As I write this essay, the forty-fourth US President Barack Obama's autobiography titled A Promised Land is the best-selling book in Germany, in both the German and the English editions. This is his second autobiographical work, following Dreams from My Father in 1995. Given Obama's prominent place in our modern political culture, this is hardly surprising, but today's publishers seem to have no specific criteria for deciding whose life and career are worthy of an autobiography. Any moderately successful individual from any walk of life can publish an autobiography today. The popularity of the genre is certainly related to the extreme glorification of individual and personal success in modern society, but it also shapes how we view premodern self-narratives: as a window into an intellectual's individuality and Bildung. This essay questions this convention and explores the opportunities that self-narratives embedded in literary and narrative sources present to historians of 15th-century Iran and Central Asia. I will argue that autobiographies and self-narratives are much more than tools for refashioning the self in the early modern period. They open a window to a much wider network of weak ties and acquaintances, a closer scrutiny of which may allow us to reconstruct transregional networks, understand the connectedness of these intellectual networks, and delineate their collective identities in the early modern period. In my discussion I will focus on a selection of 15th-century texts, most prominently the self-narratives of the Timurid intellectual Saʾin al-Dīn Turka (d. 1432).

在我写这篇文章时，美国总统巴拉克奥巴马的第四十四本自传《应许之地》是德国最畅销的书，有德文版和英文版。这是他继《我父亲的梦》之后的第二部自传体作品1995 年。鉴于奥巴马在我们现代政治文化中的突出地位，这并不奇怪，但今天的出版商似乎没有具体的标准来决定谁的生活和事业值得一本自传。今天，任何来自各行各业的中等成功人士都可以出版自传。这种类型的流行当然与现代社会对个人和个人成功的极端赞美有关，但它也塑造了我们如何看待前现代自我叙述：作为了解知识分子个性和学习的窗口。本文质疑这一惯例，并探讨嵌入文学和叙事资源中的自我叙事为 15 世纪伊朗和中亚历史学家提供的机会。我认为自传和自我叙述不仅仅是现代早期重塑自我的工具。它们为更广泛的弱关系和熟人网络打开了一扇窗户，对它们进行更仔细的审查可能使我们能够重建跨区域网络，了解这些知识网络的连通性，并在现代早期描绘出他们的集体身份。在我的讨论中，我将专注于精选的 15 世纪文本，其中最突出的是帖木儿知识分子 Saʾin al-Dīn Turka（卒于 14​​32 年）的自述。