Daily Times

The decision of Bollywood stars Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor to name their son Taimur led to a severe backlash on social media by right-wing Indian nationalists. Why name a child after the 14th-century mass murderer who butchered Indians, they asked. The good old Goodwin’s Law came into play. Taimur is to India what Hitler is to Israel, cried one RSS Poster boy on Twitter.

That Taimur was an extraordinarily brutal conqueror, even by the standards of his time, is not in dispute. So was Genghis Khan — even more so — but I have yet to hear of any countries breaking off their ties with the Republic of Mongolia for honouring him as their hero and indeed as the father of the Mongols. The comparison with Adolf Hitler is misplaced, however. Hitler’s brutality, particularly in respect to the Jews, is a recent memory and not the story of a warlord from the 14th century. Nor is Hitler going ever to be remembered in the same league as Genghis Khan or Taimur because unlike Hitler, legacy of both Genghis Khan and Taimur persevered leading to great Empires that significantly altered the course of history.

Hitler, by comparison, was a passing phenomenon. He was defeated and disavowed within his lifetime. His name became a curse in his own country. The German state that emerged from the ashes of his spectacular defeat made every effort to distance itself from the decade and a half long Nazi rule. In the long and proud German history, he is seen as an aberration. What explains the rise and fall of Nazis in Germany in such a short span of time is the fact that Nazi ideas, especially of racial superiority and of the use of gas chambers to exterminate six million Jews, were utterly out of place and pace with the march of humanity.

Not so the case with Genghis Khan or Taimur in their times. Building minarets out of skulls was the favourite pastime of any invading horde in the 13th, 14th and 15th century, Central Asia. This is just the kind of world it was back then. Warfare was itself a highly gory enterprise. Think Game of Thrones and multiply it by ten. Taimur just happened to be the greatest warrior of his time, just as Genghis Khan was before him. Brutality was — like politics is today — the art of the possible.

So why then would a history buff like Saif Ali Khan choose the name Taimur? Part of this, one would imagine, has to do with the influence of the subcontinent’s Mughal past, especially on the Muslim aristocracy. Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire, was a Timurid prince from Ferghana. In the dog eats dog world of fragmented Timurid Empire in Central Asia, Taimur’s bloodline was the primary source of legitimacy. Every Timurid prince wanted to prove that he was the true heir to Taimur’s legacy. Babur carried this mindset with him to India in the 16th century and based the Mughal Empire on this idea — the right to rule as the heir of Taimur. By and large, the first five Mughal Emperors remained wedded to this idea, including the Great Akbar whose policy of Sulh-e-Kul has been appreciated down the ages by all. The Mughal Emperor who made a significant departure from this myth of Timurid blood line legitimacy was — ironically — the one who is most reviled by the right wing Indian Nationalists, Aurangzeb. Aurangzeb sought instead to legitimise his rule on the principles of orthodox Sunni Islam, which in turn did alienate the Hindus from his rule and ultimately led to the slow demise of Mughal Empire in India.

Taimur’s name has generally been associated with courage, indomitable will and the perseverance which he showed rising from humble origins and becoming the conqueror of much of the known world. Many of us first learnt of Taimur from the famous story of him observing an ant attempting to climb a wall from our grandmothers. This Taimur, an inspirational figure who believed in never giving up or surrendering, was never a figure of any religious significance. It was much later that I learnt that he was a Muslim. While Taimur had at various times used religious pretext, like for example killing of 20,000 residents of Damascus on the grounds that they had humiliated the family of Hussain bin Ali A.S. or the killing of “infidels” in Delhi (which included both Hindus and Muslims), his name has never been invoked by Muslims in general. Unlike Mahmud Ghaznavi and Mohammad Ghauri, he is not celebrated by Muslims as a hero fighting for the glory of Islam (neither were Ghaznavi and Ghauri fighting for Islam but they are nonetheless praised for destroying idols and establishing Muslim rule in India respectively). So I am sure that Saif Ali Khan was not moved by any religious considerations in naming his son.

The problem lies with the propensity of people in this subcontinent, Pakistanis and Indians, Muslims and Hindus, to wage history in the name of identity and ideology. Historical figures, especially those from the distant past, should be seen as products of their time and judged accordingly. If an objection was to be raised on such flimsy grounds, most of the names in the world today would be problematic including Richard, William, Alexander and Ashok.

Names are personal choices. Most Taimur I have met have been extremely cultured and civilised human beings. Indians especially would also do well to remember that some of their own national Muslim heroes from recent past like Maulana Mahmud ul Hassan of Jamiat Ulema Hind who supported Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement or their current star Maulana Mahmood Madani, who was championed by Indian nationalists for his comments on two nation theory and his takedown of General Musharraf in 2009, were named after Mahmud Ghaznavi, the destroyer of Somnath. By the same token, it is about time Pakistan stopped naming its missiles after Afghan invaders like Abdali and Ghauri and chose names more relatable to our identity as a modern nation state. Let history be, warts and all. Learn from it, seek inspiration if you must, but do not let it hinder the march of human progress.

The writer is a lawyer based in Lahore and the author of the book Mr Jinnah: Myth and Reality. He can be contacted via Twitter @therealylh and through his email address yasser.hamdani@gmail.com