A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Timur and the Timurids 141
Central Asia, and about their special reincarnation in India, are needed.
Abu Said’s foreign policy, to use a modern term, brought him a victory
on his most important frontier, for in terms of legitimacy of rule, the
Timurids’ chief rivals were the Chaghatayids of Moghulistan, who
could at any time lay claim to Transoxania as their heirloom; and this is
exactly what Esen Buqa (1434–61) attempted to do.Abu Said stood his
ground on the battlefield, but he also had recourse to a political stratagem
by giving the Moghul khan’s elder brother Yunus, since his childhood
exiled to Shiraz, the means with which to drive Esen Buqa back
and recover the western part of Moghulistan.An alliance ensued
between Abu Said and Yunus Khan (1461–86) that was not only political
and military but also personal, for two of the Timurid’s three sons –
Ahmad and Umar Shaykh – married two of the Chaghatayid’s three
daughters, Mihr Nigar Khanim and Qutlugh Nigar Khanim (the third
daughter, Khub Nigar Khanim, was married to a member of the prestigious
Dughlat clan).The alliance even helped Abu Said to more
effectively block the recurrent raids of the nomadic Uzbeks from the
north across the Syr Darya into Transoxania.The Timurid sultan,
however, took a step – apparently encouraged by Khwaja Ahrar – that
was to be his undoing: he intervened in a war between the two
Turcoman dynasties of northwestern Iran and eastern Anatolia, the
Aqqoyunlu and Qaraqoyunlu, and in 1469 lost both the campaign and
his life.
If Abu Said’s nemesis was the Aqqoyunlu chieftain Uzun Hasan, the
Timurid dynasty succumbed a generation later to another Turkic conqueror,
the Uzbek khan Muhammad Shaybani.Despite his illustrious
Genghisid ancestry, this khan was linguistically a Kipchak Turk and culturally
a devout Muslim.He had spent a part of his youth in Bukhara as
a student of Islamic science and culture, at a time when the Naqshbandi
order of dervishes was in the ascendant throughout the Timurid realm.
Muhammad Shaybani, however, retained his attachment to another
Sufi order, that of the aforementioned Yasaviya.
The Yasaviya could be considered a sister order of the Naqshbandiya
for two reasons: both originated in Central Asia, and both traced their
roots back to the same Sufi master, the aforementioned Khwaja Yusuf
Hamadani.Khwaja Yusuf was a Persian, and, as his nisba suggests, came
from Hamadan.His early training took him to Baghdad, where he
studied the standard Islamic sciences, especially fiqh (jurisprudence)
under the renowned Shafii jurist Abu Ishaq al-Shirazi.He rose in stature
to the point of becoming a teacher himself, but then he abandoned these