When a Dove Faced a Hawk

Exchanges between Tibet and the Islamic World along the Silk Road

A History Essay Submitted To The Concord Review Journal

Spring 2020

This essay was dedicated to examine the relationship between different exchanges happening between Tibet and the Islamic world around 10th century. Silk Road is something that I knew about since middle school but I never had a chance to dig deep into the time era to discover relationships between different regions. The research paper was to help me build a logical thinking around the progression of trade and cultural exchange between the two regions: Tibet and Islam specifically.

A white dove darted across the frigid mist, fluttering its wings faster as a hawk’s piercing cry echoed in the snowy Himalayas. The hawk let out another menacing scream as it desperately searched for a white dove above the undisturbed snow. Suddenly, the dove plummeted towards the ground. Its pristine feathers transformed into a white robe, and the dove itself became a man with deep brown eyes and curly black hair.

“You have reached your limit,” the man said to the hawk. “Go back or you will lose your strength!”

The hawk drew one last graceful loop in the sky and glided towards the speaker. As soon as its feet touched the ground, the fearsome predator turned into a stately old man clad in a bright orange garment.

“I am the Dalai Lama, the living Buddha and the soul of Tibet,” he uttered in a serene voice that bore no traces of his sharp hawkish cry. “What do you know of my strength, Khair ud-Din? Now that I have finally reached you, I shall not leave until you compete with me and show me what you and your faith are worth.”

Thus began a duel in magic between the Fifth Dalai Lama and Khair ud-Din, a Muslim saint and the Imam of the Muslim community in Lhasa. Reluctant as he was to enter the contest, Khair ud-Din emerged out of it with a stunning victory. The Dalai Lama was in such awe with the powers of the Sufi mystic that he, the highest spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, converted to Islam.[1]

This story first appeared in the travel journal of Khwājah Ghulām Muhammad, a Muslim merchant who visited Tibet in 1882–1883, and it was later translated and published by a nineteenth-century French scholar Marc Gaborieau.[2] While this episode is clearly fictional, it accurately captures the high level of mutual religious influences between the Muslim and the Buddhist worlds and, more specifically, between Tibet and the Arab Caliphate. The Dalai Lama himself may have never converted to Islam, but several Arab rulers were heavily influenced by Buddhism, and some Tibetan rulers were even said to have converted to Islam. For instance, the eighth-century Arab caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd grew up with a Buddhist tutor himself and later hired one for his sons.[3] The religious interest was evidently mutual because, according to an account by an Arab chronicler Yaʿqūbī in 891, during the reign of the Umayyad caliph Umar II, the King of Tibet asked the governor of Khorasan, Jarrāḥ ibn Abdallāh, to send missionaries to teach Islam to Tibetans.[4] Yaʿqūbī also recorded that, during the reign of the Abbasid Caliph Al-maʾmūn, a different Tibetan king converted to Islam and sent a golden figurine to the throne of Khorasan as a token of gratitude for his new faith.[5] These religious exchanges, powerful enough inspire a Buddhist ruler to change his beliefs, reveal the great extent of interactions between Tibetan Buddhists and Arab Muslims along the Silk Road. The so-called “origins” of these interactions can be traced back to as early as the seventh century, when Muslim and Buddhist merchants traveled to Kashmir, an important cultural junction for merchants, to trade silk. Buddhist scriptures and scientific works were transmitted from there to the Arab Caliphate, while the teachings of Muslim scholars and theologians made their way to Tibet.[6] Although the significance of the merchants’ initiation of contacts between Tibet and the Islamic world is widely recognized, this paper aims to explore whether merchants remained the most important contributors to these interactions throughout the Middle Ages and to reexamine the centrality of the merchants’ role in the cultural and religious exchanges between the Arab Caliphates and Tibetans. This work will, therefore, challenge the notion that most of the events that happened along the Silk Road revolved around trade and suggest that, although commerce was no longer the sole purpose of the Silk Road, merchants’ early effort in opening the trade enabled further interactions in science, technology, culture, and religion.

