Promotion of Learning in India during Muhammadan Rule (by Muhammadans) c12.s7.29

c12.s7.29

“Warren Hastings may have visited the city, Sir Eyre Coote certainly did, while Duncan’s visit in 1788 is recorded in those volumes of *Proceedings* which are mouldering unnoticed on the record-shelves of the Commissioner and Collector of Benares. He writes too favourably of the site and laments the decay of the town, telling how it once was the seat of all Muhammadan learning, and the residence of many of their learned men in so much that it was known by the appellation of the Shīrāz of India. Though no trace be now left of the schools but the story of their past fame, we have better ground than Mr. Duncan’s for saying that this city was the Shīrāz or the mediaeval Paris of India. Fīrūz determined to make it a seat of learning worthy of his cousin’s fame. Each of the princes of Jaunpūr prided himself on patronizing science, and the troubles which in the early part of the fourteenth century scattered the doctors of the ancient imperial city were eminently favourable to the rise of a school of learning in the peaceful and secure Jaunpūr. Even in Muḥammad Shāh’s time, 20 famous schools existed in Jaunpūr of which now but the names are known—the founder of one having died in the middle of the fifteenth century, and another in the middle of the seventeenth century. Nor was scholastic learning only cultivated. Of the successful cultivation of the arts, let the noble masjids of Ibrāhīm and Ḥusain bear witness.”²