In Volume 5: Poetry of the Pre-Mongol Period

previous chapter: Part 2

§ 93. Lāmiʿī Dihistānī,¹ or Gurgānī,² is listed by ʿArūḍī among the panegyrists of the Seljuqs. There are three poems in his dīwān praising a king named Nōshirwān, or, as one verse³ has it, ‘mīr Fakhr al-daulah Nōshirwān, khudāwand i jahān’, evidently the Ziyarid ruler of his native Gurgān, (A)nōshirwān b. Manūchihr, who occupied his throne under the uneasy tutelage of the Ghaznavids and Seljuqs from around 420/1029 to perhaps as late as 441/1049–50.⁴ He would appear to have been Lāmiʿī’s first patron. Afterwards he entered the service of the Seljuqs, praising their two well-known wazīrs, ʿAmīd al-mulk Abū Naṣr al-Kundurī (who served Ṭoghrıl and was eliminated shortly after the succession of Alp Arslān) and Niẓām al-mulk, as well as the latter’s master, Alp Arslān (455/1063 to 465/1072).

Neither of two oldest tadhkirahs (those of ʿAufī and Daulat-shāh) devotes an entry to this poet. The latter does, however, mention one Lāmiʿī Bukhārī among the pupils of Sōzanī. If this is true, we must surely have two poets with the same name. The authors of the later tadhkirahs evidently confused the two: Ādhar makes Lāmiʿī a pupil of Muḥammad al-Ghazālī and says that he died in Samarqand. Hidāyat repeats this last piece of information and adds that his death occurred during the reign of Sanjar (511/1118 to 552/1157), which is much too late, at least as far as our poet is concerned.

The hitherto recorded dated manuscripts of his dīwān are without exception late. Apart from those listed by Munzawī (iii 25647–58) we could mention: London Or. 2889 fol. 10–24a (Rieu Suppt. no. 212 ii. Completed 28 Jumādā i 1293/1876); r.a.s. Storey bequest no. 3, fol. 156b–175a (Uncatalogued; inspexi. ¶ This dīwān is added by a second hand to an older codex and dated 1269/1852–3); Cambridge Browne Coll. V.88 pp. 144–179 (Dated 1266/1849–50); Leningrad Univ. 941* (Salemann-Rosen p. 15); Univ. 1003c (Romaskewicz p. 87).

Selections: Berlin Sprenger 1378 fol. 379b sq. (Pertsch 681. Dated 28 Rabīʿ ii 1270/1854).

Editions: Tehran 1295/1878; 1319sh./1931 (ed. S. Nafīsī); 1353sh./1964–5 (ed. M. Dabīr-Siyāqī); reprinted 2335sh.sh./1976–7.

lf (one verse in ed. Mujtabāʾī/Ṣādiqī pp. 30–1; there is another verse in the marginal additions to manuscript nūn, ed. Iqbāl p. 420); ʿArūḍī p. 28; Shams pp. 335, 360; Jājarmī i pp. 142–3; Yaghmāʾī pp. 93–5; Daulat-shāh p. 102; Ādhar pp. 160–2; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i pp. 494–501; ln s.v. ‘Lāmiʿī’ pp. 74–6 (S. Nafīsī); Khaiyām-pūr pp. 499–500; Ṣafā, Tārīkh ii⁶ pp. 386–98; Shafīʿī-Kadkanī, Ṣuwar pp. 641–8; ei² s.v. ‘Lāmiʿī’ (J.W. Clinton).

§ 94. Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Muḥammad al-Ghazālī (or probably better: Ghazwānī) al-Laukarī⁵ is credited by ʿAufī with 14 verses in praise of the Samanid Nūḥ (ii) b. Manṣūr and with three addressed to his wazīr ʿUbaid Allāh b. Aḥmad al-ʿUtbī (367/977–8 to 372/982–3).

ʿAufī ii p. 15; Shams pp. 231, 233 (and Qazwīnī ad loc.); ln s.v ‘Abū l-Ḥasan’ p. 412; Khaiyām-pūr p. 419; Ṣafā, Tārīkh i⁶ pp. 421–2; Lazard, Poètes i p. 14; Idārah-chī pp. 131–2.

§ 95. A single verse by one Maḥmūdī is quoted in lf s.v. kasak (or kashak) (ed. Horn p. 69; ed. Iqbāl p. 297; also in Ṣiḥāḥ p. 185). Horn identified this poet with Zainabī Maḥmūdī (below, § 155), but this is only a guess.

§ 96. Maisarī⁶ is the author of a medical poem of some 5000 verses in hazaj metre (inc. ba nām i pāk i dādār i jahān ast * kih bakhshāyā u dānā i nihān ast). Nothing is known of him except what can be deduced from that work, the title of which is given in the text (twice) as Dānish-nāmah, in the colophon, however, as Kitāb i Manṣūrī ba naẓm; the latter title would seem to imply that the poem is based on the well-known medical compendium al-Kitāb al-manṣūrī of Muḥammad b. Zakarīyāʾ al-Rāzī, but there seems to be nothing in the text to support this. The title given in the colophon is thus probably spurious. The author tells us that he began his poem in Shawwāl 367/978 and completed it ¶ in 370/980–1 when he was more than 46 years old, thus indicating that he was born about 324/936. The work is dedicated to one ‘Nāṣir i Daulat’, evidently the governor of Khurāsān, Abū l-Ḥasan Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm b. Sīmjūr, who received the title Nāṣir al-daulah after the ascension of the Samanid Nūḥ (ii) b. Manṣūr in 365/975–6.

Ms.: Paris Ancien fonds 310 (Blochet 818/Richard. Dated 3 Rabīʿ ii 852/1448).

Edition: Tehran 1366sh./1987 (non vidi). Partial edition and French translation in Lazard, Poètes i pp. 163–80, ii pp. 178–94.

Cf.: pl ii § 354; Lazard, Poètes i pp. 36–40; J. Matīnī, ‘Dar bārah i dānish-nāmah i Maisarī’, mdam viii, 1351sh./1972, pp. 593–628; Gh. Yūsufī, ‘Dānish-nāmah i Maisarī’, Rah-nirmā i kitāb vii, 1343sh./1964, pp. 283–8.

§ 97. Abū l-Muẓaffar Makkī b. Ibrāhīm b. ʿAlī al-Panjhīrī⁷ is included by ʿAufī among the poets of the Ghaznavids.

Rādūyānī p. 69 (and Ateş ad loc.); ʿAufī ii p. 46; Rāzī (Calcutta edition pp. 38–9); Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 66; ln s.v. ‘Abū l-Muẓaffar’ pp. 843, 848; Khaiyām-pūr p. 23.

§ 98. Maʿnawī Bukhārī is credited with four gnomic verses in ʿAufī’s chapter on the Samanid poets.

ʿAufī ii p. 27; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 510; Ethé, Vorl. pp. 49–50; Khaiyām-pūr p. 554; Idārah-chī p. 39.

§ 99. Abū Saʿīd⁸ Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Manshūrī al-Samarqandī is included by ʿArūḍī and ʿAufī among the Ghaznavid poets. ʿAufī quotes, among other things, an ode to Sulṭān Maḥmūd; a fuller version of the same poem is quoted by Jājarmī and Hidāyat and five verses from it can be found already in Rādūyānī.⁹ Another long ode to Maḥmūd is quoted in the old jung published by Yaghmāʾī. Presumably the same Manshūrī is the author of two verses quoted in the Punjab and Tehran (Malik) manuscripts of lf s.v. haft-ōrang (the second verse is also in the marginal additions to manuscript nūn). Waṭwāṭ reports that in his Kanz al-gharāʾib Aḥmad Manshūrī collected artificial poems of the type called mutalawwin, which, if vocalised differently, can be scanned in two different metres.

¶ lf (ed. Iqbāl p. 292; ed. Mujtabāʾī/Ṣādiqī p. 21); Rādūyānī pp. 64 88 (and Ateş’s notes p. 140); ʿArūḍī p. 28 (and Qazwīnī ad loc.); Waṭwāṭ p. 55; ʿAufī ii pp. 44–6; Jājarmī ii pp. 459–61;¹⁰ Yaghmāʾī pp. 118–22; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 506; ln s.v. ‘Abū Saʿīd’ p. 508, and ‘Aḥmad’ p. 1273, 1356; Ṣafā i⁶ pp. 553–5; Khaiyāmpūr p. 566.

§ 100. Manṣūr b. ʿAlī al-Manṭiqī al-Rāzī, known as Mōrd¹¹ (‘myrtle’, or perhaps rather Muwarrid?) eulogised the Būyid wazīr of Rai al-Ṣāḥib Ismāʿīl b. ʿAbbād (367/977–8 to 385/995).

Collection of fragments and French translation: G. Lazard, ‘Le poète Manteqi de Rey’, Mélange d’iranologie en mémoire de feu Saïd Naficy (=mdat xix/1–2), Tehran 1972, pp. 56–82 of the Latin script section; see also Idārah-chī pp. 162–7.

Bairūnī, Kitāb al-jamāhir fī maʿrifat al-jawāhir, ed. Krenkow, Hyderabad 1355/1936–7, p. 81 (one verse by ‘Manṣūr Mōrd’; not in Lazard); lf (ed. Iqbāl) passim (quoted only in the marginal additions to manuscript nūn); Rādūyānī pp. 53, 55 (and Ateş’s notes, p. 133); ʿArūḍī p. 28 (and Qazwīnī ad loc.); Waṭwāṭ pp. 4, 47, 83; ʿAufī ii pp. 16–8; Shams pp. 275, 308; Jājarmī ii pp. 464–3; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i pp. 508–9; Ṣafā, Tārīkh i⁶ pp. 431–3; Khaiyām-pūr p. 568.

§ 101. Abū l-Najm Aḥmad b. Qaus b. Aḥmad al-Dāmghānī, known as Manūchihrī (or Minōchihrī),¹² flourished under the Ghaznavid Masʿūd i (421/1030 to 432/1040), to whom a large portion of his surviving poems is dedicated. His earliest patron, the one to whom he owed his pen-name, appears to have been the Ziyarid Falak al-Maʿālī Manūchihr b. Qābūs (402/1012 to 420 or 421/1029), who is identified in the superscriptions in at least some of the manuscripts as the dedicatee of poems no. 27 and 31 of Dabīr-Siyāqī’s edition. Admittedly, the name of this prince is not actually mentioned in the odes in question. However, in one of the poems written after his arrival in Ghaznah, Manūchihrī alludes to his previous service ‘in Rai and Gurgān’,¹³ which would certainly seem to suggest that he had been at the court of one or another of the Ziyarids.¹⁴ Two of his poems (no. 13, 48) are dedicated to Khwājah (Abū) Ṭāhir, who was Masʿūd’s ¶ kad-khudā in Rai for a short period in 423 to 424 (1032–3), and it was evidently after serving this representative of the Ghaznavids in Rai that our poet betook himself to the court of the king himself. In one place,¹⁵ in fact, he claims that Masʿūd had brought him from Rai on an elephant, but this must perhaps be taken with a pinch of salt. There is in any case no evidence that Manūchihrī entered the service of the Ghaznavids before the time of Masʿūd,¹⁶ and no indication that he outlived that ruler. The tadhkirahs give the date of his death as 432/1040–1, 439/1047–8, or as late as 483/1090.¹⁷

Apart from qaṣīdahs and the usual shorter poems Manūchihrī’s dīwān contains eleven celebrated musammaṭs. He has been admired in particular for his description of nature.

Manuscripts of his dīwān are frequent, but overwhelmingly late (19th or 20th century), and it is on these modern copies that the existing editions are based. There is, however, an as yet unused manuscript in Tehran dated 1010/1601–2¹⁸ as well as a few fairly old manuscripts with more or less extensive selections from the poems. (Blochet’s 16th century dating of the Paris manuscript needs closer scrutiny). That the vulgate text is, nonetheless, not all that bad can be seen from the fairly close agreement between the text given by Dabīr-Siyāqī for the first strophe of his poem no. 58 with the version quoted by Rādūyānī, p. 105.

Mss.: London Or. 2844 (Rieu Suppt. no. 206. Dated 1274/1857–8); Or. 2889 fol. 75b–119a (Rieu Suppt. no. 212 V. Completed 28 Jumādā i 1293/1876); r.a.s. Storey bequest no. 3, fol. 96b–155b (Uncatalogued; inspexi. Contains the qaṣāʾid and the 7th, 3rd, 1st and the beginning of the 2nd musammaṭāt of Dabīr-Siyāqī’s edition, breaking off in the middle of latter); Cambridge Browne Coll. V.l (Dated 1290/1873); Browne Coll. V.2 (Dated 22 Muḥarram 1295/1878. qaṣāʾid only); Paris Supplément 725 ii (Blochet 1206. 16th century?); Leningrad Univ. 1004 (Romaskewicz p. 8. Dated 1271/1854–5); Univ. 1276 (Tagirdzhanov p. 6); Istanbul Üniversité fy 917 (=Halis Ef. 1647. Ateş 10. Dated 20 Dhū l-ḥijjah 1285/1869); Baku i 338 (Dated 1260/1844); i 339 (Dated 1274/1857–8); Tehran Univ. xiv 4669 (Dated 1010/1601–2, with an introduction); Majlis 4906 (Munz. ¶ 26235 inspexit. Dated 1260/1844); Shūrā i Islāmī i 91 pp. 1–63; Sari Shihāb Collection (Nuskhah-hā vi p. 621. Dated 1209/1794–5); Qum Marʿashī v 1930; Mashhad Univ. 157, 158, 159; Lahore Univ. ii p. 134 (Dated 1249/1833–4. See ocm iii/2, 1927, p. 74); Bankipore i 14 (19th century); i 15 (19th century); Hyderabad Āṣafīyah i p. 734 no. 309; Calcutta Ivanow Curzon 188 (modern); Lucknow Sprenger 349 (Dated 1010/1601–2). A large number of late manuscripts are listed by Munzawī (iii 26230–91) and in Dabīr-Siyāqī’s introduction.

Selected poems: London Or. 2880 fol. 118b–140a (Rieu Suppt. no. 224 ii. Completed Jumādā i 1245/1829. A selection of qaṣāʾid only); Cambridge Browne Coll. V.65 no. 36 (Anthology dated 27 Ramaḍān 827/1424); Calcutta Ivanow 927 fol. 1s v sq. (Modern); Tehran Malik (Dated Rabīʿ i 1011/1602, according to Dabīr-Siyāqī’s introduction, p. vii); Majlis viii 2326 (17th century?).

