BOOK REVIEW
Tamerlane through Central Asian eyes
The Legendary Biographies of Tamerlane: Islam and Heroic Apocrypha in Central Asia by Ron Sela
Reviewed by Dmitry Shlapentokh

This well-researched book focuses on what seems to be a very narrow subject - the written history of Timur (Tamerlane), ruler of a vast Central Asian empire in the late 14th century, with Samarkand as the capital.

Similar to other great rulers of the past, Timur became a legend after his death. Indeed, he exists in most discourses not as he really was but as narrators described him.

The bulk of the narrative consists of presentations of Timur in 14th-century Central Asian apocryphal stories about his life. Besides providing a translation/paraphrase of the 18th-century

 

texts, Sela provides extensive commentaries.

The narrative is divided into several chapters/segments, corresponding with Timur's life, his birth, maturity and achievements as well as his premonition about his demise and the fall of his dynasty to invading armies of Uzbeks who would finally dominate the heartland of Timur's empire. Upon the collapse of the USSR, it became the independent state of Uzbekistan.

While the image of Tamerlane has been quite popular in Asian and Western cultures, Sela chose narratives created in Central Asia in the 18th century for his book. These are apocryphal and are not particularly rarities - they can be found in many libraries and archives.

Despite the comparative accessibility of the sources, the 18th-century apocryphal stories basically had been ignored by researchers. As Sela implied, there were several reasons for this. Firstly, the manuscripts did not seem to provide any credible information about Timur as a real historical figure. Secondly, the narratives have little quality as literature. Finally, 18th-century Central Asia was not a time or place of interest, plainly because it was a time when the region entered an era of clear decline. At least, as Sela noted, this was the perception of quite a few travelers who visited Central Asia during this time.

Many 20th-century historians also shared this belief, albeit, as Sela noted, their approach to Central Asia at that time was conditioned by their political views, as was the case with the Soviet observers who followed Moscow's party line.

Still, Sela (and here his achievements as a historian are clear) has provided valuable information, possibly not about Timur himself or Central Asian culture, but about 18th-century Central Asian peoples' - taking this term holistically and ignoring the ethnic differences between people of this area.

The very misery of the region - the increasing harassment by the strongest powers, and its divisions - led Central Asians to look to the past where they found in Timur the symbol of their past greatness and a promise of future glory. It was this image of Timur - as the great Central Asian, and especially as an Uzbek (though as Sela rightfully notes, Timur had nothing to do with the Uzbeks who were, in fact, Timur's greatest enemy) that makes Tamerlane so important, not just in the 18th century but in recent history.

Sela elaborates on the role of Timur in 20th-century discourse, albeit briefly in his introduction. Timur's image had apparently emerged as a positive or, if one would speak in Soviet parlance, "progressive" figure in Soviet discourse. While early Soviet ideologists blasted Russian tsars as the reactionary representatives of landlords and capitalists, their view on Timur was much softer as he represented the minorities, the janissaries of the regime.

By the 1930s, Russian nationalism reasserted itself in the form of National Bolshevism. Tamerlane had survived critical scrutiny plainly because the people of Central Asia were legitimate ethnicities of the USSR, a part of Soviet people who embraced variety of ethnicities.

Timur's tomb and religious and public buildings were restored and his exceptional brutality, even judged by the criteria of his time, was overlooked and viewed as a part of the Oriental picturesqueness.

Still, he moved from the forefront of official Soviet narrative to the margins, so as not to question the paramount importance of Russian rulers and, consequently, ethnic Russians' central role in the family of Soviet nations.

The attempt to boost his popularity among some Uzbek intellectuals and, implicitly, the Uzbekistan party apparatus, was seen with apprehension by the Kremlin. And it was not surprising that when the USSR started to fall apart and the independence of Uzbekistan, as well as other republics of Central Asia, became increasingly possible, Tamerlane re-emerged not as a shadow of the great Russian rulers but as a great leader in his own right.

By that time, Timur had been finally "Uzbekistanized". And the very fact that the Uzbeks were Timur's major enemies and that he ruled a century before the Uzbek invasion of the heart of his empire was discarded. He even started to be propagandized as the greatest Uzbek ruler, who demonstrated not just the Uzbeks' glorious past as the rulers of one of the greatest empires in Asia, but their even greater future and pretention to dominate entire Central Asia and beyond.

One could assume that the cult of Timur was launched by no one but Islam Karimov, the future strong man of independent Uzbekistan. Karimov seems to have started to propagandize this image of Tamerlane early on when he was still the past chief of Uzbekistan as a part of the USSR. In 1990, on the eve of the collapse of the USSR, as Sela noted, the biography of Tamerlane was published. An unbelievable - at least from the Western perspective - number of copies, 200,000, and were sold for pennies. This would hardly be possible without a direct blessing "from above".

After the collapse of the USSR, Tamerlane became, finally, a defying figure in the Uzbeks' past and present and implicitly identified with Karimov - the tough and, if need be, brutal ruler but who provided Uzbekistan with stability and the drive for growth.

Consequently, a monument to Timur emerged in Tashkent; his name was given to streets and metro stations. Medals were created in his honor. Timur emerged not just as the way to assert Uzbeks' present and, even more so, future greatness but also a way to delineate Uzbeks from their Central Asian neighbors as well as from their recent masters: the Russians.

On one hand, Timur vanquished the Tajiks with whom present-day Uzbekistan has a rather tense relationship. On the other hand, Timur emerged as a man who crushed the Mongols/Tatars - the brutal devastating force, sort of analogous of al-Qaeda, of the Middle Ages - and saved Russians and Europeans from this menace. This reshaping of history is not uniquely Uzbeks' proclivity but can be seen all over the post-Soviet space and, of course, beyond, and reflects continuous political/geopolitical shifts. The present image of Timur is just one of these new images of the past, and their roots can be found down in the layers of historical narratives.

The Legendary Biographies of Tamerlane: Islam and Heroic Apocrypha in Central Asia by Ron Sela. (Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization).  Publisher: Cambridge University Press; April 29, 2011. ISBN-10: 0521517060 ISBN-13: 978-0521517065; Price US$85.00, 184 pages. 

Dmitry Shlapentokh, PhD, is associate professor of history, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Indiana University South Bend. He is author of East Against West: The First Encounter - The Life of Themistocles (2005).

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