KAŠKUL-E ŠAYḴ BAHĀʾI

 

KAŠKUL-E ŠAYḴ BAHĀʾI, the title of a large literary anthology compiled by Shaikh Bahāʾ-al-Din Moḥammad ʿĀmeli, commonly known as Shaikh Bahāʾi, the gifted polymath and leading jurist of the Safavid empire during most of the reign of Shah ʿAbbās I (r. 1587-1629).

Shaikh Bahāʾi, born in Baalbek in what is now northern Lebanon in 953/ 1547, was brought by his father, Ḥosayn b. ʿAbd-al-Ṣamad, to Iraq and then to Iran in 961/1554, when Bahāʾi was seven years old (Stewart, 2006). Ḥosayn was one of a number of scholars of the religious sciences from Jabal ʿĀmel, the predominantly Shiʿite area of southern Lebanon, who settled in Iran in the mid-sixteenth century and assumed religious functions such as those of prayer leaders, jurists, and teachers of the religious sciences under the patronage of the Safavid kings, particularly Shah Ṭahmāsb (r. 1524-76). Their native village of Jubaʿ, just inland from Sidon, had produced a number of notable scholars, including Ḥosayn’s teacher, Zayn-al-Din ʿĀmeli, who would become known as “the Second Martyr” (al-Šahid al-Ṯāni) after he was executed as a heretic by the Ottomans in Istanbul in 965/ 1558.

In Iran, Shaikh Bahāʾi’s family first settled in Isfahan, where they came into contact with another immigrant ʿĀmeli jurist, Shaikh ʿAli Menšār, whose daughter Shaikh Bahāʾi would eventually marry. They moved to Qazvin about three years later, when Shah Ṭahmāsb appointed Bahāʾi’s father šayḵ̱-al-eslām, chief jurist of the newly established Safavid capital. In about 970/ 1563, the family moved to Mashad and then Herat, where Ḥosayn held similar positions. Before 979/ 1571-72, Bahāʾi parted with his family in Herat to study and teach the religious sciences back in the capital, Qazvin, and he remained there when his father left Safavid territory to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca in 983/ 1575 (Stewart, 1991, pp. 567-68). Ḥosayn never returned to Iran. He died in 984/ 1576 while visiting Bahrain the next year, perhaps on a less-traveled route back to Iran or on the way to Hyderabad in the Deccan of India, in search of more lucrative employment with the reigning Qotbshahid dynast, Ebrāhim b. Solṭānqoli (r. 1550-80).

Bahāʾi assumed the position of šay̱-al-eslām of Isfahan when his father-in-law, Shaikh ʿAli Menšār, passed away that same year (Eskandar Beg, I, p. 156; tr., p. 248). While he seems to have remained aloof from the politics of the royal court for the ensuing period, during the turbulent reigns of Shah Esmāʿil II (r. 1576-78) and Shah Moḥammad Ḵodābanda (r. 1578-87), his renown as a jurist kept growing. When his older contemporary, Mir Ḥosayn Mojtahed, died in Qazvin in 1001/ 1591-92, he became the leading religious authority in the empire, a prominent courtier who enjoyed the favor of Shah ʿAbbās; he remained such until his death three decades later, in 1030/ 1621 (Stewart, 1998, pp. 186-94).

Though Shaikh Bahāʾi was accomplished in many fields, including mathematics, astronomy, Islamic law, Hadith, and commentary on the Qurʾan (tafsir), he owes much of his fame, both in Shiʿite and Sunnite circles, to the Kaškul, a substantial anthology that has enjoyed wide popularity in the Middle East and India from the late sixteenth century until the present time. In the pedagogical manual Taʿlim al-motaʿallem, Borhān-al-Din Zarnuji (602/ 1223) suggests that a serious student should always have a book in his sleeve and furthermore that the book should have some blank pages so that he might copy down anything worthwhile he comes across (Zarnuji, p. 24). Bahāʾi seems to have taken such advice to heart in composing the Kaškul (ed. Naṣiri, I, p. 2). He collected the work, originally in five volumes, over many years, mainly between 1583 and 1599, and evidently constructed it after the fashion of a scrapbook, adding quotations, poems, and anecdotes gradually, as he saw fit, including more substantial treatises of his own authorship as well as other texts, and leaving blank pages to be filled in later (Bosworth, pp. 21-27).

