Mirror for princes or vizor for viziers: The twelfth-century Arabic popular encyclopedia Mufīd al-‘ulūm and its relationship with the anonymous Persian Bahr al-fawā'id

There are close links between the anonymous Persian twelfth-century Bahr al-fawā'id, translated by Julie Scott Meisami as The sea of precious virtues: a medieval mirror for princes (Salt Lake City, 1991) and an Arabic work entitled Mufīd al-‘ulūm wa-mubīd al-humūm, variously attributed but probably by a certain Jamāl al-Din Abū ‘Abd Allāh Muhammad Ihn Ahmad al-Qazwīnī who wrote it in 551/1156, only a few years before the Persian work was completed (at some time between 1159 and 1162, according to Meisami). The article provides a summary of the contents of Mufīd al-‘ulūm, which has been printed several times but which has never been studied in any detail, and discusses the parallels with and differences from Bahr al-fawā'id.