In a recent publication of great interest M. Zakeri hasreopened the question of the identity of the Abnā'who appear in the early 'Abbāsid army. Once assumedto be the physical descendants of the 'Abbasidcaliphs, or the 'Abbāsids and their adoptive membersand clients, the abnā'al-dawla/al-da'wa/al-shī'a were shown byAyalon in 1964 to be “in all probability, thedescendants of the Khurāsānīs who brought the'Abbāsids to the throne”. This has been generallyaccepted. In Zakeri's opinion, however, the Abnā'were not “Sons of the Revolution”, but rather sonsof Sāsānid horsemen (asbārān):their ancestors had been members of the lowernobility that furnished the cavalry of the Sāsānidempire after Khusraw I's reforms. In Zakeri'sopinion the revolutionary troops consisted primarilyof such recruits, and so the conventional view is inone sense quite correct: the Abnā' did indeed end upas sons of revolutionaries. But the conventionalview, according to him, obscures the fact that theAbnā' belonged to a distinct social group: it was byallying themselves with Sāsānidasbārān that the ‘Abbāsids cameto power.

Temür has been many things to many people. He was nomadand city-builder, Turk and promoter of Persianculture, restorer of the Mongol order and warriorfor the spread of Islam. One thing he was to all: aconqueror of unequalled scope, able to subdue boththe vast areas of nomad power to the north and thecentres of agrarian Islamic culture to the south.The history of his successors was one of increasingpolitical fragmentation and economic stress. Yetthey too won fame, as patrons over a period ofbrilliant cultural achievement in Persian andTurkic. Temür's career raises a number of questions.Why did he find it necessary to pile conquest uponconquest, each more ambitious than the last? Havingconceived dreams of dominion, where did he get thepower and money to fulfill them? When he died, whatlegacy did Temür leave to his successors and to theworld which they tried to control? Finally, what wasthis world of Turk and Persian, and where did Temürand the Timurids belong within it?

The term Timurid is generally understood to compriseall Timur's descendants who reigned or competed forpower in western Turkistan, Iran and Afghanistan inthe century demarcated by the deaths of Timur in1405 and Sultan Husayn Bayqara of Herat in 1506. Inpolitical terms Timurid rulers distinguishedthemselves by their fractiousness and perennialinternecine warfare, but they and their subjectsstill bequeathed a legacy that influenced a broadregion of the eastern Islamic world and could befelt even in the west in the twentieth century. Itwould be more accurate, though, to say that therewere multiple, discrete Timurid bequests. Apart fromthe universal acclaim for the cultural florescencethat occurred in Husayn Bayqara's Herat (1469–1506),different dynasties and populations selected onlythose elements of Timurid civilization that suitedtheir own political traditions and culturalpreferences. There were three principal groups ofTimurid legatees. These were: the Mughul emperors ofIndia, true Timurids who enthusiastically embracedTimurid legitimacy and consciously presided over aTimurid renaissance; the Uzbek and Ottoman States,whose Turkic rulers and subjects revered Timuridcultural achievements while sharing ambiguousfeelings about the figure of Timur himself; and thenon-Timurid, culturally non-Turkic Safavid andmodern Afghan states in which the Timurid legacywas, respectively, the most ephemeral and the mostdiffuse. More recently a small number of Westernershave laid claim to part of the Timurid heritage byproclaiming the most anomalous product of itsculture, Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur'sautobiographical memoir, to be a work informed bymodern literary sensibility and psychologicalinsight. Their enthusiasm is only the most recentexample of the diverse ways in which acivilization's legacy may be transmuted by itsheirs' divergent interests.

The “foreignness” of Islam in India is a familiar themein the rhetoric of contemporary-Hindufundamentalism. The numerical majority of Hindus inIndia is taken to mean that the nation-state oughtto be founded on ideals and institutions defined asauthentically “Hindu”, that India is the land of theHindus, and that it must be ruled only by them. Thisideology evidently leaves little room fornon-Hindus, but especially so for Muslims, who ruledlarge parts of the Indian subcontinent for severalcenturies and who still constitute a sizeableminority in India. It is argued, for instance, thatas the ruling elite in India, Muslims not onlyexploited the Hindus, they never even thought ofthemselves as “really” Indian and should notconsequently be considered as such. For all thecentrality of the Muslim Other to constructions ofHindu fundamentalism, the appeal and success of thelatter is predicated on the systematic exclusion, ifnot the expulsion, of Muslims from the Hindunation-state.