[518] Abd al rahmen Ben Ahmed received his surname _Ja mi_ from a place called Jám, very near Herat, in Khorasan, where he was born; he lived under the reign of sultan Hossain Bai kara, who issued from the family of Tamerlan, and whose capital Herat was. Jâmî is one of the most celebrated Persian poets, author of a Divan, which contains the whole mystical theology of the Muselmans; of the Baharistan, or “the spring,” a composition mixed with prose and verse; and of the romance Yúsef and Zuláikha, a most favourite poem of the Orientals. Jâmî died in the year of the Hejira 888 or 891 (A. D. 1483 or 1486).
[519] This title is more particularly applied to Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammed.
[520] According to some rabbins and to some Muselmans, wheat was the forbidden fruit which Adam eat.――(See upon this subject, _Les Oiseaux et les Fleurs, allégories d’Azz-eddin el Mocadessi_, publiées en arabe avec une traduction française par M. Garcin de Tassy, p. 167, notes.)
[521] Muhammed, in the fifty-second year of his age and the twelfth of his preaching (A. D. 621), whilst lying asleep between the mountains Al Safa and Merva, in the vicinity of Mecca, had a vision in which he proceeded from earth through the seven heavens to the throne of God. Muhammed himself alludes to it twice in the Koran, the seventeenth chapter of which is entitled “the night journey;” but he mentions nothing else but a vision: it was the fanaticism of his followers which wrought the most strange circumstances into an absurd fable, according to which their prophet was visited by the angel Gabriel, and in his company carried first from Mecca to Jerusalem, and then, upon a ladder of light, to the presence of God.
[522] For the just mentioned miraculous journey, Gabriel had brought with him the sacred animal on which the prophets used to ride when executing a divine command; it was called _Al borak_, “flashing as lightning,” in shape resembling an ass of a larger size, with a face like that of a man, the eyes brighter than the star Aldebaran, the ears of an elephant, the neck of a camel, the body of a horse, with the tail of a mule and hoofs of a bull; the breast of the animal shone like rubies, his legs like pearls, and a silken caparison of Paradise bedecked his back.――(See hereafter on the _Borak_, in chapter XI, the section “on the miracles of the prophet.”)