From the point of view of the official Moghul historians, Kamran was an unmitigated traitor and villain, and he was a certainly far less attractive than his gentle older brother. But it is likely that in his own mind he was behaving within his rights. The tradition among the descendants of both Jenghiz Khan and Timur had been for sons to divide their inheritance and then, within certain agreed limits such as those which probably prevented Kamran from killing Akbar, to struggle to increase their share. On this basis Kamran, who had originally been given the province of Kabul, would have felt every justification in keeping his dispossessed brother out; and Humayun would have found it unthinkable, as he evidently did, to execute Kamran for treachery.
But Kamran was following an older nomadic tradition of the Mongols and Turks, whereas Humayun was being forced into the ways of strong centralized kingdoms, such as existed in India and Persia, where inheritance of the whole by one ruler was the established system. Without the accompanying principle of primogeniture this leads almost inevitably to fratricide in the struggle after each king's death: so, for example, Humayun's enemy, Sultan Bahadur of Gujarat, had systematically set about exterminating his brothers after winning the throne in 1526 and Sultan Mohammed of Turkey murdered no fewer than nineteen of his brothers on his accession in 1595, a simple fact of history which astounded Akbar when he heard it. In centralized kingdoms such ruthlessness was the norm.
It was Humayun's misfortune that he grew up in one system but needed to operate another, though it is doubtful whether he would by nature have been capable of the cold-blooded murder of his brothers. Fortunately for his family's future empire in India, his son and grandson inherited the throne with no brothers capable of making a strong rival claim. But after them the fraternal struggles for the Moghul empire were to prove as ruthless as any.
- Bamber Gascoigne (The Great Moghuls, pages 53-54). Bolded emphases added, and paragraph structure reformatted to avoid a wall of text.
