Muhammad Aufi

Sadid ud-Din (or Nur ud-Din) Muhammad Aufi Bukhari was born in the late 12th century in Bukhara into a distinguished family; sources differ on his birth year (1171–1177) and on his death (1233 or 1242). He traced his descent to Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf.

He studied at a madrasa in Bukhara; in 1201 he was a secretary at the court of the ilek of Bukhara, and until 1204 he served at the courts of the Qarakhanid rulers in Samarkand. He travelled through Khwarezm and Khorasan (Nishapur, Herat, Merv), Sistan and India and met scholars such as Najm ad-Din Kubra.

When the Mongol invasion began he emigrated to India and lived there for the rest of his life, serving at the Ghurid court and that of Nasir ad-Din Qubacha, ruler of Multan, and later under Sultan Iltutmish of Delhi.

His best-known work, Lubab ul-Albab ("Core of Cores", 1220–1223), is the earliest known anthology (tazkira) of Persian poets and a valuable source on poets before the Mongol invasion. In 1223 he translated into Persian the Arabic work al-Faraj ba'd ash-shidda ("Joy after Difficulty") by al-Tanukhi.

His second major work, Jawami ul-Hikayat wa Lawami ur-Riwayat ("Collection of Stories and Lustre of Narratives", 1228), contains over two thousand short, mostly historical, tales; some of them have been translated into Uzbek.