[مجموعه قصص رسول و صحابه]

"22 tales in mes̱nevī verse, totalling a little more than 5000 beyt (5070 lines including headings). They deal with incidents (many of them pious legends) in the life of the Prophet and his companions, ending with his death, and the appointment of [Ebū Bekr-i] Ṣiddīḳ in his place. From time to time the tales mention specific rāvīs of ḥadīs̱ and Koran commentaries (tefsīr) as the source for details cited. Each story is introduced by an invocation to a songbird (ʿandelīb, bülbül) to tell the tale, and the last verse or two usually consists of a conventional statement that it is ended (tamām oldu/olsun), followed by blessings on the Prophet and often on the reader or reciter, audience and copyist. While other mes̱nevī versions of some of these tales exist in other MSS [e.g. in the mecmūʿa of 12 tales in the Birnbaum collection, MS 67, T13], the format and literary style of the 22 tales in this mecmūʿa is uniform, presumably the work of a certain Şāhidī whose name appears in line 3 of the 9th ḳıṣṣa (Ḳıṣṣa-ı ḳabāʾil-i ʿarż kerden-i resūl-i dīn-i ẖūd, f. 116a, line 10): “Ac gözini Şāhidī cān āşikār . . .” Several poets have taken this taẖalluṣ. This MS appears to be unique. It seems unlikely that its author is the sufi dede İbrāhīm Şāhidī (d. 957/1550) who composed a famous Persian-Turkish rhymed vocabulary, Tuḥfe-i Şāhidī in 920/1514–15 (see MS 170, T21/I), as it is not recorded in the biographical notices of İbrāhīm Şāhidī." -- Copies from E. Birnbaum.