In Volume 5: Poetry of the Pre-Mongol Period

previous chapter: 1 The Origins of Persian Poetry

¶The poets discussed in this chapter are essentially those quoted in Asadī’s Lughat i furs and in Rādūyānī’s Tarjumān al-balāghah, as well as a few others who can confidently be regarded as their contemporaries. Asadī’s work cannot be dated precisely, but its author was still alive some years after 458/1066.¹ It appears that Asadī continued to revise the work up until the end of his life and indeed that he left it unfinished at his death.² The family represented by the Vatican and India Office manuscripts contains a few quotations from poets of the first half of the 6th/12th century, namely a number of verses by Muʿizzī and one by Khātūnī. These are missing in the other manuscripts and evidently represent very early interpolations. Apart from these, everyone quoted by Asadī can safely be assumed to have made his name as a poet by the end of the third quarter of the 11th century at the latest. (This is naturally not true of the poets quoted only in the marginal additions to manuscript nūn, which have nothing to do with Asadī. These contain many samples of verse of the 6th/12th century). Rādūyānī’s work was evidently written after 482/1089³ and in any event before Ramaḍān 507/1114, the date of the unique manuscript. Rāduyānī quotes on the whole the same poets as Asadī. To these two 11th-century sources we can add two from the 12th century, namely ʿArūḍī’s Chahār Maqālah (completed in 552/1157) and Waṭwāṭ’s Ḥadāʾiq al-siḥr (very heavily dependent on Rādūyānī) and finally two from the 13th, ʿAufī’s Lubāb al-albāb (the earliest Persian anthology) and Shams’s al-Muʿjam fī maʿāyīr ashʿār al-ʿajam. These six books, apart from stray references in the early historians and, of course, from the surviving poems themselves, represent pretty much the sum total of what we know about the first two centuries of Persian poetry. It will become evident from the biographies that follow how very little this often is. Later sources are almost entirely dependent on ʿArūḍī and ʿAufī for the more-or-less authentic biographical information which they contain about the early poets, but this has been augmented by much that is uncontrollable and in most cases evidently false. They do, however, often quote genuine poems not cited by ¶earlier authorities; particularly valuable for our purposes is the 14th-century anthology Muʾnis al-aḥrār by Jājarmī. The only later tadhkirahs which have consistently been cited in the present chapter are those by Daulat-shāh (15th century) and Hidāyat (19th century) and the information contained in these has been sifted with great caution. Given the scarcity of genuine biographical information no attempt has been made to arrange the following entries in chronological order; the ordering is strictly alphabetical. Anonymous works of the pre-Mongol period (which are generally even more difficult to date) will be found in appendix i.

Not included here are poets known to us by name, but who have not left us any verses. We have also excluded the versifying amateurs cited (often at considerable length) in the first volume of ʿAufī’s work, apart from those who are also quoted (and thus evidently recognised as more or less respectable poets) by Asadī or Rādūyānī.

§ 1. A long qaṣīdah by one ʿAbharī in praise of the Seljuq Alp Arslān (455/1063 to 465/1072; the king’s name is mentioned in the 3rd verse) is quoted by Jājarmī. Hidāyat, who quotes a dozen lines from the same poem, as well as some other verses, calls their author ʿAbd al-Majīd ʿAbharī Ghaznawī, evidently identifying him with the ʿAbd al-Majīd ʿAbharī whom ʿAufī had included near the end of his chapter devoted to what he rather inadequately calls the Seljuq poets of Ghanzīn and Lahore (and which in fact contains mainly the panegyrists of the later Ghaznavids). If the two are in fact identical it would seem that ʿAufī lacked reliable information about when this poet lived. But perhaps we have rather two different ʿAbharīs.

ʿAufī ii p. 295; Jājarmī ii pp. 477–81; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 337; Khaiyām-pūr p. 383; ln s.v. ‘ʿAbharī’ p. 93.

§ 2. Abū l-ʿAbbās al-Faḍl b. ʿAbbās al-Rabinjanī⁴ is the author of a poem, quoted in various anthologies, lamenting the death of the Samanid Naṣr (ii) b. Aḥmad (which occurred on 1 Shaʿbān 331/943) and greeting the succession of his son Nūḥ. It is likely that the numerous verses attributed in the Lughat i furs (and later dictionaries) to ‘Abū l-ʿAbbās (i ʿAbbāsī)’, or to ‘ʿAbbāsī’ belong to the same poet. The fragments of his work indicate that he was at one point exiled from his native country and took refuge in Farghānah.

Collection of fragments (79 verses), French translation, discussion and literature: Lazard, Poètes i pp. 26–7, 85–93, ii pp. 64–77.

¶Thaʿālibī, Thimār al-qulūb, Cairo 1326/1908, pp. 147–8; lf (see indexes); Rādūyānī p. 25; ʿArūḍī ¶ [62] p. 28; ʿAufī ii pp. 9–10; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 381; Khaiyām-pūr p. 449; Idārah-chī pp. 95–109.

§ 3. A single verse by Abū ʿAbīr ʿAnbar⁵ (or ʿAbbās⁶) is quoted in Asadī’s lf , s.v. farkand.

§ 4. A handful of verses by Abū l-ʿAlā al-Shushtarī are quoted by Asadī and Rādūyānī; the latter authority mentions also a treatise of his on prosody. He must have lived well before the time of Manūchihri, as the latter mentions him in a list of ancient poets.⁷

lf (see indexes); Rādūyānī pp. 2, 49, 74, 85; Waṭwāṭ p. 46; Qazwīnī in his edition of ʿArūḍī p. 127 n. 1; S. Nafīsī, ‘Abū l-ʿAlāʾ i Shustarī’, Sharq i/5, 1310sh./1931, pp. 265–8; ln s.v. ‘Abū l-ʿAlā’ p. 634; Ṣafā, Tārīkh i ⁶ pp. 438–9; Khaiyām-pūr p. 20; Lazard, Poètes i p. 15 n. 2; Idārah-chī pp. 53–4; EIr s.v. ‘Abu’l-ʿAlāʾ Šoštarī’ (M. Zand).

§ 5. Abū ʿAlī Ṣāḥibī is credited with one verse in manuscript sīn of lf (ed. Iqbāl p. 427; also in Ṣiḥāḥ p. 276).

Cf. ln s.v. ‘Abū ʿAlī’ p. 674.

§ 6. Abū ʿAlī Sīmjūr was the governor of Khurāsān on behalf of the Samanids from 380/990–1 onwards, later rebelled against them and died in 387/997. One of his verses is quoted in the Vatican manuscript of lf , s.v. sān.

Cf. Lazard, Poètes i p. 14; Khaiyām-pūr p. 94.

§ 7. Two verses are attributed to one Abū ʿĀṣim in lf (see indexes). Cf. ln s.v. ‘Abū ʿĀṣim’ pp. 568–9; Khaiyām-pūr p. 19. ¶ [63]

§ 8. Abū Dharr al-Būzjānī was a Ṣūfī saint. Jāmī tells us that Sebüktigin (reg. 366/977 to 387/997) visited him and presented to him his infant son Maḥmūd (born 361/971–2). The same authority adds that the saint died in 387/997. Apart from one Arabic and two Persian verses quoted by Jāmī we have a single verse attributed to (presumably the same) ‘Bū Dharr’ in the marginal additions to manuscript nūn of lf s.v. sangalah.

¶ lf (ed. Iqbāl) p. 501; Jāmī, Nafaḥāt p. 322; Hidāyat, Riyāḍ p. 43; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 67; Buzurg i p. 40; ln s.v. ‘Abū Dharr i Būzjānī’ p. 454; Khaiyām-pūr p. 17; Lazard, Poètes i p. 14; Idārah-chī p. 238; EIr s.v. ‘Abū Ḏarr Būzjānī’ (M.N. Osmanov).

§ 9. Abū l-Haitham Gurgānī is the author of a didactic qaṣīdah (inc. yak-ē-st ṣūrat i har nauʿ u nēst z-īn-t gudhār * chi-rā kih haiʾat i har ṣūrat-ē bawad bisyār) which has been preserved for us thanks to the two commentaries written to answer the long series of philosophical-theological questions posed by it: one by an anonymous pupil of the author (who is perhaps identical with the Muḥammad b. Surkh al-Naisābūrī, whose commentary on the poem is mentioned by ʿAlī b. Zaid al-Baihaqī), the other the Kitāb jāmiʿ al-ḥikmatain by Nāṣir i Khusrau.⁸ Both commentators were Ismāʿīlīs, and both seem to imply that Abū l-Haitham belonged to the same sect, though the qaṣīdah itself is written from the standpoint of taqīyah. The first-mentioned commentary contains a somewhat mysterious passage (p. 43) where the author accuses Rōdakī, Shahīd al-Balkhī and Muṣʿabī of having distorted Abū l-Haitham’s thought; this would seem to imply that the latter flourished in the first half of the 4th/10th century, if not ¶ [64] earlier. And the lines (19–21) in which the author laments the fact that the world is at present under evil auspices might indeed suggest that they were written before the spectacular political successes of the Ismāʿīlī daʿwah towards the end of the 3rd/9th century.

Edition of the qaṣīdah, French translation, discussion and literature: Lazard, Poètes i pp. 24–5, 78–84, ii pp. 52–63.

Commentaries: Commentaire de la qasida Ismaélienne d’Abu’l-Haitham Jorjani attribué à Muhammad ibn Sorkh de Nishapour … edited with a Persian and a very extensive French introduction by H. Corbin and M. Muʿīn, Tehran/Paris 1955 (=Bibliothèque iranienne 6. Title also in Persian); Nasir-e Khosraw Kitab-e Jamiʿ al-Hikmatain Le livre réunissant les deux sagesses … texte persan édité avec une double étude préliminaire en français et en persan par H. Corbin et M. Moʿin, Tehran/Paris 1953 (=Bibliothèque iranniene 3).

Cf. ʿAlī b. Zaid al-Baihaqī, Tatimmat ṣiwān al-ḥikmah, ed. M. Shafīʿ, Lahore 1935, p. 132 (Arabic section), 91 (Persian section); EIr s.v. ‘Abu’l-Hayt̲am Gorgānī’ (H. Corbin).

¶ § 10. Abū Ḥanīfah Iskāfī⁹ or Iskāf¹⁰ is mentioned in three passages in the Tārīkh i Baihaqī in connection with events during the early part of the reign of Sulṭān Ibrāhīm b. Masʿūd of Ghaznah (451/1059 to 492/1099), where four long odes of his are quoted. His poetic career at the Ghaznavid court must, however, have begun a good deal earlier if we are to believe Sanāʾī’s statement that ‘Bū Ḥanīfah’ wrote a poem for ʿUnṣurī (who appears to have died in the early part of Masʿūd’s reign¹¹). ʿArūḍī is in any case correct in listing ¶ [65] him among the Ghaznavid poets. ʿAufī, on the other hand, says that he flourished at the time of Sanjar, i.e. at the beginning of the 12th century, which would appear to be an error. Even greater confusion reigns with Hidāyat, who confused him with a scribe of the Samanid period, Abū l-Qāsim al-Iskāfī, and stated that he died in 386/996. Recently Bosworth has suggested that our poet might be identical with one Abū Ḥanīfah Panjdihī, of whom Bākharzī¹² quotes some Arabic verses. One Persian verse by ‘Abū Ḥanīfah i Iskāf’ is quoted in the Vatican manuscript of lf , s.v. pashang, another in the marginal additions in manuscript nūn, s.v. āwang.

Collection of fragments: M. Dabīr-Siyāqī, Abū Ḥanīfah i Iskāfī, Tehran 1334sh./1955.

Baihaqī pp. 274–80, 380–4, 635–8; lf (references above); ʿArūḍī p. 28 (and Qazwīnī’s extensive comments, pp. 136–40); Sanāʾī , Dīwān, ed. Mudarris i Riḍawī, Tehran 1341 sh./1962, p. 639; ʿAufī ii pp. 175–6; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i pp. 83–5; ln s. vv. ‘Abū Ḥanīfah i Iskāf i Ghaznawī’ and ‘Iskāf’; Ṣafā, Tārīkh ii ⁶ pp. 398–403; Khaiyām-pūr p. 17 (with references to further tadhkirahs); C.E. Bosworth, The later Ghaznavids, Edinburgh 1977, p. 75, 174; J.T.P. de Bruijn, Of piety and poetry, Leiden 1983, pp. 117, 149, 261; EIr. s.v. ‘Eskāfī’ (J.T.P. de Bruijn). ¶ [66]

§ 11. Abū l-Ḥārith ¹³ Ḥarb b. Muḥammad al-Ḥaqq-warī¹⁴ al-Harawī is included by ʿAufī in his chapter on the Ghaznavid poets where we find a ghazal of six verses and a rubāʿī. Two further verses by ‘Ḥaqq-warī’ are quoted in the marginal additions to manuscript nūn of lf .

¶ lf (ed. Iqbāl) pp. 17, 505; ʿAufī ii pp. 60–1; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 197; ln s.vv. ‘Abū l-Ḥarth’ p. 397 and ‘Ḥaqq-warī i Harawī’ pp. 744–5; Khaiyām-pūr p. 169.

