More Weird History Books read in 2024

My Obsession With Central Asia

For reasons I can’t quite explain, over the past couple of years I have developed an interest in Central Asia—basically where modern Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, all the “stans” are. Part of my interest is due to the region’s obvious historical importance as the hinge around which human history revolved (at least until the establishment of transoceanic travel in the 15th and 16th century), and part due to my own lack of familiarity with that part of the world—its mystery appealed to me.

Sometime last year, I became interested in the 14th century Turco-Mongolian conqueror, Timur (better known in the West as Tamerlane). My interest in him was largely because he was so consequential to history but seemed virtually unknown to contemporary America. Unknown to me at least.

I started trying to learn more about him through the easiest means possible—YouTube videos. Because Timur’s life was one long military campaign, his many battles were described in detail in various military history videos (a vast genre on YouTube). It was via watching these videos that I discovered the biography of Timur I read at the beginning of the 2024.

Tamerlane: The Life of the Great Amir by Ahmad Ibn Arabshah (translated by J. H. Sanders) was written about 30 years after the conqueror’s death in 1405. Ahmad Ibn Arabshah had the terrible luck to be a child in Damascus when the city was sacked and plundered by Timur. He was 12 in 1401, and he, his mother and sister were captured by Timur’s army and brought to Samarkand. In the introduction, Robert McChesney suggests that his mother and sister were taken as sexual servants by Timur’s army. Ibn Arabshah held a grudge. Timur died in 1405, and 30 years later, Ibn Arabshah got a small measure of revenge. He wrote a biography of the conqueror and didn’t hold back.

Modern readers will find Ibn Arabshah’s version of a history quite different from what we are used to. Modern historians rarely insert poems into the text (unless they are quoting something). Ibn Arabshah’s hatred of Timur couldn’t be expressed in mere prose.

Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane by S. Frederick Starr. If we in the West know anything about the intellectual history of the Muslim world, we know about a period called the Islamic Golden Age. But most of those Muslim scholars were not Arabs—they were Persians. Starr essentially provides short biographies of the various thinkers and scientists of the various Islamic dynasties that ruled over the areas of Iran, Afghanistan, etc. Some were Arabic, but the Arabs who ruled the Abbasid Caliphate knew they couldn’t rule without a cadre of well-educated Persians. The political history of Central Asia is no less complicated than the history of Europe, but by writing about the rise of various intellectual currents within the Islamic world of the time, the reader absorbs some of the political history at the same time. Writing about the Arab invasion of Iran in the 7th century, Starr expresses regrets at the actions of the Arab general Qutayba, who “succeeded in wiping out an entire literature in the Khwarazmian language, including works on astronomy, history, mathematics, genealogy, and literature. “ Qutayba directed his jihad especially against Zoroastrians, murdering “various writers from this faith” and obliterating “much of the corpus of Zoroastrian theology and letters, a tragic loss to civilization.”

But Khwarazmia (basically the northeastern side of modern Iran) would go on to produce some of the most brilliant scientists in history, including Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, from whom the West received Arabic numerals and the word “algorithm”, but more important were his solutions to linear and quadratic equations.

Among the Central Asian philosophers and scientists were Abu Rayhan al-Biruni and Ibn Sina (known in the West as Avicenna). These two men lived in the Samanid Empire (more-or-less northeastern Iran, Uzbekistan and parts of Afghanistan) and corresponded with one another over two years (998-999) over questions of philosophy and science. The questions were pretty basic—can a vacuum exist? How does heat from the sun reach the Earth? Do other heavenly bodies have gravity, or just the Earth? Many of the questions dealt with Aristotle’s philosophy, which Ibn Sina had translated from Greek. Biruni and Ibn Sina rejected the intrusion into their scientific discussion of metaphysics. This was a dangerous area—it suggested that physical laws governing heat, light, gravity, etc., did not come from God.

Buruni also wrote a history of the world, The Chronology of Ancient Nations, in which he took the various available kings lists and stories from various nations of the Earth and rationalized the time scales. It’s one thing to know that Augustus was emperor of Rome for 41 years and that Kumaragupta I ruled the Gupta empire for 40 years. But when did they rule relative to one another? (I can easily glance at my Timeline of World History poster and see that Kumaragupta I was later than Augustus. But Biruni had to construct his own timeline of world history.) Biruni was the first historian to attempt to figure this out for the countries of the known world in his time (late 900s and early 1000s).

But more important than Starr’s biographies of Central Asian thinkers and artists is his description of intellectual currents that swept over the Islamic medieval world. The rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman literature was just as important for Baghdad as it was for Florence. The Islamic world loved philosophy (a word that in Arabic became “falsafa”). Starr also explains the rise of Shi-ism and the Sunni disciplines. And he describes a certain ethnic tension. First the Arabs invade Iran and conquer it, snuffing out their pre-Islamic culture almost completely. Then for a few hundred years, the Persians claw back their cultural identity, only to be conquered again over and over by Turkish peoples. Starr particularly fingers Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni for being the author of the ongoing and especially bloody means of conquest that would become the hallmark of Turkic invaders for centuries—the Seljuks, Tamerlane, Babur, etc. But the medieval Turkic people had their writers and intellectuals as well.