In part because of this method of compilation, several recensions of the work exist in manuscripts, and a critical edition has yet to be produced. The work is meant to be at once entertaining and edifying, and Bahāʾi seems to have prized variety over organization. It includes poetry, historical and literary anecdotes, mathematical proofs, prayers, Hadith reports, discussions of grammatical and exegetical questions, and longer treatises on various technical topics in the Islamic sciences. It also includes what might be described as trivia, such as a document dated 1584 cataloguing the number of mosques, churches, baths, and other types of buildings to be found in Istanbul, a list of the names of the books in the Hebrew Bible, and so on (Kaškul, ed. Naṣiri, I, pp. 42-43; ed. Ḵārsān, II, pp. 46-48). Poetry makes up about one-third of the anthology, and Persian material about a fourth. The poets quoted are mainly from the ʿAbbasid and later periods.

Because of the circumstances of his background and upbringing, Bahāʾi acquired excellent training in a number of fields and was able to combine learned traditions to an extent that was unusual. On the one hand, he was versed in the religious sciences of the Shiʿite tradition, including law and Hadith, along with the ancillary arts of Arabic grammar and rhetoric. On the other hand, he studied the rational sciences, including mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and philosophy, which were highly cultivated in Iran and Transoxania during this period, with the best scholars available, while at the same time becoming versed in Persian mystical traditions. Two centuries earlier, Ebn Ḵaldun had already noted the expertise of scholars from Persia and Transoxania in the rational sciences (Ebn Ḵaldun, III, p. 117), and Bahāʾi benefited from this tradition. While many scholars from this period had training in several disciplines, few could boast having authored the most highly regarded texts on mathematics and astronomy and, at the same time, standard-setting works on Islamic law and Hadith. Bahāʾi’s achievement was quite rare, and this varied expertise had a profound effect on the contents of his Kaškul.

Internal evidence suggests that Bahāʾi began the work in the course of an extensive journey through Ottoman territory in 1583-85, during which he performed the pilgrimage to Mecca and visited Aleppo, Damascus, Jerusalem, and Cairo. Traveling with merchants, he followed the trade route Tabriz-Van-Amid-Aleppo, passing through an Ottoman checkpoint at Amid. While on the journey, he wrote a work entitled Sawāneḥ safar al-Ḥejāz fi’l-taraqqi ela’l-ḥaqiqa men al-majāz. This work consisted of original compositions by Bahāʾi himself, both in poetry and prose, primarily, as far as is evident, in Persian. No manuscript of the original work survives, but Bahāʾi quotes it many times in the Kaškul, and more quotations are found in other manuscripts. It included individual Persian lyrics (ḡazal) as well as several longer couplet poems (maṯnawi) written in the style of Jalāl-al-Din Moḥammad Rumi. Bahāʾ’s maṯnawis, Nān o panir (Bread and cheese), Nān o ḥalwā, and Šir o šekar (published with his other Persian poems by Jawāheri), may all have been included in the Sawāneḥ. They are all didactic poems of mystical inspiration, discussing the traps of infatuation with outer meaning, fame and fortune, and formal learning, while true meaning lies elsewhere. The Sawāneḥ included as well an artistic prose piece, also in Persian, entitled Muš o gorba. This text, too, is of mystical inspiration, an allegorical tale of the mystic quest for inner meaning undertaken by various persons of distinct character (Dalāl ʿAbbās, pp. 431-98).

Several of the lyrics that appeared in Sawāneḥ safar al-Ḥejāz were, after a fashion, occasional poems written in response to the events of the journey. In these poems, he adopted the poetic pen name (ta̱̱alloṣ) Bahāʾi, by which he would become known. For example, in Amid (modern Diyarbekir in Turkey), Bahāʾi mentions that he wrote a poem in Persian while being held up at the border by greedy customs officials. He mentions that he wrote a poem in Shirvan on the 6th of Ramażān 993 (1 September 1585?), perhaps on the return from his trip (Kaškul, ed. Naṣiri, I, p. 355).