§ 12. Abū l-Ḥurr (Bū l-Ḥurr) is credited with one verse in lf , ed. Iqbāl, p. 455 (also in Ṣiḥāḥ p. 282). A poet of that name is mentioned also in a characteristically unflattering verse by Labībī (no. 37 of the collection by Rypka/Borecký, also from lf ), where it rhymes with ushtur.

Cf. ln s.v. ‘Abū l-Ḥurr’ p. 396.

§ 13. Abū l-Khaṭīr Munajjim¹⁵ Gūzgānī¹⁶ (or: Gurgānī¹⁷) is quoted as the author of two verses in manuscript sīn of Asadī’s Lughat i Furs,¹⁸ to which Nakhjawānī’s Ṣiḥāḥ al-furs ¹⁹ adds one further verse.

Cf. ln s.v. ‘Abū l-Khaṭīr’ p. 448.

§ 14. Abū Laith al-Ṭabarī, who was known already to Rādūyānī, is the author of a ghazal of seven verses quoted by ʿAufī in his chapter on the Ghaznavid poets. He is presuambly identical with the author of the ode which Jājarmī ascribes to ‘Bā Laith Gurgānī’. Rāzī adds a third poem, cited also by Hidāyat, who calls him ‘Abā Laith Ṭabaristānī Gurgānī’.

Rādūyānī p. 39 (and Ateş ad loc.); ʿAufī ii p. 66; Jājarmī ii pp. 467–9; Rāzī iii p. 102 (no. 1157); Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i pp. 81–2; Buzurg i p. 263; ln s.v. ‘Abū Laith’ pp. 790–1; Ṣafā, Tārīkh i ⁶ pp. 598–9; Khaiyām-pūr p. 23.

§ 15. Abū l-Mathal al-Bukhārī is included by ʿArūḍī and by ʿAufī, who quotes three of his ¶ [67] verses, among the poets of the Samanid period. There is a verse by Khusrawānī lamenting his death.²⁰

lf passim; ʿArūḍī p. 28 (and Qazwīnī ad loc.); ʿAufī ii p. 26; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 25; Ethé, Vorl. pp. 51–2; ln s.v. ‘Abū l-Mathal’ pp. 793–4; Khaiyām-pūr p. 23; Lazard, Poètes i pp. 14–5; Idārah-chī pp. 70–3; EIr s.v. ‘Abu ’l-Maṯal Boḵārī’ (J.W. Clinton).

§ 16. Abū l-Muʾaiyad al-Balkhī merits a brief entry in ʿAufī’s chapter on the Samanid poets. His versification of the story of Yūsuf and Zulaikhā is mentioned in one of the versions of the preface to the poem on the same subject formerly ¶attributed to Firdausī (ed. Ethé, v. 170–1).²¹ His main importance, however, was as an antiquarian and prose writer. A work with the title Kitāb i ʿajāʾib i barr wa baḥr, apparently written jointly by Abū l-Muʾaiyad and one Bishr Muqaṣṣim, is quoted in the Tārīkh i Sīstān (p. 13) and the other reports of ‘marvels’ which the same history gives on the authority of Abū l-Muʾaiyad come presumably from the same work. We possess in fact a geographical work entitled ʿAjāʾib al-dunyā (or ʿAjāʾib al-ashyāʾ)²² which, at least according to the preface in the Cambridge manuscript, was written by ‘Abū l-Muʾaiyad Abū Muṭīʿ al-Balkhī’ for the Samanid Nūḥ b. Manṣūr (365/975–6 to 387/997), but as that book clearly belongs to a much later period the connection between Abū l-Muʾaiyad and Nūḥ cannot be regarded as assured. His version of the Shāh-nāmah (apparently in prose) is mentioned in the Tārīkh i Balʿamī, by ʿUnṣur al-Maʿālī and Ibn Isfandyār. al-Bairūnī refers in one passage to a Shāh-nāmah by a certain Abū ʿAlī Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Balkhī al-Shāʿir, ¶ [68] which he tells us was based on the Kitāb siyar al-mulūk of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ and other sources; it is possible that this ‘Abū ʿAlī’ is identical with Abū Muʾaiyad, i.e. he was the father of a man with the given name (ism) ʿAlī and the honorary title (laqab) al-Muʾaiyad. The Mujmal al-tawārīkh, speaking of the various recensions of the Iranian national saga, mentions a number of works ‘in prose’ by ‘Abū l-Muʾaiyad al-Balkhī’²³ such as the stories of Narīman, Sām, Kai-Qubād, Afrāsyāb etc.; it is not clear whether these were separate works or rather parts of his Shāh-nāmah. In the same category must be placed also his Kitāb i Karshāsp, mentioned in the Tārīkh i Sīstān (p. 35).

Collection of his poetic fragments: G. Lazard, ‘Abu l-Muʾayyad Balxī’, Yádnáme-ye Jan Rypka, Prague 1967, pp. 95–101 (With English translation, biography and bibliography).

Bairūnī, al-Āthār al-bāqiyah (ed. E. Sachau, Leipzig 1878) pp. 99–100; lf passim; Rādūyānī p. 26 (and Ateş ad loc.); Tārīkh i Sīstān pp. 13–4, 16–7, 35–7 (and Bahār’s notes, p. 1); Mujmal pp. 2, 3; ʿUnṣur al-Maʿālī, Qābūs-nāmah (ed. Yūsufī, Tehran 1345sh./1967) p. 4; Shahmardān b. Abī l-Khair, Nuz’hat-nāmah i ʿAlāʾī, ed. F. Jahānpūr, Tehran 1362sh./1983, p. 342; ʿAufī ii p. 26; Ibn Isfandyār, Tārīkh i Ṭabaristān (ed. ʿA. Iqbāl, Tehran 1324sh./1945) p. 60; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 81; Ethé, Vorl. p. 54; Bahār ii p. 8, 18–24; Ṣafā, Tārīkh i ⁶ pp. 401–3; Khaiyām-pūr p. 23; ln s.v. ‘Abū l-Muʾaiyad’ pp. 877–9; Idārah-chī pp. 133–51; EIr s.vv. ¶‘Abu ’l-Moʾayyad Balḵī’, (G. Lazard) and ‘Abū ʿAlī Balḵī’ (Dj. Khaleghi-Motlagh, with further literature on the question of the identity of the two).

§ 17. Abū l-Muʾaiyad al-Raunaqī al-Bukhārī is another of the Samanid poets quoted by ʿAufī; Wālih²⁴ claims to know more precisely that he ¶ [69] lived during the time of the last Samanids and of the first Ghaznavids. It is perhaps possible that some of the fragments which the sources attribute to ‘Abū l-Muʾaiyad’ belong to him rather than to his namesake from Balkh.

ʿAufī ii pp. 26–7; Ethé, Vorl. pp. 54–5; ln s.v. ‘Abū l-Muʾaiyad’ p. 879; Khaiyām-pūr p. 23; G. Lazard, Yádnáme-ye Jan Rypka, Prague 1967, p. 97 n. 19; Idārah-chī p. 40.

§ 18. Abū l-Muẓaffar ʿAbd al-Jabbār b. al-Ḥasan al-Baihaqī al-Jumaḥī,²⁵ the ṣāḥib al-barīd at Naisābūr during the time of Masʿūd, is frequently mentioned in Baihaqī’s history of the period. His contemporaries Thaʿālibī and Bākharzī both quote a number of his Arabic verses, and Ibn Funduq, after referring to the two afore-mentioned literary historians and repeating a few of the Arabic verses that they had adduced, adds three more in Persian. It is likely that he is also the author of the verse which the Vatican manuscript of lf , s.v. ābād, attributes to ‘Abū l-Muẓaffar j.kh.j’.

lf (ed. Horn) p. 34; Thaʿālibī, Tatimmah ii pp. 90–1; Bākharzī no. 405; Baihaqī (see the index, s.v. ‘Jumaḥī’); Ibn Funduq pp. 178–9; ʿA. Iqbāl, ‘Abū l-Muẓaffar ʿAbd al-Jabbār b. Ḥusain (sic) i Jumaḥī (az shuʿarā i nīmah i awwal i qarn i panjum)’, Sharq i, 1310sh./1922, pp. 705–8; Qazwīnī, Yād-dāsht-hā iii pp. 25–6; ln s.v. ‘Abū l-Muẓaffar’ p. 843; Khaiyām-pūr p. 23; Qazwīnī, Yād-dāsht-hā iii pp. 25–6.

§ 19. Abū Naṣr Aḥmad b. Ibrāhīm al-Ṭāliqānī was one of the panegyrists of the Seljuq minister Niẓām al-mulk (d. 485/1092). Bākharzī quotes three Arabic verses from an ode to this dignitary. ʿAufī repeats two of these and adds two pairs of Persian verses. One further verse is ascribed to ‘Bū Naṣr i Ṭāliqān’ in manuscript nūn of lf.²⁶ There are two ¶ [70] Ṭāliqāns, one in Dailam and the other near Marw i Rōd; if this poet was a native of the latter he might then be identical with the ‘Abū Naṣr i Marghazī’ to whom Asadī attributes one verse, ¶s.v. farhast.²⁷ Two further verses²⁸ are ascribed by the same authority to an unspecified ‘Bū Naṣr’.

Bākharzī no. 304; lf (references in the article); ʿAufī ii p. 69; ln s.v. ‘Abū Naṣr’ p. 893 and 908; Khaiyām-pūr p. 24 (two entries).

§ 20. One verse by Abū l-Qāsim Mihrānī is quoted in the Vatican manuscript of lf (ed. Horn p. 83).

§ 21. Abū Saʿīd Faḍl Allāh b. Abī l-Khair, the famous mystic, was born (according to the hagiographie sources) on 1 Muḥarram 357/967 and died on 4 Shaʿbān 440/1049. The prose works attributed (probably wrongly) to him will be described in pl iv (Sufism); we are concerned for the moment only with his supposed rubāʿīyāt. The two principal sources for his life, the Ḥālāt u sukhunān i Shaikh Abū Saʿīd b. Abī l-Khair by the saint’s great-great-grandson Luṭf Allāh b. Saʿd b. Asʿad b. Saʿīd b. Faḍl Allāh²⁹ and the Asrār al-tauḥīd fī maqāmāt al-shaikh Abī Saʿīd, by a cousin of the preceding, Muḥammad b. Munawwar b. Asʿad etc.,³⁰ from the first and second half of the 6th/12th century respectively, both quote a number of quatrains that Abū Saʿīd is supposed to have ¶ [71] recited on various occasions, but both also deny explicitly that these are the work of Abū Saʿīd himself: the Ḥālāt ³¹ quotes him as saying that the poetry that ‘falls from my lips’ is the composition of the ʿazīzān, i.e. the earlier Sufis, and that most of it is by Abū Saʿīd’s teacher, Abū l-Qāsim Bishr, while the Asrār ³² states (on the authority of the author’s grandfather, the saint’s grandson) that although some people (jamāʿat ē) believe that the verses that the master recited were of his own composition, the fact is that he composed only one verse and one rubāʿī (both quoted) and that everything else was a repetition of what had been composed by his pīrs. In the introduction to his edition of the poems, Saʿīd Nafīsī has attempted to refute the idea that Abū Saʿīd wrote no poetry (apart from the three verses quoted in the Asrār) by referring to the many passages in the Asrār, the Ḥālāt and other relatively early sources which ¶refer to the recitation of verses by Abū Saʿīd, but this is really a petitio principii; the sources are unanimous in conceding that Abū Saʿīd recited poetry; they deny, however, that the verses were of his own composition. Ivanow³³ has quite rightly emphasised that ‘it is improbable that the admiring biographer of his own holy ancestor should have missed an opportunity to add to the fame of the Shaykh by corroborating the general belief in the latter’s poetical talents. If he has done otherwise there cannot be any doubt that this was due to the fact that memory was still fresh and the real state of things could not be misrepresented.’ Of course, this does not rule out the possibility that at least some of the verses which the older ¶ [72] sources put into the mouth of Abū Saʿīd might indeed be of great antiquity and thus of real importance for the history of Persian poetry. At the same time it is clear that in the surviving collections any authentic kernel has been encompassed in a mass of late elaboration. The task of disentangling the two remains to be done.

Collections of rubāʿīyāt : Mss.: Oxford Whinfield 42 (Beeston 2546. An abridged modern copy of the Calcutta Ms.); London Add. 7822 no. 2 (Rieu p. 738. Dated Rabīʿ ii 1063/1653); Or. 5348 (Meredith-Owens p. 50. 17–18th century?); Or. 8503 fol. 114a–115b (Meredith-Owens p. 94. 18th century?); Paris Supplément 1252 fol. lv, 3v, 61v (Blochet 1992. 17th century?); Leningrad Acad. A67 fol. 108a–142b (Index 1711. Dated 1204/1789–90); C2424 (Index 1712. 45 quatrains with commentary); Tehran Malik 4076/10 (Munz. no. 29907 vidit); Univ. xiii 4436/5 (18th or 19th century?); Adabīyāt i p. 282; Majlis majmūʿah 2357 pp. 114–124 (Nuskhah-hā v p. 157. 19th century?); Millī ii 966/3 (19th century?); Sipah-sālār v p. 2 [Munz.]; Kabul Museum 182 (Cat. p. 133. ‘Assez récent’); Ministry of Information 53 (Cat. p. 244); Lahore Shērānī i p. 137 [Munz.]; Bankipore Suppt. i 1969 (Dated 21 Dhū l-qaʿdah 1139/1727); Calcutta Ivanow 426 (=Lucknow Sprenger 67). Cf. Munz. iv 29907–30.

