic Koran’ until the wretched victim cried out that he repented. There could be no question of reading Daniel or other foreign writings on the side.

These stories nicely catch the contrast between Central Asian and Arab conquest. The Chʼi-tan episode was merely one of the many undignified moments the Central Asian conquerors had to endure in the course of their invariably vain attempts to resist Sinification. There were few who were not determined morally to stay in their ancestral ‘forests of Ötükän’, and yet there were none who escaped at least a measure of cultural assimilation: even the Chʼi-tan, who had so aggressively insisted that they possessed a respectable civilization of their own, took a Chinese type of administration with them when they escaped to western Turkestan. And no barbarian conquest of China ever resulted in the formation of a new civilization.