Bahāʾi’s Arabic poetry appears in the Kaškul as well. He quotes a lost collection of his Arabic poems entitled Riāż al-arwāḥ (Kaškul, ed. Naṣiri, I, p. 47). Bahāʾi’s own Arabic poetry falls in the main into two formal categories, odes of the classical form and quatrains or do-bayti. Also during his trip, in 992/ 1584, he composed a panegyric for Sayyed Moḥammad Bakri, a leading sayyed, Shafiʿite jurist, and Sufi master in Cairo. Bahāʾi has many poems such as the riddle poem he wrote for Ebn Abi’l-Loṭf Maqdesi, the Hanafite mofti of Jerusalem, which served as a medium of entertaining scholarly social intercourse (Kaškul, ed. Naṣiri, I, pp. 63-65). Indeed, both Bahāʾi and his father appear to have been skilled composers of this type of poem, termed loḡaz, moʿammā, or čistān, which provide cryptic hints at an unknown word, such as “If you remove its middle [i.e., the middle letter of the word], it is a tree.” The poem in question has as the answer the word al-Qods (Jerusalem). Ebn Abi’l-Loṭf responded in kind, with another riddle poem having the same answer (Kaškul, ed. Naṣiri, I, pp. 65-66). One of Bahāʾi’s more famous odes found in the Kaškul is Wasilat al-fawz wa’l-amān (The means of attaining success and being saved), a poem in praise of the Twelfth Imam. The seventeenth-century Damascene scholar Aḥmad b. ʿAli Manini (d. 1172/ 1759) later wrote an extensive commentary on this poem and dedicated it to a prominent Syrian sayyed (Kaškul, Bulaq, 1872, pp. 394-435). Other poems are in a more blatantly humorous vein, such as that about a Kord who ends up killing his sexually overactive mother, in which Bahāʾi indulges in extensive punning drawing on the technical terminology of Arabic grammar. Bahāʾi also quotes his own poetry from lost works entitled Riāż al-arwāḥ and al-Ḥadiqa al-sanāʾiya, perhaps one section of his larger anthological work Ḥadāʾeq al-ṣāleḥin (Kaškul, ed. Naṣiri, I, pp. 47, 80).

Bahāʾi’s quatrains are perhaps his most original poetic contribution, and he seems to have felt a strong affinity for the form. Like the following Arabic example, the quatrains are overwhelmingly devoted to the theme of love (Kaškul, ed. Naṣiri, I, p. 183):

 

I love a moon that has led me to disaster,
Yet my tortured heart holds no complaint of him.
How many times have I come to complain, but when he looked upon me,
From the ecstasy of his nearness, I forgot the complaint.

 

Neither contrived nor excessively ornate or hyperbolic, the quatrains attest to his ability to use this terse form to convey emotion and tension in a deceptively simple manner.

At the same time, Bahāʾi displays his expertise in Qurʾanic exegesis, writing commentaries on the famous Sunni tafsir works of Abu’l-Qāsem Maḥmud Zamaḵ̱šari (d. 538/ 1144) and Nāṣer-al-Din Abu’l-Ḵayr Bayżāwi (d. 685/ 1286) and other short treatises on the tafsir of particular verses. He was profoundly engaged with this field of study by the time he left to perform the pilgrimage, and includes in his anthology Kaškul many discussions of questions of exegesis, in addition to several more substantial treatises of Qurʾanic commentary that may have been written during this period. Of particularly interest is an untitled treatise on the interpretation of the verse 2:23 that attempts to resolve a difficulty in Zama̱šari’s Kaššāf that, in his view, the various super-commentaries had failed to explain adequately (Kaškul, ed. Naṣiri, I, pp. 481-88; Stewart, 1996, pp. 38-40). This treatise work was probably dedicated to Ottoman Sultan Morād III (r. 1574-95) as a precaution in case he were stopped by Ottoman authorities and accused of spying for the Safavids, but the name of the Ottoman sultan has been removed from the text, perhaps by Bahāʾi himself. In the treatise, he claims to have been inspired with the correct interpretation of this particular verse in Mecca, in the vicinity of the Kaʿba itself (Kaškul, ed. Naṣiri, I, p. 488).

The Kaškul shows some interest in history, particularly the history of Iran, for it includes a list of the Il-khanid dynasts, who ruled in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries from Tabriz and may have been a significant model for the Safavids. There is also a discussion of Ḥasan Ṣabbāḥ, a prominent Ismaʿili dāʿi, and the Nezāri Ismaʿilis of Alamut, whose fortresses were reduced by Hulāgu Khan in the mid-thirteenth century after inspiring fear in Sunnite rulers for over a century and a half. He also presents the text of Naṣir-al-Din Ṭusi’s letter to the ruler of Aleppo after Hulāgu’s conquest of Baghdad in 1258 (Kaškul, ed. Ḵārsān, II, pp. 500, 507-8). Bahāʾi’s attention to these matters may reflect some recognition of the Il-khanid period’s formative influence on subsequent Iranian history, including the rise of the Safavid dynasty itself.

