A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

chapter eleven
The Shaybanids
Muhammad (ruled 1500–10), the Uzbek khan who dashed Babur’s lifetime
dream, accomplished more than that, for he put an end to the
Timurid dynasty and replaced it with his own, that of the Shaybanids
(1500–99) and thus carried out a restoration of Genghisid rule in
Central Asia.He was a grandson of Abulkhayr, whose Genghisid
lineage, as we have seen, went back to Genghis Khan’s grandson Shiban.
The nisba derived from the Mongol name was vocalized as Shaybani by
Muslim historians who preferred its unrelated Arabic approximation.By
1501 Muhammad Shaybani had crossed the Syr Darya, seized
Samarkand from Babur’s cousin Ali, and fought off all attempts by
Babur and other contenders to recover their Timurid heirloom; seven
years later, in 1507, he made a successful lunge for the other Timurid
prize, Herat, so that the greater part of Central Asia now passed under
the control of the nomadic Uzbeks from the Kipchak steppe.Up to a
point the change was only one of degree.The Shaybanids were Turks
like the Timurids, although they spoke a different dialect, Kipchak, in
contrast to the local Turki; both led a partly nomadic way of life and had
a tribal social structure, although again this must have been more pronounced
among the newcomers; both were Sunni Muslims, like the bulk
of the sedentary population of the area; and the Uzbeks had been
sufficiently exposed to Arabo-Persian Islamic culture to ensure a fundamental
continuity.The subsequent behavior of the Shaybanids does
indeed reveal more continuity than change, and it may be that our infatuation
with the intellectual brilliance of Timurid Herat and Samarkand,
and our fascination with such figures as Ulugh beg, Husayn Bayqara,
Mir Ali Shir Navai, Bihzad, or Babur, has tended to obscure this
continuity.
In other respects, however, changes were taking place.We have already
referred to the most dramatic and radical changes that were gathering
momentum elsewhere in the world.Although geographically remote,
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