Abu Sa'id Abu'l-Khayr

The unsigned Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd ed.) entry on Abu Sa'id b. Abi l-Khayr gives him as a Persian mystic born on 1 Muharram 357/7 December 967 at Mayhana (Mihna, today Me'ana in Khurasan), between Abiward and Sarakhs, and dying there on 4 Sha'ban 440/12 January 1049. His biography was written by his descendant Muhammad b. al-Munawwar as Asrar al-tawhid. His father was a druggist. Abu Sa'id received his first instruction from Abu l-Qasim Bishr-i Yasin (d. 380/990), and studied Shafi'i law at Marw under Abu Bakr al-Qaffal and al-Juwayni, and exegesis and hadith at Sarakhs under Abu 'Ali Zahir. At Sarakhs Abu l-Fadl Muhammad b. al-Hasan al-Sarakhsi induced him to abandon learned subjects and devote himself to Sufism, and became his pir. He later received the khirqa from al-Sulami. ¹

In the first period he disciplined himself severely, for forty years, and the article says that the social side of Sufism, the service of the poor, came to the fore for him, since he begged for the poor and swept mosques. "The shortest way to God", he said, "lies in bestowing comfort upon the soul of a Muslim." At Nishapur he gathered large audiences and lavish, even extravagant gatherings with sacred music, and his gift of reading thoughts was counted a miracle. He went into debt to finance them, and his household manager Hasan-i Mu'addib raised money from devotees. The article gives the charges against him from the Karramite and Hanafi enemies, which led Mahmud b. Subuktigin to order an enquiry, and records how al-Qushayri disapproved of him and how Ibn Baku and Ibn Hazm criticised him. He met Ibn Sina at Nishapur, and their correspondence survives. ¹

He wished to accompany his son Abu Tahir on the pilgrimage, but was restrained at Kharakan by Abu l-Hasan al-Kharaqani, and then visited the grave of Abu Yazid at Bistam, Damghan and Rayy. He spent the rest of his life at Mayhana. The article says that he is supposed to have written many quatrains, but that the attribution is doubtful; the quatrain that cured his Qur'an teacher Abu Salih was made the subject of a commentary, the Risala-yi Hawra'iyya. His family tended his tomb for more than a hundred years. ²