taken from

—Introduction —

The original Persian manuscript memoirs of Amir Timour, Manam Timour-e Jahan Gusha, was in possession of the 17th Century Yemenite Ottoman ruler Ja’fer. After Ja’fer’s death in 1610, the manuscript was passed down to his descendants. Sometime thereafter, a scribe transcribed the manuscript and brought the copy with him to India.

The manuscript stayed in India until an English officer got hold of it and took it with him to England, although it is unclear whether it had been transcribed once more or whether the “original” transcribed copy was taken. In any case, the manuscript found its way to Oxford University.

In the 1960’s, a French scholar by the name of Marsal Bryun who was fluent in Arabic as well as in French, German, and English and who had done extensive research about Amir Timour in all four languages, translated the work into French. Because the original Persian autobiography was never published, an Iranian scholar by the name of Zabi’ullah Mansuri then translated the work back into Persian and had it published in the early 1960’s.

I was first exposed to the Persian Manam Timour-e Jahan Gusha when I picked up an old and torn copy of it lying around the house during my freshman year of college. At the time, I was simply trying to get my mind off the dry requirements of academia. As I progressed through the chapters, though, I found the book extremely exciting and inviting, so much so that I used it as a mental warp zone that would take me back to the simplicities and sophistications of the centuries past.

Amir Timour wrote his memoirs late in life. The autobiography begins from a time just prior to his birth and continues up until his last conquest mission, when he set out to conquer China but suffered a stroke on the way. (He died shortly thereafter.) The account is well written and is, by and large, coherent, and the “natural progression” of the unfolding of the events gives the reader a sense of excitement that makes him want to keep turning the page. During the time I was reading the Persian, I tried to discuss the contents of the book with my peers to gain different points of view, but the discussions usually ended up as one-sided debriefings of the chapters, as none of my peers—not even those to whom English was a second language to Persian—were able to read Persian. This prompted me to decide that I had to translate the book into English so that anyone who was interested in reading this work was not devoid of it just because he was unable to read Persian. Unfortunately, however, I didn’t get started on the translation until well after I graduated from college.

To many, the name Amir Timour, or Tamerlane, as he is known in the West, brings to mind visions of a cruel and ruthless conqueror who massacred tens of thousands of people at will, burned their towns and villages, and conquered their lands, leaving behind mass destruction. Looking back at history, there is no doubt that this image is a true image of the ruler. But it is not the only image that should define the name Amir Timour. Although the attributes of wrath probably well define the man as a whole, other facets to his personality paint him as an extraordinarily complex human being who helped shape the future of an entire region, if not the world.

Amir Timour was a learned man who was extremely well-taught and well-read, enabling him to contend intellectually with the highest-ranking scholars of his time. In fact, according to his account, he had the entire Koran memorized at an early age, which caused him to be given the title Hafiz al-Qur’an. He was also well-versed in Koranic exegesis, which was a credit to the teachers and masters of his time. He possessed an incredibly powerful memory, which enabled him to absorb and remember things at a remarkable pace. His powerful memory helped him early in life, when he was able to quickly remember things taught in school, making him excel over his peers. Later in life, when Amir Timour was a military commander, his memory proved to be an asset with such things, for example, as remembering the full name of each and every one of his officers, which quickly earned him their respect.

As the reader reads through these memoirs, he will quickly realize that Amir Timour also possessed an enormous degree of willpower. Perhaps this is why, as Harold Lamb points out, “In everything he undertook he was successful”. In this age of technological advances and super-fast modes of transportation such as planes, trains, and automobiles, it might be difficult to ponder the degree of willpower required to conquer half the world while having only a horse and a spare for transportation, a tent and felt for shelter from the elements, and a sword and spear as your weapons of war.

Through this strong sense of willpower, Amir Timour was able to defeat the strongest rulers of his time and vanquish the most formidable fortresses of his day. He was also able to come out victorious over a series of life-threatening situations such as contracting the plague, having cholera, and getting bitten by a cobra, not to mention the many injuries he sustained during his many battles, one of which maimed his right hand and another of which left him limping on his left leg for the rest of his life, thereby earning him the slang name Timour-e Lang, which was transformed into the better-known name Tamerlane.

As Zabi’ullah Mansuri points out in his introduction to Amir Timour’s autobiography, anyone reading the memoirs will have to come to his own conclusions about the man as a whole. But one thing is clear: Anyone reading the memoirs will be able to see for himself that, aside from the negative attributes of wrath that history (and the memoirs itself) has painted Amir Timour as having possessed, he also exhibits positive qualities of willpower, knowledge, discipline, focus, strength, and courage that define his personality.