Editions: Tehran 1285/1868–9;1290/1873;1295/1878; 1297/1880; 1301/1883–4; 1326sh./1948 (Ed. M. Dabīr-Siyāqī); reprinted¹⁹ 1338sh./1959, 1347sh./1968. Paris 1886 (Menoutchehri, poète persan du 11^ème siècle de notre ère (du 5^ième de l’hégire). Texte, traduction, notes et introduction historique par A. de Biberstein Kazimirski). The same scholar had previously published a Spécimen du Divan … de Menoutchehri,Versailles 1876.

Translations (French prose): See editions, Paris.

lf passim; Rādūyānī pp. 104–5 (and Ateş ad loc.); ʿArūḍī p. 28; Waṭwāṭ p. 10, 63; Shams passim; ʿAufī ii pp. 53–5; Rāwandī, Rāḥat al-ṣudūr, ed. M. Iqbāl, London 1921, p. 477; Jājarmī ii pp. 542–52 (two poems); Daulat-shāh pp. 40–2; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i pp. 542–70; M. Qazwīnī, ‘Manūchihrī’,Yādgār i/2 pp. 52–75; V.F. Blücher, ‘Minučihri, ein Hofdichter Masʿud’s von Ghazna’, Acta Orientalia i, 1923, pp. 135–47; Hadi Hasan, ‘The poetry of Minuchihri’ in his Studies in Persian literature, first series, Aligarh 1924, pp. 159–204; Ṣafā, Tārīkh I⁶ pp. 580–97; Khaiyām-pūr p. 570; M. ʿAbd al-Muʿnim, ‘Taʾthīr i zabān wa adabīyāt i ʿarab dar ashʿār i M.’, Āryānā xxiv, 1345sh./1966, pp. 229–54; Fouchécour, Nature pp. 1–180; Shafīʿī-Kadkanī, Ṣuwar pp. 498–525; W. al-Kīk, Taʾthīr i farhang i ʿarab dar ashʿār i Manūchihrī i Dāmghānī, Beyrouth 1971; J.W. Clinton, The Divan of Manūchihrī Dāmghānī A critical study, Minneapolis 1972; M.C. Hillmann, ‘Manūchihrī: poet or versifier?’, Edebiyât i, 1976, pp. 93–112; W.L. Hanaway, ‘Blood and wine: sacrifice in M.’s wine poetry’, Iran xxvi, 1988, pp. 69–80; Ḥ.-ʿA. Mallāḥ, Manūchihrī i Dāmghānī wa mūsīqī, Tehran 1363sh./1984; T.H. Subḥānī, ‘Du qaṣīdah i tāzah az Manūchihrī’, Nāmwārah i Duktur Maḥmūd i Afshār iv, Tehran 1367sh./1989, pp. 2301–8 (two poems from an old anthology, one not in the printed dīwān, the other Dabīr-Siyāqī’s no. 39 with variants); A.D.H. Bivar, ‘Manūchihrī’s Māzandarān ode: an English version’, jras 1990 pp. 55–63; J.S. ¶ Meisami, ‘Ghaznavid panegyrics: some political implications’, Iran xxviii, 1990, pp. 31–44 (contains a commentary on poem no. 17); ei² s.v. ‘Manūčihrī’ (J.W. Clinton).

§ 102. Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Maʿrūfī al-Balkhī is credited by ʿAufī with two verses from an ode which he says were dedicated to the Samanid ruler ʿAbd al-Malik b. Nūḥ b. Naṣr (343/954–5 to 350/961). Moreover, Dih-khudā²⁰ refers to an unpublished source which has him recite an ode in the presence of the ruler of Sīstān, Khalaf b. Aḥmad (died 399/1008–9).

Collection of fragments (45 verses), French translation, discussion and literature: Lazard, Poètes Ip. 31, 128–33, ii pp. 132–8.

lf passim; Rādūyānī p. 44; ʿAufī ii p. 16; Shams passim; Jājarmī ii p. 953; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 505; Khaiyām-pūr p. 551.

§ 103. Marwārīdī is credited with a single verse in lf, s.v. lāmah.

§ 104. Abū l-Faḍl Masrūr b. Muḥammad al-Ṭāliqānī is known to us only from the verses quoted by ʿAufī in his chapter on the Ghaznavid poets. These include a qaṣīdah of fifteen verses in praise of the wazīr Abū l-Qāsim Aḥmad b. Ḥasan.

ʿAufī ii pp. 42–4; Ṣafā, Tārīkh i⁶ pp. 576–7; Khaiyām-pūr p. 537.

§ 105. Masʿūdī al-Marwazī is the author of the earliest known versification of the Shāh-nāmah (inc. nakhustīn Gayyumart āmad ba shāhī * ba gētī dar girift-ash pēsh-gāhī).²¹ Two fragments of his poem are quoted in the Kitāb al-badʾ wa l-taʾrīkh of Muṭahhar b. Ṭāhir al-Maqdisī,²² a work written in about 355/966, which is thus the terminus ad quem of our poet. It is however likely, as Lazard has argued, that he wrote well before the time of al-Maqdisī, perhaps towards the end of the 3rd/9th century. Judging from these fragments and from the references in Thaʿālibī’s Ghurar mulūk al-furs²³ his poem encompassed the whole of the legendary history of the Iranians from Gayōmart to the fall of the Sasanian empire.

¶ Collection of fragments (3 verses), French translation, discussion and literature: Lazard, Poètes i p. 22, 73, ii p. 47; see also Idārah-chī pp. 20–2.

§ 106. Masʿūd²⁴ or Masʿūdī²⁵ al-Rāzī²⁶ served at the court of Sulṭān Masʿūd. Baihaqī relates how, during the Mihragān festival in 430/1039,²⁷ he incurred the wrath of his royal patron and was exiled to India on account of two verses in which he warned of the growing power of the king’s enemies, comparing these with ants (mōr) who had turned into serpents (mār). According to the same historian the king pardoned Masʿūd on the following Nau-rōz (6 March 1040).²⁸ He is presumably identical with the ‘Masʿūdī i Ghaznawī’ cited in lf s.v. warrafān(or warraqān) and by Rādūyānī p. 38. ʿAufī gives us further samples of his verse. Hidāyat’s statement that our author was a leading Shiite religious scholar cannot be traced to any early source, and seems in any case most improbable.

Baihaqī p. 594, 611; lf (see the indexes to the three editions; Horn, Einl. p. 28 wrongly identifies our poet with Masʿūd i Saʿd i Salmān, for whom see infra, no. 240); Rādūyānī pp. 36, 38 (and Ateş’s notes, pp. 125–6); ʿArūḍī p. 28 (and Qazwīnī ad loc.); Waṭwāṭ p. 27 (and Iqbāl ad loc.); ʿAufī ii p. 63; Rāzī iii pp. 38–9; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 503; Ṣafā, Tārīkh i⁶ pp. 555–7; Khaiyām-pūr p. 538.

§ 107. A single verse is attributed to one Abū l-Qāsim Muʾaddib²⁹ in Asadī’s lf (ed. Iqbāl p. 317, ed. Mujtabāʾī/Ṣādiqī p. 177).

¶ § 108. Muḥammad b. ʿAbdih³⁰ was a secretary to one of the Qarakhanids and a contemporary of Maḥmūd. ʿArūḍī praises the style of his letters. Rādūyānī quotes four of his verses; two of these (which in turn incorporate an explicit quotation from Khusrawānī) occur also in a fragment of five lines which ʿAufī³¹ (and later authors) ascribe to Firdausī. Obviously, the attribution to Muḥammad is supported not only by the greater antiquity of Rādūyānī, but also by the fact that, as the less famous poet, he is also less likely to have had stray verses wrongly attached to his name.

Rādūyānī passim (and Ateş’s notes pp. 100–1); ʿArūḍī pp. 13, 24 (and Qazwīnī’s notes); Waṭwāṭ p. 78; Ṣafā, Tārīkh i⁶ pp. 439–41; Lazard, Poètes i p. 14.

§ 109. Muḥammad b. Mukhallad is mentioned by the author of the Tārīkh i Sīstān in the same context as Muḥammad b. Waṣīf³² and Bassām i Kūrd.³³

Collection of fragments (3 verses), French translation, discussion and literature: Lazard, Poètes i pp. 19, 58, ii p. 17.

Tārīkh i Sīstān p. 212; Meier, Mahsatī p. 11.

§ 110. Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad b. Ṣāliḥ flourished under the Samanids, according to ʿAufī, who quotes four of his verses. His nisbah is given in the printed text of ʿAufī’s Lubāb as al-Walwālijī,³⁴ but by Hidāyat, who refers expliticly to ʿAufī as his source, as Nawāʾiḥī. Qazwīnī³⁵ equated him with the poet mentioned by Manūchihrī³⁶ in a list of ancient poets as ān-ki āmad az Nawāʾiḥ.³⁷ It is therefore likely, as Qazwīnī argued, that Nawāʾiḥī is the correct reading.

ʿAufī ii p. 22; id., Jawāmiʿ (facsimile) pp. 352–3 (no. 1124); Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 501; Bahār i p. 425; Ṣafā, Tārīkh i⁶ p. 421; Khaiyām-pūr p. 523; Idārah-chī pp. 47–8.

¶ § 111. Muḥammad b. Waṣīf composed, according to the author of the Tārīkh i Sīstān, the first Persian poem in quantitative metre, namely an ode in honour of Yaʿqūb b. Laith, probably at about the time when the latter captured Herat in 253/867. Another poem bemoans the death of ʿAmr b. Laith and alludes to the events of 296–7/909–10.

Collection of fragments (23 verses), French translation, discussion and literature: Lazard, Poètes i pp. 18, 54–6, ii pp. 13–15.

Tārīkh i Sīstān pp. 209–10, 253, 260, 286; Meier, Mahsatī pp. 10–11; S.M. Stern, Minorsky Volume pp. 546–8; Bosworth, Saffarids pp. 174–7, 222 fn. 670; ei² s.v. ‘Muḥammad b. Waṣīf’ (C.E. Bosworth)

§ 112. Abū Sharīf³⁸ Aḥmad b. ʿAlī Mukhalladī³⁹ Jurjānī is, according to ʿArūḍī and ʿAufī, the name of the author of two verses stating that all that remains of the glory of the Sasanians and the Samanids is the praise bestowed upon them by Bārbad and Rōdakī respectively; he must therefore have lived after the fall of Samanids.⁴⁰ Rādūyānī quotes a translation by him of a prophetic ḥadīth and this is followed by further translations (not specifically attributed, but perhaps also by Mukhalladī) of a series of sayings by ʿAlī. One verse by ‘Bū Sharīf’ is quoted in the Vatican manuscript of lf s.v. bīnī, and the same verse is quoted in Ṣiḥāḥ p. 299 as the work of ‘Mujalladī’. ‘Mujalladī’ is also quoted six times in the marginal additions to manuscript nūn of lf and four connected verses are cited in Ṣiḥāḥ (p. 46).

lf passim; Rādūyānī pp. 119–21 (and Ateş ad loc.); ʿArūḍī p. 27 (and Qazwīnī ad loc.); ʿAufī i pp. 13–4; ln s.v. ‘Aḥmad’ p. 1245 and ‘Abū Sharīf p. 539; S. Nafīsī, ‘Mukhalladī i Gurgānī’, mdat iv/1, 1335sh./1956, pp. 18–22; Ṣafā, Tārīkh i⁶ pp. 557–9; Khaiyām-pūr pp. 93, 529

§ 113. al-Adīb Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Mukhtār was a contemporary, and evidently also a friend, of Bākharzī (died 467/1075), who quotes, among many other samples of his Arabic poetry, three verses dedicated to Abū ¶ Ibrāhīm Ismāʿīl b. Ghuṣn. Two of these are quoted also by ʿAufī in the first entry of his chapter on the poets of the Seljuqs. There is a lacuna at the beginning of this entry in the manuscripts used by Browne, who supplied the missing name of the author as Bahrāmī; this is doubtless wrong. The Arabic verses are—as mentioned—by Mukhtār and he must consequently be the author of the five Persian verses quoted there as well. According to Iqbāl the author of the ‘Tadhkirah i ʿArafāt’⁴¹ states explicitly that Muḥammad ʿAufī ascribes the last of these verses to Adīb Mukhtār; it is thus clear that the name Mukhtār still stood in the manuscript of ʿAufī’s work available to that author. The same verse occurs already in ʿArūḍī, who says that it was recited by Burhānī at the time when he gave over his position as poet-laureate to his son Muʿizzī,⁴² whereby ʿArūḍī seems to imply that the verse is in fact by Burhānī. If this is true Mukhtār must have quoted it in his own qiṭʿah, though it is just as likely that Burhānī was in fact quoting Mukhtār. Daulat-shāh⁴³ and other late authors ascribe the same verse to Niẓām al-mulk.

Bākharzī no. 488; ʿAufī ii p. 68; Iqbāl’s introduction to his edition of the dīwān of Muʿizzī, Tehran 1318sh./1939, pp. ii–vi.

§ 114. Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Muḥammad al-Tirmidhī al-maʿrūf bi-Munjīk⁴⁴ flourished at the court of the Āl i Muḥtāj, the rulers of Chaghāniyān,⁴⁵ just to the north of his birthplace, Tirmidh, on the Amū Daryā. ʿAufī quotes an ode to ‘Abū l-Muẓaffar Ṭāhir b. al-Faḍl’, a form which represents a contamination of the names of Abū l-Ḥasan Ṭāhir b. al-Faḍl (died 381/991) and of his successor Abū l-Muẓaffar Aḥmad b. Muḥammad. That the poem was in fact dedicated to the latter is clear from the fuller version of it quoted by Hidāyat⁴⁶ and in an early jung,⁴⁷ where the poet addresses his patron as ‘Abū l-Muẓaffar Shāh i zamīn’.⁴⁸ The same patron is addressed as ‘Abū l-Muẓaffar Shāh i Chaghāniyān Aḥmad’ in ¶ three verses of Munjīk’s quoted by Rādūyānī.⁴⁹ On the other hand, in Asadī’s Lughat i furs we find a verse which several of the manuscripts⁵⁰ state was recited by ‘Shahīd’, mocking Munjīk in the presence of Maḥmūd of Ghaznah, as well as two verses by Munjīk himself⁵¹ which are clearly his reply to the attack. Shahīd al-Balkhī died, of course, long before the time of Maḥmūd; it is however not impossible that Munjīk attended the court of that ruler and engaged there in a slanging match with some poet whom the copyists confused with Shahīd. Munjīk is one of the poets most frequently quoted by Asadī and Rādūyānī and thus clearly enjoyed a considerable reputation up to a century after his own time. Many of his surviving verses (like those of Labībī) are of a satirical and decidedly scatological vein.

lf passim; Rādūyānī passim (and Ateş’s notes, p. 93); Waṭwāṭ p. 39, 49, 74; ʿAufī ii pp. 13–14; Shams pp. 324, 346, 351; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i pp. 506–8; ln s.v. ‘Munjīk’ (Dh. Ṣafā); Ṣafā i⁶ pp. 424–8; Khaiyām-pūr p. 566 (with further references); Lazard, Poètes i p. 14; Shafīʿī-Kadkanī, Ṣuwar pp. 434–8; Idārah-chī pp. 184–224.

