Indeepent work from the subject of english

Samanid, Karakhanid and Khwarezmid rules

The Samanid Empire, rising from the Arab Muslim conquest of Persia, pushed into what was then called Greater Khorasan, including Transoxiana and the Fergana Valley from the West. In 819, Ahmad ibn Asad – son of Asad ibn Saman – was granted authority over the city of Fergana by Caliph Al-Ma`mun`s governor of Khorasan, Ghassan ibn Abbad, as a reward for his support against the rebel Rafi ibn Laith. Following the death of his brother Yahya were given rule over the city by Abdallah, the governor of Khurasan.

By the time of Ahmad`s death in 864 or 865, he was the ruler of most of Transoxiana, Bukhara and Khwarazm. Samarkand and Fergana went to his son, Nasr I of Samanid, leading to a series of Samanid Dynasty Muslim rulers of the valley. During demise of Samanids in 10^th century, Fergana Valley was conquered by Karakhanids. Eastern part of Fergana later was under suzerenaity of Karakhitays. Karakhanid rule lasted till 1212, when Khwarezmshahs conquered the western part of the valley.
Mongol ruler Genghis Khan invaded Transoxiana and Fergana in 1219 during his conquest of Khwarazm. Before his death in 1227, he assigned the lands of Western Central Asia to his second son Chagatai, and this region became known as the Chagatai Khanate. But it was not long before Transoxian Turkic leaders ruled the area, along with most of central Asia as fiefs from the Golden Horde of the Mongol Empire. The Fergana became part of a larger Turco-Mongol empire. This Mongolian nomadic confederation known as Barlas, were remnants of the original Mongol army of Genghis Khan.

After the Mongol conquest of Central Asia, the Barlas settled in Turkistan ( which then became also known as Moghulistan - ,, Land of Mongols’’ ) and intermingled to a considerable degree with the local Turkic and Turkic-speaking population, so that at the time of Timur`s reign the Barlas had become thoroughly Turkicized in terms of language and habits. Additionally, by adopting Islam, the central Asian Turks and Mongols also adopted the Persian Literary and high culture which had dominated Central Asia since the early days of Islamic influence. Persian literature was instrumental in the assimilation of the Timurid elite to the Perso-Islamic courtly culture.

Heir to one of these confederations, Timur, founder of the Timurid dynasty, added the valley to a newly consolidated empire in the late 14^th century, ruling the area from Samarkand.

Located on the Northern Silk Road, the Fergana played a significant part in the flowering of medieval Central Asian Islam. Its most famous son is Babur, heir to Timur and famous conqueror and founder of the Mughal dynasty in Medieval India. Islamic proselytizers from the Fergana Valley such as al - Firghani, al - Andijani, al –Namangan, al - Khojandi spread Islam into parts of present-day Russia, China, and India.

The Fergana valley was ruled by a series of Muslim states in the medieval period. For much of this period local and southwestern rulers divided the valley into a series of small states. From the 16^th century, the Shaybanid Dynasty of the Khanate of Bukhara ruled Fergana , replaced by the Janid Dynasty of Bukhara in 1599. In 1709 Shaybanid emir Shahrukh of the Minglar Uzbeks declared independence from the Khanate of Bukhara, establishing a state in the eastern part of the Fergana Valley. He built a citadel to be his capital in the small town of Kokand. As the Khanate of Kokand, Kokand was capital of a territory stretching over modern eastern Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, southern Kazakhstan and all of Kyrgyzstan.
Fergana was a province of Russian Turkestan, formed in 1876 out of the former Khanate of Kokand. It was bounded by the provinces of Syr Darya in the north and northwest, Samarkand in the West, and Zhetysu in the Northeast, by Chinese Turkestan ( Kashgaria ) in the east, and by Bukhara and Afghanistan in the South. Its southern limits, in the Pamirs, were fixed by an Anglo-Russian commission in 1885, from Zorkul ( Victoria Lake ) to the Chinese frontier; and Khignan, Roshan and Wakhan were assigned to Afghanistan in exchange for part of Darvaz ( on the left bank of the Panj ), which was given to Bukhara. The area amounted to some 53,000 km ( 20,463 sq mi ), of which 17,600 km ( 6,795 sq mi ) are in the pamirs.