With the advent of commercial relations between Tibet and the Muslim world, the convenient movement along the Silk Road prompted people from different parts of the Middle East, Tibet, and China to travel along these routes, bringing with them a wide variety of commodities.[7] One of the most valued goods exchanged between Tibet and the Arabs was the Tibetan musk. This type of musk, secreted by musk deer, was the key ingredient in the production of perfume and served many purposes in medieval eastern medicine.[8] In the Middle Ages, both Muslims and Tibetans regarded musk as an omnipotent cure for a variety of diseases of different parts of the human body, such as the eyes, the liver, and the kidney.[9] Musk was also used extensively as an antidote to different kinds of poisons, such as snake venom and aconitum.[10] Because the only means of acquiring the musk pod was hunting and killing the agile musk deer, this form of harvesting made musk a rare find for apothecaries and perfumers.[11] The processing of musk was also cumbersome, requiring extreme attention and dexterity on the part of the artisans.[12] For this reason, the number of musk pods that could be processed in a day was very limited, and musk was considered a luxury good by Tibetans and Arabs alike.

The Arabs, who had access to musk from India as well, acknowledged the superior quality of the Tibetan musk, as is evident from a Christian Arab physician Ibn Māsawayh’s evaluation of different types of musk in Kitāb jawāhir al-ṭīb al-mufrada: “The best of [the types of musk] is the sogdian; it is what arrives in Sogdiana from Tibet, and then it is carried to the horizons overland.”[13] Several different features of the Tibetan musk deer contributed to its dominant position on the market. According to Nuwayri's Encyclopedia, unlike the deer of other origins, the Tibetan deer nourished itself on fragrant vegetation, an herb called دكشس (dakshas) that grows primarily in Tibet and Kashmir, which gave the Tibetan musk an exquisite aroma.[14] Additionally, Tibetans used to sell their musk intact inside the pod, while merchants from China, India, and other countries would take the musk out of the pod and add extra substances to it in order to preserve it during the journey. This contaminated the musk and lowered its quality, while the transportation of musk in its pod ensured its original purity. Because Tibet was located exactly on the Silk Road, the short land route between Tibet and the Middle East helped preserve the quality and the fragrance of the musk, which made the Tibetan musk even more favorable than the Indian variety.

There is evidence from as early as the seventh century that medieval musk merchants could safely travel from the Arabian Peninsula to Tibet via Persia.[15] This remained the case throughout the Middle Ages, and, in The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, a twelfth-century Spanish Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela describes one of these musk routes and notes that Jewish traders heading to Tibet traveled from Baghdad to Shiraz, Ghazna, and Samarkand in order to obtain the highly desired musk. From there, he said: “it is four days to Tibet, the country in whose forests the musk is found.”[16] The positive diplomatic relationships between Buddhist and Muslim nations on the Silk Road provided a safe platform for these commercial exchanges to take place. The area of Central Asia, including the Tarim Basin, the Uyghur lands, and Transoxiana, had long suffered from military tensions and banditry. In many instances, banditry became so frequent that it hindered international trade. To address this issue and to continue securing the profit gained from trade, Kirghiz, Qarluq, Tibetan, and Arab rulers came to an agreement to provide safety for the travelers on the route between Tibet and the Arab Caliphate.[17] Subsequently, through the cooperation of several governments, the commercial and social interactions could develop in a safe environment. More importantly, once travelers entered the Kirghiz realm, special escorts assigned by the government would protect them from potential Uyghur banditry.[18] An anonymous geographer cited by Melikian-Chirvani writes that, because the trade route between Tibet and Iran was being kept safe by the escorts, the two nations enjoyed a fruitful commercial relationship and exchanged a wide array of commodities. In the seventh and eighth centuries, Tibetans had started to use three types of silver wine banquet vessels—wine bowls, wine horns terminated with animal heads, and animal-headed ewers—manufactured in Iran.[19] Textiles and fashion also started spreading in the seventh century, when the royals of Tibet started making clothes out of Persian silks. Not only was a fragment of a Sasanian silk with a Pahlavi inscription establishing its royal ownership recovered from a Tibetan tomb at Dulan in Qinghai, but images of silk outfits were also incorporated in the western Tibetan mural paintings in Ladakh and Spiti, indicating the presence of this type of material in Tibetan clothes.[20]

