DAWN The Review, Nov 9-15, 2000
Tamerlane
When he left Delhi in 1398, it
was a city of the dead. The entire male population had been
slaughtered, and women and children taken captive. In the feast
of victory, those women were stripped naked and forced to serve
wine and food to their captors, according to the Tatar custom.
Then they were raped.
As the armies moved on, they left
behind tall pillars of severed human heads, another trademark
of his conquests. Some two hundred craftsmen were allowed to
live because the conqueror had other designs on them. When
he returned to his capital, Samarkand, he thanked God for the
victory and, equally importantly, the wealth of India. The Indian
craftsmen were ordered to construct a replica of the Grand Mosque
of Delhi. When the mosque was completed, some of the builders
were rewarded for their service to God while others were beheaded
for negligence.
This is just one chapter from
the simple, brutal and unexplainable life of Amir Taimur, commonly
known as Tamerlane, who shook the world in the later half of
the fifteenth century. His enemies hated him, and that doesn't
surprise us. What is surprising, however, is the fact that he
was also remembered with love and respect. Despite his inhuman
barbarity, he had seeds that germinated later into the splendor
of the Mughal India, and such cultural miracles as Taj Mahal.
Through a perverse irony of history, he was the founder of the
civilization that gave us Ghalib!
Taimur started with the simplest
human motive: to survive. He belonged to the Turkish Barlas
tribe, long past its glory in 1335 when Taimur was born somewhere
north of Balkh. His father, once a pagan, had turned to Islam
and became a mystic. Taimur was forced to find his own means
of survival, and this he did well.
As a young man, he was recognized
for bravery and shrewdness. He was known, not only for jumping
into great dangers in the battlefield, but also for coming out
of them alive, and always with the severed head of his enemy.
Rising to the position of a notable, he married Oljai, a descendant
of Genghis Khan, and started his long struggle for power that
ended in 1369 after he killed Oljai's brother Husain. A grand
council of the tribes recognized him as the ruler of Balkh.
Taimur was thirty-four by that
time and had lost his wife, whom he dearly loved. Also, a wound
in his foot had made him slightly crippled; hence, the derogatory
nickname among his enemies: Taimure Lang, or Tamerlane. By the
time Taimur came to power, he had become a man of few words,
spending most of his spare time playing chess -- usually alone.
It was thought that he even planned his war strategies on a
giant board of chess with over 120 squares and more than 60
pieces.
His first priority was, of course,
to find revenue for his kingdom. The Tatars knew trade and agriculture,
as they had seen foreign traders coming to their cities and
peasants working in the fields. But such professions weren't
fit for a Tatar. He had to earn by the sword. Taking something
wasn't robbery if one could also kill the victim. Then it was
clear that the winner was more powerful than the previous owner
was and therefore had a right to possess what he had taken.
With this simple philosophy in mind, Taimur set out rebuilding
his empire.
He chose Samarkand as his capital
and furnished it with riches taken from the tribes of Southern
Russia. During one such march, his army crossed over into the
Arctic Circle where nights became extremely long. Worried about
his daily prayers, Taimur consulted the religious scholars whom
he always carried with him. They gave a verdict for making suitable
changes in the prayer timings. They didn't dare remind him that
the regular orgies committed during the feasts of victory were
against the Islamic code of mercy.
Between the years 1386 and 1400,
Taimur had attacked Persia twice, dismantled the Muslim rule
in India, and raised to dust the cities of Isfahan, Halb, Damascus
and Baghdad -- all cultural centers of medieval Islam. It is
said that in Isfahan he gave orders that each of his soldiers
must bring at least one severed head of an Iranian. Some seventy
thousand Iranians were killed on the spot, and many soldiers
had to "purchase" Iranian heads from their colleagues
in order to save their own!
Taimur's role model was Genghis
Khan, the Mongol barbarian who had lived two centuries ago.
Muslim historians, often deceived by the fact that Taimur claimed
to be a Muslim, have overlooked that he completed the business
left unfinished by Genghis and his grandson Halaku: the destruction
of the Muslim culture. Baghdad had revived after Halaku's invasion
of 1258, but it never became a city of culture after Taimur
ravaged it in 1401. In Damascus, the architectural monuments
dating back to the early days of the Muslim history were burnt
down. It is said that the dome of the Grand Mosque of Damascus
caught Taimur's fancy as it was coming down in flames. Back
in Samarkand, he copied it on several buildings and that's how
it was perpetuated not only in Russia, but also found its greatest
replica in the Mughal India, in Taj Mahal.
Yet Taimur could use the pretext
of religion to wage war against his Muslim enemies. For instance,
when he was about to invade India, he declared that the Tughlaq
rulers of that country were tolerant to Hinduism and therefore
it was obligatory on Taimur's army to punish them. What he achieved
in the two years of his Indian adventure was a holocaust of
the Indian population in Northern India, irrespective of religion.
Islam was a stranger in the land of Taimur, and Taimur spent
a lifetime figuring out what purpose religion could have in
one's life. Most probably he failed. The warriors in the pagan
days used to carry their idols to the battlefield for power
over enemies. After victory, the warriors would offer sacrifices
to those idols and gifts to the priests. Taimur built mosques
and granted allowances to the ulema.