Not all the inhabitants of the area were happy with this state of affairs. In 1898 Muhammed Ali Khalfa proclaimed a jihad against the Russians. However, after about 20 Russians had been killed, Khalfa was captured and executed. When the 1905 Revolution spread across the Russian Empire, some Jadids were active in the Fergana Valley. When the Tsarist regime extended the military draft to include Muslims, this led to a revolt which was far more widespread than that of 1898, and which was not entirely suppressed by the time of the Russian Revolution.

In 1924, the new boundaries separating the Uzbek SSR and Kyrgyz SSR cut off the eastern end of the Fergana Valley, as well as the slopes surrounding it. This was compounded in 1928 when the Tajik ASSR became a fully-fledged republic, and the area around Khujand was made a part of it. This blocked the valley`s natural outlet and the routes to Samarkand and Bukhara, but none of these borders was of any great significance so long as Soviet rule lasted. The whole region was part of a single economy geared to cotton production on a massive scale, and the overarching political structures meant that crossing borders was not a problem.

Post Soviet breakup

With the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the establishment of independent republics, borders have been strongly enforced, though the impact of the new international borders was minor until 1998-2000. Uzbekistan regularly closes its borders with Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, strangling trade and causing immense difficulties for those who live in the region.

People in the Tajikistan city of Khujand traveling to the Tajik capital of Dushanbe, unable to take the more direct route through Uzbekistan, have to cross a high mountain pass between the two cities instead, along a terrible road. Communications between the Kyrgyzstan cities of Bishkek and Osh pass through difficult mountainous country. Ethnic tensions also flared into riots in 1990, most notably in the town of Uzgen near Osh. There has been no further ethnic violence, and things appeared to have quieted down for several years.

However, the valley is a religiously conservative region which was particularly hard-hit by President Karimov`s secularization legislation in Uzbekistan, together with his decision to close the borders with Kyrgyzstan in 2003. This devastated the local economy by preventing the importation of cheap Chinese consumer goods. The deposition of Askar Akayev in Kyrgyzstan in April 2005, coupled with the arrest of a group of prominent local businessmen brought underlying tensions to a boil in the region around Andijan and Qorasuv during the May 2005 unrest in Uzbekistan in which hundreds of protestors were killed by troops. There was violence again in 2010 in the Kyrgyz part of the valley, heated by ethnic tensions, worsening economic conditions due to the global economic crisis, and political conflict over the ouster of Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev in April 2010. In June 2010, about 200 people have been reported to be killed during clashes in Osh and Jalal-Abad, and 2000 more were injured. Between 100,000 and 300,000 refugees, predominantly of Uzbek ethnic origin, attempted to flee to Uzbekistan, causing a major humanitarian crisis.

The area has also been subject to informal radicalization.

Until the late 19^th century, Fergana, like everywhere else in Central Asia, was dependent on the camel, horse and donkey for transport, while roads were few and bad. The Russian built a trakt or post-road linking Andijan, Kokand, Margilan and Khujand with Samarkand and Tashkent in the early 1870s. A new impulse was given to trade by the extension ( 1898 ) of the Transcaspian railway into Fergana as far as Andijan, and by the opening of the Orenburg-Tashkent or Trans – Aral Railway in ( 1906 ).

Until soviet times and the construction of the Pamir Higway from Osh to Khorog in the 1920s the routes to Kashgaria and the Pamirs were mere bridle – paths over the mountains, crossing them by lofty passes. For instance, the passes of Karakazyk, 4,389 m ( 14,400 ft ) and Tenghiz – bai 3,413m ( 11,200 ft ), both passable all the year round, lead from Marghelan to Karateghin and the pamirs, while Kashgar is reached via Osh and Gulcha, and then over the passes of Terek – davan, 3,720m, Taldyk, 3,505m , Archat, 3,536m, and Shart-davan, 4,267m. Other passes leading out of the valley are the Jiptyk, 3,798m, S. of Kokand; the Isfairam, 3,657m, leading to the glen of the Surkhab, and the Kavuk, 3,962m, across the Alai Mountains.

The Angren-pap railway line was completed in 2016, giving the region a direct railroad connection to the rest of Uzbekistan.

The Pap-Namangan-Andijon railway line is going to be electrified.