Commentary: Risālah i ḥaurāʾīyah by ʿUbaid Allāh b. Maḥmūd al-Shāshī, published in Zhukovskiy’s edition of Ibn al-Munawwar, pp. 487–93. An anonymous commentary on one rubāʿī was contained in Luck—now Sprenger 67.

Editions: Munich 1875–8 (Die Rubâʿîs des Abû Saʿîd bin Abulkhair, SB München 1875, pp. 145–168, 1878, pp. 38–70. 92 quatrains edited and translated in German ‘verse’ by H. Ethé); Bombay 1294/1877; 1297/1880; 1308/1890–1 (96 p. Collection of quatrains ascribed to Khaiyām, Bābā Ṭāhir, Abū Saʿīd and Anṣārī, together with the latter’s Munājāt); Cracow 1895 (Abu Saʿid Fadlullah ben Abulchajr i ¶ [73] tegoż czterowiersze, przełożył z perskiego Damian Rolicz-Lieder); Lahore 1934; 1935 (ed. Maulawī Maḥmūd al-Ḥasan Kānpūrī, with Urdu translation and commentary); Tehran 1334sh./1955 (Sukhanān i manẓūm, ed. S. Nafīsī. ¶Edition of 720 rubāʿīyāt, and fragments in other metres, from the various ancient and modern sources listed on pp. 177–200); See also Maulavī ‘Abd’ul Walī, ‘The Rubāʿīyāt of Abu Saʿīd ibn Abu’l Khayr’, jasb n.s. v, 1909, pp. 421–56, vii, 1911, pp. 637–67 (edition of 400 quatrains from the Calcutta and London Add. 7822 Mss., with some critical remarks), and H.D. Graves Law, ‘Some more quatrains of Abú Saʿíd bin Abí’l Khair’, jasb n.s. xii, 1916, pp. 185–237 (text and prose translation of 98 further quatrains from the Bombay edition of 1297 and a Ms. which the author found ‘among the débris of an Oriental book-shop in Hyderabad City’).

Translations (English, German and Urdu) see under editions; moreover: The Rubaiyat of Abu Saʿid bin Ab’il-Khair (sic) done into English verse by D.C. Datta, Jaipur 1943; 2nd edition. Jaipur 1971.

Literature on the rubūʿīyāt: R.A. Nicholson, Studies in Islamic mysticism, Cambridge 1921, p. 4; M.R. Shāfiʿī-Kadkanī, ‘Dar bārah i Abū Saʿīd i Abū l-Khair’, Sukhan xix, 1348sh/1969, pp. 681–98; Ṣafā, Tārīkh i ⁶ pp. 603–6; EIr s.v. ‘Abū Saʿīd’ (G. Böwering).

§ 22. Abū Salīk al-Jurjānī is mentioned in a verse by Manūchihrī (Dīwān, ed. Dabīr-Siyāqī p. 113) as one of the illustrious poets of Khurāsān. According to ʿAufī he flourished under ʿAmr b. Laith (died 287/900).

Collection of fragments (10 verses), French translation, discussion and literature: Lazard, Poètes i pp. 19, 61, ii pp. 21–22. ʿAufī ii pp. 2–3; Shams p. 255, 276; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 66; Khaiyām-pūr p. 18; EIr s.v. ‘Abū Salīk’ (M.N. Osmanov). ¶ [74]

§ 23. Abū Shakūr al-Balkhī is the author of the Āfrīn-nāmah, completed, according to ʿAufī, in 336/947–8. A verse apparently belonging to this work (Lazard’s fragment 186) seems to indicate that be began work on the poem in 333, and another (fragment 130) that he began ‘this book’ at the age of 33; it has thus been deduced that the poet was born in 300/912–3. The Āfrīn-nāmah was apparently a long mathnawī in mutaqārib metre, largely of moralising content. Besides the fragments explicitly assigned to Abū Shakūr, Saʿīd Nafīsī (followed with a certain amount of hesitation by Lazard) has attributed to the Āfrīn-nāmah a number of further verses quoted anonymously in the Tuḥfat al-mulūk. We also have a fair number of fragments of Abū Shakūr’s lyrical poems.

Collection of fragments, French translation, discussion and literature: Lazard, Poètes i pp. 27–30, 94–126, 181–4, ii pp. 78–128.

lf passim (there are several new verses in the edition by Mujtabāʾī/Ṣādiqī, including three evidently from the Āfrīn-nāmah on p. 22); Rādūyānī pp. 26, 130; ʿUnṣur al-Maʿālī, Qābūs-nāmah, (ed. Yūsufī, Tehran 1345sh./1967) pp. 39, 71; ¶Fakhr i Mudabbir,³⁴ Ādāb al-ḥarb wa i-shajāʿah, ed. Suhailī Khwānsārī, Tehran 1346sh./1967, p. 370 (with two new verses); ʿAufī ii p. 21; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i pp. 65–6; Khaiyām-pūr pp. 18–9; Fouchécour, Moralia pp. 102–3; EIr s.vv. ‘Abū Šakūr Balk̲ī’ (G. Lazard) and ‘Āfarīn-nāma’ (J. Matīnī); One verse is discussed by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ʿImādī, fiz 24/1–4, 1358sh./1979, separate pagination.

§ 24. Abū Shuʿaib Ṣāliḥ b. Muḥammad al-Harawī is included by ʿAufī among the poets of the Samanids. We have no more precise indication of his dates apart from the (highly questionable) statement by Hidāyat that he was born during the last years of Rōdakī’s life, i.e. towards the middle of the 4th/10th century.

Collection of fragments (16 verses), French translation, discussion and literature: Lazard, Poètes i pp. 30–1, 127–8, ii pp. 129–31. ¶ [75]

lf passim; ʿAufī ii p. 5; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 66; Khaiyām-pūr p. 18; EIr s.v. ‘Abū Šoʿayb Heravī’ (J.W. Clinton).

§ 25. Abū Zurāʿah al-Muʿammarī (or al-Maʿmarī?) al-Jurjānī is mentioned in ʿAufī’s chapter on the Samanid poets in connection with an unnamed amīr of Khurāsān, who asked Abū Zurāʿah whether he could compose poems as well as Rōdakī, whereupon he produced three verses affirming his superiority over that poet.

ʿAufī ii pp. 10–11; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 82; Ethé, Vorl. pp. 52–4; ln s.v. ‘Abū Dhurāʿah’ (sic) p. 456; Ṣafā, Tārīkh i ⁶ p. 397; Lazard, Poètes i p. 15; Khaiyām-pūr p. 17; Idārah-chī pp. 42–3.

§ 26. Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Ilyās al-Āghājī al-Bukhārī³⁵ is mentioned in ʿArūḍī’s list of the ¶ [76] Samanid poets. ʿAufī includes him in his chapter on the ‘great kings’ ¶who indulged in poetry, calls him an amīr and states that he was himself the subject of panegyrics, and on the basis of this Nafīsī (apparently encouraged by Hidāyat’s uncontrollable statement that Āghājī served as a governor in Kirmān) has suggested that our poet was in fact the brother of the ruler of Kirmān, Muḥammad b. Ilyās (died 356/967 or 357/968). But this suggestion seems gratuitous, especially since Thaʿālibī (writing about two centuries before ʿAufī) says nothing of our poet being a prince. Moreover, the title āghājī is not that of a prince, but of a court official. ʿAufī states further that Āghājī was a contemporary of Daqīqī and proceeds to quote a number of fragments of his, including a Persian rendering of a verse attributed to ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, and two verses in which he brags of his proficiency in such courtly talents as horsemanship, archery, chess-playing and poetising. An Arabic translation of the last-mentioned verses by Abū l-Qāsim Ismāʿīl b. Aḥmad al-Shajarī, who lived at the time of the collapse of the Samanid kingdom, is quoted in Thaʿālibī’s Yatīmat al-dahr (where li l-aʿājim is a misreading for li l-āghājī); the same verses are quoted again, together with two other Arabic verses, in the entry devoted to our poet in the same author’s Tatimmat al-yatīmah, though here, strangely, Thaʿālibī attributes the translation to Āghājī himself.

Thaʿālibī Yatīmah iv pp. 79–80; id., Tatimmah ii p. 114; lf passim; Rādūyānī pp. 35, 84, 95, 128 (and Ateş’s notes, pp. 123–4); ʿArūḍī p. 28 (and Qazwīnī ad loc.); ʿAufī i pp. 31–2 (and Qazwīnī’s ¶ [77] and Nafīsī’s notes ad loc.); Shams p. 213; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 11; Ethé, Vorl. pp. 62–3; Buzurg i p. 9; Ṣafā, Tārīkh i ⁶ pp. 429–31; Khaiyām-pūr p. 8 (with further references); ln s.v. ‘Āghājī’ p. 126; Lazard, Poètes i p. 14; C.E. Bosworth, Minorsky Volume p. 119; Idārah-chī pp. 152–61; EIr ‘Āğājī Bok̲ārī’ (ʿA. Zaryāb); dmbi s.v. ‘Āghājī’ (J. Shiʿār).

§ 27. A single verse by one Aḥmad Barmak (or Barmakī³⁶) is quoted in the Vatican manuscript of lf s.v. milk.

§ 28. Two verses by an otherwise unknown Aḥmad i Manṣūr referring to the captivity of ‘the Qarakhan’, (i.e. evidently Aḥmad i b. Khiḍr, who was taken prisoner by Malik-Shāh in 482/1089) are quoted by Rādūyānī p. 23. They are ¶important because they give the terminus post quem for Rādūyānī’s book. The same verses are quoted anonymously by Waṭwāṭ p. 77.

§ 29. Aḥmad Wātikī (?), the author of a single verse quoted by Rādūyānī, p. 10, is also unknown.

§ 30. ʿAiyūqī is the name by which the author of Warqah u Gulshāh refers to himself.³⁷ There seems to be no other mention of him in Persian literature apart from the two verses attributed to an author of the same name in the marginal additions to manuscript nūn of Asadī’s Lughat i furs.³⁸ The poem in question, which is preserved in a unique, but obviously very old manuscript, is a mathnawī of more than 2200 verses in mutaqārib metre and is dedicated to a patron whom the poet calls³⁹ sulṭān Maḥmūd, Abū l-Qāsim, sulṭān i ghāzī and amīr ¶ [78] (read: amīn?) i milal; it would seem most likely that this is the well-known Yamīn al-daulah wa Amīn al-millah Abū l-Qāsim Maḥmūd b. Sebüktigin of Ghaznah (389/999 to 421/1030) though it cannot, perhaps, be ruled out entirely that a later monarch with the same kunyah and ism is intended.⁴⁰ An interesting stylistic feature of the poem is the fact that nine times⁴¹ the poet interrupts the narrative to put short lyrical pieces into the mouths of various characters; these, too, are in mutaqārib, but use monorhyme.

The poem is based on the pre-Islamic Arabic story of the love of ʿUrwah b. Ḥizām al-ʿUdhrī and his cousin ʿAfrāʾ; it is found in the Kitāb al-aghānī of Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī⁴² and was evidently the subject of a lost Kitāb ʿUrwah wa ʿAfrāʾ mentioned in the Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadīm.⁴³ The author himself tells us⁴⁴ that he has extracted his poem zi akhbār i tāzī u kutb i ʿarab. Ateş has ¶claimed an influence of the Arab-Persian story on the French romance of Floire et Blancheflor, but the evidence for this is fragile.⁴⁵

Iranian critics have been rather dismissive of the literary merits of ʿAiyūqī’s poem. None the ¶ [79] less, it is of considerable interest for the history of Persian narrative poetry and is an important document of the early Neo-Persian language, all the more so given the antiquity of the unique manuscript.

The beginning of the poem is lost. In the manuscript the first 16 verses (inc. ba nām i khudāwand i bālā u past * kih az hastī-ash hast shud har chih hast) are written, as the editor has noted, in a much later hand. In fact, all these verses are lifted word for word from the dībājah of Khwājū Kirmānī’s Humāy-Humāyūn, completed in 732/1331–2 (vs. 1–5 = H.-H. 1–5; vs. 6 = the last verse of the section headed dar tauḥīd; vs. 7–11 in dar naʿt; vs. 12–16 in dar ḥasab). The text contains other lacunae as well.

Ms.: Istanbul Topkapı, Hazine 841 (Karatay 386. 13th century? Pictures).

Edition: Tehran 1343sh./1964 (Ed. Dh. Ṣafā).

Translation (French prose) with reproduction and analysis of the miniatures: A.S. Melikian-Chirvani, Le roman de Varqe et Golšāh, essai sur les rapports de l’esthétique littéraire et de l’esthétique plastique dans l’Iran pré-mongol, suivi de la traduction du poème (Arts asiatiques, xxii [Numéro spécial]), 1970.

