1916.] Quatrains of 



189 



;-' "s^ "-"• xuiui oijau in me norm- 



east corner of Persia; and he died there in 1049. Practically 

 the whole of Ins life he spent in Khorasan, now living with his 

 parents m his native village, now studying at Merv, or preach- 



S 8 i ?- ?f sha P lir ' wifch Perhaps an occasional visit to distant 

 Bokhara ; oblivious of, or at any rate untouched by the 

 violent events which were happening in those troublous times, 

 ine lurkish tribes which Mahmud of Ghazni (998-1030) had 



Khorasan 



t-bat province which became the constant scene of raids, punitive 

 expeditions, and rebellions during the reigns of Mahmud and 

 his successor Mas'ud. These culminated at length in the defin- 

 ite conquest of Khorasan by the Seljuk Turkomans in a.d. 1037. 

 But of all this we hear little from his biographers, and 

 nothing in his own poems.' 2 He was busy with other things. He 

 wandered in exile, he preached, and he debated with other 

 dervishes, a fantastic crowd who pass to and fro across the 

 stage with a strange and sombre dignity. He was reviled, he 

 was revered ; and on the whole enjoyed considerably more than 

 the usual amount of honour that a prophet is supposed to 

 acquire in his own land. 



This is a bald enough picture ; but if we seek to fill in the 

 details, we must do so with a certain amount of caution. 

 Abu Sa'id has his biographers in plenty. 3 But the records of 

 his life which they give us, though extremely diverting and full 

 of interest, consist for the most part of isolated anecdotes and 

 sayings which are placed in no definite sequence, and which 

 moreover leave a great deal to the imagination. A picture 

 made up of these fragments would be something very like the 



Patched crarmonf. fVio SIhailrV) himHAlf mnaf. h q ttq ttj^w* n 4-1,: 



of strange colours, with many gaps 



kb himself must have worn 



But authentic or not, these stories give us a clear enough 



picture of the man. Leaving aside the prodigies of his infancy 



those early signs of greatness which are the usual tribute of 



1 The home of Avicenna the great philosopher who was born there in 

 987 a.d. (when Abu Sa'id was 20 years old), and lived there at any rate for 

 the first part of his life. But he and Abu Sa'id first met in Nishapur, not 

 in Bokhara. 



2 A somewhat unconvincing story is related by one of his biographers 

 of how Abu Sa'id once came across a party of Turkoman robbers in the 

 desert, fresh from a successful raid : and of how, having converted them 



stery at Nishapu 



are 



the Asrdr ut Tauhid fi Maqdmdt-i- Shaikh, Abu Sa'id written by a dea_ 

 dant in the second half of the 12th century a.d., and the Hdldt u Sukhu 

 ndn-i Shaikh Abu Sa'id composed, as E. G. Browne conjectured, some- 

 what earlier. The latter is very much shorter. They have both been 

 edited by Professor Valentine Zhuko ki. For the rest there are notices 

 of him in many memoirs and anthologies, such as the Safinat-ut-AuUyd. 

 the Tadhkirat-nl- A uliuA. «nd others. 



