The legendary biographies of Tamerlane: Islam and heroic apocrypha in central Asia.

• Author: Broadbridge, Anne

The Legendary Biographies of Tamerlane: Islam and Heroic Apocrypha in Central Asia. By RON SELA. Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization. New York: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2011. Pp. xvii + 164. $85.

The purpose of this concise volume by Ron Seta is to introduce to scholarly and lay audiences a large set of unknown or disregarded manuscripts of legendary biographies of the Transoxanian warlord Timur (d. 1405), composed in Persian prose and produced in Central Asia beginning in the eighteenth century. Sela based this monograph on nine unpublished manuscripts, which form a representative sample of a larger body of work. All the biographies share certain characteristics: they are long, sometimes reaching 1,000 pages (500 folios); their authors and copyists are unknown; and they do not seem to have been produced for wealthy patrons. Although some Turkic versions also exist. Sela did not use them for this study. Because the legendary biographies originated when and where they did--within Central Asia starting in the early eighteenth century--Sela is able to disprove the scholarly claim that Timur's legacy vanished from the region within a century of his death, surviving only in Mughal India, Safavid Iran, and the Ottoman empire until reappearing in Central Asia in the early twentieth century as a result of Soviet interest.

Sela describes the legendary biographies as heroic apocrypha--heroic, meaning their protagonist. Timiir, is a heroic figure: and apocrypha, meaning their material is largely legendary and imaginary, even though some of it draws explicitly from the canon composed by Timurid court historians and their successors. Sela hypothesizes that we might also view these works as Central Asian popular histories, given the authors' departures from the official record. But thus far modern historians have largely ignored the legendary biographies because of their "folkloric and fantastic" elements. Similarly, literature scholars, unable to classify the biographies neatly as epics, oral history, or poetry, despite elements of each within the texts, have labeled the biographies unsophisticated and unworthy of attention.

So, if historians disregard them and literature scholars sneer at them, why should we pay attention to them? Sela's answer hinges on the crucial detail that these works appear to have been wildly popular. As evidence he points to the dozens of manuscripts created from the early eighteenth century down to the twentieth, many...