Mirza Muhammad Haidar Dughlat

Mirza Muhammad Haidar was born in 1499–1500 in Tashkent. His father, Muhammad Husayn Mirza, belonged to the Moghul nobility of the Dughlat tribe; his mother, Khub Nigar Khanum, was a daughter of Yunus Khan and a sister of Babur's mother, which made him Babur's first cousin.

After the Shaybanids took Tashkent his father was killed, and a family retainer took Haidar through Bukhara and Badakhshan to Kabul, to Babur. In 1512 he entered the service of Sultan Said Khan and went with him through Andijan to Kashgaria; in the Yarkand Khanate he took part in military and state affairs, led campaigns to Badakhshan, Ladakh and Tibet, and raised Said Khan's son Abd ar-Rashid Khan.

After Said Khan's death Abd ar-Rashid Khan had part of the Dughlats put to death, and Haidar left for India. In 1540 he fought for Humayun at Kannauj, then conquered Kashmir and ruled it from 1540 to 1551 on behalf of the Mughals. He was killed in 1551 in a clash with mountain tribes in Kashmir and was buried in Srinagar.

Haidar wrote in Persian and Turkic. His best-known work is the Tarikh-i Rashidi, in Persian, a history of the Moghul khans and the Dughlats in Kashgaria and Moghulistan and a key source for Central Asia; his Turkic poem Jahan-nama also survives. In verse he used the pen name Ayaz.

In Kazakhstan the Taraz Regional University bears his name, a monument was erected in Taraz in 1999, and Kazakhfilm made a documentary about him in 2007.