Hundred Great Muslims

390 HundredGreatMuslims
The Sultan stands unrivalled even up to the present times in his munificence
and expenditure to the cause of education and learning. He founded a
university equipped with a vast collection of books on different subjects and
in different languages. A museum of natural curiosities was attached to the
university.
"He showed so much munificence to individuals of eminence", says
Elphinstone, "that his Court exhibited a greater assemblage of literary geniuses
than any other monarch in Asia has ever been able to produce". (Cambridge
History o[ India). The number of poets alone attached to his Court was more
than 400.
The Sultan, himself being a poet and scholar of repute, enjoyed the
Company of intellectual luminaries who adorned his Court. Iran immensely
benefited from Mahmood's patronage of learning. "It is to Sultan Mahmood"
writes Elphinstone, "that the (Iran) is indebted for the full expansion of her
national literature". According to Professor M. Habib "among the patrons of
Persian renaissance, he (Mahmood) is the most remarkable",
Amongst the brightest intellectual luminaries which illuminated the Court
of the Sultan was the encyclopaedist Abu Rehan Biruni, the philosophermusical
theorist Farabi, the philosopher-linguist Ansari, the witty poet
Manuchehri, the celebrated poet Asjadi and the great epic poet Firdausi, whose
Shahnama ranks amongst the greatest epic poems of the world.
The Sultan's boundless generosity to these men of letters has been
recorded in history. The story of his paying sixty thousand silver coins instead
of the gold ones to Firdausi as settled with him is a fiction that has been
contradicted by modern historical research.
The great Sultan breathed his last at Ghazni on April 30, 1030 A.C. at
the age of 63, being worn out by the labours of 40 years' rule.