§ 115. Abū l-Ḥusain (or al-Ḥasan) Muḥammad b. Muḥammad al-Murādī exercised his poetic talents mainly in Arabic. Thaʿālibī, in his Yatīmat al-dahr,⁵² quotes some two dozen of his Arabic verses, including a fragment of an ode to Naṣr (ii) b. Aḥmad (301/914 to 331/943) and verses which he is said to have recited just before his death to al-Jaihānī (who served as wazīr during the early part of Naṣr’s reign).⁵³ Rōdakī wrote an elegy on his death.

Collection of Persian fragments (2 verses), French translation, discussion and literature: Lazard, Poètes i pp. 23, 76, ii p. 50. See also: A. Ḥabīb-allāhī, ‘Murādī, az muʿāṣirān i Rūdakī, Farkhundah Payām 1360sh./1981 pp. 288–301.

¶ § 116. A single verse by one Muraṣṣaʿī is quoted in lf s.v. parwāzah.

§ 117. Abū Ṭaiyib Muḥammad b. Ḥātim al-Muṣʿabī was a high-ranking official in the service of the Samanid ruler Naṣr (ii) b. Aḥmad (301/914 to 331/943), rising to the rank of wazīr before his eventual execution. It has been suggested that he had sympathies with the Ismāʿīlīs. A verse of his is quoted in the anonymous Ismāʿīlī commentary on the qaṣīdah of Abū l-Haitham Gurgānī.⁵⁴ His fragments include what seems to be a complete poem on the vanity of the world.⁵⁵

Collection of fragments (16 verses), French translation, discussion and literature: Lazard, Poètes i pp. 23, 74–5, ii pp. 48–9.

Baihaqī p. 107; Rādūyānī p. 7; ʿAufī ii p. 7; Gardēzī, Zain al-akhbār (ed. M. Nāẓim, Berlin 1928) p. 32; Thaʿālibī, Yatīmah iv pp. 12–13, 15–16; Yāqūt, Buldān i pp. 619–20.

§ 118. An otherwise unknown Muwaqqarī is the author of a ‘long’ qaṣīdah of which Rādūyānī (p. 106) quotes the first four verses.

§ 119. Muẓaffarī Panjdihī Marwī⁵⁶ is included by ʿArūḍī and ʿAufī (who quotes a dozen of his verses) among the poets of the Ghaznavids. He is presumably identical with the Muẓaffarī quoted repeatedly by Asadī.

lf passim (and Horn, Einl. p. 28); ʿArūḍī p. 28 (and Qazwīnī ad loc.); ʿAufī ii pp. 63–5; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 505; Khaiyām-pūr p. 549.

§ 120. Abū Sarrāqah ʿAbd al-Raḥmān⁵⁷ b. Aḥmad al-Balkhī al-Amīnī al-Najjār is the author of an ode of 16 verses in honour of Maḥmūd of Ghaznah, quoted by ʿAufī. It is presumably with him (and not with Najjār al-Sāgharjī, whom ʿArūḍī⁵⁸ mentions as one of the poets at the court of Khiḍr Khān b. Ṭafghāj Khān) that we must identify the ‘Najjār’ to whom Asadī attributes one verse. The ‘Nijādi’ (error for ‘Najjārī’?), one of whose verses is quoted by Rādūyānī, is perhaps also the same poet.

¶ lf s.v. shatrang (and Horn ad loc.); Rādūyānī p. 72 (and Ateş ad loc.); ʿAufī ii pp. 41–2; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 89; ln s.v. ‘Abū Sarrāqah’ p. 501; Ṣafā, Tārīkh i⁶ pp. 599–600; Khaiyām-pūr p. 64.

§ 121. A single verse is attributed to one Na-shinās (or rather Nashnāsh?) in the Vatican manuscript of lf (ed. Horn p. 40; also in Ṣiḥāḥ p. 138).

§ 122. A substantial ode by Nāṣir Jaʿfarī is quoted by Jājarmī and a shorter version of the same poem is given by Hidāyat, who calls its author Nāṣir Nasawī. Hidāyat’s text contains a verse giving the name of the poet’s patron as ‘Bū l-Fatḥ Malik-Shāh’ (465/1072 to 485/1092); the verse is missing in Jājarmī’s version, though the superscription in the latter does identify Malik-Shāh as the object of the poet’s attentions. Hidāyat, however, claims that the author’s patron was ‘Muḥammad b. Maḥmūd Saljūqī’, evidently confusing our poet with ʿAufī’s Nāṣir Lughawī, the boon-companion of Muḥammad b. Maḥmūd Ghaznawī (see below, § 124).

Jājarmī ii pp. 475–7; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i pp. 636–7; Khaiyām-pūr p. 588.

§ 123. Abū Muʿīn Nāṣir b. Khusrau al-Qubādiyānī al-Marwazī,⁵⁹ with the pen-name Ḥujjat, the celebrated Ismāʿīlī propagandist, is discussed in pl i § 1589, to which the following is a supplement. The year of the poet’s birth is indicated in one of his poems⁶⁰ as 394/1003–4 and this is consistent with his account in the Safar-nāmah⁶¹ of how on the eve of Thursday 6 Jumādā ii 437 (19 December 1045) he suddenly awakened ‘from forty years’ sleep’. ‘Forty’ is here a round number; his precise age on that date would have been 42 or 43 lunar years.⁶² His travels through Persia, Syria, Egypt and Arabia and back to Central Asia in the years 437–444 (1045–1052) are described in detail in his ¶ Safar-nāmah. In his last years the poet settled in the district of Yumgān, in Badakhshān, his loneliness in that remote place being the subject of constant complaint in the poems. The latest clearly established date in his biography is the year 462/1069–70, when he dedicated his Kitāb Jāmiʿ al-ḥikmatain to an otherwise unknown amīr of Badakhshān, ʿAlī b. Asad b. al-Ḥārith. Ḥājjī Khalīfah, in his Taqwīm al-tawārīkh,⁶³ states that Nāṣir died in 481/1088–9; this date has been widely accepted and, though not improbable, has no authority, all the more so since the same Ḥājjī Khalīfah, in two different places in his Kashf al-ẓunūn⁶⁴ has him die as early as 431/1039–41, as does already Daulat-shāh. This date is naturally impossible. Later tradition, reflected by a spurious ‘autobiography’ and by the tadhkirahs⁶⁵ made Nāṣir into a mighty magician who lived for more than a hundred years.

His extant theological works (Gushāyish u rahāyish; Khuwān al-ikhwān; Zād al-musāfirīn; Wajh i dīn; the prose Rōshanāʾī-nāmah, or Shash faṣl; Jāmiʿ al-ḥikmatain—all to be discussed in pl iv) are at least in part translations of Ismāʿīlī tracts in Arabic. Besides these we have his travelogue (Safar-nāmah) and the dīwān. The two didactic mathnawīs traditionally attributed to him, namely the Saʿādat-nāmah and the Rōshanāʾī-nāmah, are discussed below (pp. 115–20) under the heading ‘spurious works’. Of Nāṣir’s Arabic dīwān, to which he occasionally refers,⁶⁶ no trace remains.

Nāṣir’s Dīwān consists almost entirely of religious and didactic poems which, though occasionally dedicated to the Fatimid caliph al-Mustanṣir, or to the dāʿī l-duʿāt, al-Muʾaiyid fī l-dīn al-Shīrāzī, are far removed in character from the usual laudatory qaṣīdahs. Mss.: London i.o. 903 fol. 97–112 (Dated Dhū l-qaʿdah 714/1315. 78 poems only);⁶⁷ i.o. Delhi 1297 (18th century?); Or. 10919 (Meredith-Owens p. 60. Dated 1276/1859–60); Or. 3323 (Rieu Suppt. no. 210. Dated 9 Jumādā i 1296/1879. Contains also the spurious ‘autobiography’); Or. 2845 (Rieu Suppt. no. 209. 19th century? End missing); Berlin Sprenger 1416 (Pertsch 710. ‘Nicht ganz neu’); Ms. or. quart. 2026 (Heinz 359. With ‘autobiography’); Vienna Flügel 506 (Dated Dhū l-ḥijjah 1259/1843–4. With a prose preface); Leningrad Acad. C1702 (Cat. viii 5; Index 1480. Dated 1334/1915–6); ¶ Istanbul Çelebi Abdullah Ef. 290 (Munz. no. 26421. Dated Jumādā ii 736/1336); Üniversite fy 315 (Ateş 11. Dated Shawwāl 1262/1846); Üniversite fy 799 (=Halis Ef. 8626. Ateş 12. Dated 18 Jumādā i 1269/1853. Contains the ‘autobiography’); Najaf Amīr al-muʾminīn 1434 (Munz. 26429); Tehran Majlis 8421/2 (Munz. no. 26422. In a daftar dated 868/1463–4); Majlis ii 388 (Written for the Ottoman Sulṭān ‘Muḥammad b. Murād’, i.e. either Muḥammad ii, died 886/1481, or Muḥammad iii, died 1012/1603–4); Malik 5567/2 (Munz. no. 26425. 17th century?); Univ. xi 3201 (Dated 29 Jumādā ii 1201/1787); Ḥuqūq p. 115 (18th century?); Millī iv 1672 (Dated 4 Shaʿbān 1229/1814); Millī iii 1204 (Dated 29 Dhū l-qaʿdah 1252/1837); Gulistān/Ātābāy ii 485 (Dated 1253/1837–8); Gulistān/Ātābāy ii 488 (Dated Dhū l-ḥijjah 1261/1845); Gulistān/Ātābāy ii 486 (Dated 1266/1849–50); Gulistān/Ātābāy ii 487 (Dated Muḥarram 1268/1851); Gulistān/Ātābāy ii 489; Millī v 2028; Mashhad Riḍawī vii 965/2 (Ms. completed 1041/1631–2. Selections only); Riḍawī ix 1163 (Dated 28 Rabīʿ ii 1261/1845); Riḍawī ix 1162 (Dated Rajab 1266/1850); Dushanbe Acad. ii 325 (Dated 11 Jumādā ii 1050/1640); Hyderabad Āṣafīyah i p. 734 no. 300 (Dated 1104/1692–3); Kapurthala 179 (ocm iii/4, 1927, p. 290); Lucknow Sprenger 265 (two copies, one of which was dated 1037/1627–8); Madras i 70 and 71 (both copies called ‘qaṣā’id i Ḥujjat’); Princeton 38 fol. 364–450 (dated 815/1412–3); and many late Mss. (Nāṣir became popular towards the end of the 19th century); cf. Munz. iii 26420–71.

Selections from his poems: Oxford Elliot 37 fol. 4b, 29a, 67a, 191b, 209b (Ethé 1333 = Daqāʾiq al-ashʿār. On fol. 67a a tasmīṭ of 33 strophes); Cambridge Browne Coll. V.65 no. 31 (Anthology dated 27 Ramaḍān 827/1424); Berlin Sprenger 1378 fol. 442a sq. (Pertsch 681. Dated 28 Rabīʿ ii 1270/1854. Apparently copied from the Calcutta Ms.); Istanbul Köprülü, Fazıl Ahmet Paşa 1620/12 (Cat. ii p. 376); Calcutta Ivanow 927 fol. 28v–47v (late).

Editions: Bombay 1860; Tabriz 1280/1863–4 (Ed. Riḍā-qulī Khān Hidāyat); Tehran 1314/1896–5 (together with Safar-nāmah); 1304–7sh./1925–8 (Ed. Naṣr Allāh Taqawī and Mujtabā Mīnuwī, introduction by Ḥasan Taqī-zādah, notes by ʿAlī Akbar Dih-khudā, contains also Rōshanāʾī-nāmah and Saʿādat-nāmah); reprinted 1335sh./1956–7 and 1348sh./1969; 1353sh./1974–5 (ed. M. Mīnuwī and M. Muḥaqqiq; volume i: text and variant readings. The first critical edition).

Partial editions: H. Ethé, ‘Auswahl aus Nâṣir Chusrau’s Ḳaṣîden’, zdmg 36, 1882, pp. 478–508 (based mainly on the i.o. manuscript, i.e. the oldest, with German verse translation); id., ‘Kürzere Lieder und poetische Fragmente aus Nâçir Khusraus Dîvân’, Nachrichten … Göttingen, 1882, pp. 124–52; E.G. Browne, ‘Nasir-i-Khusraw, poet, traveller, and propagandist (Text and verse translation of a hundred couplets … from the first five poems of N.-i-Kh.’s Díwán)’, jras 1905, pp. 313–52; Also: Calcutta 1926 (ed. M.K. Shīrāzī, contains ‘only the portions prescribed for the m.a. examination of the Calcutta University’); Stalinabad 1957 (Gulchine az devoni ashʾor, ed. K. Aini, in Tajik script); Tehran ¶ 1340sh./1961–2 (Pānzdah qaṣīdah az Ḥakīm Nāṣir i Khusrau i Qubādīyānī az rūy i qadīm-tarīn nuskhah i khaṭṭī, ed. M. Muḥaqqiq), reprint 1341sh./1962–3.

Commentaries: A fragment, commenting one poem = Dīwān, ed. Taqawī/Minuwī p. 120 (not in the new edition), of a work by Maulānā Qāḍī Maḥmūd Bahrī (first half of 12th/18th century) is contained in Madras ii 611.

Translations: (German and English verse): see partial editions.

(English verse): Nasir-i Khusraw Forty Poems from the Divan translated with introductions and notes by Peter Lamborn Wilson and Gholam Reza Aavani, Tehran 1977; Make a shield from wisdom. Selected verses from Nāṣir-i Khusraw’s Dīvān, trans. with extensive commentary by A. Schimmel, London/New York 1993.

(Russian verse): Насир Хосров: Лирика, ed. I. Braginskiy, Moscow 1979 (various translators; includes selections from the Dīwān as well as from the Rōshanāʾī-nāmah and the Saʿādat-nāmah.)