Bahāʾi studied some philosophy, but no philosophical work by him is extant. The Kaškul mentions that he wrote a philosophical treatise on the concept of the essence (al- Jawhar al-fard), but this has apparently been lost. Other philosophical topics appearing in the Kaškul include a text (ed. Naṣiri, I, pp. 230-33; II, p. 30) criticizing the philosophers’ terminology regarding physics, as well as a discussion of the distinction between instinctive and acquired reason. Probably drawing on the works of Abu Ḥāmed Ḡazāli, Bahāʾi describes the controversy between theologians and philosophers over the cr eation of the world, as well as their debate over theodicy. Bahāʾi distances himself from the Islamic philosophers, as well as from the Moʿtazelites, when he quotes them, and he cites a passage arguing that Avicenna is destined for Hell, apparently with approval (Kaškul, ed. Naṣiri, II, p. 174).

Astronomy and mathematics are major topics of interest in the Kaškul. The work includes many mathematical proofs and constructions in geometry and algebra, a method for finding the center of a circle, another for finding the meridian, and another for constructing a triangle on the surface of a sphere. More substantial is a treatise on the controversy over the light of the planets besides the moon, discussing whether it is primary/original (ḏātiya) or secondary/derived (mostafāda; Kaškul, ed. Naṣiri, I, pp. 71-76).

The Kaškul cites some explicitly Shiʿite material, including statements and Hadith reports attributed to the Imams, and indulges in some typical Shiʿite-Sunni polemics, but these are not presented in a heavy-handed manner, mainly in the mode of clever answers to pointed questions. For example, he includes an anecdote about the tenth Imam, al-Hādi, answering questions in the audience of the ʿAbbasid caliph al-Motawakkel (r. 847-61). Another passage, quoting the Moḥāżarāt of Abu’l-Qāsem Rāḡeb Eṣfahāni (d. 502/ 1108), describes the inhabitants of Qazvin, in this case Shiʿites, beating a man named ʿOmrān (not generally subject to opprobrium by Shiʿites) on the grounds that his name is formed by joining ʿOmar with half of ʿOṯmān (Kaškul, ed. Naṣiri, I, p. 363). These do not differ in kind from other humorous anecdotes, such as Ebn al-Jawzi’s (598/ 1200) clever improvisations in his sermon sessions, and this aspect of the Kaškul led Ignaz Goldziher (1874, pp. 457-67) to view Bahāʾi as a moderate Shiʿite who was not particularly inimical to Sunnis.

The history of the Kaškul’s publication is complex. It was published several times already in the nineteenth century in Iran and Egypt. The early Egyptian editions of the work, which circulated widely in the Arab world and attracted the attention of Goldziher during his stay in Egypt in the 1870s, are decidedly inferior as witnesses to Bahāʾi’s original conception, since they omitted the Persian material altogether. The best editions to date are those of Moḥammad-Mahdi Ḵarsān (1973) and Moḥammad-Ṣādeq Naṣiri (1958-61), which include the Persian material and are otherwise more complete and accurate.

Bahāʾi actually composed two literary anthologies, the earlier of which bore the title Meḵlāh and is mentioned in the introduction to the Kaškul. However, the work that has been published as al-Meḵlāh, reprinted many times and even translated into Persian, is a false attribution to Bahāʾi perpetrated originally by an Egyptian publisher. The authorship of this pseudo-Me̱̱̱lāh has not been determined, but internal evidence suggests that it was composed in Egypt by a Sunni literary scholar and adherent of the Ḥanafi legal school in the mid-fifteenth century, over a century before Bahāʾi wrote his works (Stewart, 1990, pp. 280-81). Little is known of the real Me̱̱̱lāh besides Bahāʾi’s characterization of it in the introduction to Kaškul. He explains that he wrote the work in the prime of his youth, that it was well organized, arranged in a clever manner, and that it included poetry, anecdotes, Qurʾanic exegesis, Hadith reports, and problems. Āḡā Bozorg Ṭehrāni reports that an acquaintance, Sayyed Āqā Tostari, had a copy of Bahāʾi’s real Meḵlāh in his private library, that it was quite different from the published editions, and that it included a commentary on a prayer by the Companion ʿAbd-Allāh b. Estenṭāl (Āqā Bozorg Ṭehrāni, XX, pp. 232-33). In the Kaškul (ed. Naṣiri, I, p. 502; II, p. 280), Bahāʾi refers the reader to two specific texts he had included in the Meḵlāh, one the story behind the aphorism “Dance for the evil monkey in his time,” and the other a passage where he cited poems describing the gazelle by the poets Borhān-al-Din Qirāṭi (d. 781/ 1379) and Ebn al-Ḵarrāṭ (d. 839/ 1436). Āqā Bozorg’s report of the existence of an authentic manuscript of Meḵlāh has not been confirmed by other sources, and the work has not yet been published.

