The Legacy of the Timurids

Abstract

The term Timurid is generally understood to comprise all Timur's descendants who reigned or competed for power in western Turkistan, Iran and Afghanistan in the century demarcated by the deaths of Timur in 1405 and Sultan Husayn Bayqara of Herat in 1506. In political terms Timurid rulers distinguished themselves by their fractiousness and perennial internecine warfare, but they and their subjects still bequeathed a legacy that influenced a broad region of the eastern Islamic world and could be felt even in the west in the twentieth century. It would be more accurate, though, to say that there were multiple, discrete Timurid bequests. Apart from the universal acclaim for the cultural florescence that occurred in Husayn Bayqara's Herat (1469–1506), different dynasties and populations selected only those elements of Timurid civilization that suited their own political traditions and cultural preferences. There were three principal groups of Timurid legatees. These were: the Mughul emperors of India, true Timurids who enthusiastically embraced Timurid legitimacy and consciously presided over a Timurid renaissance; the Uzbek and Ottoman States, whose Turkic rulers and subjects revered Timurid cultural achievements while sharing ambiguous feelings about the figure of Timur himself; and the non-Timurid, culturally non-Turkic Safavid and modern Afghan states in which the Timurid legacy was, respectively, the most ephemeral and the most diffuse. More recently a small number of Westerners have laid claim to part of the Timurid heritage by proclaiming the most anomalous product of its culture, Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur's autobiographical memoir, to be a work informed by modern literary sensibility and psychological insight. Their enthusiasm is only the most recent example of the diverse ways in which a civilization's legacy may be transmuted by its heirs' divergent interests.