Both an official chronicle and the highly personal memoir of the emperor Babur (1483–1530), The Baburnama presents a vivid and extraordinarily detailed picture of life in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India during the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries. Babur’s honest and intimate chronicle is the first autobiography in Islamic literature, written at a time when there was no historical precedent for a personal narrative—now in a sparkling new translation by Islamic scholar Wheeler Thackston.This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition includes notes, indices, maps, and illustrations.Author Biography: Wheeler M. Thackston is professor of the Practice in Persian and Other Near Eastern Languages at Harvard University, where he has taught for twenty years.Salman Rushdie is the author of Midnight’s Children (winner of the Booker Prize) and Fury, among others. His latest book is Step Across This Line.