The Chachnāma (Fatḥnāma-yi Sind) 47.7

47.7

This book which bears the title of ‘The highway of religion and the glory of the high and great chief the eye of the kingdom’ is one of the compositions of Arab men of learning and moral philosophers, on the conquest of the country of Hind and Sind. It is a book adorned with beautiful thoughts and varieties of nature, with wonders of wisdom and curiosities of knowledge and with excellencies of hearts and singularities of mind. It is nectar for the hearts of friends and a garden for human beings and spirits, It is based on the foundation of laws and of Government and on the strength of constitutional administration. It contains eloquent discourses on religious and state matters and treats of territorial and national peculiarities. As it occupied a high rank in the very superior Arabic language and in the accomplished Hijazic tongue, all the princes of Arabia derived encouragement and excessive pleasure from reading it. But since it was enveloped in Arabic, and was made of the ornament and beauty of Persian idiom, it could not become popular with Persia or other non-Arab countries. No dresser of the people of Fars (Persia) had (before this translation) dressed and adorned the bride of this book of conquest, or prepared garments for her in the manufactory of just and philosophical words, or given her any ornament from the treasury of wisdom, and none of them had galloped a horse in this field of eloquence or in this meadow of rhetoric.