Pihānī is a village in the district of Qannauj.* Ṣadr-i-Jahān is a learned Sayyid of a happy disposition, most of whose life has been passed in the camp. He acquired his great learning under the tuition of Shaikh ‘Abdu-'n-Nabī,* and it was in consequence of the Shaikh's exertions that he was appointed chief muftī of the empire, a post which he held for several years. After the religious leaders of India had fallen into disgrace, his habits of submission to authority and his time-serving and worldly disposi­tion led him to regard before everything the honour and esteem which he enjoyed in the world. He accompanied the physician Humām* on his embassy to the ruler of Tūrān,* and when he returned thence he was honoured by being appointed Ṣadr of the empire. At the time when it was noised abroad in Lāhōr that those who remained of the 'Ulamā were to be banished to Makkah the glorious, and a list of them had been prepared, the Ṣadr-i-Jahān said one day, “I fear lest I may have been included in this class.” Mīrzā Niāmu-d-dīn Aḥmad, who had prepared the list, said, “Why should you be sent to Makkah?” The Ṣadr-i-Jahān asked the Mīrzā, why he needed to ask the question, and the Mirzā replied, “You have never given utterance to God's words, that you should be worthy of this banishment.”

The Ṣadr-i-Jahān, notwithstanding his poetic gifts and his great aptitude for writing poetry, now repents of his former devotion to the art. The following opening couplet of a qaṣīdah is by him:—

“May each hair of my beloved's locks,
O God, become an affliction,
And may my heart be afflicted with each one of those
afflictions!”

I pray that, if it please God, he may be given grace to repent of foolish disputations on points of secular knowledge, of hypo­crisy, ostentation, self-esteem, and extravagant boasting, which he must have learnt from one possessed of a devil, just as he has repented of writing poetry.