“Four things I bring, O Lord, to Thee, which exist not Thy
treasure within;
Need I bring, and nothingness, and my crimes, and my deadly
sin.”
Súzaní's own words sufficiently show that his life, to put it mildly, was open to criticism. Thus, in a fine poem quoted by Dawlatsháh (p. 100), he says:—
“I trod in the path of the Devil, I was snared in the Devil's
gin,
Till my evil conduct made me surpass the Devil in sin.
Unstained by sin in my lifetime I scarcely recall a day;
That I reckoned innocence sinful 'twere almost just to say.
From each of my limbs and members a crop of sins had
birth,
As weeds of every species will flourish in humid earth.
At To-morrow's great Uprising, which men to-day deny,
Each limb of my sinful body my shame will loudly cry.”
'Alí Shatranjí, the author of the “Stork qaṣída” (Qaṣída-i-
It would be useless to attempt an enumeration of all the poets of this period who achieved some celebrity in their day,
Minor poets of this period. but whose very names are now almost forgotten, and must be sought in the older histories and biographies. 'Awfí, for example, in the tenth chapter of his Lubáb, which deals with the poets of the earlier Seljúq period—that is, the period ending with the death of Sanjar, which we are considering in this chapter—enumerates fifty-two, not including those who, being princes, ministers, or doctors, as well as poets, are discussed in the first half of his Anthology. Some of these—like Jawharí of Herát; Samá'í and Athíru'd-Dín of Merv; Sayfí of Níshápúr; Rúḥí-i-Of Mahsatí we know but little, and even the correct pronunciation and derivation of her name (also given as Mihsití,
Mahsatí. Mahastí and Mihastí) are uncertain. * She seems to have been, not to speak harshly, of a somewhat gay disposition, and to have chiefly employed the rubá'í, or quatrain, as the vehicle of her expression. She is said * to have attracted the notice and gained the favour of Sanjar by the following verse, which she extemporised one evening when the King, on going out from his audience-hall to mount his horse, found that a sudden fall of snow had covered the ground:—“For thee hath Heaven saddled Fortune's steed,
O King, and chosen thee from all who lead;
Now o'er the Earth it spreads a silver sheet
To guard from mud thy gold-shod charger's feet.”
She is said to have been the mistress of the poet Táju'd-Dín Aḥmad ibn Khaṭíb of Ganja, and quatrains interchanged between these two are quoted in the Ta'ríkh-i-Guzída, * which also gives two quatrains addressed by her to a butcher-boy of whom she was enamoured. * The brief notice of her contained in vol. iii of the I'timádu's-Salṭana's Khayrátun Ḥisánun, or Biographies of Eminent Women (pp. 103-4), adds little to our knowledge of her life and work, but it is worth noticing that the last but one of the quatrains there ascribed to her is in the Ta'ríkh-i-Guzída * attributed to another poetess named Bintu'n-Najjáriyya.
Of the innumerable minor poets of this period Faríd-i-Kátib (or -i-Dabír, both words, as stated above, meaning “the Faríd-i-Kátib, 'Imád-i-Zawzaní, and Ḥasan of Ghazna. scribe”), 'Imád-i-Zawzaní, and Sayyid Ḥasan of Ghazna are, perhaps, the most celebrated. The following quatrain composed by the first-named of these poets on the occasion of Sanjar's defeat by the Ghuzz about A.H. 535 (= A.D. 1140-41) is sufficiently celebrated to make it worth quoting:—
“O King, thy spear hath set the whole world straight;
Thy foes for forty years thy sword did sate:
If now ill luck befalls, Fate willed it so,
For God alone remaineth in one state!”
The most celebrated of all the poets whose names are associated with Sanjar's Court is without doubt Anwarí, whose work Anwarí, Kháqání, Nidhámí, and Dhahír of Fáryáb. will be considered, along with that of his younger contemporaries, Kháqání, Nidhámí of Ganja, and Dhahír of Fáryáb, in the following chapter, since their importance demands that they should be discussed at considerable length.
Of the most important Persian prose works of this period,
two, the Ḥadá'iqu's-Siḥr (“Gardens of Magic”) of Waṭwáṭ and
Persian prose
works of this
period.
the Chahár Maqála (“Four Discourses”) of
Nidhamí-i-'Arúḍí of Samarqand, have been already
discussed, the latter very fully. Al-Ghazálí's
work and influence have likewise been noticed, and it is
sufficient to mention here the most celebrated of his Persian
works, the Kímiyá-yi-Sa'ádat (“Alchemy of Happiness”), which
is essentially an abridgement of the much fuller Iḥyá'u'l-'Ulúm,
or “Quickening of the Sciences” [of Religion], composed by
him in Arabic. Three other prose works of this period
deserve at least a brief mention, viz., the great medical Ency-
The Thesaurus, or Encyclopædia of Medical Science, composed early in the sixth century of the hijra (twelfth of our The Dhakhírai-Khwárazmsháhí. era) by Zaynu'd-Dín Abú Ibráhím Isma'íl al-Jurjání, and dedicated to Quṭbu'd-Dín Khwárazmsháh, the father of Atsiz, need not detain us, as it does not fall into the category of Belles Lettres, and is, so far as I know, a mere résumé or digest of the medical theories and practice of Avicenna (Ibn Síná) and his successors, set forth in Persian for the benefit of laymen unskilled either in the healing art or in the Arabic language.*
The Maqámát, or Séances, of the Qáḍí Ḥamídu'd-Dín Abú
Bakr of Balkh (a contemporary of Anwarí, who has eulogised
The Maqámát-i-Ḥamídí.
him in several of his poems) is an imitation in
Persian of the similar but much more celebrated
Arabic Maqámát of Badí'u'z-Zamán al-
“Every discourse which is not the Qur'án or the Traditions of
Muṣṭafá *
Hath now, by the Maqámát of Ḥamídu'd-Dín, become as vain
words.
Regard as blind men's tears the Maqámát of Ḥarírí and Badí' *
Compared with that Ocean fulfilled of the Water of Life.
Rejoice, O thou who art the Spirit [animating] the elemental
form of the followers of Maḥmúd! *
Go [onwards], for thou art the Maḥmúd of the age, and we [but]
the idols of Somnáth! *
Should I read a chapter of thy Maqámát over the numbers,
At once the ‘Surds’ would find deliverance from their speech-
lessness.
The Universal Intelligence meditated on a line thereof, and
exclaimed, ‘O Wonderful!
Does this most learned judge [Ḥamídu'd-Dín, the author] possess
the Science of the Transmutation of Speech?’
Live long, O powerful judgement, for in the World of Divine
Talent
Thou art an undeclining Sun and an enduring Heaven!”