Spurious works:

(1)

Saʿādat-nāmah is a collection of moral precepts in some 300 verses (inc. dil-ā hamwārah taslīm i riḍā bāsh * ba har ḥālī kih bāshī bā khudā bāsh). It was first published by Fagnan in 1888, from the Paris manuscript supplément 781A, then reprinted (from Fagnan, with some emendations) in the appendix to the edition of Nāṣir’s Safar-nāmah published in Berlin in 1341/1922–3, and then (from the Berlin edition, but collated with a manuscript in the editor’s possession) in Taqawī’s edition of Nāṣir’s dīwān of 1307sh./1928. In Taqawī’s manuscript the text ends with a verse in which the author tells his readers to heed ‘the words of Sharīf’, evidently the author’s signature; there is no mention in this recension of the name Nāṣir. But in some other copies ‘Sharīf’ is replaced by ‘Nāṣir i Khusrau’, while the manuscript published by Fagnan retains the verse mentioning ‘Sharīf’ (three lines from the end) but adds a final verse giving the author’s name as ‘Nāṣir b. Khusrau’. It is quite obvious that (except in the version represented by Taqawī’s manuscript) the text has been tampered with. The poem is clearly not by Nāṣir i Khusrau, whose pen-name was ‘Ḥujjat’, not ‘Sharīf, and whose style is quite unlike that of the author of the Saʿādat-nāmah; moreover, the latter poem contains no trace of Ismāʿīlī doctrines. Nothing else is known of this Sharīf, except that he must have lived before the middle of the 9th/15th century, the date of the earliest manuscripts. A striking feature of the poem is the vehemence with which the author denounces the ‘great ones’ and his insistence that, after the prophets and saints, the best of mankind are the peasants, and then the artisans.

¶ The modern Persian scholar M.T. Bahār identified the author of the Saʿādat-nāma as one Nāṣir al-dīn b. Khusrau Iṣfahānī, who supposedly died in 735/1334–5, referring in a foot-note to the entry on the Saʿādat-nāmah in the Kashf al-ẓunūn of Ḥājjī Khalīfah. This is an error on the part of Bahār. In Flügel’s edition of the Kashf al-ẓunūn the Saʿādat-nāmah is described as the work of ‘Nāṣir Khusrau al-Iṣfahānī who died in the year 431’ and the same date, 431, is given for Nāṣir’s death also in the entry on the Safar-nāmah. It emerges from the critical edition by Yaltkaya and Bilge that the date was left blank in both entries in the author’s rough draft, but that at least in the former entry the date ‘431’ is indicated in the Ismail Paşa manuscript, presumably reflecting the author’s fair copy. In fact this is the (erroneous) date given already by Daulat-shāh for the death of Nāṣir i Khusrau, just as it is Daulat-shāh who (again wrongly) made Nāṣir a native of Isfahan. It is thus clear that Ḥājjī Khalīfah has merely repeated the erroneous data that he found in Daulat-shāh and did possess any independent information about some different ‘Nāṣir b. Khusrau Iṣfahānī’. In the edition of the Kashf al-ẓunūn published in Bulaq in 1277/1861 the date ‘431’ occurs (in figures and words) in the entry on the Safar-nāmah⁶⁸ but is misprinted as ‘731’ in the entry on the Saʿādat-namah⁶⁹ (again first in figures, and then spelt out in words). It is not clear whether Bahār’s ‘735’ is again a misprint in the (unidentified) oriental edition of the Kashf al-ẓunūn consulted by him, or whether it is simply a mistake of his own. In any case, this date has no authority and it does not justify assigning the Saʿādat-nāmah to ‘Nāṣir b. Khusrau Iṣfahānī’; this person is fictitious.

Mss.: Dublin Beatty 139 (Dated 23 Shaʿbān 869/1465); London Or. 12969 fol. 26a–40a (Meredith-Owens p. 76. 15th century? Inspexi);⁷⁰ Paris Supplément 1398 fol. 20v sqq. (Blochet 1970. Dated 861/1456–7); Supplément 781A fol. 255v sqq. (Blochet 1972. Dated Rabīʿ i 892/1487); Leningrad Acad. A 904 fol. 51b–64b (Index 2248); Istanbul Üniversite fy 593/8 fol. 227a–231b (Ateş 19. Dated 890/1485); Üniversite fy 1037 (=Halis Ef. 1962. Ateş 20. Dated Dhū l-qaʿdah 973/1566); Tehran Majlis 4940 (Munz. 30982. Dated 872/1567–8). Cf. Munz. iv 30982–4.

¶ Editions: E. Fagnan, ‘Le Livre de la Félicité … par Nâçir ed-Dîn ben Khosroû’, zdmg 34, 1880, pp. 643–74 (with a French translation; see also the emendations by F. Teufel in zdmg 36, 1882, pp. 106–114). Also printed in the appendix to the edition of Nāṣir’s Safar-nāmah published in Berlin, Kaviani Press, 1341/1922–3, and in N. Taqawī’s edition of Nāṣir’s dīwān, Tehran 1307 Sh./1928, pp. 545–61, and reprints (see above, p. 114).

Translations: (French prose): See editions.

(English prose): G.M. Wickens, ‘The Saʿādatnāmeh attributed to Nāṣir-i Khusrau’, The Islamic quarterly 2, 1955, pp. 117–32, 206–21.

Ḥājjī Khalīfah iii p. 598 (new edition ii col. 990); Bahār, Sabk iii p. 188; ei² s.v. ‘Sharīf’.

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Rōshanāʾī-nāmah is a didactic poem of about 550 verses in hazaj metre (inc.: ba nām i kirdigār i pāk dāwar * kih hast az wahm u ʿaql u fikr bartar, with variants) and is preceded in the Gotha manuscript (followed by Ethé’s edition) by 34 verses in the same metre, with the heading ‘iftitāḥ i Rōshanāʾī-nāmah’, beginning ba nām i ān-kih dārā i jahān ast * khudāwand i tan u ʿaql u ruwān ast. But it is not clear whether this actually has anything to do with the poem. The Rōshanāʾī-nāmah contains three verses (218, 231, 508 of Ethé’s edition) where the author refers to himself as ‘Ḥujjat’, and in the first of these he is also seen to state that he resides in Yumgān. It is thus, at least in its published form, ostensibly the work of our poet. Moreover, the name ‘Nāṣir i Khusrau’ occurs in the Leiden manuscript in the line following Ethé’s verse 566. Nowhere does the work refer explicitely to Ismāʿīlī, or even general Shiite, doctrines, though the discussion of the exoteric and esoteric meanings of the Qur’ān (v. 430–1) might suggest an Ismāʿīlī connection. Towards the end of the poem (555–8) the author states that he completed the work in the year so-and-so, on the first of Shawwāl, when the sun was in Pisces and the moon in Aries and there was a conjunction of ‘the stars’ in Libra. The year given in the manuscripts varies from as early as 323 to as late as 463,⁷¹ with an array of intermediate dates. But in none of the years mentioned in the manuscripts did 1 Shawwāl fall in late February or early March (i.e. when the sun is in Pisces); moreover, at none of the various times in Nāṣir’s lifetime when 1 Shawwāl did fall in February/March was there any conjunction in Libra.

¶ Ethé, ignoring the statement about the conjunction, emended the line mentioning the year to read ‘440’, when 1 Shawwāl corresponded roughly to 9 March 1049. However, since Nāṣir was in Cairo at that time, Ethé was forced to assume that the author revised the poem later in Yumgān, without changing the original date. Taqī-zādah, to whom we owe an extensive investigation of the question,⁷² suggested that the verse mentioning the position of the sun and moon might be a spurious addition and proposed that the date mentioned in the original text might have been 1 Shawwāl 460, corresponding to 3 August 1068, on which date Jupiter and Saturn were (according to Taqī-zādah’s calculation) both in Libra, although not actually in conjunction. But as these two planets had been in conjunction the previous September in the last segment of Virgo (i.e. just before Libra) contemporary observers might have regarded their close proximity in August 1068 as amounting to a repeated conjunction.

More recently Mīnuwī⁷³ proposed that the Rōshanāʾī-nāmah is not by Nāṣir i Khusrau at all, but by a later poet who used the same takhalluṣ (Ḥujjat) and also happened to live in Yumgān and that the correct date of the poem is 1 Shawwāl 643, i.e. roughly 19 February 1246 (643 instead of the 343 attested in a number of manuscripts, sī-ṣad being a misreading of shash-ṣad). At this time the sun and the moon were indeed in Pisces and Aries respectively; moreover, in that year there was a conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn in Libra, admittedly not in February, but in September. But already in February the two planets were very close to each other, in Libra, and thus could reasonably be considered to be in conjunction.⁷⁴ This seems to me to be a very strong argument for putting the composition of the poem in 643/1246; in this case it naturally has nothing to do with Nāṣir.⁷⁵ On the other hand, Minuwī’s suggestion ¶ that there were two ‘Ḥujjats’ in the same obscure Yumgān is a most improbable one. It would certainly seem more likely that the three verses alluding to ‘Ḥujjat’ or to ‘Yumgān’ were interpolated by someone who wanted to pass the poem off as a work of Nāṣir’s. Indeed, v. 218, which says that Ḥujjat resided in Yumgān ‘like a king’ (pādshah-wār) is sufficiently reminiscent of the legends about ‘Shāh Saiyid Nāṣir’ to make it seem most likely that it is an interpolation. The same interpolator might then have altered the original date to something that he thought fell in Nāṣir’s lifetime; uncertainty about when the presumed author actually lived would account for the wild discrepancy between the dates given.⁷⁶

Mss.: London i.o. 904 (Dated 1061/1651); i.o. 1761/5 (With unusual orthography, the kasrah i iḍāfah being ‘almost always’ indicated by yāʾ); i.o. 4057; Paris Supplément 1777 fol. 158r sqq. in marg. (Blochet 1645. Ms. dated 852/1448); Supplément 1398 fol. lv sqq. (Blochet 1970. Dated 861/1456–7); Supplément 1417 fol. 41v sqq. (Blochet 1662. Dated 15 Ramaḍān 879/1475); Supplément 781A fol. 249v sqq. (Blochet 1972. Dated Rabīʿ i 892/1487); Leyden 968 (2) (Cat. dcxxx. Dated 855/1451); Gotha 6/6 (gives the date of composition as 420); Leningrad Acad. C1102/4 (Cat. viii 1; Index 2054. Dated 710/1310–1; the oldest recorded copy); Univ. 1113 (Romaskewicz p. 9. Dated 1318/1900–1); Acad. A1414/3 (Cat. viii 2; Index 2052. Dated 1338/1919–20); Acad. B1809/4 (Cat. viii 3; Index 2053); Konya Mevlânâ ii 318/vi (Ms. dated 885/1480–1); Istanbul Şehid Ali Paşa 2703/9 fol. 166b–178a (Cf. H. Ritter in Der Islam xxv, 1939, p. 82 and Mīkrūfīlm-hā i p. 515. Dated 11 Rajab 732/1332); ‘Lala Ismail’ [=Lâlali?] 487/9 (Mīkrūfīlm-hā i p. 500. Dated 741/1340–1); Nuruosmaniye 4198/4 fol. 330b–338b (Ateş 15. Dated 27 Rajab 825/1422); Köprülü, Fazıl Ahmet Paşa 1097/3 (Cat. ii p. 300. Ms. dated Shaʿbān 840/1437); ‘Millat Efendi Ali Emiri’ 1017/8 (according to Mīkrūfīlm-hā i p. 487. Dated 855/1451); Nuruosmaniye 4964/37 ¶ fol. 195b–205a in marg. (Ateş 16. 15th century?); Üniversite fy 593/9 fol. 231b–228b [sic Ateş; for 238b?] (Ateş 17. Dated 890/1485); Topkapı, Hazine 299 (Karatay 387); Kayseri Reşid Efendi 607 fol. lb–13b (Karabulut 465); Tehran Malik 4925/3 (Munz. 30158. Dated 842/1438–9); Majlis 8421/1 (Munz. 30161. Dated 868/1463–4); Majlis viii p. 213 no. 2344/2⁷⁷ (Dated 15 Shaʿbān 883/1478. Beginning missing); Majlis 5299 (Munz. 30164. 15th century?); Malik 5124 (Munz. 30165. 15th century? Incomplete); Univ. xi 3142/4 (Dated 10 Jumādā ii 950/1543. Date of poem given as 343); Univ. xiv 4736/9 (17th century?); Malik 5076/5 (Munz. 30168. 17th century?); Majlis 4869 (Munz. 30169. 17th century?); Univ. xii 3533/3 (Dated 1228/1813); Gulistān/Ātābāy ii 490 (Dated Dhū l-qaʿdah 1274/1858); Dushanbe Acad. ii 328 (Dated Ṣafar 1289/1872); Acad. ii 329; Bombay Rehatsek p. 128 (Dated 25 Shaʿbān 926/1520); Bankipore Suppt. i 1981 (18th century? Date of composition given as 323 as in the older i.o. copy). Cf. Munz. iv 30156–77.

Extracts: Istanbul Nuruosmaniye 4904/14 fol. 63b–68a (Ateş 18. Dated 940/1533–4); Köprülü 1597 fol. 166b–178a (see Taeschner in Islamica v, 1932, p. 320); Tehran Gulistān/Ātābāy ii 488 (Dated Dhū l-ḥijjah 1261/1845).

Editions: (See also above, under dīwān). H. Ethé, ‘Nâsir Chusrau’s Rûśanâinâma … oder Buch der Erleuchtung …’ bzdmg 33, 1879, pp. 645–664, 34, 1880, pp. 428–464, 617–42 (critical edition with German verse translation); see also the corrections in F. Teufel, ‘Zu Nâṣir Chusrau’s Ruśanâinâma’, zdmg 36, 1882, pp. 96–106; Ethé’s text was reprinted in the Berlin 1341/1922 edition of Nāṣir’s Safar-Nāmah (separate pagination); Bombay ca. 1915; A.A. Semenov, Шугнанско-исмаилитская редация “Книги Света” … Насир-и-Хосрова », Записки Коллегии Востоковеднов v, 1930, pp. 589–610 (edition of a modern Ismāʿīlī manuscript which contains some interesting variants).

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A poem⁷⁸ entitled Āfāq u Anfus is attributed to Nāṣir in Kayseri Râşid Efendi 607/2 fol. 14b–17b (Karabulut 343).

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A collection of ‘mathnawīyāt i Hakīm Nāṣir i Khusrau’, including also ghazals, by a poet who uses the takhalluṣ ‘Khusrau’ (evidently not our poet) is found in Cluj M.O. 21425 (Nuskhah-hā xi/xii p. 989).