The merits of Kaškul are several. It provides valuable information about Bahāʾi’s life and works that is not recorded elsewhere. It also records a large proportion of his extant poetry. In addition, it provides insight into the scholar of the period as a whole person, albeit an academic person, something that is often possible to miss when one reads works written within narrow, generic confines. Bahāʾi cites a great deal of both Arabic and Persian poetry by other authors, and even a few samples of Turkish poetry. C. E. Bosworth has examined the Arabic poetry in particular, finding that the majority of the poets are postclassical, including favorites of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries such as Ebn Nobāta, Qirāṭi, and Ebn al-Ḵarrāṭ. The work is thus an important witness to reading habits and literary taste during this period throughout the central Islamic lands, supplementing other anthologies of Arabic poetry such as Šehāb-al-Din Ḵafāji’s (d. 1069/ 1695) Rayḥānat al-alebbāʾ, Moḥammad Moḥebbi’s (d. 1082/ 1671) Nafḥat al-rayḥāna, and Ebn Maʿṣum’s (d. 1120/ 1708) Solāfat al-ʿaṣr. It thus challenges modern views (e.g., Nicholson, pp. 442-70; Cachia, pp. 103-22; Bauer; Kilpatrick; Lowry and Stewart) that Arabic poetry went to seed after the tenth century and that Arabic literature entered a prolonged period of decadence, only to emerge from its stupor in the nineteenth century with the influx of new forms and ideas from Europe.

As a book of entertainment literature, Kaškul was a great success. This is attested by the large numbers of manuscripts throughout the Middle East, the early editions of the work, and the many later anthologies that adopted Kaškul as a title. One might argue that the work established a particular sub-genre of the anthology in the Islamic world. Āqā Bozorg Ṭehrāni (XVIII, pp. 70-83) lists over thirty works by this title in his catalogue of Shiʿite works; perhaps the most famous of these is the Kaškul of Yusof b. Aḥmad Baḥrāni (d. 1186/ 1772; Āqā Bozorg, XVIII, p. 81), which, however, never attained the fame of its model. Many of these works range less widely in topics than Bahāʾi’s Kaškul and are more decidedly Shiʿite in flavor. Yet another tribute to the fame of Bahāʾi’s work is the fact that an early twentieth-century Egyptian humor magazine adopted al-Kaškul as its title.

 

Bibliography:

Major editions of Kaškul-e Šayḵ Bahāʾi.

Bulaq, 1864; Cairo, 1871; Tehran, 1879; Cairo, 1884; ed. Mahdi Ajurdi, 3 vols., Qom, 1858-59; ed. Moḥammad Ṣādeq Naṣiri, Qom, 1958-61; ed. Ṭāher Aḥmad al-Zāwi, 2 vols., Cairo, 1961; ed. Moḥammad- Mahdi Ḥasan Ḵarsān, Najaf, 1973.

Translations in Persian.

Tehran, 1902; by Moḥammad- Bāqer Saʿidi Ḵorāsāni, Tehran, 1979; by ʿAziz-Allāh Kāseb, Tehran, 1995; by Bahman Rāzāni, Tehran, 1996.

Studies.

Dalāl ʿAbbās, Bahāʾ-al-Din al-ʿĀmeli: adiban wa faqihan wa ʿāleman, Beirut, 1995.

Āqā Bozorg al-Ṭehrāni, al-Ḏariʿa elā taṣānif al-Šiʿa, Qom, Najaf, and Tehran, 27 vols., 1936-78, XVIII, pp. 77-78.