All this philosophy and science was going to lead lead to a backlash, which came in the form of al-Ghazali, a man from Tus (also in Northeastern Iran). He was a skilled practitioner of formal logic, but a crisis of faith turned him into a Sufi, who was directly and mystically in communion with God. He made very subtle attacks on rationalists like Ibn Sina and Biruni, and made arguments that science bred rationalism that leads to skepticism and atheism, in a book with the awesome title Incoherence of the Philosophers which became a best-seller in the decades after it was written. Starr posits that al-Ghazali’s convincing arguments caused a full retreat of free inquiry.

Not that Central Asian culture completely died out. It still had great scientists like Omar Khayyam, as well as great poets like Rumi and Attar. But Attar’s bloody end reminds us the killing blow that the Mongols made on Central Asian culture. (And on 60 million human lives.) And Central Asia never recovered intellectually. Although there were great visual artists in the Timurid times (15th century), there were few good scientists and no philosophers even approaching the level of an Ibn Sina. Starr lays out a bunch of theories as to why this enlightenment era came to an end: the popularity of al-Ghazali’s Incoherence of the Philosophers, the rise of Sufism and its mystical mind-set, the vast destructive power of the Mongols (who pushed much of the Islamic world’s intellectual power westwards, to Spain and Cairo).

Reading this book was for me like discovering that there had been a second earlier but somehow unknown Renaissance. One that was as intellectually vibrant as the one in Europe a few centuries later, but also as personally intertwined—human and juicy—and surprisingly political (even for the intellectuals, who were rarely permitted the quiet luxury of an ivory tower). The leaders of some of these Central Asian dynasties (who were the patrons for all these scientists and poets) were just as freaky as the freakiest Renaissance Popes.

Timur and the Princely Vision by Thomas W. Lentz and Glenn D. Lowry is an elaborate museum catalog detailing the visual arts of the various Timurid rulers. The Timurids were a relatively short-lived dynasty founded by the Turco-Mongolian warlord Timur. Considering the brutal beginning of this dynasty, its ruling class were surprisingly a bunch of art connoisseurs. Timur himself spent virtually his entire life on campaign, but when he did sponsor artworks, they were all about imperial grandeur—massive architectural projects, such as the Shrine of Ahmad Yasavi.

The Shrine of Ahmad Yasavi, in Yasi, Turkestan, built c. 1397

Unusually for a lavish catalog for an art exhibit, they spend considerable space deriding Timur’s bad taste:

Timur’s own artistic interests (as determined from the objects that have survived) were typically nouveau riche, ostentatious and obvious, especially when considered with the refined sensibility of his descendants.

That should give you an idea of the focus of this exhibit. After Timur died attempting to invade China, the primary artistic focus switched from monumental architecture to workshops for producing very delicate, fine artworks. These workshops were called kitabkhanas, and they principally existed to produce books—elaborate illuminated manuscripts. It was these books that contained the Persian miniatures that so characterize Islamic visual art from about the time of the Mongols to the introduction of mechanical printing.

If you are a medieval potentate, and you want some gorgeous artworks to help legitimize your tyranny, I can understand producing art that you can show off to a large number of people—architecture, sculptural monuments, even jewel-encrusted thrones and crowns. But somehow, books served that purpose. “Timur was keenly aware of the importance of books for legitimizing his rule.” But the contents of a book are different from the physical book itself. How does a hand-made luxury object, packed with original paintings and calligraphy, legitimize one’s rule beyond the fact that only a powerful and rich emir could afford to commission such a work?

Nonetheless, the Timurid rulers felt obligated to support the production of artworks. “Artistic patronage was not perceived as a subsidiary preoccupation but as an integral component of rule. The impression of a sophisticated cultural veneer conveyed by poets or by works of art generated considerable prestige, which among rival courts in the eastern Islamic world eventually translated into political power.” This suggests one reason for preferring the production of illuminated manuscripts over vast architectural projects—a book can be given by one potentate to another, as Shah Tahmasp (who came after the Timurids) did when he gave an illuminated Shahnameh to Ottoman Sultan Selim II on the occasion of Selim’s coronation. You can’t do that with architecture.

Part of the reason that Timur was able to build such elaborate architectural monuments was that he kidnapped artists and craftsmen from all over the Islamic world to work for him as slaves in Samarkand. Timur’s grandson, Ulugh-Beg liberated them in 1411, which lead to a dispersion of artistic talent all over the Timurid realms. But the primary artistic production was in kitabkhanas, especially the one set up in Herat. (When I think of the cultural void that is modern Afghanistan, where even music is banned, the rich cultural history of Herat feels like a lost miracle.)

This volume is absolutely packed with images painted to illustrate various Persian poetic epics, as well as Korans and scientific texts. The authors get deeply into how a kitabkhana functioned. For example, they give examples of how a standard image would be reused.

On the left is an image of Bahram Gur slaying a dragon from the Khamsa by Nizami, a 12th century Persian poet, produced around 1490. On the right is the same scene from about 1494. Once an artist got just the right “pose”, it would be reused.

Once the kitabkhana system of book production was well-established, it was duplicated all over the various Central Asian empires, like the Safavids (Iranians who came after the Timurids), the Moghuls, and the Ottomans. This artform continued until printed books made the hand-production of books an obsolete and pointless activity. At that point, producing and owning elaborate hand-made books was no longer a marker of imperial power. These masterpieces were sliced up and dispersed among the various museums of colonizing Western powers. That’s how we show imperial power—by stealing other people’s art.

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