Cf. A. Ateş, ‘Yak mathnawī i gum-shudah az daurah i ghaznawiyān: Warqah wa Gulshāh i ʿAiyūqī’, MDAT 1/4, 1333sh./1954, pp. 1–13; id., ‘Un vieux poème romanesque persan: récit de Warqah et Gulshâh’, Ars Orientalis iv, 1961, pp. 143–52 and plates; Ṣ. Kiyā, ‘Āyā mathnawī i Warqah u Gulshāh i ʿAiyūqī ham-zamān i Shāh-nāmah i Firdausī ast?’, MDAT ii/1, 1333sh./1954, pp. 49–50; Ṣafā, Tārīkh i ⁶ pp. 601–3; ln s.v. ‘ʿAiyūqī’ p. 490; Dh. Ṣafā, ‘Comparaison des origines et des sources des deux contes persans: “Leylî et Madjnoun” de Niẓāmī et “Varqah et Golchâh” de ʾAyouqi’, Colloquio sul ¶ [80] poeta persiano Niẓāmī, Rome 1977, pp. 137–47 [non vidi]; Shafīʿī-Kadkanī, Ṣuwar pp. 471–4; EIr s.v. ‘ʿAyyūqī’ (Dj. Khaleghi-Motlagh).

There is also an anonymous, and evidently later Warqah u Gulshāh in hazaj metre (inc. in the Delhi editions: shinīdam k-andar aiyām i payambar * yak-ē khail-ē bud-ē bā jāh u bā farr). The relationship (if any) of this and of the various Turkish⁴⁶ and Kurdish versions of the story to ʿAiyūqī’s poem remains to be examined.

¶Mss.: Tehran Ilāhīyāt i p. 250 (16th–17th century? Beginning missing); Majlis viii p. 469 no. 2617 (18th century?); Univ. xii 3880 (recent); Univ. xiv 4775 (recent); Shūrā i Islāmī i 98 (recent).

Editions: Persia 1282/1865 (48 pp.); Delhi n.d. (116 pp.); 1306/1889 (in the margin of the Chahār Parī of Aḥmad Jāmī, 127 pp.); 1899 (112 pp.); Lahore 1896 (again in the margin of Chahār Parī, 128 pp.); Tehran 1331/1913–4.

§ 31. An otherwise unknown ʿAlī b. Aḥmad wrote his Ikhtiyārāt (or Intikhāb) i Shāh-nāmah in 474/1081–2. See below, p. 76.

§ 32. Amīr ʿAlī Pūr i Tigīn ⁴⁷ (or: ʿAlī-pūr Tigīn?) is credited with a total of twelve verses by Rādūyānī, half of them riddles, and a few of them ¶ [81] are repeated by Waṭwāṭ and (anonymously) by Shams. His identity has not been established, but he is clearly not the well-known Qarakhanid ruler Böritigin, as the latter’s Muslim name was not ʿAlī, but Ibrāhīm.

Rādūyānī pp. 18, 48, 100–1 (and Ateş’s notes, pp. 102–6); Waṭwāṭ 16–7; Shams p. 401; Khaiyām-pūr p. 105.

§ 33. ʿAlī Qurṭ Andugānī is credited with a handful of verses in Asadī’s Lughat i furs.

lf (see the indexes to the three editions); ln s.v. ʿAlī i Qarṭ (? sic) i Andukānī’ pp. 242–3.

§ 34. Abū Manṣūr ʿAmmārah ⁴⁸ b. Muḥammad al-Marwazī wrote an elegy on the last Samanid ruler, Ismāʿīl (ii) al-Mustanṣir (died 395/1005) as well as an ode to the Ghaznavid Maḥmūd (ruled from 388/998), both of which, along with a number of other fragments, are quoted by ʿAufī. According to the 12th-century biography of Abū Saʿīd b. Abī l-Khair (357/967 to 440/1049) by his great-great-grandson Muḥammad b. Munawwar, the saint was so impressed by one of ʿAmmārah’s verses that he and all his disciples made a pilgrimage to the poet’s ¶grave in Marw. The story is at least chronologically possible.⁴⁹ Hidāyat’s statement that he died in 360/970–1 is, on the other hand, wrong. ¶ [82]

lf passim; Rādūyānī pp. 28, 45 (and Ateş’s notes, pp. 118–20); Muḥammad b. Munawwar (see above, § 34) ed. Zhukovskiy, p. 350; ʿAufī ii pp. 24–6 (and Nafīsī’s notes, pp. 654–6, with a quotation from the 14th-century Majmaʿ al-ansāb of Shabānkāraʾī); Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 350; Ethé, Vorl. pp. 63–8; ʿA. Iqbal, ‘ʿUmārah i Marwazī’, Sharq i, 1309/1930–1, pp. 8–15 (also in his Majmūʿah i maqālāt pp. 196–201); ln s.v. ‘Abū Manṣūr’ pp. 870–1; Ṣafā, Tārīkh i ⁶ pp. 452–5; Khaiyām-pūr p. 407; Lazard, Poètes i p. 15; M. Ishaque, ‘ʿUmarah of Merv’, Indo-Iranica xxix , 1976, pp. 144–147; Idārah-chī pp. 247–60; EIr s.v. ‘ʿAmāra Marvazī’ (J. Matīnī).

§ 35. For Abū Ismāʿīl ʿAbd Allāh b. Muḥammad al-Anṣārī, the celebrated Hanbalite mystic (396/1006 to 481/1089), see provisionally pl i § 1245, where the literature on the 20 ghazals ascribed to him can be found. His prose works will be discussed in pl iv. A few of his rubāʿīyāt are quoted in the Kashf al-asrār of his pupil Maibudī.⁵⁰ Other editions are:

Bombay 1308/1890–1 (96 pp. Collection of quatrains ascribed to Khaiyām, Bābā Ṭāhir, Abū Saʿīd and Anṣārī, together with the latter’s Munājāt); Iran 1361sh./1982–3 (Rubāʿīyāt i mansūb ba Khwājah ʿAbd Allāh i Anṣārī, ed. M. Mudabbirī. Contains 217 quatrains; the sources for each are indicated in a rather cryptic fashion—there is no bibliography or identification of the editions used—in the notes. From the latter it becomes clear that a very large proportion of the poems have also been attributed to others, in particular Abū Saʿīd b. Abī l-Khair). ¶ [83]

A versified Pand-nāmah ascribed to Anṣārī is found in Bombay Rehatsek p. 233 no. 45.

§ 36. ʿAbd Allāh al-ʿĀriḍī (or ʿĀriḍ) is known to us only from the two verses of his cited in lf (see indexes).

Cf. Khaiyām-pūr p. 366.

¶ § 37. Abū Manṣūr⁵¹ ʿAlī b. Aḥmad al-Asadī al-Ṭūsī is the author of the Karshāsp- (or Garshāsp-) nāmah,⁵² of five Munāẓarāt, and of the oldest surviving Neo-Persian dictionary and anthology of verse, the invaluable Lughat i furs. Besides these we are very fortunate to posses a copy in his own handwriting of the Kitāb al-abniyah ʿan ḥadāʾiq al-adwiyah of Abū Manṣūr Muwaffaq b. ʿAlī al-Harawī, the oldest surviving dated Persian manuscript in Arabic script; in the colophon the scribe gives the date of completion as Shawwāl 447 (December 1055 or January 1056) and his name as ʿAlī b. Aḥmad al-Asadī al-Ṭūsī al-Shāʿir, from which we can conclude that he was at that time already active as a poet. His magnum opus, the Karshāsp-nāmah, was completed, as the poet tells ¶ [84] us,⁵³ in 458/1066 and is dedicated to a ruler of Nakhchiwān whom he calls ‘Malik Bū Dulaf,’⁵⁴ ‘Jahāndār i Dairānī’⁵⁵ and ‘zi tukhm i Barāhīm i paighambar’.⁵⁶ This king does not seem to be mentioned in historical sources. We do know, however, of an Abū Dulaf al-Shaibānī who ruled in Nakhchiwān ca. 370/980; Asadī’s patron must have been a descendant and namesake of his. Afterwards Asadī appears to have attached himself to the court of Shujāʿ al-daulah Manūchihr b. Shāwūr, who ruled in Ani (Armenia) as a vassal of the Seljuq Alp Arslān from some time after 456/1064;⁵⁷ this prince’s name (Manūchihr) and title (Shujāʿ al-daulah) are mentioned in Asadī’s Munāẓarah i rumḥ u qaus. With this we lose track of him. Hidāyat’s statement that he died in 465/1072–3 is not unlikely, but, as usual, unconfirmed.

¶The responsibility for the extraordinary degree of confusion which for a long time surrounded Asadī’s biography rests firmly on the shoulders of that notorious liar, Daulat-shāh. According to this ‘authority’, Asadī, the author of the Karshāsp-nāmah, was an older contemporary of Firdausī and, indeed, the latter’s teacher. He declined the invitation to write the Shāh-nāmah and entrusted this task to his ‘pupil’, but when Firdausī was forced to flee from Ghaznah he gave ¶ [85] his unfinished manuscript to Asadī, who composed, in less than a day, the last 4000 verses of the poem. Ethé, noticing the blatant contradiction between Daulat-shāh’s statement that Asadī was Firdausī’s elder and the author’s own statement that he completed his epic in 458/1066 (more than a century after his ‘pupil’s’ birth), attempted to reconcile the two by positing the existence of two Asadīs: Asadī père, Firdausī’s contemporary, the author of the Munāẓarāt (whose patron ‘Manūchihr’ Ethé identified with Maḥmūd), and Asadī fils, the author of the Karshāspnāmah and Lughat i furs and the copyist of Muwaffaq’s handbook of pharmacology. This construction, which for many years was accepted virtually unanimously by Western scholars,⁵⁸ was refuted by Chaykin in an article published in 1934, in which the true identity of the poet’s patron is established and other weighty arguments against the existence of an ‘older’ Asadī are adduced. Daulat-shāh’s story is, in short, pure fantasy.

The Karshasp-nāmah is a long epic in mutaqārib metre (inc.: sipās az khudā, īzad i rah-numāy * kih az kāf u nūn kard gētī ba pāy) consisting, as we are told in one of the versions of the concluding sections,⁵⁹ of some 9000 verses. The poem deals with the adventures of Karshāsp, the great-great-uncle of Rustam, which, as the poet explicitly tells us (chap. 11), Firdausī had not included in his Shāh-nāmah, despite the fact that it is ‘a branch from the same tree’, i.e. part of the same epic tradition. As for his source, the poet speaks of ‘a book of the adventures of Karshāsp’, possibly identical with the Kitāb i Karshāsp of ¶ [86] Abū Muʾaiyad al-Balkhī, mentioned in Tārīkh i Sīstān.⁶⁰ In fact, it is clear that the story of Karshāsp is of great antiquity. The dragon-slayer Kərəsāspa is mentioned a number of times in the Avesta and figures (as Karsāsp) significantly in Middle-Persian religious writings,⁶¹ but the story that Asadī tells has few points of contact with what we know from older sources.

¶Mss.:⁶² Oxford Elliot 140 (Ethé 507. Pictures); Elliot 141 (Ethé 508. Incomplete); London Or. 2780 i (Rieu Suppt. no. 201. Dated Ṣafar 800/1397. End missing. Pictures); Or. 11586 (Meredith-Owens p. 73. 14th century? Fragments of a Ms. found in a binding); Or. 12985 (Meredith-Owens p. 76. Dated 981/1573–4. Pictures); i.o. 893 (Dated 1003/1594–5. Damaged and incomplete); Or. 2878 (Rieu Suppt. no. 202. 16th century? The prologue and epilogue omit any mention of the poet’s patron. Pictures); Or. 11678 (Meredith-Owens p. 73. Dated 1045/1635–6); Edinburgh Univ. 271 (16th century?); Paris Supplément 496 (Blochet 1186. Dated 11 Rabīʿ ii 1174/1760); Supplément 1376 (Blochet 1187. Dated 26 Ramaḍān 1262/1846); Supplément 1377 (Blochet 1188. Dated 4 Shaʿbān 1294/1877); Hanover [acc. to Fyzee, b.b.r.a.s. catalogue]; Cairo 96 mīm adab fārisī (Ṭirāzī 1870. Dated 1037/1627–8); Istanbul Topkapı, Hazine 674 (Karatay 385. Dated 755/1354; the oldest copy. Pictures); Aya Sofya 3287 (Mīkrūfīlm-hā p. 171 no. 399. ¶ [87] Apparently dated 905/1499–1500); Tehran Sipahsālār (Acc. to Yaghmāʾī’s edition p. xvi; apparently not in the published catalogue. Dated 10 Muḥarram 860/1455); Millī 119 (Acc. to Yaghmāʾī. Dated 1237/1821–2); Millī iii 1060/1 (Dated 1240/1824–5); Majlis iii 1167 (Dated 1264/1848); Gulistān/Ātābāy 8 (Selections); Mashhad Riḍawī iii p. 92, no. 56; Bombay Rehatsek p. 164 no. 129 (End missing. ‘Seems to be almost a different work’, Fyzee p. 14); Brelvi p. xxxiii no. 24 (Dated, according to Dhabhar no. 119, 4 Farwardīn 900(?) Y./1530. Damaged); b.b.r.a.s. Persian 3 (Apparently completed on 7 Rajab 1025/1616, though in the colophon the year has been altered to 625/1228); Navsari Collection of Māhyār Naoroji Kutār (acc. to Fyzee, b.b.r.a.s. catalogue p. 14); Hyderabad Nadhīr Aḥmad 225; Sālār Jung iv 1114/4 (17th century?). Yaghmāʾī mentions three further Mss. in private collections in Iran. Cf. Munz. iv 33091–101.

