Karl Hermann Ethé

“ At last, weary of Damascus, he withdrew into the desert near Jerusalem and led a solitary wandering life, till one day he was taken captive by a troop of Frankish soldiers, brought to Tripoli, and condemned to forced labour in the trenches of the fortress. After enduring countless hardships, he was eventually rescued by a rich friend in Aleppo, who paid his ransom, and gave him his daughter in marriage. But Saʽdī, unable to live with his quarrelsome wife, set out on fresh travels, first to North Africa and then through the length and breadth of Asia Minor and the adjoining countries. ”

“ It concludes with an imaginary vision of a beautiful world of spirits who have stripped off the fetters of earthly cares and sorrows and revel in the pure light of divine wisdom and love. If we compare this with a similar allegory in Nāsir's dīwān, which culminates in the praise of Moṣtansir, we are fairly entitled to look upon it as a covert allusion to the eminent men who revealed to the poet in Cairo the secrets of the Isma‘ilitic faith, and showed him what he considered the “heavenly ladder” to superior knowledge and spiritual bliss. ”

“ The early death of his parents, which illustrated to him in the most forcible manner the unstableness of all human existence, threw a gloom over his whole life, and fostered in him that earnest piety and fervent love for solitude and meditation which have left numerous traces in his poetical writings, and served him throughout his literary career as a powerful antidote against the enticing favours of princely courts, for which he, unlike most of his contemporaries, never sacrificed a tittle of his self-esteem. ”

“ Nāsir visited Mecca four times, and performed all the rites and observances of a zealous pilgrim; but he was far more attracted by Cairo, the capital of Egypt, and the residence of the Fātimite sultan Mostanṣir billāh, the great champion of the Shī‘a, and the spiritual as well as political head of the house of ‘Ali, which was just then waging a deadly war against the ‘Abbāside caliph of Bagdād, and the great defender of the Sunnite creed, Toghrul Beg the Seljūk. ”

“ But scattered through all these alternate outbursts of hope and despair we find precious lessons of purest morality, and solemn warnings against the tricks and perfidy of the world, the vanity of all earthly splendour and greatness, the folly and injustice of men, and the hypocrisy, frivolity and viciousness of fashionable society and princely courts in particular. ”

“ The religious atmosphere of Ganja, besides, was most favourable to such a state of mind; the inhabitants, being zealous Sunnites, allowed nobody to dwell among them who did not come up to their standard of orthodoxy, and it is therefore not surprising to find that Nizāmī abandoned himself at an early age to a stern ascetic life, as full of intolerance to others as dry and unprofitable to himself. ”

“ Although the Makhzan is mainly devoted to philosophic meditations, the propensity of Nizāmī’s genius to purely epic poetry, which was soon to assert itself in a more independent form, makes itself felt even here, all the twenty chapters being interspersed with short tales illustrative of the maxims set forth in each. His claim to the title of the foremost Persian romanticist he fully established only a year or two after the Makhzan by the publication of his first epic masterpiece Khosrau and Shīrīn, composed, according to the oldest copies, in 576 A.H. (1180 A.D.) . ”

“ Sadly grieved by the misfortune of his patron and disgusted with the miserable condition of Persia, Saʽdī quitted Shīrāz and entered upon the second period of his life—that of his wanderings (1226–1256) . He proceeded via Balkh, Ghaznī and the Punjab to Gujarāt, on the western coast of which he visited the famous shrine of Sīva in Somnath. After a prolonged stay in Delhi, where he learnt Hindūstānī, he sailed for Yemen. Overcome with grief at the loss of a beloved child (when he had married is not known) , he undertook an expedition into Abyssinia and a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. ”

“ His first successor in the rectorship of the Maulawī fraternity was Husām-uddīn himself, after whose death in 1284 Jalāl-uddīn's younger and only surviving son, Shaikh Bahāudd-īn Ahmed, commonly called Sultān Walad, and favourably known as author of the mystical mathnawī Rabābnāma, or the Book of the Guitar (died 1312) , was duly installed as grand-master of the order. ”

