Download PDF | (Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization) Ron Sela - The Legendary Biographies of Tamerlane_ Islam and Heroic Apocrypha in Central Asia-Cambridge University Press (2011).
186 Pages
The Legendary Biographies of Tamerlane Timur (or Tamerlane) is famous as the fourteenth-century conqueror of much of Central Eurasia and the founder of the Timurid dynasty. His reputation lived on in his native lands and reappeared some three centuries after his death in the form of fictional biographies, authored anonymously in Persian and Turkic. These biographies have become an important part of popular culture, but despite a direct continuity in their production from the eighteenth century to the present, they remain virtually unknown to people outside the region. This remarkable and rigorous scholarly appraisal of the legendary biographies of Tamerlane is the first of its kind in any language. The book sheds light not only on the character of Tamerlane and how he was remembered and championed by many generations after his demise, but also on the era in which the biographies were written, and how they were conceived and received by the local populace during an age of crisis in their own history.
ronsela is Assistant Professor of Central Asian History at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of Ritual and Authority in Central Asia: The Khan’s Inauguration Ceremony (2003) and coeditor, with Scott C. Levi, of Islamic Central Asia: An Anthology of Historical Sources (2009).
. Introduction
In the beginning of the eighteenth century, Central Asia witnessed the enigmatic appearance of imaginary biographies about Tīmūr (Tamerlane), the famous conqueror of much of Central Eurasia three centuries earlier. These texts, authored anonymously in Persian and in Chaghatay Turkic at least three hundred years after Tīmūr’s death, quickly gained enormous popularity. But despite their almost uninterrupted production from the eighteenth century until the present, they remain virtually unexplored by scholars and unfamiliar to people outside the region.1 Tīmūr’s “heroic apocrypha,” as I label this narrative cycle, consist of lengthy biographies of the hero, in prose, chronologically ordered from his birth to his death and presented in dozens of anecdotes. A “typical” manuscript begins with prophecies announcing Tīmūr’s imminent birth, foretold by eminent Sufi shaykhs or by men of mythical, historical, and heroic significance, such as Alexander the Great. The story then develops through the course of Tīmūr’s childhood, the young hero’s first love, a daring prison rescue by his future bride, and the adventures that lead to his enthronement, including a memorable dream appearance by none other than the Prophet Muhammad. In the course of the narrative, Tīmūr goes on pilgrimage to the graves of Qur’anic prophets while visiting the holy cities of Mecca and Jerusalem. He experiences countless adventures, battles, crises, and accomplishments, emerging triumphant from his campaigns in India, Russia, and the Ottoman lands. The biographies are interspersed with many tales, ostensibly based on oral traditions, revealing the significance of different Muslim – more often than not, Sufi – authorities and their role in the formation of diverse peoples and communities in Central Asia.
The choice of Tīmūr for the protagonist of these texts is particularly remarkable given that the conqueror’s legacy is reputed to have departed from his homeland more or less a century after his death in the year 1405, only to find its prominence elsewhere: in Mughal India, Safavid Iran, the Ottoman Empire, and even in Europe. This alleged disappearance of Tīmūr’s legacy is usually assigned to the nomadic invaders and migrants from the steppes who had taken over the Timurid domains in the early sixteenth century. The newcomers – a host of Turkic, predominantly Uzbek tribes led by descendants of Chinggis Khan, commonly known as the Abu’lKhayrids – seemed to emphasize the break with the Timurids and also to downplay the image of the fierce conqueror. After all, Tīmūr and his descendants had been their mortal enemies for a while, even if they did cooperate on numerous occasions previously. Since most court propaganda under Uzbek and Chinggisid rule would have us believe that Tīmūr was no longer of any real consequence after the sixteenth century, historians simply assumed that they had to look for his legacy elsewhere, above all in places where his fame became instantly recognizable. Nevertheless, it seems that Tīmūr’s spirit never really left the land of his birth even if his repute fell into relative dormancy until the beginning of the eighteenth century. Only then, at a time of profound transformation in Central Asian history, did the long-dead ruler come to life in one of the most unusual developments of the period. Moreover, although the appearance of his legendary biographies was probably the most compelling manner for his glorious return, it was not the only one. My interest in these biographies began almost a decade ago, while conducting research in archives across Eurasia. As I was evaluating different eighteenth-century Central Asian sources, I began to encounter in the Turkish, Hungarian, German, Russian, Swedish, Uzbek, and Tajik manuscript catalogs more and more references to works bearing the generic title Tīmūr-nāma (or, Book of Tīmūr). Catalog entries hinted at similar contents for these works but at the same time cautioned the reader not to take these texts too seriously because they contained too many “folkloric and fantastic elements” and would therefore prove fairly useless to a self-respecting historian. Having failed to adhere to the catalogers’ warnings, I investigated further and discovered that the descriptions of the manuscripts had much in common: • The manuscripts in question are often extensive works, sometimes up to 500 folios (or 1,000 pages) long. • All the manuscripts emerged in the eighteenth century and since, not earlier. • All seem to share similar content. • All are Central Asian creations: Contrary to many other works that had been produced originally in Central Asia and later copied and recopied in Iran, India, and in the Ottoman Empire, the manuscripts in the various archives were authored or copied in Central Asia, not outside the region. • The authors or compilers of these works are almost always anonymous and no patrons are acknowledged. Closer inspection of many of the manuscripts themselves (or microfilms thereof) revealed a complicated story that ventures beyond a simple dismissal of the tales as “fantastic.” On the one hand, events in these Books of Tīmūr do indeed oscillate between fact and fiction frequently, feature incredible encounters and exhibit many stylistic formulas that border on the hagiographical or the fabulous. On the other hand, Tīmūr’s biographies maintained a very special and interesting relationship with works that have long been considered part of the conventional historical and literary canon in the Turco-Iranian world, most particularly with the extensive and rich historiographical legacy of the Timurids.