Extracts: Gotha 40 fol. 11b sqq. (Baḥr al-durar).

Parts of the work are interpolated into various manuscripts of the Shāh-nāmah, or manuscripts containing extracts from that poem and from other epics such as:⁶³ London Or. 4906 fol. 10a–68b, 73a–101b; Or. 2926 fol. 15a–54; Paris Supplément 502 fol. 1r sqq.; Florence Laurenziana Or. 5; Berlin Ms. or. fol. 209; Leningrad Publ. Lib. Suppt. 90; Dorn 333; Bankipore Suppt. i 1792 fol. 523b–606a; and doubtless many others.

¶[The Karshāsp-nāmah included in the Parsee riwāyat entitled Khulāṣah i dīn (cf. Paris Suppl. 46 = Blochet 201/5) is not the same work.]

Editions: Paris 1926 (Le livre de Gerchâsp poème persan d’Asadî junior de Ṭoûs publié et traduit par Clément Huart. Tome premier. No more ¶ [88] published. A critical edition of the first half of the poem with a prose translation); Tehran 1317sh./1938–9 (ed. Ḥ. Yaghmāʾī. Critical edition of the whole poem); reprinted 1354sh./1975.

Partial edition in Macan’s edition of the Shāh-nāmah, pp. 2099–2133 and its various reprints.

Translations: (Gujrati): Ms.: Navsari Meherji Rana p. 139 no. 18 (3 volumes. Dated 21 Ādar 1189 Y./1820). An extract from a Gujrati version (the story of Karshāsp and the Brahmin) is found in Navsari Meherji Rana p. 139 no. 17 (Two hands, dated 1178 Y./1808–9 and 1185 Y./1815–6 respectively). Brelvi, p. xxxiii, mentions a Gujrati version of the Karshāsp-nāmah ‘made by Novroji Kavasji and printed in 1852 ad … A later edition [of the same translation?] also exists in the Library.’

(French): for the first half of the poem see editions; the remainder is translated in: Le livre de Gerchâsp poème persan d’Asadi de Ṭoûs traduit par Henri Massé. Tome second et dernier. Paris 1951.

(German): A translation by H. Kanus-Credé has been published in instalments in Iranistische Mitteilungen xxvi, 1996, to xxviii, 1998.

Asadī’s other principal poetic work is the five Munāẓarāt , or poetical contests, namely: (1) a debate between lance and bow (munāẓarah i rumḥ u qaus); (2) between heaven and earth (munāẓarah i āsmān u zamīn); (3) between Muslim and Zoroastrian (munāẓarah i muslim u gabr); (4) between Arab and Persian (munāẓarah bā ʿarab kunad ba faḍl i ʿajam); (5) between day and night (munāẓarah i shab u rōz). The last-mentioned of these is quoted in extenso by Daulat-shāh and others. Ms.: Oxford Elliot 37 fol. 222a sqq. (Ethé 1333 = Daqāʾiq al-ashʿār).

Editions: Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i pp. 107–10 (without no. 4); J. Khāliqī-Muṭlaq, ‘Asadī i Ṭūsī’, mdam xiv, 1357sh./1978, pp. 68–130.

Cf.: H. Ethé, ‘Über persische Tenzonen’, Verhandlungen des fünften internationalen ¶ [89] Orientalisten-Congresses, Berlin 1882, ii/1, pp. 48–135 (Contains an edition and translation of no. 1, 2 and 5); Ye. E. Bertel’s, Пятое муназара Асади Тусского; uziv 19, 1958, pp. 55–88 (=edition and translation of no. 4).

A tasmīṭ of 13 strophes is likewise found in Oxford Elliot 37 fol. 68a (Ethé 1333 = Daqāʾiq al-ashʿār) as well as in some copies of the dīwān of Qaṭrān. Edition: J. Khāliqī-Muṭlaq, ‘Asadī i Ṭūsī’, mdam xiii, 1356sh./1978, pp. 643–78. Verses of his quoted in anthologies: Paris Supplément 826 after fol. 302v (Blochet 1975. Completed Dhū l-ḥijjah 947/1541); Berlin Sprenger 1378 fol. ¶428b sq. (Pertsch 681. Dated 28 Rabīʿ ii 1270/1854. Apparently copied from the Calcutta Ms.); Calcutta Ivanow 927 fol. 24 (Modern).

lf (Two verses—one from the Karshāsp-nāmah and one from another poem—are quoted in the Vatican manuscript, ed. Horn pp. 50, 72;⁶⁴ a large number of quotations are included in the marginal additions to manuscript nūn); Waṭwāṭ p. 74 (quoting a du-baitī); Mustaufī (ed. Nawāʾī) p. 719; Daulat-shāh pp. 35–9; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i pp. 107–39 (with extensive extracts from the Karshāsp-nāmah); V. Rugarli, ‘Il libro di Gershasp, poema di Asadi’, Giornale della Società asiatica italiana ix, 1895–6, pp. 33–80; K.I. Chaykin, ‘Асади старшийи Асади младший’, Фердовси 934–1934, Leningrad 1934, pp. 119–60; M. Molé, ‘Garšāsp et les Sagsār’, La nouvelle Clio iii, 1951, pp. 128–33; ln s.v. ‘Asadī’; Khaiyām-pūr pp. 38–9 (with further references); Ṣafā, Tārīkh ii ⁶ pp. 403–21; Shafīʿī-Kadkanī, Ṣuwar pp. 613–25; J. Khāliqī-Muṭlaq, ‘Gardish-ī dar Garshāsp-nāmah’, Īrān-nāmah i, 1362sh./1983, pp. 388–423, 513–559, ii, 1362sh./1983, pp. 94–147; M. Amīrī, ‘Lughāt i ʿarabī dar Garshāspnāmah’, Nām-wārah i Duktur Maḥmūd i Afshār iii, ¶ [90] Tehran 1366sh./1987 pp. 1655–70; EIr. s.v. ‘Asadī Ṭūsī’ (Dj. Khaleghi-Motlagh); EIr. s.v. ‘Garšāsp-nāma’ (with a summary of the story).

§ 38. Abū Naẓar ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz b. Manṣūr al-ʿAsjadī al-Marwazī eulogised the Ghaznavids Maḥmūd and Masʿūd (i) and appears to have survived into the reign of Maudūd (432/1041 to 440/1048), if we are to believe Muʿizzī⁶⁵ when he reminds one of his patrons that the father of the latter had enjoyed the praise of ʿAsjadī ‘in the days of Chaghrī and Maudūd’.

Mss.: A selection of his poems is found in Tehran Univ. ix 2487 (17th century?).

Collection of fragments: Dīwān i … ʿAsjadī, ed. Ṭ. Shihāb, with an introduction by S. Nafīsī, Tehran 1334sh./1955 (list of sources: pp. 37–8).

Baihaqī p. 280; ʿUnṣur al-Maʿālī, Qābūs-nāmah (ed. Yūsufī, Tehran 1345sh./1967) p. 57, 224; lf passim; Rādūyānī pp. 14, 24, 57 (and Ateş’s notes pp. 99–100); ʿArūḍī p. 28; ʿAufī ii pp. 50–3; Shams p. 315; Jājarmī i pp. 144+iii to 144+vi; Daulat-shāh p. 47; Yaghmāʾī pp. 148–50; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i pp. 340–2; S. Nafīsī’s edition of the Qābūsnāmah (Tehran 1312sh./1933) pp. 237–46; M.A. Amīn, ‘Āthār i ʿAsjadī i Marwazī’, Armaghān xxiv, 1328sh./1949, pp. 152–61, 309–15; Ṭ. Shihāb, ‘Ustād ʿAsjadī’, ibidem pp. 48–55; Ṣafā, Tārīkh i ⁶ pp. 577–80; ln s.v. ‘ʿAsjadī’ pp. 242–3 (Dh. Ṣafā); Khaiyām-pūr p. 391 (with further references); Fouchécour, Nature pp. 227–8; EIr. s.v.’ʿAsjadī’ (Dj. Khaleghi-Motlagh).

¶ § 39. Abū Bakr⁶⁶ (or: Abū l-Maḥāsin⁶⁷) al-Azraqī ¶ [91] al-Harawī has left us with a fairly slender dīwān (2675 verses in Nafīsī’s edition), consisting largely of odes dedicated to two Seljuq princes: Abū l-Fawāris Shams al-daulah Ṭughān-shāh b. Alp-Arslān Muḥammad b. Chaghrī, who was the ruler of Herat during the reign of his father (Alp-Arslān, died 465/1072) and that of his brother (Malik-Shāh) at least until 476/1083–4 (from which year we posses a coin minted in his name), and Abū l-Muẓaffar Amīrān-shāh b. Qāwurd b. Chaghrī, who was blinded by order of Malik-Shāh shortly after his succession. We also have one poem lauding—at least according to the superscription in Nafīsī’s edition⁶⁸—the holy man ʿAbd Allāh al-Anṣārī (396/1006 to 481/1089).⁶⁹ All of this indicates that Azraqī must have flourished in the third quarter of the 11th century; this is consistent also with Mustaufī’s statement that Azraqī was a contemporary of the Ghaznavid Ibrāhīm (451/1059 to 492/1099) as well as with ʿArūḍī’s story of how Firdausī took refuge with Azraqī’s father, Ismāʿīl al-Warrāq, in Herat, after his flight from Ghaznah,⁷⁰ which—if the story is true—must ¶ [92] have been in the first decade of the 11th century. Taqī Kāshī⁷¹ (who was in the habit of giving totally fanciful dates for the deaths of the poets included in his anthology) says that Azraqī died in 527/1132–3, which is much too late, as Qazwīnī rightly observed; if Ismāʿīl was really Firdausī’s host at the beginning of the 11th century he is not likely to have had a son who lived well into the second quarter of the 12th. Despite this, Nafīsī has attempted to rescue our poet’s claim to extraordinary longevity by pointing out that some copies of Azraqī’s dīwān contain a poem (no. 25 of his edition) praising the Ghaznavid Abū l-Mulūk Arslān-shāh (509/1115 to 512/1118) and another (no. 24) dedicated to his successor Yamīn al-daulah Bahrām-Shāh (512/1118 to 547/1152). But Nafīsī himself admits⁷² that he ¶found the first of these poems in only two (unspecified) manuscripts and the second in only one and that their authenticity is thus far from certain. To this I can add that neither of the poems is to be found in the excellent 13th-century London manuscript of Azraqī’s dīwān.⁷³

ʿAufī states that Azraqī versified the book of Alfīyah wa Shalfīyah (or however the title is to be read)⁷⁴ in order to cure his master Ṭughānshāh of impotence and proceeds to give a lurid description of how the remedy took effect. Azraqī’s poem is doubtless connected with the (lost) Arabic works Kitāb al-alfīyah al-ṣaghīr and … al-kabīr ¶ [93] listed by Ibn al-Nadīm under the heading ‘books written about sexual intercourse in the guise of titillating anecdotes’.⁷⁵ ʿAufī adds that Azraqī’s poem was illustrated. Baihaqī⁷⁶ tells how Masʿūd had one of his pleasure-domes decorated with copulation scenes from the ‘book of Alfīyah’, evidently not Azraqī’s version, though the latter could well have been the object of the (lost) ‘refutation’ (Naqīḍat kitāb Alfīyah wa Shalfīyah) which Abū Bakr b. Khusrau al-Ustād wrote for the atabeg of Azerbaijan, Qızıl Arslān (581/1186 to 587/1191).⁷⁷

Some late authors (Daulat-shāh and Ḥājjī Khalīfah, both expressly on the authority of others⁷⁸) claim that Azraqī ‘wrote’ (i.e. presumably versified) the Sindbād-nāmah, but as long as no quotations from this work have been identified this cannot be regarded as certain. There are two references to the story of Sindbād in Azraqī’s dīwān: in one⁷⁹ the poet appears to claim the authorship not only of the akhbār i Sindbād, but ¶ [94] also of the tārīkh i Shāh-nāmah; but—assuming the poem is indeed by Azraqī—it would seem more likely that the author is in fact alluding to two well-known poems from the past. In the ¶other⁸⁰ Azraqī says that the ‘poetry’ in the counsels of Sindbād is ‘difficult’ but that he will elucidate its ‘expressions’ (maʿānī) if the king gives him sufficient funds. This would seem to refer to a ‘difficult’ older version of the story (perhaps Rōdakī’s?) which Azraqī is proposing either to replace by a more up-to-date version, or perhaps merely to supply with a commentary. In either case it is by no means certain that Azraqī ever carried out this undertaking; the account of how Azraqī ‘wrote’ the Sindbād-namah may have been extrapolated from these verses.

