The great religious and political rivals of the 'Abbásids were the heterodox Fáṭimid anti-Caliphs of Egypt. These repre- The Shí'ite rivals of the 'Abbásids. sented one of the two great divisions of the Shí'a, or “Faction,” of 'Alí—to wit, the “Sect of the Seven,” or Isma'ílís, whose origin and history were fully discussed in the Prolegomena to this volume, together with those of the allied party of the Carmathians. The other great division of the Shí'a, the “Sect of the Twelve,” which is now the State-religion of Persia, only became so generally (though it prevailed for some time in Ṭabaristán, and was professed by the powerful House of Buwayh) on the rise of the Ṣafawí dynasty under Sháh Isma'íl in A.D. 1502, though it always had a strong hold amongst the Persians. Until the Mongol Invasion in the thirteenth century the political power of the Isma'ílís (represented in Persia by the so-called Assassins or Isma'ílís of Alamút) was, however, as we shall presently see, much greater.

The great dividing line in the Muhammadan period of Asiatic history is the Mongol Invasion, which inflicted on the Muslim The Mongol Invasion of the thirteenth century. civilisation a blow from which it has never re­covered, and, by destroying the Caliphate and its metropolis of Baghdád, definitely put an end to the unity of the Muslim empire. This Mongol Invasion, beginning early in the thirteenth century with the conquests of Chingíz Khán, culminated in the sack of Baghdád and murder of al-Musta'ṣim, the last 'Abbásid Caliph, by Húlágú Khán in A.D. 1258. The devastation wrought by it throughout Persia was terrific. The irresistible Mongol hordes were bloodthirsty heathens who respected nothing, but slew, burnt, and destroyed without mercy or compunction. “They came, they uprooted, they burned, they slew, they carried off, they departed” (“Ámadand, u kandand, u súkhtand, u kushtand, u burdand, u raftand”) * —such was the account of their methods and procedure given by one of the few who escaped from the sack of Bukhárá, wherein 30,000 were slain; and there were other cities which fared even worse than Bukhárá. The invasion of Tímúr the Tartar, horrible as it was, was not so terrible in its effects as this, for Tímúr was professedly a Muslim, and had some consideration for mosques, libraries, and men of learning; but Chingíz and Húlágú were blood­thirsty heathens, who, especially when resistance was en­countered, and most of all when some Mongol prince was slain in battle, spared neither old nor young, gentle nor simple, learned nor unlearned; who stabled their horses in the mosques, burned the libraries, used priceless manuscripts for fuel, and often razed the conquered city to the ground, destroyed every living thing within it, and sowed the site with salt.

Hence, as it seems to me, there is a gulf between what preceded and what followed this terrific catastrophe, which effected in Muslim civilisation, science, and letters a deteriora- Irrevocable harm done by Mongol Invasion. tion never afterwards wholly repaired. So, though less than two centuries and a half of the period which remains to be considered precede the Mongol Invasion, while six centuries and a half succeed it, the former may well claim for their treatment an equal space with the latter.

The earliest dawn of the Persian Renaissance, which culminated in Firdawsí and his contemporaries, was fully The Persian Renaissance. discussed in the Prolegomena to this volume, but a brief recapitulation in this place may not be amiss. According to 'Awfí, the oldest biographer of the Persian poets whose work has been preserved to us, and who wrote early in the thirteenth century, the first Persian qaṣída was composed by a certain 'Abbás to celebrate the entry of the 'Abbásid Caliph al-Ma'mún, the son of Hárúnu'r-Rashíd, into Merv, in A.H. 193 (A.D. 808-9). This extract from 'Awfí's work (the Lubábu'l-Albáb), including four couplets of the poem in question, was published, with translation, by Dr. H. Ethé in his interesting paper entitled Rûdagî's Vorlaüfer und Zeitgenossen (pp. 36-38), but I entirely agree with A. de Biberstein Kazimirski's * view as to the spurious character of this poem. One of the oldest Persian verses which has come down to us is probably that which, as we learn from the “Four Discourses” (Chahár Maqála) of Nidhámí-i-'Arúḍí-i-Samarqandí (composed about the middle of the twelfth century), * inspired Aḥmad al-Khujistání to rebel against the Ṣaffárí dynasty in A.H. 262 (A.D. 875-76), and “stirred within him an impulse which would not suffer him to remain in the condition wherein he was.” The verse is as follows:—

Mihtarí gar bi-kám-i-shír dar-ast
Shaw, khaṭar kun, zi kám-i-shír bi-júy,
Yá buzurgí u náz u ni'mat u jáh,
Yá, chú mardán't marg-i-rúy-á-rúy.

“If lordship lies within the lion's jaws,
Go, risk it, and from those dread portals seize
Such straight-confronting death as men desire,
Or riches, greatness, rank, and lasting ease.”

These verses are quoted by the author of the “Four Dis­courses” in support of his proposition that “poetry is that art whereby the poet arranges imaginary propositions, and adapts the deductions, with the result that he can make a little thing appear great and a great thing small, or cause good to appear in the garb of evil and evil in the garb of good. By acting on the imagination, he excites the faculties of anger and concupiscence in such a way that by his suggestion men's temperaments become affected with exaltation or depression; whereby he conduces to the accomplishment of great things in the order of the world.”

Persian poetry, then, began to be composed more than a thousand years ago, * under the earliest independent or semi- Wonderful stability of the Persian language. independent rulers who sprung up pari passu with the decline, decentralisation, and disintegration of the Caliphate of Baghdád. The Persian language has changed so little during this long period that, save for a few archaic words and spellings, the oldest verses extant hardly present any difficulty, or even uncouthness or unfamiliarity, to the Persian of to-day. In feeling and sentiment, however, a certain difference is, as it seems to me, perceptible; the older poetry of the Ṣaffárí and Sámání periods is simpler, more natural, more objective, and less ornate and rhetorical. Nothing can be more instructive, as Change of taste and canons of criticism. an indication of the change of taste which three and a half centuries effected in Persia, than to compare two criticisms of the same celebrated verses of the poet Rúdagí (by common consent the greatest Persian poet before the epoch of the Kings of Ghazna), the one contained in the Four Discourses of Nidhámí-i-'Arúḍí (about A.D. 1150), the other in Dawlatsháh's Memoirs of the Poets (A.D. 1487). The poem in question begins:—

Bú-yi Jú-yi-Múliyán áyad hamí,
Bú-yi yár-i-mihrabán áyad hamí,

and its translation is as follows:—

“The Jú-yi-Múliyán we call to mind,
We long for those dear friends long left behind.
The sands of Oxus, toilsome though they be,
Beneath my feet were soft as silk to me.
Glad at the friend's return, the Oxus deep
Up to our girths in laughing waves shall leap.
Long live Bukhárá! Be thou of good cheer!
Joyous towards thee hasteth our Amír!
The Moon's the Prince, Bukhárá is the sky;
O sky, the Moon shall light thee by and by!
Bukhárá is the mead, the Cypress he;
Receive at last, O Mead, the Cypress-tree!”*

The extraordinary effect produced on the Amír Naṣr ibn Aḥmad the Sámánid by these verses, and the rich reward which Rúdagí earned for them, seemed natural enough to the earlier critic, who considers that “that illustrious man (Rúdagí) was worthy of this splendid equipment, for no one has yet produced a successful imitation of that elegy, nor found means to surmount triumphantly the difficulties [which the subject presents].” In particular he maintains that in the following verse (not generally included in the current text of the poem, but evidently belonging to it):—