From Yazdī’s Zafar-nāma to Mīrkhwānd’s Raużāt al-safā, from Hāfiz-i Abrū to Mīr ‘Alī Shīr Navā’ī, the official histories are often referenced in Tīmūr’s biographies, many chapter headings were copied directly from the court or dynastic chronicles, and most of the characters are historical figures even if their appearance is anachronistic or made up. Books of Tīmūr are therefore apocryphal in the sense that they are noncanonical yet aware of and manipulate the historical canon; they are imaginary and their authorship is unsubstantiated and debatable, yet they claim to be the source of truth. Upon further reflection, it seems that for many in the region, Tīmūr’s “heroic apocrypha” served as Central Asia’s popular history. Tīmūr’s legendary biographies have been ignored or omitted from nearly all scholarly considerations, partly because the texts seemed to elude traditional categorizations and classifications and therefore remained outside the clear demarcations of genre boundaries. Thus, surveys of literature (Persian, Turkic, Central Asian) tended to disregard the biographies, possibly because the latter were not considered – perhaps justifiably so – sophisticated specimens of literary triumph. Surveys of Central Asia’s epic traditions would not have them either, most likely for lacking established “epic” criteria such as poetic qualities, certain stylistic standards, a clearer oral dimension, and a complex performance. When reviewing official historical sources for the study of Central Asia’s history and culture, the picture becomes a little murkier. The first, rather brief scholarly evaluations of Tīmūr’s legendary biographies estimated, for reasons that will become evident later in this book, that they had been written with the intent to produce a “real” history of Tīmūr and his successors. When it was realized that these biographies probably did not shed any new light on the fourteenth-century Tīmūr – even if they illuminate very brightly his eighteenth-century symbolic reincarnation – modern historical surveys discarded them as well. Ironically, most of the biographical manuscripts are listed in the History section of the different catalogs, occasionally accompanied by a warning to avoid using them as historical sources.
It is difficult to determine how many manuscripts of Books of Tīmūr still exist, partly because the texts have been cataloged under many different titles in addition to the aforementioned Tīmūr-nāma. It is also important to emphasize that not every manuscript bearing this rather generic label inevitably belongs to our biographical corpus. Thus, the celebrated “epic poem” Tīmūrnāma by ‘Abdallāh Hātifī (d. 1521) is a very different type of composition, although this work, too, was known to the authors or compilers of the legendary biographies and served to inform a small part of their account. To further muddle up the picture, some of our manuscripts were also labeled Zafar-nāma (Book of Victory) in the catalogs, a title that has been most commonly identified with Yazdī’s renowned oeuvre. This title has been used – particularly in manuscript catalogs and in historiographical surveys of Indo-Persian literature – to refer to Hātifī’s Tīmūr-nāma as well. Lastly, Tīmūr’s so-called autobiographies that appeared in India in the 1630s and became known by such appellations as the Malfūzāt-i Tīmūrī (the “utterances” attributed to Tīmūr) and the Tūzūkāt-i Tīmūrī (Tīmūr’s “institutes”) also seem to have no direct relationship with the biographies discussed in this book.2 These Indian “memoirs” of Tīmūr made their way to Central Asia only in the nineteenth century and their mandatory popularity in present-day Uzbekistan has been a relatively recent phenomenon. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that no scholarly work exists, in any language, that discusses Tīmūr’s legendary biographies in depth, neither exploring individual manuscripts nor the corpus as a whole. Although it seems that specialists in Central Asian history have heard of these texts, they have remained largely unfamiliar with their contents and diversity.