Azraqī’s dīwān, which exists in at least one 13th-century manuscript⁸¹ and from which, moreover, ʿAufī quotes a good number of poems, would seem a very promising candidate for a critical edition.

Mss.: Dublin Beatty 103 v (Ms. completed Dhū l-ḥijjah 699/1300. End missing); London Or. 3713 fol. 18b–35b (Rieu Suppt. no. 211 iii. Ms. completed 5 Ṣafar 697/1298); Or. 3376 fol. 109a–129a (Rieu Suppt. no. 234 iii. Dated 2 Dhū l-qaʿdah 1002/1594. Imperfect); s.o.a.s. 35350 (Dated 1006/1597–8); Or. 2880 fol. 140b–197b (Rieu Suppt. no. 224 iii. Completed Jumādā i 1245/1829); Or. 2995 fol. 2b–87a (Rieu Suppt. no. 213 i. Dated 10 Ramaḍān 1264/1848); i.o. 909; Cambridge Browne Coll. v.4 (Pictures); Or. 1724/4 (modern forgery ‘dated’ Rajab 604/1208; see also Mīkrūfīlm-hā i p. 541); Paris Supplément 725 i (Blochet 1206. 16th century?); ¶ [95] Supplément 724 (Blochet 1207. Dated 12 Ramaḍān 1008/1600); Supplément 701 (Blochet 1246. Dated 8 Shaʿbān 1016/1607. Contains the dīwāns of Azraqī and of Ẓahīr al-dīn Faryābī, but the pages are in disorder); Berlin Sprenger 1384 (Pertsch 711. Dated 27 Jumādā ii 1044/1634); Istanbul Ḥakīm-oğlu ʿAlī Pāşa 669/7 (Mīkrūfīlm-hā i p. 461); Madinah ʿĀrif Ḥikmat 39 (Nuskhah-hā v p. 484); Isfahan (Nuskhah-hā vi p. 596); Tehran Majlis 6228/3 (Munz. no. 21485 inspexit. Dated Rabīʿ ii 996/1588); Majlis iii 1183/2 (Dated 1003/1594–5); Adabīyāt ii p. 11 (Dated 1007/1598–9) [Munz.]; Malik 4829 (Munz. no. 21486 inspexit. 16th century?); Majlis iii 1058–9 (Dated 1010/1601–2); Adabīyāt i p. 245 (Dated 20 Ramaḍān 1013/1605); Univ. viii 1408/2 (Dated Shawwāl 1015/1607); Millī 200/1 (Nuskhah-hā vi p. 194. Dated 1045/1635–6); Majlis ii 349 (Dated 1206/1791–2); Dānish-sarāy i ʿālī (Nuskhah-hā v p. 640. Dated 13 Shaʿbān 1219/1804); Majlis 4684/1 (Munz. no. 21504 inspexit. Dated 1256/1840); Majlis ii 348 (Dated 1261/1845); Gulistān/Ātābāy 7 (Dated 1287/1870–1); Malik 4956/1 ¶(Munz. no. 21496 inspexit); Millī ii 569/3; Adabīyāt ii p. 16 [Munz.]; Millī iv 1973 (16th century?); Millī v 2694 (18th century?); Millī 39 (Nuskhah-hā iv p. 158); Malik 5174 (Munz. 21517 inspexit); Shūrā i Islāmī i 91 pp. 64–114; Qum Marʿashī xiv 5415 (17th century?); Rasht p. 1121 (17th century?); Kashan (Nuskhah-hā vii p. 730. Qajar period); Mashhad Riḍawī vii 346 (Dated 20 Muḥarram 1011/1602); Riḍawī vii 344 (Dated Rabīʿ ii 1261/1845); Riḍawī vii 343 (Dated 1288/1871–2); Univ. 111; Tashkent Acad. 781. (Dated 1269/1852–3); Acad. 782. (Dated 1270/1853–4); Hyderabad Āṣafīyah iii p. 288; Lucknow Sprenger 151; Calcutta Ivanow Curzon 190 (17th century?). Nafīsī (pp. xii–xv) mentions various manuscripts in private collections including one completed on 2 Dhū l-qaʿdah 821/1418. Cf. Munz. iii 21484–528. ¶ [96]

Selected poems: Oxford Elliot 37 fol. 98a (Ethé 1333 = Daqāʾiq al-ashʿār); Whinfield 54 (Beeston 2662/11. Dated 9 Rajab 1012/1603); Cambridge Browne Coll. v.65 no. 18 (Anthology dated 27 Ramaḍān 827/1424); Paris Supplément 783 fol. 4r sqq. (Blochet 1981. 16th century?); Supplément 1252 fol. l0v (Blochet 1992. 17th century?); Rome Ms. Caetani 60 (Piemontese 17. Dated 1 Shaʿbān 1013/1604); Tehran Majlis xvii 5975 (18th century?); Majlis viii 2326 (17th century?); Calcutta Ivanow 927 fol. 167v–172 (Modern).

Editions: Tehran 1336sh./1957 (Ed. ʿA. ʿAbd al-Rasūlī); 1336sh./1957 (Ed. S. Nafīsī).

lf (ed. Iqbāl p. 8: one verse from manuscript sīn); ʿArūḍī pp. 43–44 (and Qazwīnī’s extensive commentary); ʿAufī ii. 86–104; Mustaufī p. 714; Muḥammad b. Ibrāhim, Tārīkh i Saljūqiyān i Kirmān (in M.Th. Houtsma, Recueil de textes relatifs à l’histoire des Seljoucides i, Leyden 1886) pp. 10, 14; Jājarmī pp. 240–5, 245–7, 253–6, 331–3, 333–6, 629–32; Daulat-shāh pp. 72–3; Rāzī ii pp. 138–43; Ḥājjī Khalīfah i no. 1152 (Alfīyah wa shalfīyah), iii no. 7259 (Sindbād-nāmah); Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i pp. 139–52; Ṣafā, Tārīkh ii ⁶ pp. 432–8; ln s.v. ‘Azraqī’ pp. 1978–81; Khaiyām-pūr p. 37; Fouchécour, Nature pp. 183–226; Shafīʿī-Kadkanī, Ṣuwar pp. 649–57; L.W. Harrow, A study of the imagery of the eleventh century panegyrist Azraqī of Herat (unpublished MPhil. thesis. London 1973); EIr s.v. ‘Azraqī Heravī’ (Dj. Khaleghi-Motlagh).

§ 40. Bābā Ṭāhir ʿUryān is a ṣūfī saint and the reputed author of a number of fahlawīyāt, i.e. quatrains in hazaj metre and non-standard Persian. The closest thing that we have to a historical fact about him is the story that Rāwandī tells us about his meeting with Toğril at the time when the latter entered Hamadan, i.e in 447/1055. Attempts to deduce the date of his birth from one of the ¶ [97] quatrains are idle speculation.⁸² He is not mentioned as a poet by any early ¶source; it is particularly striking that Shams i Qais, who devotes an extensive discussion to fahlawīyāt, mentions only Bundār (q.v.) and not the supposedly so famous Bābā Ṭāhir as an author of such pieces. Attempts by various scholars to determine the dialect basis of the quatrains have not led to coherent results. It seems most probable that the recitation and copying of the poems by speakers of several idioms have resulted in a dialect mixture. His du-baitīs have been noted in the following manuscripts: London i.o. 4582/7 (Dated 1274/1858); Paris Supplément 1542 (Blochet 1072. 19th century); Supplément 1435 fol. 5 sq. (Blochet 2183. Manuscript dated 1 Dhū l-ḥijjah 1262/1846); Berlin Minutoli 297 (Pertsch 697); Ms. or. oct. 1151 (Heinz 85); Leningrad Acad. A67 (Index 1726. Dated 1204/1789–90); Univ. 1280, 1281a (Tagirdzhanov p. 6); Konya Museum 2547 (Dated 848/1444–5, according to M. Mīnuwī, mdat iv/2, 1325sh./1946, pp. 54–9); Baku i 337 (Dated Shawwāl 1278/1862); Tehran Majlis xvii 5995/57 (16th–17th century?); Univ. xiii 4351 (17th–18th century?); Univ. xiii 4430 (19th century?); Mashhad Univ. 332/5 (Ms. contains the date 14 Muḥarram 1264/1847); Riḍawī vii 930 (Dated Shaʿbān 1222/1807); Univ. 318 pp. 12–23 (Dated 29 Dhū l-ḥijjah 1292/1876); Calcutta Ivanow 923 fol. 310. Further late Mss. in Munz. iv pp. 2827–8.

Editions: Tehran 1274/1857–8; 1306sh./1927 (ed. W. Dastgirdī); reprinted several times; 1336sh./1957 (ed. Ḥ.K. Kirmānī); 1354sh./1976 (J. ¶ [98] Maqṣūr, Sharḥ i aḥwāl u āthār u du-baitī-hā i Bābā Ṭāhir i ʿUryān; contains on pp. 85–184 an edition of 365 quatrains and 4 ghazals); 1363sh./1984 (ed. M. Ilāhī-Qumsharī, 2nd edition); Bombay 1297/1880; 1301/1883–4; 1308/1890–1 (96 p. Collection of quatrains ascribed to Khaiyām, Bābā Ṭāhir, Abū Saʿīd and Anṣārī, together with the latter’s Munājāt); London 1902 (The Lament of Bābā Tāhir, being the Rubāʿiyāt of Bābā Ṭāhir, edited and translated by E. Heron-Allen with a verse rendering by E.C. Brenton), Lahore 1924 (ed. Maulawī Wajāhat Ḥusain); Dushanbe 1963 (Bobo Tohir. Muntakhabi ruboiyot, ed. M. Rahimī, with 196 quatrains and 2 ghazals).

See also: C. Huart, ‘Les quatrains de Bâbâ Tâhir ʿUryân en pehlevi musulman’, ja , sér. viii, tome vi, 1885, pp. 502–45; id., ‘Nouveaux quatrains de Bābā Ṭāhir’, Spiegel Memorial Volume, Bombay 1908, pp. 290–302; Mirza Mehdy Khan,⁸³ ‘The quatrains of Baba Tahir’, jasb lxxiii/1, 1904, pp. 1–29.

Translations: besides those mentioned under ‘editions’: (German verse): G.L. Leszczyński, Die Rubáiʾyát (sic) des Bábá Táhir ʾUryán oder die Gottestränen des Herzen aus dem west-medischen (sic) Originale …, Munich n.d. [1920].

¶(Armenian): R. Abrahamian, Tehran 1930.

(English verse): A.J. Arberry, Poems of a Persian Ṣūfī, being the quatrains of Bābā Ṭāhir …, Cambridge 1937; J.E. Saklatwalla, The Rubaiyat-i-Baba Tahir Uryan Hamadani. A lament, [Bombay] 1939.

(Czech): Pláč Bábá Táhirův čili rubá’iját, trans. Josef Štýbr, Brno 1938.

(Russian): Баба Тахир, и небу, и земле, trans. G. Aliyev, Moscow 1971; 2nd edition 1977.

(Italian): Quatrine (Dobeiti), trans. G. Rebecchi, n.p., n.d.

Cf. Rāwandī, Rāḥat al-ṣudūr, ed. Iqbāl, London 1921, pp. 98–9; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 326; Hidāyat, Riyāḍ p. 102; Gh.-R.R. Yāsamī, ‘Bābā Ṭāhir i ʿUryān’, Armaghān x, 1308sh./1929, pp. 66–70; R. Abrahamian, Dialecte des Israëlites de Hamadan et d’Ispahan et dialecte de Baba Tahir, Paris 1936; Ā. Hamadānī, ‘Mashāhīr i Hamadān’, Armaghān xvii, 1315sh./1936, pp. 433–40, 552–6; P.N. Khānlarī, ‘Dubaitī-hā i Bābā Ṭāhir’, Payām i nau i/8–9, 1324sh./1945, pp. 26–30, 37–9; Ṣafā, Tārīkh ii ⁶ pp. 383–6; ei ² s.v. ‘Bābā-Ṭāhir’ (V. Minorsky, with further literature); EIr s.v. ‘Bābā Ṭāher’ (L.P. Elwell-Sutton).

