Page:The Tarikh-i-Rashidi - Mirza Muhammad Haidar, Dughlát - tr. Edward D. Ross (1895).djvu/53

 26 gifts of nature, he added those of extreme valour, and all the qualities that constitute a great general. Having been sent into Kashmir by Sultan Abu Said Khan, he penetrated into this province by the road of Kashghar and Tibet [Ladak] and entirely subdued it. He entered it also a second time from the side of India, and establishing his residence in Kashmir, formed it into an independent principality He was author of the historical work entitled the Tarikh-i-Rashidi, which was named in this way after Rashid Khan, sovereign of Kashghar. This book enjoys universal esteem." Ahmad Razi then appends some verses of the Mirza's, as a specimen of his poetic genius.

Among Europeans, Mr, W. Erskine is perhaps the only original author who has touched on Mirza Haidar's personal characteristics or attainments; even he does so only very briefly, though in several passages he praises his work in the highest terms. He sums him up as "a man of worth, of talent, and of learning." For his own part, he naively tells us that he had many accomplishments, and though most of those he names were of a more or less mechanical order, others, at least, show a taste for authorship, and make us picture him as a man of some imagination. Taking into consideration the life he led—his adventures, sufferings, discomfitures, and escapes—and the age and countries he lived in, he may be accounted also a man of learning. At any rate, he was a patron of the learned whom he came in contact with, and seems to have taken an interest in their teachings, as well as in the books he knew of; though it may be open to question, perhaps (from a European point of view), how far he used them to the best advantage for historical purposes. Yet, withal, he was a bigoted Musulman and a fanatical Sunni, as his remarks about the transactions of Baber with the Persian Shias, after the capture of Samarkand in 1511, clearly indicate. And his bigotry took many curious forms, as, for instance, his approval of the hypocritical proceedings of Sultan Said Khan, his refraining to trace his pedigree beyond the date of Amir Bulaji, because Bulaji's ancestors were not Musulmans, and his pious invocations on the Moghul Khan, whose religious zeal and enlightenment led him to drive horseshoe nails into the heads of his subjects, to induce them to become Musulmans. In short