“ Tukush (1199–1220) , whose only daughter, Malika-i-Jahān, had been married to Jalāl-uddīn's grandfather. Her son, Mahommed, commonly called Bahā-uddīn Walad, was famous for his learning and piety, but being afraid of the sultan’s jealousy, he emigrated to Asia Minor in 1212. ”

“ MIRKHOND (1433–1498) . Mohammed bin Khāwandshāh bin Mahmūd, commonly called Mīrkhwānd or Mīrkhāwand, more familiar to Europeans under the name of Mirkhond, was born in 1433, the son of a very pious and learned man who, although belonging to an old Bokhara family of Sayyids, or direct descendants of the Prophet, lived and died in Balkh. From his early youth he applied himself to historical studies and literature in general. ”

“ Ch. Schefer, Sefer Nameh, publié, traduit et annoté (Paris, 1881) , and by Guy le Strange in Pilgrims' Text Society (1888) ; H. Ethé, in Göttinger Nachrichten, 1882, pp. 124-152, Z.D.M.G., 1882, pp. 478-508; and Geiger's Grundriss der iranischen Philologie ii. p. 278; Fagnan in Journ. As. 7th ser. vol. xiii. pp. 164 seq., and Rieu, Cat. Pers. MSS. in Br. Mus., concluded that the poet and the pilgrim were different persons. The opposite view was developed by Ethé. ”

“ The latter is a prose work of a similar tendency in eight chapters, interspersed with numerous verses and illustrated, like the Būstān, by a rich store of clever tales and charming anecdotes; it discusses more or less the same topics as the larger work, but has acquired a much greater popularity in both the East and the West, owing to its easier and more varied style, its attractive lessons of practical wisdom, and its numerous bons mots. ”

“ After mastering all the dogmatic disciplines of the Islamitic faith he turned his attention first to practical philosophy, and later on to the more ideal tenets of Sufic pantheism, under the spiritual guidance of the famous sheikh Shihāb-uddīn Umar Suhrawardī (died 1234; A.H. 632) . Between 1220 and 1225 he paid a visit to a friend in Isfahan, went from there to Damascus, and returned to Isfahan just at the time of the inroads of the Mongols, when the atābeg Saʽd had been deposed by the victorious Khwarizm ruler of Ghiyāss-uddīn (1226) . ”

“ The establishment of this order, which still possesses numerous cloisters throughout the Turkish empire, and the leadership of which has been kept in Jalāl-uddīn's family in Iconium uninterruptedly for the last six hundred years, gave a new stimulus to his zeal and poetical inspiration. Most of his matchless odes were composed in honour of the Maulawī dervishes, and even his opus magnum, the Mathnawī (Mesnevi) , or, as it is usually called, The Spiritual Mathnawī (mathnawī-i-maʽnawī) , in six books or daftars, with 30,000 to 40,000 double-rhymed verses, can be traced to the same source. ”

“ A more heroic subject, and the only one in which he made a certain attempt to rival Firdousī, was selected by our poet for his third epopee, the Iskandarnāma, or “Book of Alexander,” also called Sharafnāmā or Iqbālnāma-i-Iskandarī (“The Fortunes of Alexander”) , which is split into two divisions. ”

“ Mus. (vol. i. London, 1879) , p. 87 seq. Besides the lithographed editions of the whole work in folio (Bombay, 1853, and Teheran, 1852–1856) and a Turkish version (Constantinople, 1842) , the following portions of Mirkhond’s history have been published by European Orientalists: Early Kings of Persia, by D. Shea (London, 1832) (Oriental Translation Fund) ; L’Histoire de la dynastie des Sassanides, by S. de Sacy (in the above-mentioned Mémoires) ; Histoire des Sassanides (texte Persan) , by Jaubert (Paris, 1843) ; Historia priorum regum Persarum, Persian and Latin, by Jenish (Vienna, 1782) ”