The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/Feisi, Abul Feis ibn Mubárak

FEISI, Abul Feis ibn Mubárak, ā'bool fā ēs ibn moo-bä'räk fī'si or fā-ē-sē', Indo-Persian poet and scholar: b. Agra, India, 1547; d. there 1595. He surpassed all his contemporaries in philological, philosophical, historical and medical knowledge, and about 1572 was crowned “king of poesy” in the court of the Emperor Akbar. Of his poems the most noteworthy are his lyrics — odes, encomia, elegies and specially his four-line pieces or apothegms. Their exalted pantheism brought on him the enmity of the orthodox Moslem clergy. He wrote also many double-rhymed poems; and a Persian imitation of the famous Indian epic ‘Nala and Damajanti,’ designed to form the third member of an epic cycle of which the first was to be ‘The Centre of the Circle,’ the second ‘Solomon and Balkis’ (the queen of Sheba), the fourth ‘The Seven Zones of the Earth,’ and the fifth ‘The History of Akbar’; only the first and third were completed. His scientific treatises were numerous.