FĀʾEQ ḴĀṢṢA, ABU’L-ḤASAN (d. Khorasan 389/999), Turkish eunuch and slave commander of the Samanid army in Transoxania and Khorasan during the closing decades of that dynasty’s power.
Except that he was part of the Samanid amirs’ slave guard nothing is known of Fāʾeq’s antecedents, but at the beginning of the reign of the minor Nūḥ II b. Manṣūr (365-87/975-97) he and another commander, Tāš, were the most powerful military figures in the amirate. The declining power of the Samanids and the turbulent events of the time allowed his ambitions full play. In 372/982-83 Fāʾeq and Abu’l-Ḥasan Sīmjūrī persuaded a group of royal slave soldiers (ḡolāms) to assassinate the vizier Abu’l-Ḥosayn ʿOtbī, the last Samanid minister worthy of the name. Fāʾeq became governor of Balḵ and Termeḏò, and, when the Qarakhanid Boḡrā Khan Hārūn occupied Bukhara, the Samanid capital, in 382/992, he confirmed Fāʾeq in his post. After the khan’s death Fāʾeq and Abū ʿAlī Sīmjūrī joined against Amir Nūḥ, who called in Sebüktigin against the rebels. Sebüktigin defeated them in 384/994 and a second time in 385/995, so that Fāʾeq was forced to flee to the Qarakhanids. When the latter took over the Samanid lands in the Syr Darya basin in 386/996, Fāʾeq was named governor of Samarqand. In the last year of Samanid independence he espoused the cause of the transient amirs Manṣūr II b. Nūḥ (387-89/997-99) and ʿAbd al-Malek II (389-90/999-1000) and was involved in fighting with Maḥmūd b. Sebüktigin.
See also samanids.
Bibliography (for cited works not given in detail, see “Short References”):
Ebn al-Aṯīr, IX, pp. 98-100, 102-3, 107-9, 129-31, 138-39, 145-49.
Gardīzī, ed. Nazim, pp. 48-60; ed. Ḥabībī, pp. 165-73.
Aḥmad b. ʿAlī Manīnī, Šarḥ al-yamīnī al-musammā be’l-Fatḥ al-wahbī ʿalā Taʾrīḵ Abī Naṣr al-ʿOtbī II, Cairo, 1286/1869, pp. 131-320.
Naršaḵī, tr. Frye, p. 100.
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M. Nāẓim, The Life and Times of Sulṭān Maḥmūd of Ghazna, Cambridge, 1931, pp. 30-31, 36-37, 43-45.
W. L. Treadwell, “The Political History of the Sāmānid State,” Ph.D. diss., University of Oxford, 1991.
(C. Edmund Bosworth)
Originally Published: December 15, 1999
Last Updated: January 20, 2012
This article is available in print.
Vol. IX, Fasc. 2, p. 156