One may assume that the legendary character of the biographies warded off most scholars. Early on, several explorers and academics wrote them off as simple legends, unworthy of scholarly inquiry, and so there have been no attempts to deal with the texts at any level. In fact, the last time any of these manuscripts were visited at some length – apart from their catalog descriptions (mainly the ones in St. Petersburg, Tashkent, and Dushanbe) or the occasional reference – was over a century ago, when attempts were made by Russian Orientalists to speculate about the nature of some of these compositions. Other than the initial observations, stories that were borrowed randomly from manuscript fragments appeared sporadically in translation in the late nineteenth century and were treated as amusing anecdotes or folk tales, with little to no analysis. The translators did not know that the stories were taken from much more comprehensive texts – and certainly were unaware of their existence as part of a larger corpus – and thus were also unable to assess their significance.3 As previously mentioned, Tīmūr’s biographies are not brought up in general surveys of Persian or Turkic literature or even in more specific studies on the literary history of Central Asia; they have been equally ignored in bibliographical surveys or in essays devoted to the conqueror and to his legacy. We do not have a scholarly edition of any of the texts, not to mention a translation. Consequently, these works were also never thought of as belonging to one group and were never treated as a genre. In other words, they have been mostly ignored. Nevertheless, Books of Tīmūr endured as some of the most popular literary creations in Central Asia over the last three centuries and have been persistently copied and recopied, with relatively little interruption, from the eighteenth century until the present. We have dozens of manuscripts of varying lengths copied in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth century, including an extensive lithograph of a manuscript from late-eighteenth-century Bukhara that was reproduced in Tashkent in 1912.4 Manuscripts continued to circulate in Central Asia until the Soviet era, when their production seems to have died down, presumably under order of the authorities. However, they were not forgotten, and as soon as the Soviet state collapsed, a new and more concise rendition of one of the texts, in Uzbek, was published in Tashkent and printed in 200,000 copies at a very affordable price.5 I am told that more editions are in their planning stage. The Legendary Biographies of Tamerlane has several goals. The first is to introduce the corpus of manuscripts to the audience, both academic and lay, and to open the gates for further study of these fascinating texts. This volume represents a preliminary exploration and does not profess to offer the final word on this subject. Rather, it should serve as an invitation for more scholars to conduct their own investigations. Many of the stories narrated in the biographies will surely invoke a degree of familiarity from students of the literary and epic traditions of other cultures within and beyond the Muslim world, and I believe and hope that more comparative considerations may also encourage further scrutiny of these texts from different angles. In introducing the origins of Tīmūr’s biographies, this study also seeks to highlight certain aspects of Central Asia’s history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, typically a dark hole in the knowledge of much of the scholarly community, as most publications tend to gloss over the period in question. The book draws attention to the changing agendas of political legitimacy, to the peculiar interaction between Sufis and ‘ulamā’, the supposed tension between the sharī’a and so-called customary practices, as well as Central Asia’s place in the history of the Muslim world. It was in the eighteenth century that a new vision in the region emerged – a vision that shaped Central Asia’s cultural and political boundaries and its self-image and became the mode of cultural discourse that continued well into the Russian era. Moreover, the eighteenth century – and not the late twentieth century, as many mistakenly presume – also witnessed the origins for Central Asia’s claim of Tīmūr as its model native champion. Tīmūr’s legendary biographies began as a product of the early eighteenth century, an era that has long been considered the nadir of Central Asia’s decline and isolation. Although this perception has been challenged of late, I view the unequivocal dismissal of the ‘decline’ paradigm not only as premature but as simply erroneous. The crisis theme, displayed very clearly in Tīmūr’s biographies, accompanies this book from start to finish and is at the center of its final chapter. Indeed, I believe that these texts emanated from and responded to a prevailing crisis. The harsh political and economic conditions in Central Asia in the first half of the eighteenth century, coupled with real and imagined fears and anxieties, also led, among other things, to a certain degree of introspection in some quarters. This looking inward was not so much a conscious effort to pontificate philosophically about the causes of the predicament, but rather began as an intuitive reaction that envisioned a glorious past, and through that past imagined a better present and future. Tīmūr’s biographies mirror this perception, although the texts may not have been only passive reflectors of their surrounding culture and may have even actively affected that culture.6 In recalling and retelling Tīmūr’s story, Central Asians could discover a model for behavior; could debate and reevaluate the nature of kingship, the responsibilities of spiritual and communal leaders, and also the role of each and every one of them in society. Moreover, they could boast a whole new history of their own with a local hero who had shaped the world, a world that was far removed from their immediate reality. Tīmūr’s legendary biographies also contributed to the initial formation of a more localized Central Asian identity, particularly among segments of the population in Mawarannahr (also known as Transoxiana), a region typically regarded as Central Asia’s sedentary heartland.7 Like most “identities,” this one too is not easy to pin down. But it seems clear from reading Books of Tīmūr that something emerged from our texts: a sense of sharing a unique and accessible past coupled with a clearer understanding of a common fate. Equally important was the growing realization of what Central Asia was not, a realization that had been augmented by geopolitical as well as cultural and religious circumstances. Central Asia was nolonger a part of a larger empire, and the presence of superior (technologically, militarily) and bigger political entities on its doorstep was becoming very real and was serving as a catalyst for profound changes. Tīmūr’s biographies, although born in the early eighteenth century, continued to be copied and reproduced for three hundred years. With each manuscript, new stories were collected and introduced, and others omitted. Audiences understood (and still understand) their meanings differently over time. The biographies even functioned as a rallying cry for different constituencies to support a particular cause or to unite against a common foe – for example, as motivation for or reflection of resistance to Russian imperialism in the nineteenth century. At the same time, however, the stories remained a source of entertainment, purveyors of didactic messages, and also increasingly imbued their audiences with a sense that they were a part of a historical continuum, a continuum that included explanations about their past, their beginnings, and their growth as a community.