¶ Nāṣir does not appear to be mentioned as a poet⁷⁹ before the 8th/14th century.⁸⁰ Cf. Mustaufī p. 826; Jājarmī ii pp. 884–5; Ṣiḥāḥ (see index); Daulat-shāh pp. 61–4; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i pp. 607–33; Hidāyat, Riyāḍ pp. 232–43; A.V. Zhukovskiy, Песнь Насири Хосрова, zvorao 4, 1890, pp. 386–93 (with an edition of a tarjīʿ-band); W. Ivanow, Nāṣir-i Khusraw and Ismailism, Leiden/Bombay, 1948; id., Problems in N.i Kh. ’s biography, Bombay 1956 (a revised version of the preceding); Qazwīnī, Yād-dāsht-hā vii pp. 187–9; A.E. Bertel’s, Насир-и Хосров и исмаилизм, Moscow 1959; also in Persian as Nāṣir i Khusrau wa Ismāʿīliyān, Tehran 1346sh./1967–8; Khaiyām-pūr pp. 587–8 (with further references); Ṣafā, Tārīkh ii⁶ pp. 443–69; M. Muḥaqqiq, ‘Justujūy i maḍāmīn wa taʿbīrāt i Nāṣir i Khusrau dar aḥādīth wa amthāl wa ashʿār i ʿarab’, mdat xi/1, 1340sh./1961, pp. 32–93; id., ‘ʿAlawī būdan i Nāṣir i Khusrau’, Yaghmā 14/153, 1340sh. /1961, pp. 35–41; id., Taḥlīl i ashʿār i Nāṣir i Khusrau (āyāt i qurʾānī, aḥādīth, lughāt, amthāl), Tehran 1344sh./1965; id., ‘Nāṣir-i Khusraw and his spiritual nisbah’, Yād-nāmah i Īrānī i Minorsky’, Tehran 1348sh./1969, pp. 143–8; id., ‘Taṣḥīḥ i dīwān i Nāṣir i Khusrau’, Nāmah i Mīnuwī, Tehran 1350sh./1971–2, pp. 405–22 (contains a critical edition of a number of poems); Fouchécour, Nature pp. 228–9; Shafīʿī-Kadkanī, Ṣuwar pp. 550–63; Yād-nāmah i Nāṣir i Khusrau, Mashhad 2535sh.sh./1976 (38 articles, including several contributions to the textual criticism and interpretation of the dīwān); Poonawala pp. 111–25 (with further references); ʿA. Dashtī, Taṣwīr-ī az Nāṣir i Khusrau, Iran 1362sh./1983.

§ 124. Nāṣir Lughawī⁸¹ (or Baghawī?) is known to us only from the rubāʿī in which he laments the deposal of the Ghaznavid Muḥammad b. Maḥmūd in 421/1030. It is quoted by Baihaqī, who says that its author was one of the boon-companions (nadīmān) of the dethroned king, as well as by ʿAufī.

¶ Baihaqī pp. 74–5 (see also Nafīsī’s edition i p. 76 and Faiyāḍ’s new edition pp. 84–5 and the notes in the latter two); ʿAufī ii pp. 65–6; ln s.v. ‘Nāṣir i Lughawī’ p. 173, and supra, no. 122.

§ 125. A certain Abū l-Ḥasan⁸² Ōrmazdī is quoted a number of times in Asadī’s Lughat i furs. The juxtaposition of these improbable names would seem to suggest a Zoroastrian convert to Islam. Perhaps the same as Yazdānī (no. 153)?

lf passim; Shams p. 113; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 66 (one verse); Khaiyām-pūr p. 80.

§ 126. Pērōz (Fairūz) al-Mashriqī flourished, according to ʿAufī, under ʿAmr b. Laith (265/878–9 to 287/900). It is possible that he is identical with the ‘Pērōzī’ from whom Rādūyānī quotes one verse. Hidāyat gives the date of his death as 283/896.

Collection of fragments (9 verses), French translation, discussion and literature: Lazard, Poètes i pp. 19, 60, ii pp. 19–20.

lf (ed. Iqbāl) p. 87, (ed. Mujtabāʾī/Ṣādiqī) p. 157 (a new verse); Rādūyānī p. 25; ʿAufī ii p. 2; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 381.

§ 127. Abū l-Qāsim Ziyād b. Muḥammad al-Qamarī⁸³ al-Jurjānī heads ʿArūḍī’s list of the poets of the ‘kings of Ṭabaristān’ (in this case, presumably the Ziyarids), and ʿAufī quotes an ode by him dedicated to the Ziyarid Shams al-Maʿālī Qābūs b. Wushmgīr (367/978 to 402/1012), whose grandson, ʿUnṣur al-Maʿālī Kai Kāʾōs, mentions him in his Qābūs-nāmah. Qamarī is never quoted by Asadī, but Rādūyānī (followed by Waṭwāṭ) cites a good number of his verses to illustrate various rhetorical figures.

ʿUnşur al-Maʿālī, Qābūs-nāmah (ed. Yūsufī) p. 202; Rādūyānī passim (and Ateş’s notes p. 93); ʿArūḍī p. 28 (and Qazwīnī ad loc.); Waṭwāṭ pp. 25, 38, 75; ʿAufī ii pp. 19–20; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i pp. 477–8; ln s.v. ‘Abū l-Qāsim’ p. 759; Şafā, Tārīkh i⁶ pp. 435–7; Khaiyām-pūr p. 475; Lazard, Poètes i p. 15; M. Ishaque, ‘Qamari of Gurgan’, Indoiranica xxv/3–4, 1972, pp. 57–61; Idārah-chīp. 127.

§ 128. Qarīʿ al-dahr is quoted frequently in Asadī’s Lughat i furs, and once in Rādūyānī’s Tarjumān al-balāghah. There is a verse mocking ‘Qarīʿ’ by ʿAsjadī,⁸⁴ which suggests that the two were contemporaries.

lf passim (and Horn, Einl. p. 27); Rādūyānī p. 79; Khaiyām-pūr p. 471.

¶ § 129. Qaṣṣār i Ummī⁸⁵ is the author of a verse quoted by Asadī addressed to ‘Mīr Abū Aḥmad Muḥammad Khusrau i Ērān-zamīn’, the Ghaznavid, who ruled for a short time in 421/1030 and again in 432/1040–1. Two further verses of his are quoted by Rādūyānī.

lf s.v. kafā; Rādūyānī p. 42 (and Ateş ad loc.); ʿArūḍī p. 28 (and Qazwīnī ad loc.); Khaiyām-pūr p. 472.

§ 130. al-Ḥakīm Sharaf al-zamān Qaṭrān al-ʿAḍudī al-Tabrīzī⁸⁶ was born, as we learn from one of his own poems,⁸⁷ in Shādī-ābād, just outside Tabrīz. He appears to have spent his whole life in the service of the minor dynasties of Ādharbāijān and Transcaucasia. His dīwān consists largely of odes to the Rawwādids of Tabrīz, Abū Manṣūr Wahsūdān (416/1025 to 451/1059) and his successor Abū Naṣr Mamlān, as well as the Shaddādids at Ganjah, ʿAlī Lashkarī b. Mūsā (425/1033–4 to 441/1049–50) and Faḍl (or Faḍlūn) b. Abī l-Aswār (459/1067 to 466/1073–4), but also to others, including Asadī’s patron Abū Dulaf. Nāṣir i Khusrau describes in his Safar-nāmah his meeting with Qaṭrān in Tabrīz in 438/1046. The most recent date that can be adduced from his poems is Friday 1 Dhū l-ḥijjah 462 (10 September 1070) on which day Mihragān coincided with a Friday and a new moon (ādīnah u mihragān u māh i nau * bādand khujastah har sih bar khusrau).⁸⁸ Hidāyat says that he died in 465/1072–3, while Taqī⁸⁹ makes it as late as 485/1092.

The introduction in manuscript ʿain of the Lughat i furs, ostensibly the work of Asadī himself, mentions an older Persian dictionary by ‘Qaṭrān i shāʿir’. Asadī thus obviously knew him not only as a lexicographer, but also as a poet. The fact that he never actually quotes any of Qaṭrān’s verses in his own dictionary merely underlines the fact that the purpose of the latter was to illustrate the rare words used by the Eastern Persian poets; the poems of a Western writer like Qaṭrān were thus for his purposes of no significance. Qaṭrān’s interest in lexicography is confirmed by Nāṣir i Khusrau when he tells us that he ‘came to me and brought the dīwān of Munjīk and the dīwān of Daqīqī and read ¶ them in my presence and asked me about every expression (maʿnā) which he found difficult. I told him its meaning and he wrote it down’. The point of the anecdote is clearly that the dīwāns of these poets contained Eastern Iranian (i.e. Sogdian etc.) words that were incomprehensible to a Western Persian like Qaṭrān, who consequently took advantage of the presence of an educated visitor from the East, Nāṣir, to ascertain their meaning. It was exactly the same gap in comprehension which induced another Easterner, Asadī, to compile, again for the benefit of the literati of North-Western Persia, his Lughat i furs. Nāṣir’s own comment on the incident, namely that Qaṭrān ‘writes good poetry, but does not know Persian well’, is of course fuelled by malice.⁹⁰

A good-sized collection of Qaṭrān’s poems (ca. 1400 verses) is contained in a manuscript⁹¹ from a private collection in Tabrīz supposedly copied on 11 Rabīʿ i 529/1134—about half a century after the poet’s death—by ʿAlī b. Isḥāq al-Abīwardī al-Shāʿir, whom scholars have identified with the celebrated poet Anwarī. The name of the latter was, however, most probably Muḥammad b. ʿAlī b. Isḥāq.⁹² Unfortunately, the manuscript seems to have disapppeared from sight shortly after its discovery and there have been rumours in Iranian literary circles⁹³ that it is in fact a modern forgery from the same factory which produced the notorious fake copies of the rubāʿīyāt of ‘Umar i Khaiyām and of the Qābūs-nāmah. As long as the manuscript is not available for study it is thus imprudent to draw any conclusions from the data contained in it.

Manuscripts of Qaṭrān’s dīwān include an exceptionally large number of spurious poems, among them several by Rōdakī.⁹⁴ Mss.: London Or. 3246 fol. 263–86 (Rieu Suppt. no. 204 iii. Dated Ramaḍān 1248/1833. Attributed to Rōdakī, but contains a note by Bahman b. ʿAbd Allāh Mīrzā b. Fatḥ ʿAlī Shāh stating that, with the exception of the two poems beginning mādar i mai and yād i jōy i Mūliyān, these poems are in fact the work of Qaṭrān); Or. 2847 fol. 94–130 (Rieu Suppt. no. 245 Dated 26 Rajab 1279/1863. Selections); Or. 7894 (Meredith-Owens p 54. Dated 1295/1878. ‘Attributed in a note at the end to Rūdakī’); Or. 3317 (Rieu Suppt. no. 207. 19th century? The endorsement ‘Dīwān i Ḥakīm Rōdakī’ is corrected in a note); Or. 2879 (Rieu Suppt. no. 208. 19th century?); r.a.s. Storey bequest no. 3, fol. 1b–94a (Uncatalogued; inspexi); i.o. 3688; i.o. 4599 fol. 118–126a (selections); Cambridge Browne Coll. v.3 (Dated ¶ 7 Jumādā i 1261/1845. Formerly in the possession of Riḍā-Qulī Khān Hidāyat and apparently used by him in the compilation of his Majmaʿ al-fuṣaḥāʾ); Paris Supplément 1502 (Blochet 1204. Dated Ṣafar 1257/1841); Supplément 1529 (Blochet 1205. Dated 22 Ṣafar 1294/1877. Attributed to Rōdakī); Tehran Univ. xii 3944/2 (17th century? ‘With poems by Rōdakī’); Majlis viii 2477 (Dated 1206/1791–2); Majlis 4099/1 (Munz. 25357. Dated Muḥarram 1207/1792); Millī 203/2 (Nuskhah-hā vi p. 202. Dated 1245/1829–30. With poems by Rōdakī); Sipah-sālār iv p. 522 (Dated 1250/1834–5) [Munz.]; Gulistān/Ātābāy ii 377 (Dated 28 Ṣafar 1258/1842); Millī iii 1402 (Dated 1256/1840); Millī v 2297/1 (Attributed to Rōdakī); Gulistān/Ātābāy ii 378; Isfahan (Nuskhah-hā vi p. 596); Mashhad Riḍawī vii 519 (Dated 1267/1850–1); Riḍawī vii 521 (Dated 19 Rajab 1277/1861. With poems by Rōdakī); Riḍawī vii 520 (Dated 3 Rabīʿ i 1283/1866. With poems by Rōdakī); Peshawar Islamīyah 1823(5) (Dated 1134/1721–2); Hyderabad Salār Jung iv 1119 (17th century?); Calcutta Ivanow 430 (Dated 1018/1609–10. Contains two collections of poems; the one in the centre of the page corresponds, according to Ivanow, to London Or. 3317, that in the margins to Or. 2879. Attributed at the beginning to Rōdakī but in the colophon to Qaṭrān); Private collections ʿAbd al-Ḥusain Bayāt (Nuskhah-hā vi 68. Dated 1007/1598–9); Nakhjawānī’s edition mentions 8 Mss., all in private collections, including the supposedly 12th-century Ms. described above. Cf. Munz. iii 25352–82.

Poems in anthologies: Oxford Elliot 37 fol. 68a, 194a, 209a, 245b (Ethé 1333 = Daqāʾiq al-ashʿār. Includes a tasmīṭ and a tarjīʿ); Cambridge Browne Coll. V.65 no. 35 (Anthology dated 27 Ramaḍan 827/1424); Berlin Sprenger 1378 fol. 364b sq. (Pertsch 681. Dated 28 Rabīʿ ii 1270/1854. Apparently copied from the Calcutta Ms.); Tehran Majlis viii 2326 pp. 247–9 (17th century?); Calcutta Ivanow 927 fol. 2v sq. (Modern).

Editions: Tabriz 1332sh./1954 (Ed. M. Nakhjawānī, with introductions by S.Ḥ. Taqī-zādah and the editor. Important review by H. Ritter, Oriens ix, 1956, pp. 367–8); reprint 1362sh./1983.

Nāṣir i Khusrau, Safar-nāmah (ed. Dabīr-Siyāqī, Tehran 1354sh./1976) p. 9; lf (ed. Iqbāl) p. 1; Waṭwāṭ pp. 7, 8, 9; ʿAufī ii pp. 214–21; Jājarmī pp. 137–42; Daulat-shāh pp. 67–9; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i pp. 466–76; S.A. Kasrawī, Pād-shāhān i gum-nām, Tehran, 1307–9sh./1928–30, vols. ii–iii passim (see the indexes. Fundamental); id., ‘Qaṭrān, shāʿir i Ādharbāijān’, Armaghān xii, 1310sh./1931, pp. 45–51, 101–6, 177–84, 297–301, 383–91, 457–61, 534–8 (also in Maqalāt i Kasrawī i, Tehran 1327sh./1948 pp. 123–55); V. Minorsky, Studies in Caucasian history (=Cambridge Oriental Series No. 6), London 1953, passim; Ṣafā ii⁶ pp. 421–30; Khaiyām-pūr p. 437; Y. Dhukāʾ, ‘Qaṭrān wa nukhustīn mamdūḥ i ū’, Sukhan xiv, 1343sh./1964, pp. 763–8; Fouchécour, Nature pp. 183–226; ¶ Shafiʿī-Kadkanī, Ṣuwar pp. 540–9; S.A.H. ʿĀbidī, ‘Sih qaṣīdah i nā-shinākhtah az Qaṭrān i Tabrīzī’, Āyandah vi/7–8, 1359sh./1980, pp. 507–16; ei² s.v. ‘Ḳaṭrān’ (I. Dehghan).