§ 41. Badīʿ and § 42. Badāʾiʿī: The former is included by ʿAufī⁸⁴ among the poets of the Samanid period. He gives his name as Abū Muḥammad al-Badīʿ b. Muḥammad b. Maḥmūd al-Balkhī and quotes a number of verses⁸⁵ from an ode in praise of Abū Yaḥyā (thus in the poem) Ṭāhir b. al-Faḍl al-Ṣaghānī (died 381/991)⁸⁶ and two verses from another poem. Hidāyat⁸⁷ attributes six verses from the mentioned ode to a poet whom he calls Muḥammad b. Maḥmūd Balkhī, with the pen-name Badāʾiʿī, and whom he claims to have been a contemporary of Sulṭān Maḥmūd. The same author then proceeds to say that this Badāʾiʿī is the author of the Pand-nāmah i Anōshēruwān, from which he quotes 91 verses, most of which can be found in the poem published by Schefer as Rāḥat al-insān. Nafīsī suggested, with a certain amount of hesitation, that Hidāyat might have confused two different poets, ʿAufī’s Badīʿ and the author of the Pand-nāmah, who, in the manuscript from which Hidāyat transcribed his extracts, was apparently called Badāʾiʿī. This would seem to be confirmed by the discovery of a second manuscript of the poem in Leningrad, which the hand-list describes as the Pand-nāmah i Nōshēruwān i ʿādil by Muḥammad b. Maḥmūd Badāʾiʿī Balkhī. If the author’s name is really given in this form in ¶the manuscript one should perhaps reconsider the possibility that he is in fact identical with the poet mentioned by ʿAufī, but this requires confirmation. One verse by (the same?) Badāʾiʿī is quoted in Ṣiḥāḥ p. 269, and one by ‘Badīʿī in manuscript nūn of lf (ed. Iqbāl p. 474).

The manuscript used by Hidāyat included a fair number of verses missing in Schefer’s copy, among them the first six verses of the poem. Instead of these Schefer’s version has a prose introduction in which the name of the author is given as ‘Sharīf i shāʿir i jawān’ and the title of the poem as Rāḥat al-insān. But this introduction is clearly spurious; Fouchécour has observed that it is virtually identical with the introduction in two manuscripts of a Rāḥat al-insān in prose and that it was from this work that the copyist has lifted it.

This Pand-nāmah (inc.: sipās az khudāwand i charkh i buland * kih dar dil na-gunjad az ō chūn u chand) purports to contain the wise sayings which Anōshēruwān had inscribed on the 23 turrets of his throne. These are then given in 98 stanzas of 4 rhymed couplets each in mutaqārib metre. Basing himself on the fact that the poem quotes two verses by ʿUnṣurī, Schefer claimed that ‘l’auteur a dû être le contemporain d’Onṣory ou vivre peu d’années après lui’, and Nafīsī has also argued that the style of the poem points towards a dating in the second half of the 5th/11th century, a date accepted also by Rypka,⁸⁸ Lazard⁸⁹ and Fouchécour. The date of the Leningrad manuscript (708/1308–9) provides, in any event, the terminus ad quem of the work. The poem is perhaps related to the (lost) Kitāb al-tāj of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ and belongs in any case to the many versions, in prose and verse, of the wise counsels of the celebrated Sasanian autocrat.

Mss.: Paris Suppl. 1325 (Blochet 1763, who claims that the manuscript, which he considered to have been written in Turkey towards the year 1480, is ‘l’original exécuté sur les ordres de l’auteur’); Leningrad Acad. C1102 (Index 479. Dated 708/1308–9).

Editions: Ch. Schefer, Chrestomathie persane i, Paris 1883, pp. 206–232 (Persian section; see also his ‘Notice’, pp. 205–7 of the French section); S. Nafīsī, Mihr ii, 1313sh./1934, pp. 181–8, 254–64 (Based on Schefer’s edition, with additional verses from Majmaʿ).

Besides the fundamental work by Nafīsī (see editions) cf. Ṣafā, Tārīkh i ⁶ pp. 422–8; Khaiyām-pūr p. 81; ln s.v. ‘Badīʿ i Balkhī’; Fouchécour, Moralia pp. 46–9; Idārah-chī pp. 168–70.

¶ § 43. Ibn Aḥmad al-Badrī al-Ghaznawī⁹⁰ is credited with a rubāʿī in ʿAufī’s chapter on the Ghaznavid poets.

ʿAufī ii p. 67; Khaiyām-pūr p. 80.

§ 44. Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī al-Bahrāmī al-Sarakhsī is included by both ʿArūḍī and ʿAufī (who cites a dozen of his verses) among the poets of the Ghaznavid period. Rāzī says that he lived at the time of Maḥmūd, while Hidāyat states that he flourished under that king’s father Sebüktigin (died 387/948–9) and that he himself died in 500/1106–7 but these statements can hardly both be correct. A treatise on metrics with the title Kitāb ghāyat al-ʿarūḍīyīn (or: al-ʿarūḍain, i.e. ‘of Arabic and Persian prosody’) is mentioned by ʿArūḍī⁹¹ and by Shams⁹² and the former adds that he also wrote a work on rhymes, Kanz al-qāfiyah. There is in fact in London, i.o. Delhi 1217, an apparently unique manuscript of a work entitled Kanz al-qawāfī by one ʿIzz al-dīn Shaikh ʿAlī i ʿIzz al-dīn al-Sarakhsī, but closer examination of the book is required to determine if it is really a work of the 10th or 11th century. It would appear that the book mentioned by ʿAufī with the title Khujastah-nāmah also dealt with poetics.

lf passim; ʿArūḍī p. 28, 30 (and Qazwīnī’s notes); ʿAufī ii pp. 55–7;⁹³ Shams pp. 151, 159, 267; Jājarmī ii pp. 457–8; Rāzī ii p. 40; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 173; ln s.v. ‘Abū l-Ḥasan i Bahrāmī’ pp. 400–1; Buzurg i p. 148; Khaiyām-pūr p. 93 (with further references); Ṣafā, Tārīkh i ⁶ pp. 567–9; R. Levy, ‘Kanz al-Qāfiyah (or al-Qawāfī) by ʿAlī ʿIzz al-Dīn Bahrāmī-yi Sarakhsī’, A Locust’s Leg. Studies in honour of S.H. Taqizadeh, London 1962, pp. 134–8; EIr s.v. ‘Bahrāmī Sarak̲sī’ (Z. Safa).

§ 45. The Balʿamī who is named as the author of two verses quoted by the Farhang i Jahāngīrī is presumably one or the other of the well-known Samanid wazīrs, Abū l-Faḍl Muḥammad b. ʿUbaid Allāh al-Balʿamī (died 329/940), or his son Abū ʿAlī Muḥammad, called Amīrak (died probably after 382/992).

Collection of fragments (2 verses), French translation, discussion and literature: Lazard, Poètes i pp. 32, 135, ii p. 140. See also EIr s.v. ‘Amīrak Balʿamī’ (Dj. Khaleghi-Motlagh).

¶ § 46. Bassām i Kūrd is the author of a poem commemorating the defeat of the Kharijite leader ʿAmmār by Yaʿqūb b. Laith in 251/865.

Collection of fragments (5 verses), French translation, discussion and literature: Lazard, Poètes i pp. 18, 57, ii p. 16.

Tārīkh i Sīstān pp. 211–2; Meier, Mahsatī p. 11.

§ 47. Bihrōz Ṭabarī is known to us only from ʿAufī,⁹⁴ who includes him under the Ghaznavid poets and quotes two verses of his lampooning a mean patron.

§ 48. Bundār (or Pindār?) al-Rāzī is included by ʿArūḍī in his list of the poets who served the Buyids. Mustaufī and Shams i Qais state that he composed fahlawīyat, i.e. dialect poetry, and the latter quotes two verses to illustrate the metrical licenses in which he indulged (much to Shams’s disapproval). Daulat-shāh adds that his patron was Majd al-daulah (387/997 to 420/1029) and that he composed poetry in Arabic, Persian and ‘Dailamī’. Hidāyat, finally, who gives the poet’s laqab as Kamāl al-dīn, states that both he and his patron died in 401/1010–1; this is wrong with regard to Majd al-daulah and can thus not be regarded as reliable for the poet either.

ʿArūḍī p. 28 (and Qazwīnī ad loc.); Shams pp. 145–6; Mustaufī pp. 723–4; Jājarmī ii pp. 487–92; Daulat-shāh pp. 42–3; Rāzī iii pp. 21–3; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 171; Hidāyat, Riyāḍ pp. 173–4; ʿA. Iqbāl, ‘Bundār i Rāzī, yak-ī az qadīm-tarīn shuʿarā i pahlawī-zabān’, Mihr vii pp. 28–35; Khaiyām-pūr p. 89 (with further references); Lazard, Poètes i p. 15; Idārah-chīp. 261–71; EIr s.v. ‘Bondār Rāzī’ (Z. Safa).

§ 49. Burhānī was the father of the celebrated Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik al-Muʿizzī.⁹⁵ His given name must therefore have been ʿAbd al-Malik. ʿArūḍī tells the story of his own encounter with Muʿizzī in 510/1116–7, in the course of which the latter told our informant that his father, the poet-laureate (amīr al-shuʿarāʾ) Burhānī died in Qazwīn at the beginning of the reign of Malik-shāh (i.e. not long after 465/1072–3) and handed over to his son his position at the court. ʿArūḍī then quotes a verse which the old man recited on this occasion, but it is possible that the verse is not by him, but by Adīb Mukhtār.⁹⁶ A rubāʿī by Burhānī is quoted by Rādūyānī, a poem of 14 verses by Jājarmī and three further verses from an unidentified jung were added by Iqbāl.

¶Rādūyānī pp. 110–1 (and Ateş ad loc.); ʿArūḍī pp. 28, 41 (and Qazwīnī’s notes pp. 154–5, 168–9); Jājarmī ii pp. 481–2; Iqbāl’s introduction to his edition of the dīwān of Muʿizzī, Tehran 1318sh./1939, pp. ii–iv; M. Muʿīn, ‘Burhānī wa qaṣīdah i ū’, ndat i/1, 1327sh./1948, pp. 7–18; Ṣafā, Tārīkh ii ⁶ pp. 430–2; Khaiyām-pūr p. 84.

§ 50. Abū l-Fatḥ ʿAlī b. Muḥammad al-Bustī, who served as a secretary under Sebüktigin and Maḥmūd, is a well-known Arabic poet. A few fragments of Persian verse (in which, it seems, he indulged only in an amateur capacity) have come down to us as well.

lf (one verse s.v. chaghd); Rādūyānī p. 85 (and Ateş’s notes, pp. 94–5); Waṭwāṭ p. 57; ʿAufī i pp. 64–5; Daulat-shāh pp. 26–7; Jāmī, Nafaḥāt p. 405, no. 425; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 70; Ethé, Vorl. pp. 55–7; P. Baiḍāʾī, ‘Shaikh Abū l-Fatḥ i Bustī’, Armaghān xviii, 1316sh./1936, pp. 221–4; ln s.v. ‘Abū l-Fatḥ’; Ṣafā, Tārīkh i ⁶ pp. 457–8 Khaiyām-pūr pp. 20–1; Idārah-chī pp. 272–84; ei ² s.v. ‘Bustī’ (J.W. Fück); Lazard, Poètes i p. 14; EIr s.v. ‘Bostī’ (Z. Safa).

§ 51. Abū Manṣūr Qasīm b. Ibrāhīm al-Qāʾinī al-mulaqqab bi Buzurjmihr was another bilingual poet, five of whose Arabic verses are quoted by Thaʿālibī. ʿAufī, who gives him the title amīr and includes him in his chapter on the ‘great kings’ who composed poetry, repeats two of these (with explicit reference to Thaʿālibī as his source) and then quotes seven Persian verses, two of them from an ode to Sulṭān Maḥmūd. He is presumably identical with the ‘Buzurjmihr i Qasīmī’ whom Shams i Qais mentions, alongside Bahrāmī (q.v.), as one of the Persian prosodists.

Thaʿālibī, Tatimmah ii p. 45; ʿArūḍī p. 28 (and Qazwīnī ad loc.); ʿAufī i p. 33; Shams pp. 151–2; Ṣafā, Tārīkh i ⁶ p. 570; Khaiyām-pūr p. 84.

§ 52. Daqīqī is remembered primarily as the author of some thousand verses concerning the legend of Zoroaster and his patron, Gushtāsp, which Firdausī incorporated into his Shāh-nāmah.⁹⁷ His name is given by ʿAufī as Abū Manṣūr Muḥammad b. Aḥmad, by others as Muḥammad b. Muḥammad b. Aḥmad, his birthplace as Ṭōs, Balkh, Samarqand or Bukhārā. The dates which the anthologists give for his death are contradictory and improbable. We possess fragments of an ode which he wrote for two of the Samanids, Manṣūr b. Nūḥ (350/961 to 365/975–6) and his son Nūḥ b. Manṣūr (365/975–6 to 387/997); this gives us an approximate idea of when he flourished.

¶In the introduction to his Shāh-nāmah,⁹⁸ Firdausī tells how the ‘young man’ Daqīqī undertook the versification of the Book of Kings; however he had ‘bad companions’ and was killed by one of his slaves before he could complete the poem. At the beginning of the section on Gushtāsp, Firdausī tells how Daqīqī appeared to him in a dream and asked him to insert into his poem the ‘thousand verses’ on Gushtāsp and Arjāsp which he had completed ‘when my life ended’. Firdausī proceeds to do so, though not without some disparaging remarks on the quality of his predecessor’s poetry.⁹⁹ Firdausī’s words have been widely understood to mean that Daqīqī’s work on the Shāh-nāmah consisted only of the verses subsequently incorporated into Firdausī’s epic, but they could also mean simply that the episode in question was the last that Daqīqī completed before his ‘life ended’, but not necessarily the only one he wrote. That Firdausī incorporated this particular fragment into his own poem was of course a convenient way of deflecting from himself any recriminations that pious Muslims might raise against the positive image of Zoroaster in the Book of Kings; it need not mean that this was all that he had of his predecessor’s work. Indeed, ʿAufī says that Daqīqī wrote 20 000 verses of his Book of Kings. This is not necessarily true; however, the Tārīkh-nāmah i Harāt of Saif Harawī attributes some 70 couplets in mutaqārib metre and in epic style to Daqīqī, and it seems entirely possible that these are indeed fragments of his Shāh-nāmah, though they could conceivably belong to a different work of his. They include what are evidently the opening lines of the poem (Lazard’s fragments 267–9, beginning ba yazdān i dāwar khudāwand i jān * kih charkh āfrīd u zamīn u zamān).