The Plan of This Study
To an extent, this volume emulates the biographical style and is arranged in a similar fashion, treating the manuscripts of the Books of Tīmūr chronologically as if they were themselves the subject of a biography. The sequence presented here, sketching their existence from their point of origin until the present, is probably more orderly and somewhat less disjointed than the way the texts presented the story of their protagonist. The first chapter, “The Origins and Usages of Tīmūr’s Heroic Apocrypha,” conducts the reader through the original introductions to the texts and the numerous questions that arise from these introductions. We examine the reasons given – or not given – in the manuscripts to explain their own purpose and existence; we look into the puzzling queries of provenance and authorship; and we consider the literary and oral traditions that the authors claimed as their sources and evidence. Such claims lead us into questions of genre and to what we regard as the apocryphal nature of the texts, particularly given the biographies’ contention for associations with the older historical sources. At the same time, we do not discount the literary and ideological links that existed between these apocryphal writings and Sufi hagiographies, Qisas al-anbiyā’ (stories of the Prophets) and the Arabic Sīra (biography). Chapter 1 further introduces the structure and arrangement of the biographies – both as they were introduced in the texts and as they appear in actuality – including the authors’ convenient summary of Tīmūr’s life and their brief discussion of Tīmūr’s lineage. We follow with an outline of the manuscript tradition that evolved from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, touching on the chain of transmission or the retelling of these stories, and the pertinent queries of popularity and patronage. Some of the most intriguing uncertainties concern the identity of the audiences for the biographies and the manner in which these tales were conveyed to possible readers and listeners, perhaps by way of storytelling. The chapter hints at the role of storyteller guilds in the region, compared with similar institutions in other parts of the Muslim world. Finally, we explore how these works had been understood by the scholars who had first collected and read them, already in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the tradition of scholarship (or lack thereof) that built on the initial explorations. The following chapters – “Tīmūr’s Birth and Childhood,” “Youth,” “Inauguration and Kingship,” and “Premonitions” – constitute a literary portrait of Central Asia’s native hero and introduce the biographies with portions of text in English translation, complemented with brief introductions and commentary. Because the biographies were composed of numerous related and seemingly unrelated anecdotes, in many reproductions, the selection of translations reflects some of the different types of stories found in the works and also relies on different renditions of the stories from the eighteenth through the twentieth century. These four chapters present the different stages in Tīmūr’s life, following the hero from his birth – or even a little earlier – through his busy youth, to his rise to prominence and his dreams and visions of things to come. My annotated translations of different segments in Tīmūr’s life explore a variety of literary topoi, including characteristic forms of prophecy, dream sequences, symbols and miraculous contests, as well as other themes that occupied the authors and, undoubtedly, portions of Central Asian society in the eighteenth century. Throughout the biographical representations, recurring connections appear between the protagonist and diverse Muslim circles (Sufis, ‘ulama’, heretical groups and bearers of ‘Alid charisma), as well as significant historical and mythical figures. The biographies illustrate integration and conflict of lineage and loyalties – for example, between the house of Tīmūr and the house of Chinggis Khan, and between the house of Tīmūr and prestigious local families – as well as the break between Chinggis Khan’s successors and tribal leaderships, a potent characteristic of the eighteenth century. The crisis theme, expressed, among other things, by unrelenting apocalyptic dreams and visions, is also presented. The final chapter presents the biographies’ origins in their greater historical context, particularly within the political, social, and economic circumstances in the region in the first half of the eighteenth century. These circumstances were clearly reflected in our biographies, but also in a myriad of other sources, from dynastic histories to travelers’ reports. The old notion of a region in “decline” was never thoroughly explained, and the recent trend in scholarship that assumes a crisis-free era is also discussed. This chapter explores in some depth the nature of the crisis and the development of different methods of coping with it in Central Asia: the emergence of new forms of political and religious symbolism, the impact of Islamic movements from India, the birth of a new political order, the surfacing of new centers of power, changes in the economy, and ultimately, for our present purpose, the appearance of our texts.
The eighteenth century – a period of immense transformation in the region; indeed a period that planted the seeds for future developments in Central Asia – is regrettably understudied. Perhaps because most of the important historical works are still in manuscript form and often difficult to access, or because of the period’s reputation as an age of decline, there is hardly any work in English that discusses any aspect of the eighteenth century in depth. By exploring the major causes for the transformation, this chapter seeks to outline the crisis in the first half of the eighteenth century and to offer a perspective that may enable a better evaluation of the creation and the meaning of Tīmūr’s legendary biographies, as well as the complicated legacy of the ruler in Central Asian history
