288
KABUL
Maulana Saifl of Bukhara was another ;* he was a Mulla complete 2 who in proof of his mulla-ship used to give a list of the books he had read. He put two diwdns together, one being for the use of tradesmen (harfa-kar), and he also wrote many fables. That he wrote no masnawi is shewn by the following quatrain :
Though the masnawi be the orthodox vetrse,
/ know the ode has Divine command ; Five couplets that charm the heart
/know to outmatch the Two Quintets.3
A Persian prosody he wrote is at once brief and prolix, brief in the sense of omitting things that should be included, and prolix in the sense that plain and simple matters are detailed down to the diacritical points, down even to their Arabic points.4 He is said to have been a great drinker, a bad drinker, and a mightily strongfisted man.
'Abdu'1-lah the masnawi-writer was another. 5 He was from Jam and was the Mulla's sister's son. Hatifl was his pen-name. He wrote poems (masnawi) in emulation of the Two Quintets,6 and called them Haft-manzar (Seven-faces) in imitation of the^ Haft-paikar (Seven-faces). In emulation of the Sikandar-nama he composed the Tlmur-ndma. His most renowned masnawi is Laila and Majnun, but its reputation is greater than its charm.
Mir Husain the Enigmatist7 was another. He seems to have had no equal in making riddles, to have given his whole time to it, and to have been a curiously humble, disconsolate (nd-murdd) and harmless (bl-bad) person.
Mir Muhammad Badakhshl of Ishklmlsh was another. As Ishklmlsh is not in Badakhshan, it is odd he should have made it
1 Maulana Saifl, known as 'Aruzi from his mastery in prosody (Rieu's Pers. Cat.
P- 5*5)-
a Here pedantry will be implied in the mullahood.
3 Khamsatin (infra f. l8oi and note).
4 This appears to mean that not only the sparse diacritical pointing common in writing Persian was dealt with but also the fuller Arabic.
5 He is best known by his pen-name Hatifl. The B. M. and I.O. have several of his books.
6 Khamsatin. Hatifn regarded himself as the successor of Nigami and Khusrau; this, taken with Babur's use of the word Khamsatin on f. 7 and here, and Saifl's just above, leads to the opinion that the Khamsatin of the Babur-nama are always those of Nizaml and Khusrau, the Two Quintets (Rieu's Pers. Cat. p. 653).
7 Maulana Mir Kamalu'd-din Husain of Nishapur (Rieu I.e. index s.n. ; Ethe's I.O. Cat. pp. 433 and 1134).