In frag. 205–6 the poet says that ‘Daqīqī has chosen four things from the good and bad in the world’: red lips, the sound of the harp, wine and the Zoroastrian religion (dīn, var. kēsh i zard’hishtī). One the basis of these verses, it has repeatedly been argued that Daqīqī was in fact a Zoroastrian; this seems, however, most unlikely. To begin with, the statement that he has ‘chosen’ (bar guzīda-st) Zoroastrianism would be decidedly strange if the poet had been born and raised in the old religion; it would seem rather to point to a conversion. But, that a Muslim in 10th-century Persia should have converted to another religion and then flaunted his apostasy in verse is something that can hardly be imagined. The verses must mean that the Muslim poet has ‘chosen’, ‘given preference to’, ‘expressed admiration for’ Zoroastrianism, but not actually formally adhered to it. This sentiment belongs, together with the invocation of ‘idols’, or with the praise of wine and other forbidden pleasures, to the stylised ¶naughtiness of Muslim poetry and should not be regarded as an expression of religious convictions. The Muslim names that ʿAufī and his successors give to the poet and to his father are not necessarily correct, but neither should they be dismissed out of hand. And the verses at the beginning of his epic (frag. 267–8) show clearly that their author was at least nominally a Sunnite Muslim.

Collection of fragments, French translation, discussion and literature: Lazard, Poètes i pp. 32–6, 136–62, 184–7, ii pp. 141–77. Also: M. Dabīr-Siyāqī, Daqīqī wa ashʿār i ū, Tehran, 1342sh./1963; Dīwān i Abū Manṣūr Muḥammad b. Aḥmad i Daqīqī i Ṭūsī, ed. M. Jawād Sharīʿat, n.p., 1368sh./1989 [basically a reprint of Lazard’s collection plus Daqīqī’s portion of the Shāh-nāmah, but with a useful glossary].

Baihaqī pp. 376–7, 386–7; lf passim (one new verse in ed. Mujtabāʾī/Ṣādiqī p. 197); Rādūyānī passim; ʿArūḍī p. 39; Waṭwāṭ p. 38; Shams passim; ʿAufī ii pp. 11–3; Jājarmī ii pp. 454–7; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i pp. 214–7; Ṣafā, Tārīkh i ⁶ pp. 408–19; Khaiyām-pūr p. 210; Shafīʿī-Kadkanī, Ṣuwar pp. 424–9; Dj. Khaleghi-Motlagh, ‘Daqīqīs Geburtsort’ [=Ṭōs], Der Islam liii, 1976, pp. 115–9; J. Matīnī, ‘Daqīqī, zabān i darī wa lahjah i ādharī’, mdam xi, 1354sh./1976, pp. 559–75; A. Sh. Shabazi, ‘Iranian notes 6: Daqīqī’s religion’ [=Zoroastrianism], Papers in honour of Professor Mary Boyce (=Acta Iranica 25), Leiden 1985, pp. 505–10; S. Navrŭzova, ‘Baʿze lahzahoi tarjimai holi Daqiqī’, Armughon 1989 pp. 74–9; EIr s.v. ‘Daqīqī’ (Dj. Khaleghi-Motlagh).

§ 53. Two verses by an otherwise unknown Dhauqī, referring to Abū l-Fatḥ al-Bustī,¹⁰⁰ are quoted by Rādūyānī, p. 12.

Cf. ln s.v. ‘Dhauqī’, p. 181; Khaiyām-pūr p. 218

§ 54. Dihqān Khūzī is known to us only from four verses quoted by Rādūyānī pp. 15, 22.

§ 55. One verse by Fākhir or Fākhirī is quoted in lf (ed. Iqbāl p. 168); also in Qawwās p. 139 and Ṣiḥāḥ p. 130.

§ 56. A verse by Rōdakī, quoted by ʿAufī, mentions Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad b. Mūsā al-Farālāwī ¹⁰¹ and Shahīd as the two foremost poets of their time; he must therefore have flourished in the second half of the 3rd/9th century.

¶Collection of fragments (34 verses), French translation, discussion and literature: Lazard, Poètes i pp. 21–2, 70–2, ii pp. 40–6.

lf passim (one new verse in ed. Mujtabāʾī/Ṣādiqī p. 220); ʿAufī ii p. 5; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i p. 65; Ṣafā, Tārīkh i ⁶ pp. 394–5; Khaiyām-pūr p. 438; ln s.v. ‘Abū ʿAbd Allāh’ pp. 603–4; EIr s.v. ‘Farālāvī’.

§ 57. Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Jūlūgh al-Farrukhī al-Sijzī was one of the principal poets of the early Ghaznavid period. The story of his early life is related by ʿArūḍī: his father Jūlūgh had been a slave (ghulām, presumably meaning a slave-soldier) of the amīr of Sīstān and Saffarid vassal Khalaf i Bānū; the young Farrukhī was in the service (and presumably also a slave) of a land-owner (dihqān) in that country. On finding himself unable to support a wife on the salary he received from the latter, the young poet ran away from his master and went to the ruler of Chaghāniyān, Abū l-Muẓaffar (i.e. evidently Abū l-Muẓaffar Fakhr al-daulah Aḥmad b. Muḥammad¹⁰²), while the latter was supervising the branding of his colts, and attracted his attention with two apposite poems, for which he was at once richly rewarded. In the former poem¹⁰³ the author describes his voyage from Sīstān to Chaghāniyān, and alludes to the coincidence of a Muslim ʿīd with Naurōz, from which it is possible to determine the date of the poem, and thus also the approximate date of Farrukhī’s arrival in Chaghāniyān, as 1 Shawwāl 406/March 1016.¹⁰⁴ Seeing that ʿArūḍī implies that the poet was already married at the time of his arrival, he could hardly have been born much later than 385/995. Not long afterwards, the poet transferred his allegiance yet again to an even more powerful patron, Sulṭān Maḥmūd. To him are dedicated the majority of the poems in Farrukhī’s dīwān where we find also a celebrated elegy on his death (Dīwān, pp. 92–5), which occured in 421/1030; besides these we find eulogies of Maḥmūd’s two successors, Muḥammad and Masʿūd, including one which would appear to have been presented to the latter on ʿīd ¶al-fiṭr 422/1031.¹⁰⁵ If we are to believe Labībī’s statement¹⁰⁶ that Farrukhī died young, we cannot put his death very much later than this.¹⁰⁷

The biographical tradition deteriorates markedly with Daulat-shāh, who tells us that Farrukhī was born in Tirmidh (a long way from Sīstān), that he was a pupil of ʿUnṣurī and that he wrote a treatise on rhetoric called Tarjumān al-balāghah (presumably the work by that name by Rādūyānī).¹⁰⁸

Mss. of his Dīwān : London Or. 3246 i (Rieu Suppt. no. 204. Dated Ramaḍān 1248/1833); Or. 2945 (Rieu Suppt. no. 203. Dated Jumādā ii 1275/1859. The basis of the Tehran edition of 1301); i.o. 902 (incomplete); Leningrad Univ. 1003b (Romskewicz p. 8); Istanbul Üniversite fy 329 (olim Rıza Paşa 1171. Ateş 8. Dated Dhū l-Ḥijjah 1247/1832); Najaf 1387 (Munz. 25026. Dated Ramaḍān 1253/1837); 1384 (Munz. 25053); Tehran Adabīyāt i p. 266 (18th century?); Malik 5384 (Munz. no. 25024 inspexit. Dated 1249/1833–4); Majlis 5284 (Munz. 25036 inspexit); Majlis 4897 (Munz. 25037 inspexit); Majlis iii 1038; Qum Marʿashī vi 2367; Mashhad Riḍawī vii 508 (Dated 1125/1713); Univ. 147 (Dated 4 Rabīʿ i 1210/1795); Riḍawī vii 502 (Dated 1 Muḥarram 1253/1837); Riḍawī vii 505 (Dated Rajab 1263/1847); Riḍawī vii 509 (Dated 1288/1871–2); Riḍawī vii 504; Riḍawī ix 1147 (Dated 1263/1847); Tashkent Acad. ii 761 (Dated 1268/1851–2); Acad. ii 762 (19th century); Lahore Punjab Univ. Lib. (according to Oriental College Magazine iii/2, 1927, p. 73); Public Libr. i p. 375 (18th century?) [Munz.]; Public Libr. i p. 376 (18th century?) [Munz.]; Los Angeles Univ. M269 (Nuskhah-hā xi/xii p. 43. 18th century? Beginning missing). Cf. Munz. iii 25019–54.

Extracts: Oxford Elliot 37 fol. 183a (Ethé 1333 = Daqāʾiq al-ashʿār); Paris Supplément 1366 fol. 208r seqq. (Blochet 1993. Ms. dated 20 Rajab 1010/1602); Leningrad Univ. 941y (Salemann p. 15).

Editions: Tehran 1301/1883–4; 1302/1884–5; 1311sh./1932 (Ed. ʿAlī ʿAbd al-Rasūlī; the preface is dated Tīr-Māh 1312sh./1933); 1335sh./1957 (Ed. M. Dabīr-Siyāqī).

Partial editions: Tehran 1346/1968 (annotated edition of four poems by Kh. Kh. Rahbar).

Glossary: D. Meneghini Correale, Farroxi: Concordance and lexical repertories of 1000 lines, Venice 1991.

¶ Shahryār-nāmah . A manuscript of a poem of this title (not identical with the Shahryār-nāmah attributed to Mukhtārī¹⁰⁹) is found in the Bankipore library. It contains a number of passages in which the author gives his name as Farrukhī and that of his patron as Maḥmūd. However, it also contains a prologue dedicated to ʿAbbās Shāh, and the name ʿAbbās has also been inserted at one other point in the manuscript over an erasure of the original name. Ms.: Bankipore Suppt. i 1798 (17th century? 180 fol. Damaged at end).¹¹⁰

Baihaqī p. 280; ʿUnṣur al-Maʿālī, Qābūs-nāmah (ed. Yūsufī) p. 150; lf passim (a critical edition and translation of the fragments contained there is given by Rypka and Borecký [=‘R/B’] pp. 41–75); Rādūyānī passim (and Ateş’s notes, pp. 98–90); ʿArūḍī pp. 28, 36–40 (and R/B pp. 30–4); Waṭwāṭ passim (and R/B pp. 28–30); ʿAufī ii pp. 47–50 (and R/B pp. 35–8); ʿAufī, Jawāmiʿ (facsimile) p. 353 (no. 1125); Shams passim (and R/B pp. 38–41); Jājarmī pp. 130–1; Daulat-shāh pp. 55–7; Ādhar pp. 86–8; Hidāyat, Majmaʿ i pp. 439–65; J. Rypka and M. Borecký, ‘Farruh̲ī’ [in French], Archiv orientální 16, 1948, pp. 17–75 (contains a critical edition of those verses cited in Asadī’s Lughat i Furs and other early sources, confronting them with the variants in ʿAbd al-Rasūlī’s edition of the dīwān); A. Ateş, ‘Farrukhī chih zamān ba Chaghāniyān raft?’, mdat viii/2, 1339sh./1961, pp. 1–12 (Also in Turkish in Şarkiyat Mecmuasi iv, 1961, pp. 23–32); Khaiyām-pūr p. 440 (with further references); Ṣafā, Tārīkh i ⁶ pp. 531–46; Gh. Yūsufī, Farrukhī i Sīstānī. Baḥth-ī dar sharḥ i aḥwāl wa rūzgār wa shiʿr i ū, Mashhad 1341sh./1962–3; Shafīʿī-Kadkanī, Ṣuwar pp. 486–98; Fouchécour, Nature pp. 1–180; M. Mulloahmadov, Farrukhii Sistonī, Dushanbe 1978; R. Zipoli, Āyinah dar shiʿr i Farrukhī wa Saʿdī wa Ḥāfiẓ, Tehran 1366sh./1987; M. Mulloahmadov, Farrukhii Sistonī (in Tajik), Dushanbe 1978; J.S. Meisami, ‘Ghaznavid panegyrics: some political implications’, Iran xxviii, 1990, pp. 31–44 (translations of and commentary on several of his poems); C.E. Bosworth, ‘Farrukhī’s elegy on Maḥmūd of Ghazna’, Iran xxix, 1991, pp. 43–9 (with translation and detailed commentary); ei ² s.v. ‘Farruk̲h̲ī’ (Huart/Massé); EIr s.v. ‘Farrok̲ī’ (J.T.P. de Bruijn).

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