Tīmūr’s Legacy in Central Asia8 The veneration of Tīmūr, Uzbekistan’s national hero whose statues have replaced those of Soviet political and cultural champions in the squares of the young republic’s towns, immediately attracted the attention of many visitors, scholars, and commentators. Observers were quick to recognize the significance of the impressive new monuments9 and promptly evaluated them within the framework of new (or rather, old) insights into questions of national identity and related issues. In short, all the rhetoric of theory now found a new target, and the so-called cult of Tīmūr rapidly and perhaps paradoxically multiplied its audience.10 As part of the fashionable inquiries, there were also those who rebuked the choice of Tīmūr for a national hero – why should the Uzbeks choose such a “ruthless” conqueror, indeed “one of history’s worst mass murderers” as their symbol?11 At the same time, even the skeptics acknowledged with a sympathetic nod that this was simply another characteristic of nation building. The only continuity with Central Asia’s past that most analysts discovered was a succession and justification of the authoritarian state, demonstrated, in this case, within the context of post-Soviet power worship. Islam Karimov, it was claimed, Uzbekistan’s president since 1990, was merely trying to be perceived as a contemporary mirror image (perhaps somewhat less affecting) of Tīmūr, assuring Uzbekistan’s populace that Tīmūr’s professed legacy of governance was the right path to follow. Students of Central Asian history, or anyone else with an interest in the region, learn about Tīmūr by and large in the context of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries or that of the late twentieth century. We learn about Tīmūr’s rise to power, his successful campaigns and triumphs throughout the Middle East, in northern India, and over the Ottoman Empire, and about his meetings with some of the most distinguished public figures of his time. Ibn Khaldūn, the noted historian and philosopher, even referred to Tīmūr after meeting him outside Damascus as “one of the greatest and mightiest of kings … favoured by Allah.”12 Many seem to be under the impression that after his death in 1405 and the demise of his house approximately a century later, Tīmūr – the man and the symbol – virtually disappeared from Central Asia and for nearly five hundred years found his prominence elsewhere: in Mughal India, Safavid Iran, the Ottoman Empire, and even in Europe.13 True, many artists, artisans, and intellectuals, especially from the province of Khorasan, who had flourished under Timurid rule, still enjoyed a certain degree of patronage in the courts of Bukhara, Samarqand, Tashkent, and Balkh. In addition, several Timurid traditions, most notably in systems of administration and taxation, were still maintained and developed under the Timurids’ successors.14 However, Tīmūr’s commanding legacy that had enjoyed such a forceful presence in Central Asia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries practically faded away. The Uzbeks, led by the Abu’l-Khayrids, descendants of Chinggis Khan, generally emphasized the break with the Timurids – their great rivals, at least in the beginning – and naturally downplayed the image of the fierce conqueror and, for some, the usurper of the throne. Since most, although not all, court propaganda under Uzbek and Chinggisid rule would have us believe that Tīmūr was no longer of any real consequence, historians simply assumed that they had to look for his legacy elsewhere. Having lost the battle for Mawarannahr to the Uzbeks, Zahīr al-Dīn Muhammad Bābur (1483–1530), himself a descendant of Tīmūr (and Chinggis Khan), was forced to flee to Hindustan (India) where he would be celebrated subsequently as the founder of the Mughal Empire. Bābur’s descendants in Hindustan began to appropriate the legacy of Tīmūr, their great progenitor, by styling themselves “Gurganiya,” following Tīmūr’s self appellation of gūrgān (or gürägän – the royal son-in-law), a powerful position in Mongol hierarchy. They acknowledged Tīmūr as their primordial father on their seals, in their historiography, and even by assuming one of his many titles, Sāhib-qirān. 15 Several Mughal emperors tried to reclaim Central Asian possessions (like the city of Balkh), and Jahāngīr (r. 1605–1627) and Awrangzīb (r. 1658–1707) even contributed to the upkeep of Tīmūr’s tomb in Samarqand.16 The Mughals also adopted several traditions of statecraft from the Timurids, continued to maintain – similar to some of their ancestors – close ties with shaykhs of the Naqshbandi Sufi tarīqa, and of course imitated and built on Timurid artistic and architectural traditions, emulating Timurid flair for grandeur and building styles.17 The Mughals were also inspired by Timurid historiographical traditions, particularly during the reigns of Akbar (r. 1556–1605) and Shāh Jahān (r. 1628–1658). Of special significance was the famed “discovery” of Tīmūr’s “autobiography” as well as his “advice” on proper governance. These compositions, supposedly authored by Tīmūr himself for his grandson in Chaghatay Turkic, were allegedly preserved in the library of the governor of Yemen, where they had been acquired, translated into Persian, and eventually presented to Shāh Jahān in the 1630s.18 Further to the west, the Safavids, rulers of Iran from 1501 to 1722, effectively espoused similar aspects of Timurid legacy. Safavid architecture, painting, and metalwork were greatly influenced by Timurid art and architecture; Safavid chronicles idealized the court of Husayn Bayqara (d. 1506), the renowned sovereign of Khorasan, and Iranian court historiography was largely modeled on the great Timurid historical records, above all Sharaf al-Dīn ‘Alī Yazdī’s Zafar-nāma, the account most often cited by post-Timurid historians, and Mīrkhwānd’s Raużāt al-safā. 19 Safavid historiography celebrated Tīmūr as the successor of Alexander the Great and Chinggis Khan and therefore also as a model for the rulers of Iran, from Shāh Ismā‘īl (d. 1524) to Shāh ‘Abbās (d. 1629), and even for the post-Safavid Turkmen ruler Nādir Shāh Afshār (d. 1747).20 Tīmūr’s own prized possessions, both real and fabricated, were sought and valued by world leaders. In one case, Shāh Safī (r. 1629–1642) received Tīmūr’s sword as a present. In addition to the reverence shown for his alleged memoirs in India or for his sword in Iran, the cloak of the Prophet Muhammad, allegedly in Tīmūr’s treasury, also became an object of desire. According to an Afghan historian, Tīmūr brought the cloak of the Prophet to Samarqand from his campaigns in “‘Irāq-i ‘Arab.” He built a structure called Khoja Khiżr