276 H. G. Raverty— The Mihrdn of Sind and its Tributaries. [No. 4, 
by Kliizi’ Khan at the head of a considerable force, defeated, and put to 
flight; and, in the pursuit, Ikbal Khan was slain. 
This was in the height of the hot season, it must be remembered, 
and that these two armies were operating against each other in the 
midst of what could not then have been a sandy, waterless desert, 
although much must have been uncultivated waste. 
In the time of Sultan Mu’izz-ud-Dm, Mubarak Shah, son of the 
Rayat-i-’Ala, Khizr Khan, 241 who succeeded his father in 824 H. (1421 
A. D.), Jasrath, the Khokhar, Shaikha’s son, 242 rebelled. Among some 
241 This was the title assumed by the Sayyid-zadah, Khizr Khan, who never 
took that of Sultan, as he acknowledged the supremacy of the Amir Timur, and 
after him, that of his son and successor, Sultan Shah Rukh, Bahadur Khan. 
242 In every translation of these events, Shaikha, the father, has been mistaken 
for Jasrath, his son (just as we have in Elliot, for example, Vol. IV, page 54—“ re¬ 
bellion of Jasrath Shaikha Khokhar ”), precisely in the same way that Kasim, the 
father of the conqueror of Sind, has been mistaken for his son, Muhammad, merely 
because the translators did not understand the proper use of the Persian izdfat, and 
that an izdfat, expressed or understood, was required between the names of Jasrath 
and Shaikha, and between Muhammad and Kasim, thus—Jasrath-i-Shaikha, and 
Muhammad-i-Kasim—after the idiom of the Persian, instead of writing Muhammad 
bin Iyasim, or Muhammad ibn Kasim, according to the ’Arabic usage. 
Scores of errors on this account occur in translations of the kind referred to, 
through want of knowledge of the use of the izdfat of the Persian grammar; for, 
considering the two names thus following each other like the Christian name and 
surname of Europeans, such, for example, as James Thomas, or Thomas James, and 
the like, the translators generally manage to drop the first and retain the second, 
as in the case of Muhammad, whose father, Kasim, was in his grave long before his 
son set out for the conquest of Sind; and in the events above related, we have 
Shaikha, who had been dead for some years, doing what his son, Jasrath performed. 
In the same manner, we have Muhammad-i-Sabuk-Tigin, written exactly in the 
same way in Persian M88., but, as most writers appear to have been aware that 
Sabulc-Tigin was the father of Mahmud, the translators have seldom failed to add 
“ son of,” after Mahmud’s name when it did not occur (except in the form of an izdfat, 
expressed or understood), in the original. 
Such errors cannot be too much guarded against, when we find such scholars 
as Elliot, who must have known all this, falling into the same error, even after 
writing the names Muhammad bin Kasim in his extracts from ’Arab authors ; yet, 
when he comes to Persian and other non-’Arab writers, forgetting what he had 
written before, he constantly writes the two names as that of one person, and some¬ 
times leaves out the first, the actual performer of the action, altogether, and makes 
the defunct father perform what his son had effected. It may not be amiss to give 
an example here. Elliot, Vol. I, page 432, has : “ Muhammad Kasim, as he is uni¬ 
versally styled by the Persians, but by Biladuri [the Balazari was an ’Arab author], 
“ Muhammad bin Kasim,” and by Abu-1 Fida [another ’Arab or of ’Arab descent 
who wrote in ’Arabic], “ Muhammad bm Al-Kasim but, at page 397, he actually 
writes the word “ Md. Kasim,” as one would write “ltd. Smith” for Richard 
