Page 14 - DILMUN NO 6
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Ghazan was one of the ablest of Mangol      with the Creation).
            princes. A young man of twenty-four, he was           Educated Persians had a fair knowledge
            honest, intelligent and conscientious, anxious to   of their past, though as usual the historical
            get Persia on her feet again, and resolved to    stream became muddied with much legend and
            rule his kingdom in the interest of the Persians   fiction the further it receded into antiquity.
            an d not only of his fellow Mongols. To          Ghazan was less concerned with the Persian
            conciliate his subjects, who were mostly         than with the Mongol past; he feared that the
            Muslims, he embraced Islam in 1295, thereby      ycungcr generation of his people would grow
            abandoning the paganism of his ancestors. But    up in ignorance of the mighty deeds of their
            this by no means implied that he had foresworn   forebears, and that the small Mongol ruling
            his Mongol past : on the contrary, Ghazan was    class would in any case soon be absorbed into
            immensely proud of the achievements of his       the Persian nation. To keep alive the tradi­
            people, and venerated the memory of the great    tions of his race and the memory of the great
            Genghis. He was highly educated for a king       conquests, he turned to his historically minded
            cf his day; he had a thorough knowledge of       vizier and urged him to set all this down in
            Mongol folklore and tribal genealogies, and he   writing for the instruction of posterity. The
            was credited with the ability to speak and       result was an admirable history of the Mongols
            understand Mongol, Turkish, Hindi, Persian and   in Persian, known as the Ta’rikh-i Ghazani,
            Arabic, and was even said to know some           “Ghazan’s History”, that is, the history commi­
            “Frankish” presumably either French or Latin,    ssioned by Ghazan.
            He inherited an efficient bureaucratic machine,       The best historian can do little without
            staffed by members of a class of hereditary civil   direct access to the sources# written or verbal.
            servants, and he showed much insight in          Rashid was well placed in this respect, though
            his choice of ministers. In 1298 he appointed    he never visited Mongolia. His sovereign was
            Rashid al-Din grand vizier.                      himself an authority on Mdngol antiquities,
                 Rashid al-Din was born at Hamadan about     and in private conversation would tell him
            1247, and came from what in China would be       much that could not be learnt from books.
            called a mandarin family. As a boy he lived      Some Mongol writings he did have access tc,
            through the fierce invasion led by Hulegu        but they were muddled and confused. Says
            Khan, the grandsom of Genghis and brother of     Rashid:
            Kubilai, which swept throught Northern Persia         “An authentic chronicle, written in the
            and Iraq and culminated in the sack of Baghdad   Mongol language and script, had been written
            and the murder of the last Caliph in 1258.       and brought up to date at intervals, and this
            Even in those disturbed days, many upper-class   was  deposited in the State archives; but in
            Persians contrived to get a good education,      this form it had no order or method in it, being
            and Rashid was trained as a physician, a calling   a collection of isolated and incomplete frag­
            always held in high honour in the East and       ments; it remained unknown and inaccessible
            often leading to a career in the public service.   to students capable of extracting from it some
            The training was no.t narrowly professional, but   notion of the facts and events recorded in it,
            included courses in theology, literature and     and no one had received permission to make
            history, designed to deepen the student’s        use of it.”
            devotion to Islam in its totality. History            He goes on to summarize the Khan’s
            (ta’rikh in Arabic) was a traditional part of the   instruction:
            Muslim corpus of knowledge; basically it   was        “The. present writer was commissioned
            a study of the life of the Prophet and the       to put these fragments of historical materials
            expansion of his community, the people of        in order after having made a scrupulous
            Allah. (Similarly, history among contemporary    examination of them; he was to digest them in
            Christians was almost an outgrowth of the        plain languge; and he was to bring these
            study of the Bible and the history of the        hitherto inaccessible records to the light of day.
            Church - all medieval historical works begin     If there were any events that were treated too
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