to house it, appointed sayyids to supervise the shrine, and established an endowment (waqf) to pay the shrine keepers. The cloak was then moved to Bukhara and later to Juzun (also known as Faydabad). Finally, Ahmad Shāh recovered the revered cloak and arranged to bring it to Qandahar.21 Even in the Ottoman Empire, once the scene of bitter rivalry with Tīmūr, the historian Mustafā ‘Alī (d. 1600) called for an objective reevaluation of Tīmūr’s career and used Tīmūr to criticize those Ottoman rulers who had strayed from what he considered the proper path. Tīmūr was described by ‘Alī as a universal Muslim monarch, thereby enjoying a considerable advantage over the Ottoman sultans, portrayed as players in a limited regional setting. Tīmūr was also perceived as a capable integrator of Islamic law with dynastic laws modeled on an idealized “code of the steppe” (yasa).22 In the Empire, “the scholars, and the literary language of the Timurid domains played as essential role in the development of Ottoman culture.”23 More or less at the same time, or even a little earlier in the sixteenth century, Tīmūr emerged as a celebrated figure also in Europe (and later in America), commanding considerable romantic appeal.24 The focus of many plays, operas, and novels, Tīmūr has been starring in literary and musical compositions by the likes of Christopher Marlowe, Georg Friedrich Händel, Goethe, Edgar Allen Poe, Mario Vargas Llosa, and others. This fascination with Tīmūr also served to inform the many modern biographies written about him, particularly in Europe.25 What all these historical phenomena have in common is their existence outside of Tīmūr’s direct sphere of influence, his native Central Asian lands. After all, Tīmūr was born near Shahr-i Sabz, spent his youth in the environs of Bukhara, made Samarqand the capital of his vast empire, and survived in popular imagination as the native hero of contemporary Uzbekistan. Moreover, the physical landscape of the region is studded with the monumental construction projects that he and his descendants had sponsored, monuments that continued to tower above both kings and ordinary folk in Central Asia for centuries to come. What, then, happened to Tīmūr’s legacy in his native lands in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries? How did many of his real and imagined beneficiaries in Central Asia cope with or respond to his bestowed heritage? Attempts to study Tīmūr’s legacy in Central Asia have not been very fruitful due to scholars’ general unfamiliarity with the Central Asian sources of the post-Timurid era. Consequently, we do not learn about Tīmūr in a Central Asian context from the sixteenth until the twentieth century. Only then – according to modern scholarship – and more particularly in the 1910s and 1920s, was Tīmūr’s fame rekindled as various cultural groups were named after him, and poets and playwrights wrote dramas appealing to Tīmūr’s spirit to “restore Turkistan’s greatness.”26 Especially vocal was ‘Abdorauf Fitrat (1886–1938), a prominent reformist, political activist, and author, whose 1918 historical drama, Tīmūrning saghanasi (Tīmūr’s mausoleum), served as a uniting call for (a limited number of) Central Asian nationalists.27 Efforts to invoke or reject the hero (or villain, depending on one’s directed moods and political agendas) continued during the Soviet era and moved along the continuum of appreciating Tīmūr’s military prowess and cultural patronage to rejecting his reputation as a despicable barbaric chieftain. During and after World War II, interest in Tīmūr grew, perhaps also with the famed (and filmed) unearthing of his tomb by Mikhail Gerasimov in order to recreate the conqueror’s portrait based on his exhumed skull. Publications by A. Iu. Iakubovskii, for example, featured the above-mentioned dichotomies (cruel tyrant versus able strategist) in the popular perception of Tīmūr.28 Ibragim Muminov’s 1968 publication about the fourteenth-century ruler, which, among other things, accepted Tīmūr’s “autobiography” as genuine, aroused the suspicion of Soviet authorities.29 In its fear of any increase in “local nationalism,” the Soviet government criticized harshly attempts to turn Tīmūr into a great champion, and readers were reminded that Tīmūr’s policies “condemned the region to backwardness.”30 Tīmūr could not simply be ignored, of course, and he continued to live in most textbooks about the region’s history. It was clear, however, that any pronounced reverence for the conqueror would be met with restrictions. With the breakdown of the Soviet Union, as noted earlier, Tīmūr and Timurid legacy resumed their role in shaping Uzbek national awareness (an awareness that had begun prior to the collapse of the USSR) and in the construction of Uzbekistan’s national mythology.31 Given Tīmūr’s relative absence from Central Asian historiography from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, it may come as a surprise that Tīmūr’s supposed recent “revival” was neither a Soviet phenomenon nor a post-Soviet curiosity, but rather a long-standing practice that has been evoked in the region at every junction of political uncertainty, at least since the eighteenth century, and that has been serving Central Asian communities for generations. Tīmūr’s resurgence in the eighteenth century and his legacy during the centuries of proposed silence will occupy the rest of our introductory remarks. When the armies of Muhammad Shïbānī Khan (1451–1510) swept across Mawarannahr early in the sixteenth century, they defeated the ailing Timurid states, vanquished their allies, and absorbed their memory. For two hundred years, the Shïbanids and their successors, the Ashtarkhanids,32 cultivated a historiography that naturally aimed at securing their own place on the world stage and downplaying the significance of their predecessors. The newcomers were celebrating the restoration of the Chinggisid ideal, namely the principle that has been prevalent in the region’s politics since the 1220s whereby only Chinggis Khan’s male descendants had the legitimate claim to the throne. The question of political legitimation had been central and troubling to many, not only in the sixteenth century but also to Tīmūr himself as well as his sons and grandsons.33 To recap a substantial amount of scholarship on the topic, although Tīmūr was not a descendant of Chinggis Khan, he did not cast