       After the expansion of the Arab Caliphate into Persia and much of Central Asia, an amicable diplomatic relation between Tibet and the Arabs became crucial to the sustainability of the aforementioned exchanges, and religion played a significant role in the maintenance of this connection. Soon after Umar b. 'Abd al-'Aziz became the Caliph in 717, he sent messengers to “the kings of Transoxiana, asking them to embrace Islam as equals of the Arabs,” and many princes of Transoxiana who received the proposal followed the will of the Arabs and accepted Islam as their new religion.[21] The Tibetan princes also received this proposal from the Arabs and sent a delegation to the new governor of Khurasan, al-Darrih, asking him to send a group of scholars that could visit Tibet to teach Islam to Tibetans.[22] Although a conversion never followed, this invitation of Muslim scholars to Tibet opened a new avenue for missionary exchanges between the two religious groups. Coming from the rulers themselves, the political support of religious interactions provided a crucial boost for the missionary activity along the Silk Road.

This diplomatic encouragement of interreligious exchanges therefore created a proliferation of Buddhist missionaries disseminating their religion in Central Asia and the Middle East and trading luxury goods along the way. The Buddhist missionary tradition followed by these itinerant monks had been established by Buddha himself. He instructed his followers, Sanghas, to go beyond India to other areas in order to spread his message and attract new followers.[23] In the third century BCE, Emperor Ashoka of the Maurya dynasty proclaimed Buddhism to be the official religion in his northern Indian Empire, which helped the efforts of the traveling monks.[24] Between the first and the third centuries CE, these missionaries had become so powerful that they successfully achieved the unification of Bactria and Northern India, demonstrating their ability to bring about political changes.[25] As they carried the word of Buddha throughout India, Afghanistan, Tibet, the kingdoms of the Tarim basin such as Khotan, and China, the Buddhist missionaries also contributed to the market of luxury goods. Although the monks themselves were poor, they had wealthy patrons, under whose protection they were able to trade exotic commodities, such as silk, jewels, silver, and gold. Moved by the monks’ teachings, local rulers made extravagant offerings to the traveling monks in order to display their piety and gain a reputation for generosity. The monks sold the ruler’s lavish gifts someplace along the Silk Road and thus made an immense profit from the pious donations of their patrons. This desire for public praise, recognition, and approval of the monks occupied many monarchs east of Iran, and the rulers were willing to spend vast sums on the Buddhist monks in order to earn a favorable reputation for religious patronage.[26]

In addition to offering gifts to individual monks, these monarchs also funded the construction of new Buddhist monasteries, statues, and stupas, which were often decorated in a lavish and extravagant manner. Xuánzàng, a Buddhist from the seventh century that traveled between China and India, encountered a number of Buddhist monks, monasteries, and stūpas on his way, especially at Balkh. According to his estimation, one hundred monasteries were built along the Silk Road and 3,000 monks lived there. One of these new monasteries, Nava-saṅghārāma, contained extravagant adornments made of expensive materials.[27] The tremendous scale of the spread of religious centers along the Silk Road was made possible by the missionary activity of monks, and the fact that hundreds of these monasteries and stupas were located in the countries neighboring China and India demonstrates the flourishing of Buddhist worship and study in the region.       

These religious encounters between Tibet and the Islamic world also promoted exchanges among itinerant tutors, scholars, and translators in the academic sphere. Some of the most prominent translators came from the Barmakid family, which was a family of Buddhist intellectuals from Tokharistan, an area in Central Asia also known as Bactria, who were highly respected at the Abbasid court. The paterfamilias, Yahya ibn Khalid, tutored the young Harun al-Rashīd while his father was the Caliph and then entered Harun’s service as a tutor for his children when the prince inherited the throne of his late father.[28] It was under Harun al-Rashid’s patronage that the Barmakids were able to complete translations for a series of Indian medical classics into Arabic: the Suśruta, the Aṣṭaṅgahṛdaya Saṃhitā of Vāgbhaṭa, and the Siddhasāra of Ravigupta.[29] As a supervisor of this vast translation project, Yaḥyā employed Indian physicians – most notably Ibn Dahn and Manka – who translated medical treatises from Sanskrit into Arabic.[30] Based on these translations, many Sanskrit texts were later translated from Arabic into Tibetan and created a corpus of foundational texts upon which the tradition of Tibetan medical studies was established.[31]

One of the most famous Indo-Tibetan Buddhist texts, Kālacakra, was thought to have originally been composed in Sanskrit and then translated into Tibetan.[32] Kālacakra is a series of texts written by northern Indian Brahmans who shared a strong dedication to Indo-Tibetan Buddhism and were concerned about the seemingly invasive introduction of Islam into the region. The primary goal of such texts was to study the ethnography of the people in and around India, particularly the social and religious customs of Muslims and Buddhists.[33] While it was produced to prevent the defeat of Buddhism by Islam, the text itself incorporated several Islamic ideas. For example, Indo-Tibetan Buddhism champions the concept of egalitarianism just as Islam does, and Kālacakra directly refers to the egalitarianism practiced by the Muslims.[34] Such references add more credence to the theory that the Silk Road had enabled close religious contacts between Tibetan Buddhists and Muslims through Central and South Asia.

