مسالك الابصار في ممالك الامصار 2.84

2.84

This sharīf Ḥasan al-Samarqandī, who had roamed the earth and travelled the horizons, also told me about the wealth of these lands and things like this or similar that bewilder the mind. And [the Sultan] has such works of piety and charity as the world inscribes on the pages of its good deeds and the days record on the brightest of their lives. I heard from him accounts whose details I did not know until the blessed Shaykh Mubārak told me that this Sultan gives in alms every day two lakhs, no less, equivalent in the currency of Egypt and Syria to one million six hundred thousand dirhams each day; and sometimes his alms on certain days reach fifty lakhs. At the sighting of each new moon of every month he gives two lakhs in alms, a constant custom he never breaks. He bears a continuous allowance for forty thousand faqīrs, each receiving every day one dirham and five (MS p. 25) raṭls of wheat bread or rice; and he has appointed a thousand jurists to schools, their salaries charged to his treasury (dīwān), to teach orphans and the children of the people