In the past few decades—certainly in the past two—scores of specialized books have been published on self-motivation and self-improvement with respect to topics ranging from improving one’s health, to the importance of diet, to the necessities of exercise, on achieving self-discipline and focus, on overcoming fear, on finding courage, on creating success, and so on. By reading Amir Timour’s memoirs, we can see how all these qualities come together in his personality, ultimately defining his success. So, aside from having an historical significance, the memoirs could be read as a 600-year-old “motivational” text that the reader can use to make positive changes in his or her life.

As a conqueror, Amir Timour’s passion in life was conquest; thus, he used the qualities mentioned above to achieve his goals. It has already been mentioned that he was well-read, saw great importance in gaining knowledge, and constantly surrounded himself with scholars, but early in life, he also realized that to achieve one’s goals, one must put laziness aside and get the body to work through rigorous exercise. Throughout his memoirs, Amir Timour builds a recurring theme that correlates success with physical strength, exercise, focus, and foresight. He also looks down on comfort, laziness, and pleasure-seeking and directly correlates them with failure.

Discipline is another quality that helped propel Amir Timour through many battles and won him swift victories early in his conquest campaigns. Ironically, however, these swift victories early on in his life got the better of him, and as a young man of thirty-three, he was overwhelmed by his own quick success and lost focus. For the next seven years, as he himself admits, he lost discipline and gave up warfare practice and exercise. Instead, he busied himself with pleasure-seeking until he reached a turning point in his life at the age of forty, when he realized that the previous seven years of his life had been in contradiction to the principles he had set out for himself as a conqueror. As he recounts in his memoirs, the moment he got to the realization that he was heading in the wrong direction with respect to his life, he made an instantaneous decision to set himself back on the right track. After the realization that his life had taken a wrong turn, he made a vow with himself and with God to immediately abandon that lifestyle, never to return to it again. He made an immediate decision to abandon all obstacles on his path to success—namely, comfort, pleasure-seeking, laziness, and physical atrophy. The decision to leave a life of pure pleasure for a life of pure principle marked a major turning point in Amir Timour’s life. He realized that to make his decision a lasting one, full of conviction and resoluteness, he needed to give the decision a symbolic manifestation. Because, during those seven years when his life had taken a wrong turn, he had spent most of his time in the comforts of the city, Amir Timour correlated city life with comfort, pleasure, laziness, and physical frailness and likened the rugged life of the wilderness to discipline, achievement, and strength. To distance himself from those negative attributes, he therefore left the city behind and headed to the wilderness to set up camp and make it his permanent home.

This decision marks a turning point in Amir Timour’s life because, by leaving the city for the wilderness, he symbolically turned his back on the negative attributes that he associated with it that caused him to sway from his principles in life. This symbolic gesture, along with an enormous degree of courage, played an important role in helping Amir Timour to not go back on his promise to keep his discipline in check for the rest of his life.

The rough and rugged life of the wilderness soon enabled Amir Timour to bring his physical strength back to a level expected of one who aspires to be world conqueror. Along with a regimen of rigorous exercise and warfare practice, Amir Timour and his soldiers kept firm to a strict diet of rice and yogurt, especially during deployments. As a warrior constantly on the battlefield, Amir Timour realized that diet had an effect on his level of performance on the battlefield and on his level of mental alertness in the encampment during nights leading up to major campaigns. He looked down on overeating and discouraged it and frowned on drinking alcohol. In fact, he attributes the downfall of most of the rulers in history to the same qualities that he himself had been plagued with during those seven years—namely laziness, pleasure-seeking, and overeating.

In short, by reading the memoirs of Amir Timour, the reader will learn that there is a great deal more to the man known as Tamerlane than just another cruel and ruthless ruler. By reading this account, the reader will pick up on the sense of motivation, courage, strength, and dedication that he had for his passion to become world conqueror and the forces of his personality that collectively gave him the drive to achieve his goals in life without any notable setbacks. It is evident from the account that Amir Timour was aware of his own unique and remarkable capacity as a leader early in life, which gave him the vision of what he wanted to accomplish in the world. His vision and accomplishments planted the seed that gave fruit in the form of the culturally rich Mogul Dynasty that reigned, undisputed, over Transoxiana and India for the next several hundred years after Amir Timour’s passing. In the words of Harold Lamb,

He was part of no dynasty—he founded one; he was not, like Attila, one of the barbarians who harried Rome—out there in the limbo of things he built a Rome of his own in the desert. He made a throne for himself, but he spent most of his years in the saddle of a horse. And when he built he used no previous pattern of architecture; he made a new one according to his own inclination, out of cliffs and mountain peaks and a solitary dome that he saw in Damascus before he burned that city. This swelling dome of Tamerlane’s fancy has become the motif of Russian design, and is the crown of the Taj Mahal. And the Taj Mahal was built by one of the Moghuls—Tamerlane’s great grandchildren.3

Babur Rashidzada
Dix Hills, NY
Autumn 2002