{"book":"adl0957","page":161,"text":"120\n\nAbdullah Ansari of Herat was a voluminous writer and a great philosopher. He possesses a clear, straightforward style. His dominant theme is the transitory character of this life. His Munajat \"prayers\" is a fine specimen of Persian prose. He was born in Herat in 1006 and died there in 1088. His mausoleum is held in greatest veneration even to this day. Nasir-i-Khusro, a great writer and poet, was born at Qubadiyan, near Balkh in 1004 A.D. He was well-versed in mathematics, Greek philosophy, natural science and Oriental philosophy.\n\nRashid-ud Din Watwat was born at Balkh. He was the poet-laureate of Sultan Atsiz Khwarazamshah and possessed great powers as a writer and a poet. He died in 1182 A.D.\n\nSanai : Abul Majd Majdud Sanai, the famous mystic poet and one of the greatest theological writers of the age, was a native of Ghazni. He flourished in the reigns of the Ghaznavid Sultans—Ibrahim (1059-1099), his son Masud (1099-1114) and his grandson Bahram Shah (1118-1152). He died between 1140 and 1150 A.D. at Ghanzi, where his mausoleum still exists.\n\nHe started his career as court panegyrist. An accident changed the entire course of his life and made him devote his time to religious exercises, pious meditation and the composition of Sofic poetry. His poetry is among the most eloquent, learned and powerful works of the age. Some of his poems are looked upon as the best specimens of Persian poetry.\n\nRumi : Jalaud Din Mohammed is known in the East as Maulana or Maulawi, in the West as Rumi. He was born at Balkh in 1202 A.D. When he was six years old his father, Baha Walad, a teacher and theologian of note, decided to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. He thus began a period of travels which lasted throughout his son's most impressionable years. They visited the main cultural centres of the Near East and finally","chars":1834,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00161.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/161","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/161","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0957/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0957_download.pdf","rights":{"image":{"statement":"Public domain. NYU states: \"All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.\"","uri":"http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/","holder":"New York University Libraries","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/about.html","delivery":"Images are served from a copy mirrored by this project, not from NYU's servers, under the reproduction terms above.","endorsement":"This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by New York University."},"text":{"statement":"Machine-generated transcription, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No warranty of accuracy: see the provenance block on every page.","uri":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","holder":"Steps Ventures"}},"provenance":{"text_produced_by":"gemini-3.1-pro-preview","thinking_level":"low","read_completed":"2026-08-09","per_page_confidence":null,"per_page_confidence_note":"Not recorded during the corpus run. No calibrated per-page score exists, and none is estimated here.","human_reviewed":false,"accuracy_context":"Roughly two thirds of characters agree with a modern printed edition of the same text. Much of the disagreement is editorial, not misreading. Treat the transcription as a finding aid and read the page image before quoting.","primary_source":"The page image. The text is an index into it."}}