The loaning of words from Persian and Arabic in Tibetan texts can also attest the intimate relationship between Tibetan Buddhists and Muslims in the surrounding areas. Tāranātha, a sixteenth-century Tibetan author, wrote an account of the origins of Islam, in which he made use of many words that did not originate in Sanskrit or Tibetan. When he was discussing prophet Muhammad, he chose neither the term used in the Sanskrit Kālacakra literature nor the one used by the Tibetans. The name Tāranātha wrote to refer to the prophet of the Muslims was Pai kham pa, which is a derivative from the Persian word for “prophet,” paygambar.[35] The fact that the Tibetans used a word from Persian, and not from Tibetan or from Sanskrit, implies a close connection between the Tibetans and the Persians.

The academic interactions between Buddhists and Muslims also resulted in the Muslims’ adoption of the Buddhist scholastic method, in which a scholarly text is written as a sequence of questions followed by arguments and sub-arguments, and of the Tibetan college system. According to Christopher Beckwitch, the medieval Islamic college, madrasa, was an Islamicized form of the earlier Buddhist college, vihāra, which offered a pathway for the Tibetan scholastic method to travel to Central Asia and the Middle East. [36] Buddhist scholasticism was the intellectual arm of the Mahayana school of Buddhism, and it bore many similarities to the scholasticism that was popular in medieval Europe.[37] It is perhaps because of this similarity that Ibn Sīnā (known in the West as Avicenna), who was an expert in Aristotelian philosophy and an adherent of Western scholasticism, adopted elements of the Buddhist variation of this scholarly method after having encountered it in Central Asia.[38]

Such close commercial, religious, and academic exchanges, backed by diplomatic partnerships and military alliances between Muslim and Buddhist nations, naturally lead to intermarriage between the two groups, especially around North-Western India.[39] According to historian Georgios Halkias, these areas of the Himalayas had long been under the influence of both Buddhism and Islam, with Tibet adhering to the former religion and Ladakh and Baltistan to the latter. A famous folksong The Great Pashkum revealed the intermarriage between the Muslim Queen Bekim and King Drag Bumde, whose son’s name derived from both Tibetan and Muslim traditions. [40] Some scholars, such as Thomas Arnold, believe that Muslim merchants had initiated the intermarriage between representatives of the two religions. As he wrote in his book, first published in 1896, The Preaching of Islam: A History of the Propagation of the Muslim Faith, “Islam has also been carried into Tibet proper by Kashmiri merchants. Settlements of such merchants are to be found in all the chief cities of Tibet. They marry Tibetan women, who often adopt the religion of their husbands.”[41] According to Arnold, many Buddhist women converted to Islam upon marrying Muslim merchants from Kashmir. Modern historians, however, contest the notion that intermarriage between Muslim men and Tibetan Buddhist women necessarily led to conversion.[42] As is evident in Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim, the conversion of Tibetan women to Islam through marriage to Muslim merchants was not as prevalent as earlier scholars had imagined.[43] Yoeli-Tlalim argues that intermarriages between Muslim merchants and Tibetan women resulted in a symbiotic coexistence of two religions in one family rather than a forced conversion into one of them. She adds that inter-religious marriages also occurred among peasants and among aristocrats of Ladakh and Baltistan, and neither side converted into the other side’s religion. As a result of such tolerance and respect for religious differences, it was common to see people practice different religions within one family.[44]