off the Chinggisid ideal so easily and found ways to bind himself to his celebrated predecessor. First he married Sarāy Mulk, a Chinggisid princess who also plays a magnificent supporting role in the legendary biographies, and began to style himself gurgān (royal son-in-law).34 He then appointed Chinggisids to serve as puppet khans with little ceremonial authority, in keeping with established practice. Timurid historiography also promoted the story of Tīmūr and Chinggis Khan’s presumed shared ancestry, wherein Tīmūr was a descendant of Qachulai, brother of Qabūl Khan – Chinggis Khan’s great-grandfather.35 And yet, Tīmūr was careful not to assimilate other Chinggisid properties such as taking up the title “khan” or performing the ceremony of having himself elevated to kingship on a white piece of felt.36 In describing Tīmūr’s inauguration in 1369–1370, one of his biographers, Sharaf al-Dīn ‘Alī Yazdī, made no reference to Chinggis Khan as a source of inspiration for the ceremony or as a source of legitimation for Tīmūr’s kingship. Accordingly, Yazdī made no mention of the performance of the elevation ritual (which, it is plausible to assume, did not take place).37 Naturally, for the Uzbeks and their Chinggisid leaders, Tīmūr’s reputation was not easy to ignore. Some of them even welcomed, with certain limitations, the opportunity to associate themselves with the famed ruler. In 1525, for example, ‘Abdallāh Nasrallāhī, charged with the authorship of the chronicle Zubdat al-āthār38 for Sultan Muhammad b. Söyünch KhojaKhan, his patron and ruler of Tashkent,39 proudly portrayed his master’s inspiring pedigree: a paternal descent from the great Mongol conqueror, and a maternal lineage stretching back to the hero of this book. The skillful author also invoked the coveted title sāhib-qirān (“Lord of the Auspicious Conjunction”) to help make his point as unambiguous as possible. “May it be clear to the people of the world,” wrote Nasrallāhī, “that the sultans of the Turks are [descended] from two sāhib-qirāns: One of them is Chinggis Khan and the other – Tīmūr Bek. And since the origins of His Majesty the Sultan of Sultans40 reach back to those two, it is necessary to write about his ancestors.” The author then traced the roots of his patron on his father’s side back to Chinggis Khan through the Mongol rulers of the Qïpchaq steppe, and outlined his master’s illustrious lineage on his mother’s side back to Tīmūr (Sultan Muhammad was the grandson of the “Queen of Sheba-like” Rābi‘a Sultan Begïm, daughter of Ulugh Beg, Tīmūr’s grandson). Nasrallāhī concluded, appropriately, that it was hoped that since his patron had been the heir to these two sāhib-qirāns, “God would apportion their countries to him.”41 At first glance, one may consider the integration of the two illustrious lineages in line with a tradition that had begun already a century earlier with Tīmūr’s prolific biographer, Sharaf ‘Alī Yazdī, and the alleged covenant – the shared ancestry of Tīmūr and Chinggis Khan – that he had invoked. A more immediate candidate to boast such a glorious lineage was Bābur, the Timurid prince, who, by the year ‘Abdallāh b. M. Nasrallāhī was completing his work (1525), was well on his way to try and overpower northern India.42 At the same time, Nasrallāhī’s approbation of Tīmūr may have been part of his education and training and not only a fulfillment of his patron’s request. The author had worked as a scribe – probably educated in the tradition established, in part, by Yazdī – in the service of the Timurid princes of Balkh before he was forced to flee from the wrath of the Safavids, the new contenders for control over Khorasan. He was part of a substantial movement of men-ofletters who had found their livelihood in Timurid service and had fled northeast from Khorasan in fear of the invading Shi’ite rulers and their Turkmen armies. These refugees were to influence much of the intellectual and cultural undertakings, from art, to history writing, to administrative practices, in Mawarannahr and beyond, although their activities as part of a social stratum are yet to be studied.43 Featuring Tīmūr as an important pillar in their genealogical edifice did not become common practice for the Chinggisids in this new era. Indeed, it seems that sponsorship of literary production and other cultural accomplishments concerning Tīmūr’s memory and championing him as a protagonist in his own right were relatively limited. Even his monuments did not experience any particular developments in this period.44 In other words, for two hundred years, there were no literary works produced in Central Asia that were centered directly on Tīmūr’s character, and his legacy seems to have been put aside. In the scholarly arena, the scene was left open for an analysis of Central Asian political and cultural sources of inspiration in line with the supposed tension and competition between the sharī’a and the yasa. Although glimpses of Tīmūr may be found in Central Asian official dynastic histories from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, court propaganda seemed to be more comfortable with displaying the break with the Timurids, occasionally exhibiting some respect for Tīmūr, but not much more. Thus, for example, when the Manghït ruler Muhammad Rahīm Khan (d. 1758) conquered Shahr-i Sabz, he made a special visit to the Aq Saray palace to pay homage to Tīmūr. Different sites connected to the ruler, particularly in Shahr-i Sabz and in Samarqand, continued to serve as pilgrimage destinations well into the twentieth century.45 But beyond such brief allusions, probably the main official story that concerned Tīmūr, albeit indirectly, was the development of the narrative cycle of the Golden Cradle (Altun Beshik) by the Uzbek tribal dynasty of the Ming, centered in Qoqand in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to the story, before Bābur fled Ferghana to India, he had left behind a son hidden in a golden cradle. The boy, aptly named after the container in which he had been deposited, was recovered by the Uzbek Mings and gradually came to be regarded as their great progenitor.46 Such a story helped, it is assumed, legitimize Ming rule in Qoqand through the natural association of Bābur with Tīmūr, and perhaps also with Chinggis Khan. Why the Ming rulers would choose to cultivate such a story of origin is a subject for another discussion.
