i. IN PRE-MODERN ISLAMIC TIMES

Early Islamic Fāryāb lay within the region of Gūzgān/Jūzjān (q.v.). The town was probably situated some 16 km to the east of the Āb-e Qayṣār at the spot now called Ḵayrābād, where remains of an early Islamic settlement and a citadel have been noted (Ball, no. 542).

Fāryāb almost certainly had a pre-Islamic history, although we know virtually nothing of this, for it lay beyond the eastern frontiers of the Sasanian empire. Gardīzī (ed. Ḥabībī, p. 29) attributes its foundation to Fīrōz son of Yazdegerd, the Sasanian king. It was conquered by the Arab general ʿAbd-Allāh b. ʿĀmer (q.v.) in 32/652-53 during the course of fierce fighting in Gūzgān and Ṭoḵārestān; in 45/665-66 Qays b. Hayṯam was governor of Marv-al-rūd, Ṭālaqān, and Fāryāb. It nevertheless retained a local Iranian prince of its own, whose name (or title?) is corruptly written in Ṭabarī as T.r.s.l. The Hephthalite leader Ṭarḵān Nīzak brought him out in rebellion against the Arab governor of Khorasan Qotayba b. Moslem in 90/709. T.r.s.l. was pardoned by Qotayba, but again in 116/734 he was involved in the revolt of Ḥāreṯ b. Sorayj against the Omayyads (Ṭabarī, I, p. 2897, II, pp. 79, 1198, 1206, 1218, 1566; cf. Gibb, pp. 15, 36-37).

By the 10th century, Fāryāb was one of the towns of the Farighunid princes (see ĀL-E FARĪḠŪN) of Gūzgān, vassals of the Samanids, and is described by the geographers of that century. It lay on the road from Marv-al-rūd to Balḵ (q.v.), and was smaller than Ṭālaqān; it had flourishing local agriculture and artisanal activity and a congregational mosque (Ebn Ḥawqal, p. 442, tr. Kramers and Wiet, pp. 427-28; Ḥodūd al-ʿālam, ed. Sotūda, p. 97, tr. Minorsky, pp. 107, 335; Yāqūt, Boldān, Beirut, IV, p. 229; Le Strange, Lands, pp. 425, 432). Fāryāb was plundered by Čāḡrï Beg’s Turkmans in 429/1037-38 and 430/1038-39, when the Saljuqs were wresting Khorasan from the Ghaznavids (Bayhaqī, pp. 534, 537, 567). It further suffered during the devastation of northern Afghanistan by Čengīz Khan’s (q.v.) Mongols in 617/1220, but recovered enough for Ḥamd-Allāh Mostawfī to record it in the next century as a small but agriculturally rich town (Nozhat al-qolūb, ed. Le Strange, p. 156, tr. p. 153), although it subsequently, at some unrecorded date, fell into total ruin.