§ 131. The poetess Rābiʿah bint Kaʿ b al-Quzdārī is included in ʿAufī’s chapter on the Ghaznavid poets where we find several of her poems, including an early example of a mulammaʿ (a poem with alternating Persian and Arabic verses). Her passion for bilingual contrivances is attested also by the poem attributed to her by Jājarmī,⁹⁵ a Persian poem incorporating the Arabic words which make up the shahādah and the laḥwalah. Further specimens of her poetry are quoted by Rādūyānī (who calls her ‘Ibnat Kaʿb’) and by Shams. The romantic account of her in ʿAṭṭār’s Ilāhī-nāmah (for which see Ateş and Meier) has evidently no value as a biographical source.

Rādūyānī p. 81 (and Ateş ad loc.); ʿAufî ii pp. 61–2; Shams p. 121; Jājarmī i p. lām-kāf; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 222; M. Ishaque, Four eminent poetesses of Iran, Calcutta 1950, pp. 1–8 (with text and translation of most of the fragments); Ṣafā, Tārīkh i⁶ pp. 449–51; Khaiyām-pūr pp. 218–9; Lazard, Poètes Ip. 15 n. 2; Meier, Mahsati pp. 27–44; H. Massé, “The poetess Rābiʿa Qozdāri”, Yádnáme-ye Jan Rypka, Prague 1967, pp. 103–6.

§ 132. Rāfiʿī Nishābūrī figures in ʿArūḍī’s list of the poets of the ‘kings of Ṭabaristān’, which, at least in this context, evidently means not the Ziyārids, but the Bāwandids. This is clear from the appendix (dhail) to Ibn Isfandyār’s Tārīkh i Ṭabaristān, when it quotes verses of his praising the Bāwandid Shahryār b. Qārīn (ruled from before 498/1108 to ca. 508/1114–5). The old anthology published by Yaghmāʾī has a poem by Rāfiʿī praising Niẓām al-mulk (died 485/1092). Jājarmī attributes to a poet of the same name an ode the dedicatee of which is indicated with the words khilaṭ u tashrīf i mīr al-muʾminīn ibn al-Jahīr, evidently the well-known wazīr of the caliphs al-Qāʾim and al-Muqtadī and ally of Malik-Shāh, Fakhr al-daulah Abū Naṣr Muḥammad b. Muḥammad b. Jahīr (wazīr from 454/1062 to 471/1078; died 483/1090).⁹⁶ Hidāyat quotes a shorter version of this poem, and a good number of others, claims that their author lived at the time of Maḥmūd and ʿUnṣurī and names the former and his minister Ḥasan Maimandī as the dedicatees of two of the poems cited. But Nafīsī has shown that this is wrong and that Hidāyat simply misunderstood the names occurring in the poems. For his part, Nafīsī committed the blunder of stating that Ibn Jahīr lived in the 6th/12th century and that consequently there must have been two poets by the name of Rāfiʿī Nishābūrī, one (ʿArūḍī’s) in the ¶ 4th/10th century (under the Ziyārids), and another in the 6th/12th. In fact Ibn Jahīr lived, as mentioned, in the 5th/11th century. It is thus clear that we have only one Rāfiʿī Naisābūrī and that he flourished in the last quarter of the 11th century and the first quarter of the 12th.

Shams quotes two verses by Rāfiʿī, one of which he states to be an imitation of a verse by Muʿizzī, but it is by no means certain that it was not in fact the other way round.

lf (ed. Iqbāl, pp. 165, 333: two verses from the marginal additions to Ms. nūs); ʿArūḍī P. 28; Shams pp. 278, 437; Jājarmī ii pp. 485–7; Ibn Isfandyār, Tārīkh i Ṭabaristān (ed. Iqbāl, dhail p. 174; see also Browne’s epitome p. 256); Yaghmāʾī pp. 101–2; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i pp. 220–1; S. Nafīsī, Ahwāl … Rūdakī iii pp. 1302–3; Khaiyām-pūr p. 222; ln s.vv. ‘Rāfiʿī i Nishābūrī’ and ‘… Nīshābūrī’ (two entries) p. 98; Qazwīnī, Yād-dāsht-hā iii p. 99.

§ 133. Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh b. Muḥammad al-maʿrūf bi Rōdah(?)⁹⁷ al-Balkhī is cited by ʿAufī in his chapter on the poets of the Ghaznavids, where we find five single verses (fard), a type of poetry in which, according to ʿAufī, he specialised.

ʿAufī IIp. 46–7; Khaiyām-pūr p. 242.

§ 134. Abū ʿAbd Allāh Jaʿfar b. Muḥammad b. Ḥakīm b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Ādam al-Rūdhakī (Persian: Rōdakī⁹⁸) al-Shāʿir al-Samarqandī,⁹⁹ the most celebrated Persian poet prior to Firdausī, was born in the village of Rōdak, outside Samarqand, and made his name as the eulogist of the Samanid ruler of Bukhārā, Abū l-Ḥasan Naṣr (ii) b. Aḥmad (reg. 301/914 to 331/943). Early poets such as Daqīqī, Firdausī, Abū Zurāʿah and Nāṣir i Khusrau allude more or less explicitly to his blindness and ʿAufī indeed says he was born blind, but this has been doubted by some modern scholars, who have referred to the vivid descriptions of nature in a number of his verses. According to Asadī¹⁰⁰ Rōdakī’s dīwān consisted of more than 180 000 verses (an even larger number is claimed by later authors). Of this prodigious output little has survived. We have one long ode (the splendid poem beginning mādar i mai) dedicated to Abū Jaʿfar Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. Khalaf, who was governor of Sīstān on behalf of ¶ the Samanids from 310/922–3 to 352/963, a handful of shorter poems and a considerable number of fragments, mostly single verses, quoted by Asadī, Rādūyānī and others. Apart from his lyrical pieces Rōdakī evidently wrote several mathnawīs, the most celebrated of which was his versification of Kalīlah wa Dimnah.¹⁰¹ According to the ‘older preface’ to the Shāh-nāmah,¹⁰² Naṣr b. Aḥmad ordered his minister Balʿamī to have the book of Kalīlah wa Dimnah translated from Arabic to Persian, and then commanded Rōdakī to turn it into verse. The same story is found in Firdausī’s Shāh-nāmah¹⁰³ with the characteristic added detail that the amīr appointed ‘interpreters’ (guzārandah) to ‘read’ the book to Rōdakī (who was, of course, blind). A number of fragments in ramal metre, quoted in Asadī’s Lughat i furs, were identified by Horn¹⁰⁴ as belonging to that well-known collection of stories. The present author, who is preparing a new edition of the fragments of Rōdakī’s narrative poems, has so far been able to identify the location in the story of about 50 verses.¹⁰⁵ Moreover, Nöldeke observed already¹⁰⁶ that the fragments in ramal also contain verses that clearly belong to the story of Sindbād and the Seven Ministers, and, after the publication of Ẓahīrī’s prose version of the Sindbād-nāmah, Dabīr-Siyāqī was able to place a few further verses in that story. This presents us with a slight chronological problem. Samʿānī states that Rōdakī died in his native village in 329/940–1. But Ẓahīrī¹⁰⁷ states that his source, the Persian prose translation of the Sindbād-nāmah by Khwājah ʿAmīd Abū l-Fawāris Fanārūzī (or Qa-) was written in the year 339/950–1 for ‘Abū Muḥammad Nūḥ b. Manṣūr al-Sāmānī’, evidently an error for Abū Muḥammad Nūḥ (ii) b. Naṣr (regn. 331/943 to 343/954),¹⁰⁸ and that before that time ‘no-one had translated it’ (i.e. into Neo-Persian. Arabic versions had, of course, existed earlier, e.g. that by Abān al-Lāḥiqī). It is, however, possible that Rōdakī did not ‘translate’ the whole of the Sindbād-nāmah, but rendered only a few of the stories.

Rōdakī, who enjoyed a tremendous reputation for about two centuries after his death, fell out of favour with the adepts of the highly mannered style of the Mongol period. It is most instructive to compare ʿArūḍī’s exuberant praise of Rōdakī’s verses on the Jōy i Mūliyān with Daulat-shāh’s dismissal of the same ¶ verses. Only in the 19th century did the simple and direct style of the ancient Khurāsānī poets come back into favour with Persian literati, by which time the overwhelming mass of Rōdakī’s authentic verses had disappeared. But the memory of his name had not vanished, as can be seen from the fact that in the intervening years that name had been used in connection with one of the notorious literary frauds with which the history of Persian literature is so richly littered, namely the manufacture of a Pseudo-’Dīwān i Rōdakī’. As scholars like Ḥasan b. Luṭf Allāh al-Rāzī, in the 17th century, and Riḍā-Qūlī Khān Hidāyat, in the 19th, quite clearly noted, this Pseudo-Dīwān consists in fact of poems by Qaṭrān supplemented by a handful of the well-known poems of Rōdakī’s quoted in the tadhkirahs.¹⁰⁹ Unfortunately, some Western scholars have fallen victim to this mystification.¹¹⁰

For manuscripts of the (Pseudo-)Dīwān see Qaṭrān.

Edition of the Pseudo-Dīwān: Persia (n.p.) 1315/1897.

Collections of fragments: The basic work on this poet remains S. Nafīsī, Aḥwāl wa ashʿār i Rūdakī, 3 volumes, Tehran 1309sh./1930 to 1319sh./1940, with an edition of the fragments in the last volume. A revised edition of this book, with additional fragments (altogether 1047 verses, but many of them manifestly spurious), but unfortunately without any critical apparatus, was published under the title Muḥīt i zindagī wa aḥwāl wa ashʿār i Rūdakī, Tehran 1336sh./1958; reprinted 1341sh./1962. Other collections: Osori Rûdakī, ed. A. Mirzoyev, Stalinabad 1958; Рудаки. Стихи. ed. I.S. Braginskiy with Russian verse translations by V.V. Levik and S.I. Lipkin, Moscow 1964; Абу Абдулло Рудаки: Стихи. Научный текст, перевод и комментарии, by I.M. Braginskaya, Dushanbe 1987 (non vidi. Cf. the review by J. Bečka, Archív Orientální 58, 1990, pp. 86–7).

Translations: (Russian): besides those listed in the previous paragraph see: Рудаки. Tr. V.V. Derzhavin and V.V. Levik, Stalinabad 1949; reprint 1955; Избранное. Tr. V. Levik and S. Lipkin, Moscow 1957; reprint 1958, 1978.

Baihaqī pp. 61, 188, 239, 366, 599; Tārīkh i Sīstān pp. 316–24; lf passim (he is the most frequently quoted poet; there are several hitherto unattested verses in the newly published Punjab manuscript); Rādūyānī passim (and Ateş’s notes, pp. 90–2); Samʿānī fol. 262a–b; ʿArūḍī pp. 28, 31–4; Waṭwāṭ pp. 4, 14, 83; ʿAufī ii pp. 6–9; Shams passim; Mustaufī p. 732; Jājarmī ii pp. 453–4; Daulatshāh pp. 31–3; Rāzī iii pp. 335–43; H. Ethé, ‘Rûdagî, der Sâmânidendichter’, ¶ Nachrichten … Göttingen, 1873, pp. 663–742 (still valuable as a guide to the late tadhkirahs); Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i pp. 236–40; E.D. Ross, ‘Rudaki and Pseudo-Rudaki’, jras 1924 pp. 609–44; id., ‘A Qasida by Rudaki’, jras 1926, pp. 213–37 (contains a critical edition of the ode mādar i mai … by M. Qazwīnī and a translation by Ross); id., ‘Rūdakī’s “Kalīla wa-Dimna”’ in his ‘Forward’ to Tawny/Penzer, The Ocean of Story, v, London 1926 pp. xiii–xx (discusses a few of the fragments already identified by Horn); U. Melzer, ‘Über einige Verse Rudakis’, zdmg 91, 1937, pp. 404–6 (emendations to Qazwīnī/Ross); M. Dabīr-Siyāqī, ‘Rūdakī wa Sindbād-nāmah’, Yaghmā viii, 1334sh./1955, pp. 218–23, 320–4, 413–6 (the article locates 10 verses of Rōdakī’s in the story of Sindbād and 32 in Kalīlah and Dimnah); M.I. Zand, Sohibqironi shoirī—ustod Rǔdakī, Stalinabad 1957; A. Mirzoyef, Abū ʿAbd Allāh Rōdakī, Stalinabad 1958 (published simultaneously in Tajik and Arabic character versions); id., Abū ʿAbd Allāh Rōdakī wa inkishāf i ghazal dar ʿaṣr-hā i 10–15’, Stalinabad 1957; id., Рудаки и розвитие газели в X–XV вв., Stalinabad 1958 (translation of the preceding); id., Рудаки: жизнь и творчество , Moscow 1968; id., ‘One more spurious manuscript of Rudaki’s verses’, Iran Society Silver Jubilee souvenir, Calcutta 1970, pp. 247–57; Rǔdakī wa Zamoni ǔ. (Majmuʿai maqolaho), ed. A. Mirzoyev, Stalinabad 1958; M. Muʿin, ‘Yak qaṣīdah i Rūdakī’ (i.e. bōy i jōy i Mūliyān), mdat vi/3–4, 1338sh./1959, pp. 71–92; id., ‘Qaṣīdah i Rūdakī wa istiqbāl i gūyandagān’, Āmūzish wa parwarish xiv, 1323sh./1945, pp. 577–90; S. Nafisī, ‘Chand nuktah i tāzah dar bārah i Rūdakī’, mdat vi/3–4, 1338sh./1959, pp. 21–39; B. Furūzānfur, ‘Shiʿr wa shāʿrī i Rūdakī’, mdat vi/3–4, 1338sh./1959, pp. 93–116; ʿA. Ḥuqūqī, ‘Lughāt wa tarkībāt i Rūdakī’, mdat vi/3–4, 1338sh./1959, pp. 117–170; Ṣafā, Tārīkh i⁶ pp. 371–89; Khaiyām-pūr pp. 241–2 (with further references); Shafīʿī-Kadkanī, Ṣuwar 413–42; A. Tohirjonov (Tagirdzhanov), ‘Baʾze masʾlahoi tarjimai holi Rǔdakī’, Sharqi surkh, 1966/1, pp. 126–30; Z.N. Vorozheykina, Еще несколько бейтов прописываемых Рудаки, Памятрики письменности Востока , 1972 pp. 5–8; M. Ishaque, ‘Rudaki, the father of Neo-Persian poetry’, Iran Society Silver Jubilee souvenir, Calcutta 1970, pp. 143–60 (contains translations of a number of his poems); Ḥ. Zarrīn-kūb, ‘ʿAnāṣir i badīʿī dar shiʿr i Rūdakī’, mdam xii, 1355sh./1976, pp. 105–16; J.M. Khumak, ‘Charkh i kajah-bāz dar shiʿr i Rūdakī’, Nāmwārah i Duktur Maḥmūd i Afshār iv, Tehran 1367sh./1989, pp. 2325–9; M.R. Shafīʿī-Kadkanī, ‘Rūdakī wa rubāʿī’, ibid. pp. 2330–42; M. Dabīr-Siyāqī, ‘Dāstān-hā i Bīdpāy wa abyāt i bāzmāndah az manẓūm-hā i baḥr i ramal i Rūdakī’, Qāfilah-sālār i sukhan (Khānlarī memorial volume), [Tehran] 1370sh./1991–2, pp. 99–114; ʿA.A. Ṣādiqī, ‘Ashʿār i tāzah i Rūdakī’, Nashr i dānish ix/4, 1373sh./1993; Bosworth, Saffarids pp. 289–91; ei² s.v. ‘Rūdakī’ (with further discussion).

