Muntakhab al-tawarikh 157.3

157.3

In the year in which the emperor summoned Shaikh Ziyā’u-’llāh from Agra with great favour and kindness and assigned a place to him in the ‘Ibādat on an occasion when there was a gathering of the Shaikhs and ‘Ulamā, I one night in private questioned the Shaikh concerning the matter of Farīd the scribe, and, after relating what was spread abroad concerning him, I said, “Are these things really so?” The Shaikh first of all enumerated his own fragmentary writings and the works of which he was the author, detailed his own accomplishments and acquirements, and gave me a full account of himself, and then said, “In spite of all these favours which God (may His Majesty be exalted!) has bestowed upon me I cannot call myself so much as a gleaner (in the field of knowledge) after Shaikh Farīd, and all that you have heard of him does not amount to one hundredth part of the truth. His dignity is above it all, and he has attained this great good fortune by means of sweeping the threshold of the holy Sayyid Shah Mir. Now I had seen Sayyid Shah Mir before this at Badaon, whither he had gone on business connected with his subsistence allowance. A copy of the Mashariqu-’l-Anwar was between us, and we had much learned discourse. He certainly had the meditative faculty strongly developed, a pleasant disposition, a ready understanding and a good stock of knowledge, but I did not find him such a prodigy as Shaikh Ziya’u-’llah and other men had represented.