Mirkhvand

Mirkhvand
Muhammad ibn Khvandshah ibn Mahmud, more commonly known as Mirkhvand (also transliterated as Mirkhwand; 1433/34 – 1498), was a Persian historian active during the reign of the Timurid ruler Sultan Husayn Bayqara. He is principally known for his universal history, the ("The garden of purity"), which he wrote under the patronage of the high-ranking functionary Ali-Shir Nava'i (died 1501). According to the German orientalist Bertold Spuler, the is the greatest universal history in Persian regarding the Islamic world.
Life
Born in in the city of Bukhara in Timurid-ruled Transoxiana, Mirkhvand belonged to a family of , descendants of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. He was the son of Burhan al-Din Khvandshah (died 1466/7), who was a disciple of the Sufi shaykh Baha al-Din Umar Jaghara'i (died 1453) in the city of Herat, where Mirkhvand's family had distinguished themselves. Mirkhvand's brother was the (head of religious fundings) of the Timurid crown prince Badi' al-Zaman Mirza (died 1514), the eldest son of the incumbent ruler Sultan Husayn Bayqara.
Mirkhvand wrote under the patronage of Ali-Shir Nava'i (died 1501), an important counselor of Husayn Bayqara and advocate of arts and literature. Mirkhvand enjoyed good relations with Nava'i, as indicated of Mirkhvand's description of the latter in his universal history ("The garden of purity"), as well as the positive account of Mirkhvand in Nava'i's biographical dictionary ("The assemblies of rare talents"). Using the Timurid history book of Abd al-Razzaq Samarqandi (died 1482) as his cornerstone, Mirkhvand started writing his in 1474/5. Mirkhvand spent many years in the Ilkhlasiyya , a house for Sufis erected by Nava'i in 1483. Towards the end of his life, he lived for a year at the shrine of the prominent Hanbali and Sufi scholar Khwaja Abdullah Ansari (died 1088), near Herat. Mirkhvand died in Herat on 22 June 1498, and was buried in the shrine of Baha al-Din Umar Jaghara'i, the same place as his father.
Mirkhvand's daughter's son Khvandamir (died 1535/6), whom he had trained and handed over his patronage networks, wrote a concise version of his grandfathers work in 1500, the ("Summary reports on the affairs of those gone by").
Mirkhvand's only known work is the , a history of the world since creation from a Muslim point of view, divided into a preface, seven volumes, and an epilogue. The final volume and the epilogue were incomplete at the time of Mirkhvand's death, and were later completed by Khvandamir. A discussion on the advantages of studying history is included in the , a tradition that goes back to at least the 12th-century, when Ibn Funduq (died 1169) did the same in his (1168). Mirkhvand's discussion on the advantages of studying history was copied and modified by three other distinguished historians; Qasim Beg Hayati Tabrizi's (1554); Hossein Nishapuri Vuqu'i's (1591/2); and Sharaf Khan Bidlisi's (1596). Mirkhvand's work attracted much attention, as demonstrated by its numerous translations, such as the Ottoman dedicated by Mustafa ibn Hasanshah to the Ottoman grand vizier Rüstem Pasha (d. 1561) in 1550 and written by Mehmed Kemal Balatzade in 1555. The was one of the three works generally read by history students in Mughal India.
There exist hundreds of copies of , making it one of the most copied Persian history books. However, neither the current editions by Parviz (1959/60) and Kiyanfar (2001) nor the 19th-century lithographs are based on the oldest version of the books. For example, Kiyanfar's edition is based on the (written in 1854–6) of the 19th-century Iranian writer Reza-Qoli Khan Hedayat (died 1871), a continuation of the and based on a lithograph printed in Bombay in 1849/50. The was frequently used by western orientalists from the 17th to the 19th-century to understand the history of Iran. As a result, there are numerous incomplete translations of it in European languages.
According to the German orientalist Bertold Spuler, the is the greatest universal history in Persian regarding the Islamic world.
References
Sources
1433 births
1498 deaths
15th-century Iranian historians
Historians from the Timurid Empire
People from Bukhara