Thomas Bauer, “In Search of ‘Post-Classical Literature’: A Review Essay,” Mamluk Studies Review 11, 2007, pp. 137-67.

Clifford E. Bosworth, Bahāʾ al-Din al-ʿĀmili and His Literary Anthologies, Manchester, 1989; reviewed by Devin J. Stewart (see below).

Edward G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia, 4 vols., Cambridge, 1951, IV, pp. 426-28.

Pierre Cachia, Arabic Literature: An Overview, London, 2002.

Ignaz Goldziher, “Beiträge zur Literaturgeschichte der Šiʿa und der sunnitische Polemik,” Sitzungsberichte der Philosophischphilologischen und Historischen Classe der Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften 83, 1874, pp. 439-524; repr., in idem, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Joseph Desomogyi, 6 vols., Hildesheim, 1967-73, I, pp. 261-346.

Ḥasan ʿAbd-al-Karim Ḥejāzi, Bahāʾ-al-Din al-ʿĀmeli šāʿeran, 953-1030 H/1547-1621 M, Beirut, 1999.

Saʿid Nafisi, Aḥwāl wa ašʿār-e fārsi-e Šayḵ-e Bahāʾi, Tehran, 1937.

Reynold A. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs, Cambridge, 1969.

Devin J. Stewart, review of C. E. Bosworth, Bahāʾ al-Din al-ʿĀmili and His Literary Anthologies, Studia Iranica 19, 1990, pp. 275-82.

Idem, “A Biographical Notice on Bahaʾ al-Din al-ʿAmili (d. 1030/ 1621),” JAOS 111, 1991, pp. 563-71.

Idem, “Taqiyyah as Performance: the Travels of Bahaʾ al-Din al-ʿAmili in the Ottoman Empire (991-93/1583-85),” in Princeton Papers in Near Eastern Studies IV, 1996, pp. 1-70.

Idem, “The Lost Biography of Bahaʾ al-Din al-ʿAmili and the Reign of Shah Ismaʿil II in Safavid Historiography,” Iranian Studies 31, 1998, pp. 177-205.

Idem, “An Episode in the ʿĀmili Migration to Safavid Iran: The Travel Account of Husayn b. ʿAbd al-Samad al-ʿAmili,” Iranian Studies 39, 2006, pp. 481-509.

Other references.

Shaikh Bahāʾ-al-Din ʿĀmeli, Kolliyāt-e ašʿār-e fārsi-e Šayḵ Bahāʾ-al-Din Moḥammad ʿAmeli mašhur ba Šayḵ Bahāʾi, ed. Ḡolām-Ḥosayn Jawāheri, Tehran, 1962.

Carl Brockelmann, Geschicte der arabischen Literatur, 2 vols., Leiden, 1943-49, II, pp. 415-16; Supplements, 3 vols., Leiden, 1937-42., II, pp. 595-97.

Ebn Ḵaldun, The Muqaddima: An Introduction to History, tr. Franz Rosenthal, rev. ed., 3 vols., Princeton, 1967.

Eskandar Beg Torkamān, Tāriḵ-e ʿālamārā-ye ʿabbāsi, ed. Iraj Afšār, 2 vols., Tehran, 1971, I, pp. 155-57; tr. Roger M. Savory as History of Shah ʿAbbās the Great, 3 vols., Boulder, Colo., 1979- 86, pp. 247-49.

Hilary Kilpatrick, “Bey and Decadence: Dos and Don’ts in Studying Mamluk and Ottoman Literature,” Middle Eastern Literature 12, 2009, pp. 71-80.

Joseph E. Lowry and Devin Stewart, Essays in Arabic Biography, 1350-1850, Wiesbaden, 2009, “Introduction,” pp. 1-12.

Ḏabiḥ-Allāh Ṣafā, Tāriḵ-e adabiyāt dar Irān, 5 vols. in 7, Tehran, 1958, 1992, V, pp. 350-52, 1039-47.

Borhān-al-Din Zarnuji, Taʿlim al-motaʿallem ṭariq al-taʿallom, Cairo, 1890; tr. G. E. von Grunebaum and Theodora M. Abe as Instruction of the Student: The Method of Learning, Chicago, 2003.

(Devin J. Stewart)

Originally Published: May 1, 2012

Last Updated: May 2, 2012

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