Bibliographies: R.O. Tal’man and A. Yunusov, Рудаки (Указатель литерту ры) (title also in Tajik), Dushanbe 1965; J. Bečka, ‘New papers on Rūdakī by Tadzhik and other Soviet scholars’, Archív Orientální 28, 1960, pp. 494–501.

¶ § 135. Abū ʿAbd Allāh Rōzbih b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Nukatī al-Lahaurī appears, if the nisbah is correct, to be the earliest Persian poet born in India. ʿAufī quotes an ode of his praising ‘Sulṭān Masʿūd i shahīd’, i.e. Masʿūd i (421/1030 to 432/1040) and a qiṭʿah addressed to one Shāhanshāh b. Shāh i Nēshābūr b. Ibrāhīm. One verse by ‘rwznh nkny’ is quoted in the Vatican manuscript of lf s.v. shāshah.

lf (ed. Horn) p. 49 (ed. Iqbāl quotes the verse, from Horn, on p. 79 and 219 and ‘emends’ the name to Rōdakī); ʿAufī ii pp. 57–8; Ibn al-Mujāwir (see below, p. 143 fn.); ln s.v. ‘Nukatī’; Ṣafā, Tārīkh i⁶ pp. 600–1; Khaiyām-pūr p. 242 (‘Rōzbih’) and 614 (‘Nukatī’); I. Husain, The early Persian poets of India (A.H. 421–679), Patna 1980, pp. 6–10.

§ 136. Ṣaffār Marghazī is known to us only from the few verses quoted by Asadī.

lf (see the indexes to the three editions); ln s.v. ‘Ṣaffār’ p. 222 Khaiyām-pūr p. 337; Idārah-chī p. 38.

§ 137. Ṣāniʿ (reading uncertain) al-Balkhī is the author of a rubāʿī quoted in the Tārīkh i Sīstān (p. 324) which mentions ‘mīr i shahīd’, i.e. the title given posthumously to the Saffarid ruler Abū Jaʿfar Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. Khalaf (died 352/963).

Collection of fragments (1 rubāʿī), French translation, discussion and literature: Lazard, Poètes i pp. 31, 134, ii p. 139; see also Idārah-chī p. 82; Bosworth, Saffarids p. 288.

§ 138. Abū l-Ḥasan Shahīd (or perhaps better: Shuhaid) b. al-Ḥusain al-Balkhī al-Warrāq al-Mutakallim was a philosopher and a poet in Persian and Arabic who died (according to Yāqūt, followed by al-Ṣafadī) in 315/927. He was a contemporary and close friend of the polymath Abū Zaid al-Balkhī and of the muʿtazilī theologian Abū l-Qāsim al-Balkhī (the three Balkhīs were the subject of a joint biography, used by Yāqūt) and a bitter rival of the famous philosopher Abū Bakr al-Rāzī. The latter wrote a polemic against Shahīd on the subject of pleasure (al-ladhdhah) and another on eschatology (al-maʿād), both now lost. The epitome of al-Sijistānī’s Ṣiwān al-ḥikmah contains a short extract from a work by Shahīd on the ‘superiority of the pleasures of the soul over those of the body’, perhaps the object of al-Rāzī’s attack.

Shahīd was a professional scribe and had a reputation as a meticulous copyist. His Arabic poetry, which is quoted by as a Marghīnānī, Yāqūt and ʿAufī, includes two qiṭʿahs mocking Aḥmad b. Abī Rabīʿah, who was the wazīr of the Ṣaffārid ʿAmr b. al-Laith between 278/891 and 287/900. Yāqūt tells us that he also satirised Aḥmad b. Sahl, the famous governor of Khurāsān, and had to flee his anger, but returned to Balkh after Aḥmad’s execution (i.e. in 307/920).

¶ But Shahīd is mainly remembered as a Persian poet. His famous contemporary Rōdakī wrote a elegy on his death, and he is mentioned with respect by other Persian poets of the 4th/10th to 6th/12th centuries, but afterwards his poems fell into oblivion, apart from the verses preserved by the anthologists and lexicographers. These include an amatory poem of eight lines quoted by Jājarmī, a extract from a qaṣīdah which ʿAufī says he dedicated to the Samanid Naṣr ii (301/914 to 331/43), a poem with alternating Persian and Arabic verses and some couplets from a narrative poem, apparently of romantic content. Not surprisingly, several of the stray verses cited in the dictionaries have a philosophic or gnomic flavour.

Collection of fragments (106 verses), French translation, discussion and literature: Lazard, Poètes i pp. 20–1, 62–9, ii pp. 23–39.

al-Nadīm pp. 299, 301 (=ed. Tajaddud pp. 357–8); Abū Sulaimān al-Sijistānī, Muntakhab ṣiwān al-ḥikmah, ed. D.M. Dunlop, The Hague (etc.) 1979, p. 127; Bairūnī, Risālah … fī fihrist kutub Muḥammad b. Zakarīyāʾ al-Rāzī, ed. P. Kraus, Paris 1936, p. 11, 18; Thaʿālibī, Yatīmah, iv p. 21 (where ‘Sahl b. al-Ḥasan’ is an error for ‘Shahīd b. al-Husain’); id., Laṭāʾif al-maʿārif, ed. al-Abyārī/al-Ṣairafī, Cairo 1960, p. 203; Marghīnānī, al-Maḥāsin fī l-naẓm wa l-nathr, ed. G.J. van Gelder, Istanbul 1987, p. 77; Yāqūt, Irshād i pp. 143, 149 (and the edition by Iḥsān ʿAbbās, Beirut 1993, pp. 275, 279–80, 1421–2, the last passage containing the entry on Shahīd from a hitherto unpublished mukhtaṣar); id., Buldān ii pp. 167–8 (read, twice, Abū ⟨l-Ḥasan⟩ Shuhaid); ʿAufī ii pp. 3–5; id., Jawāmiʿ iii pp. 341–2; Shams p. 204; al-Risālah al-mulḥaqah, London Or. 9033, fol. 141b;¹¹¹ Ṣafadī, al-Wāfī bi l-wafayāt xvi pp. 197–8 (no. 229); Jājarmī ii pp. 952–3; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i pp. 303–4; Qazwīnī’s notes to ʿArūḍī pp. 127–8 (and those by Muʿīn in his edition, taʿlīqāt, pp. 80–2); P. Kraus in his edition of al-Rāzī’s Rasāʾil falsafīyah, Cairo 1939, pp. 145–7; Khaiyām-pūr p. 313; and (with various new suggestions) my articles ‘Shuhayd al-Balkhī, a poet and philosopher of the time of Rāzī’, bsoas 1996, pp. 333–7, and ‘Shahīd al-Balkhī’ in ei².

§ 139. Two verses are attributed to one Shāh-Sār (or -Shār?) in Asadī’s lf.

§ 140. Shākir and § 141. Jullāb: A marginal addition in manuscript nūn of Asadī’s Lughat i furs¹¹² s.v. ‘Jullāb’ explains that this is the name of a poet at Bukhārā ¶ and attests this with a verse by Khusrawānī bemoaning the death of Abū l-Mathal¹¹³ and ‘Shākir i Jullāb’. If the text is correct we must either assume that ‘Shākir’ and ‘Jullāb’ were two names for the same poet, or that Shākir was the son of Jullāb. At the same time, we must consider the possibility of the minor emendation ‘Shākir u Jullāb’, which would also give us two poets. In any event, the poet (or poets) in question must, like Khusrawānī and Abū l-Mathal, have lived during the Samanid period, if not earlier. The fact that lf quotes a good number of verses by ‘Shākir’, ‘Shākir i Bukhārī’, ‘Jullāb’ and ‘Jullāb i Bukhārī’, but never combines the two names, makes it seem most likely that we have to do with two different persons.¹¹⁴ Two verses by ‘Shākir i Bukhārī’ are quoted by Shams i Qais and it is evidently to the same author that we must credit the three verses by ‘Shākir’ quoted by Rādūyānī.

lf passim (and Horn, Einl. p. 22); Rādūyānī pp. 17, 29, 34; Shams p. 223; Dh. Ṣafā, ‘Du shāʿir i gum-nām’, mdat ii/3, 1334sh./1955 pp. 1–5; Khaiyām-pūr—p. 130 (s.v. ‘Jullāb’), 287 (s.v. ‘Shākir’); Ṣafā, Tārīkh i⁶ pp. 399–401; Lazard, Poètes i p. 14; Idārah-chī pp. 74–81.

§ 142. Shuhrah i Āfāq is similarly credited with two verses in lf. Nafīsī has recovered three more verses from Surūrī’s mf and a ghazal of 13 verses from an ‘old safīnah’. One more verse is supplied by Ṣiḥāḥ p. 260.

Cf. S. Nafīsī, ‘Shuhrah i Āfāq’, Sharq i, 1310sh./1921, pp. 577–80.

§ 143. Sipihrī Mā-warāʾ-al-nahrī¹¹⁵ is included in ʿAufï’s chapter on the Samanid poets, where two verses of his are cited. He is perhaps identical with the ʿAlī Sipihrī whom ʿArūḍī includes in his list of the poets of the Āl i Khāqān.

¶ ʿArūḍī p. 28; ʿAufī ii pp. 27–8; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 244; Khaiyām-pūr p. 261; Lazard, Poètes i p. 14; Idārah-chī p. 69.

§ 144. [According to Horn, the Vatican manuscript of lf attributes, S. v. nakhchīz, two verses to an otherwise unknown ‘Surūdī’, but Salimi (p, 34–5) says that the Ms. (which she has recollated) in fact has ‘Rōdakī’ and that ‘Surūdī’ is a misreading by Horn. The India Office manuscript (see Ethé’s catalogue, col. 1335) and Ṣiḥāḥ p. 132 likewise attribute them to Rōdakī.]

§ 145. Ṭaḥāwī is mentioned in ʿArūḍī’s¹¹⁶ list of the Samanid poets. Two verses are attributed to a poet of that name, s.v. nihāzīd, in manuscript sīn and (the first verse only) also in the manuscript P of lf¹¹⁷ as well as in Ṣiḥāḥ p. 94 (var. ‘Ṭukhārī’; this form also in Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 199 s.v. ‘Khabbāzī’). ‘Ṭaḥāwī’ is well known as the nisbah relating to the village of Ṭaḥā in Egypt; it is an unlikely name for a Persian poet, but perhaps he was the maulā of an Egyptian. In the face of the manuscript evidence it is in any event imprudent¹¹⁸ to replace the name by lectio facilior ‘Tukhārī’. See also Idārah-chī p. 34 (who reads ‘Ṭukhārī’).

§ 146. Abū al-Ḥasan Ṭāhir b. al-Faḍl, the amīr of Chaghāniyān, died in 381/991. ʿAufī includes him in his chapter on poeticising princes where he cites a number of his verses, further samples of which are quoted by Asadī and Rādūyānī.

lf passim; Rādūyānī p. 21 (and Ateş ad loc.); ʿAufī i pp. 27–9; Khaiyām-pūr p. 352; Ṣafā, Tārīkh i⁶ pp. 428–9; Idārah-chī pp. 171–83.

§ 147. Abū l-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. Yūsuf al-Sinjī al-Ṭaiyān was—I paraphrase, here and in what follows, Samʿānī’s notice—a native of the village of Sinj (near Marw).¹¹⁹ The greatest part of his poetry, which was well-known in Marw, consisted of buffoonery and jesting,¹²⁰ but later he repented and renounced poetry. He also worked as a builder (thus apparently his sobriquet ¶ Ṭaiyān, ‘hod carrier’) and is credited with the construction of the minaret of the mosque at Bāb al-Madīnah (evidently in Marw) and the one at the mosque in Sinj. A good number of verses by ‘Ṭaiyān Marghazī’ are quoted by Asadī. He is clearly not identical with the Ṭaiyān Bammī Kirmānī quoted by Rāzī¹²¹ and Hidāyat,¹²² who must—judging from his style—belong to a later period.¹²³

lf passim; Samʿānī fol. 375b (new edition ix p. 118);¹²⁴ ln s.v. ‘Ṭaiyān’ pp. 380–2; Khaiyām-pūr p. 360; Idārah-chī pp. 58–68.

§ 148. Turkī Kashī Īlāqī (or however this name is to be read)¹²⁵ is included by ʿAufī, who quotes four of his verses, among the Samanid poets. One further verse is quoted in manuscript P of Asadī’s Lughat i furs. His name is mentioned in a verse by Manūchihrī.¹²⁶ See also Ḥusain Īlāqī (above, § 68).

lf (ed. Mujtabaʾī/Ṣādiqī p. 132); ʿAufī ii p. 26; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i P. 176; Furūzanfar i p. 28; ln s.v. ‘Abū Dharr’ p. 456; Ṣafā, Tārīkh i⁶ pp. 455–6; Khaiyāmpūr p. 113.

§ 149. Abū l-Qāsim Ḥasan b. Aḥmad al-ʿUnṣurī has left us with a fairly small dīwān (evidently only a selection of his poems)¹²⁷ consisting almost entirely of odes to the Ghaznavid Maḥmūd, his brothers Naṣr and Yaʿqūb and his minister Maimandī. He was still alive during ʿīd al-fiṭr in 422/September 1031, on which occasion he and Zainabī, according to Baihaqī’s eye-witness account, received a rich reward from Maḥmūd’s son, Masʿūd.¹²⁸ We also have a poem by Manūchihrī,¹²⁹ who did not arrive in Ghaznah until some time in the reign ¶ of Masʿūd, eulogising ‘Abū l-Qāsim Ḥasan ōstād i ōstādān i zamānah ʿUnṣurī’. However, the fact that ʿUnṣurī’s dīwān contains only one poem addressed to Masʿūd suggests that he died not long after the latter’s succession. The date given by Daulat-shāh for the poet’s death (431/1039–40) is thus perhaps rather too late. Other tadhkirahs make him live as long as 441/1049–50.

