On his tombstone was engraved the following verse in Arabic:—
“I ask thee, nay, command thee, when comes my time to die,
To carve upon my tombstone, ‘Here doth a lover lie.’
That perchance some other lover, who Passion's laws doth
know,
May halt his feet at my grave, and greet the lover who lies
below.”*
Of Shaykh Abú Isma'íl 'Abdu'lláh Anṣárí of Herát, chiefly known for his Munáját, or Supplications, and his Rubá'iyyát,
Shaykh 'Abdu'lláh Anṣárí. or Quatrains, I shall say but little. He claimed, as his nisba implies, an Arabian origin, being descended from the Prophet's companion Abú Ayyúb; he was born at Herát on May 4, A.D. 1006, and died in 1088. Two works named “The Stages of the Pilgrims” (Manázilu's-Sá'irín) and “The Lights of Verification” (Anwáru't-Taḥqíq) are also ascribed to him. The following is from his Munáját:—“O God! Two pieces of iron are taken from one spot, one becomes a horse-shoe and one a King's mirror. O God! Since From the Munáját. Thou hadst the Fire of Separation, why didst Thou raise up the Fire of Hell? O God! I fancied that I knew Thee, but now I have cast my fancies into the water. O God! I am helpless and dizzy; I neither know what I have, nor have what I know!”
Quatrains.This well-known quatrain is attributed to him:—
“Great shame it is to deem of high degree
Thyself, or over others reckon thee:
Strive to be like the pupil of thine eye—
To see all else, but not thyself to see.”
The following is also typical:—
“I need nor wine nor cup: I'm drunk with Thee;
Thy quarry I, from other snares set free:
In Ka'ba and Pagoda Thee I seek:
Ka'ba, Pagoda, what are these to me?”
Ethé (loc. cit., p. 282) enumerates the following works of
Shaykh 'Abdu'lláh Anṣárí: the Naṣíhat, or “Advice,” dedi-
Other works of
Shaykh-iAnṣárí.
cated to the Nidhámu'l-Mulk; the Iláhí-náma,
or “Divine Book”; the Zádu'l-'Árifín, or
“Gnostics' Provision”; the Kitáb-i-Asrár, or
“Book of Mysteries”; a new and enlarged redaction of
Sullamí's Ṭabaqát-i-Ṣúfíyya, or Biographies of Ṣúfí Saints; and
a prose Romance of Yúsuf and Zulaykhá entitled Anísu'l-
We must now pass on to some of the chief non-mystical poets of this period, of whom four at least deserve mention,
Qaṭrán of Tabríz. viz., the younger Asadí of Ṭús, the two poets of Jurján, Fakhru'd-Dín As'ad and Faṣíḥí, and Qaṭrán of Tabríz. Let us begin with the latter, whom Náṣir-i-Khusraw met and conversed with during his halt at Tabríz (August 26 to September 18, 1046), and of whom he speaks as follows in his Safar-náma (p. 6 of the text):—“In Tabríz I saw a poet named Qaṭrán. He wrote good poetry, but did not know Persian well. He came to me bringing the Díwáns of Manjík and Daqíqí, which he read with me, questioning me about every passage in which he found difficulty. Then I explained, and he wrote down the explanation. He also recited to me some of his own poems.”
Both 'Awfí (Lubáb, vol. ii of my edition, pp. 214-221)
and Dawlatsháh (pp. 67-69) consecrate separate notices to
Qaṭrán, but both are meagre in biographical details. According
to the former he was a native of Tabríz, according to the
latter, of Tirmidh, while Schefer conjectures that he was born
in the mountains of Daylam, between Qazwín and the Caspian
Sea. Dawlatsháh speaks of him as the founder of a school of
poetry which included such distinguished poets as Anwarí,
Rashídí of Samarqand, Rúḥí of Walwálaj, Shams-i-Símkash,
'Adnání, and Pisar-i-khum-khána (“the Son of the Tavern”),
and adds that the eminent secretary and poet, Rashídu'd-Dín
Waṭwáṭ, used to say: “I consider Qaṭrán as incontestably the
Master of Poetry in our time, and regard the other poets as
being so rather by natural genius than by artistic training.”
And it is certainly true that with him poetry becomes infinitely
more artificial and rhetorical than with most of his predecessors,
while, as Dawlatsháh adds, he especially cultivated the more
difficult verse-forms, such as the murabba' (foursome), mu-
“Fresh as rose-leaves freshly fallen dost thou on my breast rest;
Didst thou erst in Heaven's embraces as a nursling pressed
rest?”
This ingenious artifice is very difficult to imitate in English, and as it is the special characteristic of nearly all his verse, * which depends for its beauty rather on form than idea, it must be left to those who can read it in the original to judge of its merit. The above attempt to reproduce this artifice in a single verse of English is, indeed, inadequate; each line should end with a word which in spelling and pronunciation exactly corresponds with the last syllable of the preceding word, like farsang (parasang) and sang (stone), nárang (orange) and rang (colour), Ámúy (the Oxus) and múy (hair), and so on; and to produce the effect in English it would be necessary to compose verses of which each line should, besides observing the ordinary laws of rhyme and metre, end with pairs of words like “recoil, coil,” “efface, face,” “refuse, use,” and the like. But in Persian the figure, though very artificial, is pretty enough when skilfully handled.
Asadí the younger, named 'Alí, who concluded his heroic
poem, the Garshásp-náma (one of the numerous imitations of
Asadí the
younger, of
Ṭús.
the Sháhnáma), in A.D. 1066, must be carefully
distinguished from his father Abú Naṣr Aḥmad,
the teacher of Firdawsí and author of the “strife-
Asadí's Garshásp-náma, an epic poem describing the adventures and achievements of Garshásp, an old legendary hero of The Garsháspnáma. Sístán, contains some nine or ten thousand verses. It is very similar in style to its prototype, the Sháhnáma, but as I have not had access to any one of the ten manuscripts enumerated by Ethé, * and have only at my disposal the portions published by Turner Macan in vol. iv of his edition of the Sháhnáma (pp. 2099 et seqq.), I am unable to say anything more about it
Of greater interest and importance is his Persian Lexicon (Lughat-i-Furs), preserved in the Vatican MS., the publication The Lughat-iFurs. of which in Göttingen in 1897 is, perhaps, the greatest of the many services rendered to Persian letters by Dr. Paul Horn. Ethé has since that time discovered another MS. in the India Office (No. 2,516 = No. 2,455 of his Catalogue), and has indicated the most important variants. The Vatican MS. is an ancient one, bearing a date equivalent to September 30, A.D. 1332. The Lexicon appears to have been composed by Asadí towards the end of his life (p. 31 of Horn's Preface), but at what precise epoch is not certain. It only explains rare and archaic Persian words, but its great value lies in the fact that each word is illustrated and vouched for by a citation from one of the old poets, including many otherwise unknown to us. The total number of poets thus cited is seventy-six, and the citations include passages from Rúdagí's lost Kalíla and Dimna, and other poems hitherto known to us either not at all, or only by name. One of the most remarkable omissions is the name of Náṣir-i-Khusraw, whom, as we have seen, 'Awfí also ignores. The explanation of this lies, I have no doubt, in the hatred and terror inspired in the minds of the orthodox by the Isma'ílís.