We may hypothesize that the Mings wished to find a heroic figure that would provide a model for their own rule, posit an alternative to the seat of central power in Bukhara, and perhaps also strengthen potential ties with India, building on mutual familial associations. To these eighteenth-century, formal Tīmūr-related developments we may add the attempts by historians of Khiva, under the tribal dynasty of the Qonrgrats, to embrace and even emulate Timurid historiography and Timurid modes of legitimation.47 More recently, scholars also began to explore the high interest in Timurid culture in Khiva beyond the realm of historiography, and also the tendencies, evident in both Khiva and Qoqand, to imitate the literary and poetic styles of the Timurids.48 Interestingly, the less official sources (popular literature, hagiographies, and travel accounts) paint a different picture. One of the most extraordinary stories that appeared in the notes of every foreign traveler to the region in the nineteenth century described a large marble stone known as the Kök Tash in Samarqand’s citadel. Every Central Asian ruler presumably obtained his legitimate rank on the occasion of his accession to power by sitting on that particular stone. Most visitors associated this coronation stone with Tīmūr’s old, fourteenth-century throne, and according to some reports, the stone was imbued with supernatural attributes and “would not allow a false khan to approach it.”49
In fact, Central Asian rulers after the middle of the sixteenth century were always enthroned in the capital, Bukhara, and not in Samarqand, although we do have reports from the eighteenth and nineteenth century of khans opting to perform the ceremony in Samarqand in addition to Bukhara in order to appease different constituencies. The appearance of the Kök Tash accounts demonstrates, among other things, how the eighteenth century provided an opportunity for some in Central Asia to contest the traditional power structures in local and regional politics. The Kök Tash innovation was actually a remarkable attempt by tribal rebels to turn Samarqand into a center of authority through the association of the city and one of its major symbols, Central Asia’s “Coronation Stone,” with Tīmūr, the most powerful tribal, nonChinggisid military commander in the region’s history.50 Naturally, Tīmūr was an obvious candidate for many more stories and oral traditions, and travelers in the nineteenth century continuously emphasized hearing tales about the famous conqueror. Joseph Wolff, for example, reported the arrival at his campsite of people from Samarqand, who “conversed about Tamerlane, as though he were dead yesterday.”
Wolff mentioned a well-known anecdote in the region whereby people “preferred in general Tamerlane to Ghengis Khan, for they say of Ghengis Khan that he knew how to conquer a world – that he was a Jehaan-Geer, a world-taker; but Tamerlane was not only a Jehaan-Geer, but also a Jehaan-Dar, a world-holder.”51 Wolff also reiterated stories communicated to him and to his party during an evening gathering – the members of the caravan were seated in a circle on the ground by the fire – by a “derveesh from Samarcand” about “the deeds of Tīmūr, also called Tamerlane; how he build at Sabz-Awar a tower of skulls of men; of his defeating Bayazid; of his entrance into Samarcand; of the festivities of triumph which he gave at Samarcand; of his death at Atrar when just on the point to march against China.”52
Different stories and oral traditions about Tīmūr had been circulating in and outside Central Asia for centuries, under one guise or another and among different constituencies. The most famous cycle was probably Tīmūr’s alleged autobiographical account that had emerged first in India and within a couple of centuries spread also to other areas of the Muslim world. Somewhat similar accounts were known in other parts of the greater region of Central Asia, especially in the Tatar lands of the Russian empire, where legendary materials about Aksak Tīmūr (Tīmūr the Lame) often were grouped together with tales of Chinggis Khan.53 Several Tīmūr-related stories may have been influenced by Central Asian traditions that had been in circulation since the sixteenth century.54 However, in Central Asia proper, no full-scale, written narrative cycle about Tīmūr emerged until the eighteenth century. In the second half of the nineteenth century, as Russian colonialism was making its presence felt forcefully across the region and European travel to the area grew substantially, more and more tales and legends about the fourteenth-century conqueror surfaced.
But beyond the stories and rumors that made their way into the diaries and reports of the foreign travelers, a much more dramatic development in Tīmūr’s legacy was the noticeable surge in literary production surrounding his figure in the early eighteenth century, and the growth in Tīmūr’s “heroic apocrypha,” the focus of this volume. It is safe to estimate that this narrative cycle, consisting of long, mostly imaginary biographies of Tīmūr, chronologically ordered from his birth to his death, became one of the high points of popular literature in Central Asia from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. The unfortunate dismissal of these stories as simple legends prevented scholars from realizing that through these works of literature, Tīmūr became a compelling symbol for many Central Asians, especially in the region of Mawarannahr. The biographies were neither a fraction of a larger, general history, nor a section of a history dedicated to the Timurids, as had been thought initially.
They were devoted solely to the retelling of Tīmūr’s life and deeds. Some of the content of these works, as the compilers themselves acknowledged, relied on previous written histories, although most of the stories that appeared in these manuscripts were novel contributions that possibly originated in oral traditions. Among them were anecdotes concerning Tīmūr’s associations with holy men, such as Bahā’ al-Dīn Naqshband, Sayyid Ata, Shaykh Sayf al-Dīn Bākharzī, and many others, or with prominent figures from days long gone, such as Alexander the Great or the eleventh-century philosopher and poet Nāsir-i Khusraw. More importantly, Tīmūr’s legendary biographies essentially provided a set of guiding principles for the Islamic community of Central Asia at a time of crisis. Authored in an age when the world around its audience had already contracted (but at the same time became more uncertain), these legendary biographies instructed the audience on matters of legitimate authority, on the ideal type of relationships between religion and state, and also on the understanding of the individual’s place in a Central Asian Muslim society.
Tīmūr’s “Heroic apocrypha” endured as one of the most popular literary creations in Central Asia in the last three centuries. The recent emergence of the fourteenth-century ruler as a triumphant native hero of the Republic of Uzbekistan, a potential restorer of prestige, and a rallying symbol was not a random occurrence. Central Asia’s claim of Tīmūr as its native champion, a claim that has been largely explored only in its post-Soviet context, began three hundred years earlier, in the early days of the eighteenth century, and has continued ever since.
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