ʿAufī says that, besides his odes, ʿUnṣurī dedicated a number of mathnawīs to Maḥmūd ‘like Shād-bahr u ʿAin al-Ḥayāh and Wāmiq u ʿAdhrā and Khing but u Surkh but’. It is very interesting that ʿUnṣurī’s contemporary Bairūnī, in his catalogue of his own writings (and those of Muḥammad b. Zakarīyāʾ al-Rāzī),¹³⁰ tells us that he himself ‘translated the story of Wāmiq and ʿAdhrāʾ’, the ‘tradition of Qasīm al-Surūr [i.e. ‘destined to happiness’, corresponding to Persian shād-bahr] and ʿAin al-Ḥayāh’ and ‘the tradition of the two idols of al-Bāmiyān’ [evidently the same as ʿUnṣurī’s ‘white idol and red idol’], as well as other stories. There is evidently some connection between the two authors’ treatment of the same tales; one must imagine either that Bairūnī translated ʿUnṣurī’s epics into Arabic, or (less probably, I think) that ʿUnṣurī based his poems on Bairūnī’s Arabic (or Persian?) prose versions.¹³¹ A number of mathnawī fragments in mutaqārib metre have been preserved in Asadī’s Lughat i furs and Rādūyānī quotes two verses explicitely from the story of the two idols.¹³² Our knowledge of ʿUnṣurī the narrative poet was revolutionised in the 1950’s when ¶ M. Shafīʿ discovered, stuffed into the binding of a manuscript dated 526/1132, substantial fragments of a yet older manuscript which the Pakistani scholar identified as ʿUnṣurī’s Wāmiq u ʿAdhrā. That this work derives ultimately from a Greek source had been observed long ago on the basis of the obviously Greek names occurring in the fragments cited by Asadī. Following the publication of Shafīʿ’s material the collaboration of two Scandinavian scholars, the Iranist B. Utas and the classicist T. Hägg, led to the discovery that ʿUnṣurī’s poem derives from the Hellenistic romance of Metiochus and Parthenope, a work known, like its Persian offshoot, only from fragments. Through what intermediaries the story passed from Greek to Persian remains, however, unknown.¹³³ It has also become clear that the 16th-century Turkish Wāmiq u ʿAdhrā of Lāmiʿī,¹³⁴ which the author claims to be a translation of ʿUnṣurī’s poem, has in fact little in common with the latter.¹³⁵

Qarīb¹³⁶ and Ṣafā have taken seriously the story which they found in their copies of the 13th-century Persian translation (by al-Ḥusain b. Asʿad al-Dihistānī al-Muʾaiyadī) of al-Faraj baʿd al-shiddah by Abū ʿAlī al-Muḥassin b. ʿAlī al-Tanūkhī, which quotes the words of ‘ʿUnṣurī the poet’ about how, having lost his father as a young man, he became a travelling merchant, was robbed of all his belongings and only narrowly escaped with his life. However, in the Arabic original of Tanūkhī’s work the name of the narrator is given as Abū l-Qāsim ʿUbaid Allāh b. Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-ʿAbqasī al-Shāʿir;¹³⁷ moreover, the ¶ name ʿAbqasī occurs also in the Topkapı manuscript (dated 706/1306–7) of the Persian translation.¹³⁸ The ‘correction’ of ʿAbqasī to ʿUnṣurī can consequently not even be blamed on the Persian translator, but only on later copyists. Quite apart from this, it must be noted that Tanūkhī died in 384/994 and is thus not very likely to have known ʿUnṣurī. It is probable that also Hidāyat’s story¹³⁹ of how the young ʿUnṣurī was attacked by robbers and subsequently sold into slavery goes back to the same murky source.¹⁴⁰

Editions of Wāmiq u ʿAdhrā: Lahore 1967 (Ed. M.M. Shafīʿ); Tblisi 1983 (Эпическое наследие Унсури, ed. I. Kaladze. Contains the manuscript fragments, reproduced photographically from Shafīʿ’s edition, the other quotations, reproduced from Qarīb’s edition of the dīwān, a Russian translation and commentary).

Manuscripts of his Dīwān:¹⁴¹ Oxford Elliot 114 (Ethé 521. Modern); London Or. 3246 fol. 213–262 (Rieu Suppt. no. 204 ii. Dated Ramaḍān 1248/1833); Or. 10936 (Meredith-Owens p. 61. Dated 1276/1859–60); Or. 2843 (Rieu Suppt. no. 205. Dated 28 Dhū l-ḥijjah 1278/1862); Or. 2889 fol. 24b–43b (Rieu Suppt. no. 212 iii. Completed 28 Jumādā i 1293/1876. qaṣāʾid only); Or. 10937 (Meredith-Owens p. 61. 19th century); Cambridge Or. 236 (Browne Suppt. 954. 19th century copy of Calcutta Ivanow 428); Browne Coll. V.88 pp. 2–139 (Dated 1266/1849–50); Leningrad Univ. 941w (Salemann-Rosen p. 15); Univ. 1003a, 1038, 1087c, 1202c (Romaskewicz p. 8); Istanbul Üniversite fy 328 (olim Rıza Paşa 33. Ateş 9. Has a waqf notice dated 1095/1684); Tehran Majlis iii 1032 (Undated but, as the cataloguer has shown, part of a now mutilated Ms. written in 1010/1601–2); Qarīb 189/1 (Nuskhah-hā v p. 648. Dated 6 Shaʿbān 1207/1793); Majlis iii 1031 (Dated 1211/1796–7); Majlis viii 2468 (18th century?); Aṣghar Mahdawī 464/5 (Nuskhah-hā ii p. 119. Dated Dhū l-qaʿdah (Dated 1225/1810); Millī iii 1489 (Dated 1255/1839–40); Majlis ii 375 (Dated 1256/1840); Majlis ii 376 (Dated 1262 /1846); Gulistān/Ātābāy ii 332 (Dated 5 Muḥarram 1262/1846); Millī iii 1481 (Dated 1296/1879); Sipah-sālār ii 1236 (19th century); Malik 4963/3 (Munz. no. 24885); Malik 5467/1 (Munz. no. 24914); Qum Marʿashī xvi 4813 fol. 88–167 (Dated 1259/1843); Marʿashī xi 4164 (Dated Dhū l-ḥijjah 1263/1847); ¶ Mashhad Riḍawī vii 499 (Dated Dhū l-Qaʿdah 1261/1845); Riḍawī vii 498 (Dated 1274/1857–8); Riḍawī vii 497 (Dated 1278/1861); Univ. 146; Lahore Univ. ii p. 135 [Munz.]; Peshawar Islamīyah 1823(1) (Dated 1134/1721–2); Hyderabad Sālār Jung iv 1115 (19th century?); Calcutta Ivanow 427 (18th century?); Ivanow 428 (=Lucknow Sprenger 437. 18th century?); Princeton 5 (Made in the reign of Shāhjahān [1628–58]. qaṣāʾid only); Qarīb refers to three Mss. in his private collection. Cf. Munz. iii 24881–915.

Selected poems: Oxford Elliot 37 fol. 180a, 200b, 208a, 235a, 240a (Ethé 1333 = Daqāʾiq al-ashʿār); London Or. 1858 fol. 65–78 (Rieu p. 1031. 19th century); Tehran Majlis xvii 5976 (18th century?); Majlis viii 2326 pp. 4–13 (17th century?); Univ. ix 2487/4 (17th century?); Calcutta Ivanow 927 fol. 273v–277v (Modern).

Editions: Persia (n.p., n.d. 68 foil.); 1298/1881 (95 foll.); Bombay 1319–20/1902; Tehran (n.d. 100 foll.); 1323sh./1944–5 (Ed. Y. Qarīb. Important review by H. Ritter in Oriens i, 1948, p. 134); reprint 1341sh./1962–3; 1342sh./1963 (Ed. M. Dabīr-Siyāqī); reprint 1363sh./1984.

An anonymous commentary on a qaṣīdah attributed to him, with numerous quotations from poets of the 10th to 14th centuries (e.g. Asadī, Farrukhī, Munjīk, Najīb Jarbādhaqānī, Qaṭrān, Rōdakī and ʿUnṣurī himself), with the title Risālah dar bāb i qaṣīd ⟨ah⟩ i lughatīyah i ḥakīm ʿUnṣurī, is contained in: Paris Ancien fonds 331 i (Blochet 1887/Richard. 17th century?).

Glossary: M.N. Osmanov, Частотный словарь Унсури, Moscow 1970.

Bairūnī, Kitāb al-nisab (see above, p. 136 fn.); Baihaqī pp. 274, 280, 386, 678 (with two verses); lf passim; Rādūyānī passim (and Ateş’s notes, pp. 88–90); ʿArūḍī pp. 28, 35; Waṭwāṭ passim; ʿAufī ii pp. 29–32; Shams passim; Mustaufī pp. 738–9; Jājarmī pp. 129, 214–5; Daulat-shāh pp. 44–7; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i pp. 355–67; M.ʿA. Tarbiyat, ‘Wāmiq u ʿAdhrāʾ, Armaghān xii/8, 1310sh./1931, pp. 519–31; Khaiyām-pūr pp. 409–10 (with further references); Ṣafā, Tārīkh I⁶ pp. 559–67; M.J. Maḥjūb, ‘Wāmiq u ʿAdhrā i ʿUnṣurī’, Sukhan xviii, 1347sh./1968, pp. 43–52, 131–42; Shafīʿī-Kadkanī, Ṣuwar pp. 526–39; Fouchécour, Nature pp. 1–180; B. Utas, ‘Did ʿAdhrā remain a virgin’, Or. Suec. xxxiii–xxxv, 1986, pp. 429–41 (important); id., ‘The ardent lover and the virgin—a Greek romance in Muslim lands’, Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 48, 1995, pp. 229–39; I. Kaladze, ‘Un ignoto intreccio romanzesco classico nella letteratura persiana’ (concerns the sources of W.u.ʿA.), Annali di Ca’ Foscari xxiii/3, 1984, pp. 119–32; J.S. Meisami, ‘Ghaznavid panegyrics: some political implications’, Iran xxviii, 1990, pp. 31–44 (contains a translation of and commentary on the ode in Qarīb pp. 10–13); ln s.v. ‘ʿUnṣurī’ p. 395; ei¹ s.v. ‘ʿUnṣurī’ (V.F. Büchner); EI² s.v. ‘ʿUnṣurī’ (J.T.P. de Bruijn).

¶ § 150. Two verses by Aḥmad Ushnānī¹⁴² are quoted by Rādūyānī. He is presumably identical with the Ushnānī Jōybārī one of whose verses is quoted in lf.

lf s.v. mōbad; Rādūyānī p. 63 (and Ateş ad loc.); Idārah-chī p. 37.

§ 151. Abū ʿAbd Allāh ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Muḥammad al-ʿUṭāridī is credited by ʿAufī with two rubāʿīyāt and with two verses from a qaṣīdah. He says that he was one of the mādiḥān i ḥaḍrat i yamīnī, which presumbly means ‘eulogists of the Ghaznavid dynasty’ rather than necessarily ‘of Sulṭān Yamīn al-daulah Maḥmūd’.

ʿAufī ii p. 57; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 342; Khaiyām-pūr p. 396; Ṣafā, Tārīkh i⁶ p. 597.

§ 152. Maḥmūd al-Warrāq is the author of two verses cited by Hidāyat, who states that he flourished under the last Ṭāhirid ruler, Muḥammad b. Ṭāhir (248/862 to 259/872–3).

Collection of fragments, French translation, discussion and literature: Lazard, Poètes i p. 19, 59, ii p. 18.

Cf. Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 511.

§ 153. An otherwise unknown Yazdānī is quoted by Rādūyānī no fewer than six times (for a total of seven verses). I wonder whether he is not identical with Asadī’s Ōrmazdī (q.v.)?

§ 154. Yūsuf ʿArūḍī, a number of whose verses are quoted in Asadī’s lf, is evidently identical with the ‘Abū Yūsuf’ whom Rādūyānī mentions as the author of a treatise on prosody. Shams quotes a further two verses of his which Rādūyānī (p. 95), however, ascribes (in a slightly different form) to Munjīk.

lf passim (and Horn, Einl. p. 31); Rādūyānī p. 2; Shams p. 335; S. Nafīsī, ‘Yūsuf i ʿArūḍī’, Sharq i, 1310sh./1922, pp. 758–60; Dh. Ṣafā, ‘Du shāʿir i gum-nām, mdat ii/3, 1334sh./1955, pp. 5–7; Ṣafā, Tārīkh i⁶ pp. 437–8; Khaiyām-pūr p. 661; Lazard, Poètes i p. 15 n. 2.

¶ § 155. ʿAbd al-Jabbār¹⁴³ Zainabī¹⁴⁴ al-ʿAlawī¹⁴⁵ al-Maḥmūdī¹⁴⁶ is included by ʿArūḍī and ʿAufī among the poets of the Ghaznavids. ʿAufī quotes, among other things, two odes dedicated to Maḥmūd; further verses praising the same king (they mention ‘Abū l-Qāsim’), and with the same metre and rhyme as ʿAufī’s second sample (and thus possibly from the same poem, though the verses do not overlap) are quoted by Jājarmī. Baihaqī, on the other hand, mentions him on three occasions as a highly esteemed panegyrist of Maḥmūd’s son, Masʿūd, one of these in connection with the events of the year 422/1031. See also above, § 95 (Maḥmūdī).

Baihaqī p. 131, 274, 280; lf passim; Rādūyānī passim (and Ateş’s notes pp. 92–3); ʿArūḍī p. 28 (and Qazwīnī ad loc.); Waṭwāṭ p. 20; ʿAufī ii pp. 39–40; Shams p. 359; Jājarmī pp. 458–9; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 241; Ṣafā, Tārīkh i⁶ pp. 550–3.

§ 156. Zarrīn-Kitāb Marghazī¹⁴⁷ is credited with two verses in Asadī’s lf (though several of the manuscripts ascribe one of these to ʿAmmārah) and a third is added by Nakhjawānī’s Ṣiḥāḥ al-furs (p. 189).

lf (see the indexes to the three editions); Ṣiḥāḥ (see index); ln s.v. ‘Zarrīn-Kitāb’ p. 371.

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