Yoeli-Tlalim also states that, in order to strengthen political ties among Buddhist and Muslim states in the Himalayas, the aristocrats and royals exchanged princess brides.[45] Although the intention for such monarchical marriages was purely political, namely to forge royal alliances across the divided Himalayas, they set a precedent for intermarriage between Muslim and Buddhist peasants, resulting in “an age-old Muslim-Buddhist symbiosis” in the region.[46] These bridal exchanges happened so often that they influenced the culture of the Himalayas, as is evident, for instance, in some local folk songs mentioning brides from other religions.[47] Through intermarriage, various groups in the Himalayas became accustomed to respecting each others’ religious beliefs and experiencing a peaceful coexistence of Islam and Buddhism not only in a nation, but even in a family, which was a rare occurrence at the time when intermarriage among Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the West was either entirely prohibited or permitted upon the condition of the woman’s conversion.[48] What is significant about the marital bonds between Buddhists and Muslims in the Himalayas is that, unlike many contemporary societies that required the bride to convert to the groom’s religion or prohibited interreligious marriages altogether, the societies of Tibet, Ladakh, and Baltistan imposed no such obligations. According to the Islamic Law, “although a Muslim man may marry a non-Muslim woman, it requires that the children of a mixed marriage be raised as Muslims,” which implies that the woman herself was under no obligation to convert to Islam.[49] Therefore, it was very common for Himalayan families to have Muslim and Buddhist family members live under one roof without any attempts at conversion. Since neither the bride nor the bridegroom suffered from forced conversion, Muslims and Buddhists living along the Silk Road developed not only political, but also profound personal connections with representatives of other religions.

All along the Silk Road, social interactions and communication between Tibet and the Muslim world were initiated by merchants, who opened a gateway for travelers of various religious backgrounds to come into contact with one another. As a result, generations of scholars, missionaries, diplomats, and other people outside of the merchant class traveled along the Silk Road and facilitated exchanges of scholarly innovations, religious beliefs, and even brides. In many ways, members of the clergy even surpassed the merchants in their contributions to the international commerce, which they made while spreading their religious teachings along the Silk Road. Not only did these connections bear fruits in various academic areas, where the Arabs, for instance, adopted a Tibetan scholastic method and Tibetans learned from Arab medicine, but they also resulted in intermarriage between Muslims and Buddhists and in a respectful coexistence of the two religions in many mixed families.

       At the first glance, the chase between the hawk and the dove is nothing but a hunt for material satisfaction: the larger bird needs to eat, the smaller one – to survive. As the story reveals, however, their journey across the Himalayas carries a much deeper spiritual significance and results in a profound exchange of religious beliefs. The early contacts between Tibet, a powerful kingdom with an ancient religion, and the Arab Caliphate, a young nation with a new religious teaching, were very much like those of the hawk and the dove. They initially revolved around material pursuits, in which Tibet had an advantage as the primary exporter of musk, but, as time went by and the Caliphate expanded, these relations evolved from exclusively commercial encounters to a complex web of cultural, scientific, technological, and, most importantly, religious exchanges that powerfully reshaped the life along the Silk Road.

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Footnotes

[1] Thierry Zarcone, “Between Legend and History: About the ‘Conversion’ to Islam of Two Prominent Lamaists in the Seventeenth-Eighteenth Centuries,” in Islam and Tibet: Interactions along the Musk Routes, ed. Akasoy, Anna, Charles S. F. Burnett, and Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim (Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2011), 282.

[2] Rohit Singh, “Reimagining Tibet through the Lens of Tibetan Muslim History and Identity,” Oxford Handbooks Online, January 2015, https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935420.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199935420-e-7.

[3] Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim, “Islam and Tibet: Cultural Interactions-An Introduction,” in Islam and Tibet, 13.

[4] Anna Akasoy, “Tibet in Islamic Geography and Cartography: A Survey of Arabic and Persian Sources,” in Islam and Tibet, 27.

[5] Akasoy, “Tibet in Islamic Geography and Cartography,” 27.

[6] Yoeli-Tlalim, “Islam and Tibet,” 4.

[7] Assadullah Souren Melikian-Chirvani, “Iran to Tibet,” in Islam and Tibet, 92.

[8] Yoeli-Tlalim, “Islam and Tibet,” 8.

[9] Anna Akasoy and Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim, “Along the Musk Routes: Exchanges Between Tibet and the Islamic world,” Asian Medicine 3, no. 2 (2007): 233, accessed October 17, 2020,

https://doi.org/10.1163/157342008X307857.

[10] Akasoy and Yoeli-Tlalim, “Along the Musk Routes,” 232, 234.