Taimur also had an ability to
appreciate beauty and refinement, and this tendency developed
in him unhampered by his savage nature. It is said that when
he came upon Shiraz he summoned the legendary Persian poet Hafiz
and questioned him about his famous couplet: Agar aan Turk-e-Shirazi
badast arad dil-e-maa ra/ Bakhal-e-Hinduash bakhsham, Samarakand-e-Bukhara
ra. (If my heart could lay its hand upon that Turk from
Shiraz, I would give away Samarkand and Bukhara over his dark
mole!). "I have spent the wealth of nations to beautify
Smarkand," Taimur said angrily. "How dare you say
YOU will give it away over some harlot of Shiraz!" Hafiz
replied with his proverbial wit, "It is due to such extravagance
that I have to live in abject poverty." Taimur appreciated
the poet's reply and sent him away with gifts. He brought other
poets and men of art from Persia to live in Samarkand and enrich
the culture.
There is a less reliable tradition
that in Damascus, Taimur held discourse with the famous historian
and sociologist Ibne Khuldun. If that ever happened, one wonders
if the scholar had a chance to share with the conqueror his
famous theory about the fate of dynasties. Khuldun had propounded
that the glory of a dynasty seldom lasted beyond four generations.
The first generation is inclined towards conquest, the second
towards administration. The third generation, being free from
the necessity to conquer or administer, is left with the pleasurable
task of spending the wealth of its ancestors on cultural pursuits.
Consequently, by the fourth generation, a dynasty has usually
spent its wealth as well as human energy. Hence, the downfall
of each royal house is embedded in the very process of its rising.
According to Khuldun, it was a natural phenomenon and couldn't
be avoided. If so, then the House of Taimur was going to prove
him wrong.
Taimur's most deadly battle was
fought against the Ottoman ruler Bayazid. It started with a
quarrel over some border territory. Bayazid, who had started
a wave of conquest over the Christian Europe, didn't pay much
heed to the barbarian and when Taimur persisted he wrote a derogatory
reply, which Taimur's historians considered too offensive to
copy. Some think that the Ottoman had challenged Taimur's virility
while others suspect that he had threatened to rape Taimur's
wife (Sirai Khanum, whom Taimur had married after killing her
husband, the brother of Oljai). Whatever may be the case, Taimur
defeated the Ottoman ruler at the Battle of Angura and captured
all the women of his harem, including Bayazid's favourite wife
Despina. She had to serve as a naked waitress while Bayazid
was forced to watch this as a "guest" in the feast
of victory. Despina was later returned to Bayazid, who died
of grief soon afterwards. Ottomans couldn't recover from this
trauma, and the kings of that dynasty never married again, so
that no future enemy could humiliate an "Ottoman queen."
The heirs to the Ottoman throne were begotten from slave girls.
Taimur could invade Europe after
the defeat of Bayazid, but he stopped. Maybe he was pleased
with the Christian kings who had congratulated him on his victory
over the Ottoman giant. Or maybe he wasn't interested in Europe
because Genghis Khan had never paid attention to that territory.
Whatever maybe the reason, he turned instead to China and, just
as his armies were about to set their teeth into the Great Wall,
Taimur died at the age of seventy on 9 February, 1405.
The House of Taimur had its first
brush with civil war soon after his death. Taimur had nominated
his grandson Pir Muhammad as successor. Pir was the son of Taimur's
favourite son Jehangir, now dead for a long time, but Taimur's
will was soon overruled by many generals who asserted their
tribal right to choose their own chief from the house of the
dead lord. Pir was away in India, and could not come home before
the defecting generals had enthroned another grandson of Taimur
in Samarkand. This was Khalil, who was begotten when Taimur's
spoilt son Meeran Shah raped Jehangir's widow, the Princess
Khanzadeh.
Pir came back, but lost his battle.
Khalil married a dancing girl and commenced a series of orgies
that enraged the generals. They threw him into prison while
his queen was subjected to public humiliation -- the soldiers'
revenge upon a dancing girl for daring to marry a prince!
The last remaining choice was
Shahrukh, a peace-loving son whom Taimur used to hold dear,
but didn't think him capable of running an empire. Shahrukh
turned out an excellent ruler. He was known for avoiding warfare
as far as possible, but also proved an effective general if
war was forced upon him. His scholarly traits were magnified
in his son Ulugh Beg, who became famous as the outstanding intellectual
of his day. Accomplished in mathematics, astronomy and poetry,
Ulugh Beg built an observatory in Samarkand and compiled an
ephemeris that was to remain the standard instrument for casting
horoscopes for more than a century.
Taimur cannot be compared with
Alexander, Caesar or Napoleon. He can best be compared with
a big earthquake — an act of nature working on a scale
larger than humanly possible and without motives that can be
completely understood in terms of human ambition. When he came,
Asia was a graceful cradle of many civilizations. When he left,
it was rubble, but from this debris was to spring up a world,
all anew. The credit for the birth of that world doesn't go
to Taimur. It goes to the human courage of starting over again
after every earthquake, holocaust or Tamerlane.