[11] Dennis Green, “The ‘Musk’ Smell of Cologne Used to Come from a Pretty Bizarre, Unexpected Place,” Business Insider, accessed October 13, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-musk-and-where-did-it-come-from-2016-2.

[12] Anya H. King, "The Musk Trade and the Near East in the Early Medieval Period," PhD Diss., Indiana University, 2007, 50,

https://search.proquest.com/docview/304855774?accountid=40386.

[13] Anya H. King, “Tibetan Musk and Medieval Arab Perfumery,” in Islam and Tibet, 148-150.

[14] Akasoy and Yoeli-Tlalim, “Along the Musk Routes,” 220.

[15] Yoeli-Tlalim, “Islam and Tibet,” 7.

[16] Marcus Nathan Adler, The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela: Critical Text, Translation and Commentary (Oxford: Henry Frowde, 1907), 59.

[17] Christopher Beckwith, The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia: A History of the Struggle for Great Power among Tibetans, Turks, Arabs, and Chinese during the Early Middle Ages, (Princeton University Press, 1987), 147, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv131bwbb.

[18] Beckwith, The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia, 147.

[19] Melikian-Chirvani, “Iran to Tibet,” 97.

[20] Melikian-Chirvani, “Iran to Tibet,” 107.

[21] Beckwith, The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia, 87.

[22] Beckwith, The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia, 87-88.

[23] Mingun Sayadaw, The Great Chronicle of Buddhas (Yangon: Ti-Ni Publishing Centre, 1992), Volume 2, Part 2, Chapter 13.

[24] David A. Scott, “Ashokan Missionary Expansion of Buddhism among the Greeks (in NW India, Bactria and the Levant),” Religion 15, no. 2 (1985): 131.

[25] Kevin van Bladel, “The Bactrian Background of the Barmakids,” in Islam and Tibet, 50.

[26] Van Bladel, “The Bactrian Background of the Barmakids,” 50.

[27] Van Bladel, “The Bactrian Background of the Barmakids,” 51.

[28] Van Bladel, “The Bactrian Background of the Barmakids,” 45.

[29] Van Bladel, “The Bactrian Background of the Barmakids,” 76.

[30] Van Bladel, “The Bactrian Background of the Barmakids,” 76.

[31] Van Bladel, “The Bactrian Background of the Barmakids,” 77.

[32] Yoeli-Tlalim, “Islam and Tibet,” 13.

[33] John Newman, “Islam in the Kālacakra Tantra; JIABS 1998,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies: 315, accessed October 13, 2020, https://www.academia.edu/42069182/_Islam_in_the_K%C4%81lacakra_Tantra_JIABS_1998.

[34] Newman, “Islam in the Kālacakra Tantra,” 320.

[35] Yoeli-Tlalim, “Islam and Tibet,” 8.

[36] Christopher I. Beckwith, “The Sarvāstivādin Buddhist Scholastic Method in Medieval Islam and Tibet,” in Islam and Tibet, 168.

[37] S. A. M. Adshead, “Buddhist Scholasticism and Transcendental Thomism,” The Downside Review 95, no. 321 (1977): 297 https://doi.org/10.1177/001258067709532105.

[38] Beckwith, “The Sarvāstivādin Buddhist Scholastic Method in Medieval Islam and Tibet,” 169.

[39] Yoeli-Tlalim, “Islam and Tibet,” 12.

[40] Georgios T. Halkias, “The Muslim Queens of the Himalayas: Princess Exchanges in Baltistan and Ladakh,” in Islam and Tibet, 236.

[41] Sir Thomas Walker Arnold, The Preaching of Islam: A History of the Propagation of the Muslim Faith, A. Constable and Company, 1896, 293.

[42] Yoeli-Tlalim, “Islam and Tibet,” 13.

[43] Yoeli-Tlalim, “Islam and Tibet,” 13.

[44] Arnold, The Preaching of Islam, 181.

[45] Yoeli-Tlalim, “Islam and Tibet,” 13.

[46] Yoeli-Tlalim, “Islam and Tibet,” 13.

[47] Yoeli-Tlalim, “Islam and Tibet,” 13.

[48] David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages-Updated Edition, Princeton University Press, 2015, 325.

[49] Richard Foltz, Religions of the Silk Road: Premodern Patterns of Globalization, Springer, 2010, 100.