AMĀNI

 

AMĀNI, pen name of Amān-Allāh Khan, Ḵān-e Zamān (d. 14 Ḏu'lḥejja 1046/29 April 1637), an Indo-Muslim physician and author of works on medicine.

He was the son of Mahābat Khan Ḥosayni (d. 1634), the well-known commander of the Mughal’s army, whose connections and support led Amān-Allāh to a prominent career in the Mughal administration. In 1622 Amān-Allāh became his father’s deputy as governor of Kabul with the title of Ḵānzād Khan, and three years later succeeded him as governor of Bengal. Šāh-Jahān (r. 1628-58) appointed him in 1628 governor of Malwa and gave him the title of Ḵān-e Zamān, but in the same year Amān-Allāh followed his father as his deputy in the Deccan, and later on the Bālā Ḡāt territory was entrusted to him. He then entered the services of Emperor Awrangzēb (r. 1658-1707) in Dawlatābād but died shortly after on 29th April 1637.

Amān-Allāh left several works on medicine and other subjects. His Ganj-e bādāvard is one of the largest Persian treatises on pharmacology composed in Mughal India, in which he has also used Sanskrit sources, such as those by Suśruta and Bhoja. He also translated into Persian, with the title Dastur al-honud, the Madanavinoda, a Sanskrit treatise on drugs and foods composed in 1375 under the patronage of king Madanapāla. He mentions in the beginning of his Ganj-e bādāvard the other medical treatises written by him, including Omm al-ʿelāj, a Persian monograph on purgatives (comp. 1036/1626-27), which he dedicated to Emperor Jahāngir (q.v.). His non-medical writings include two collections of letters: the Roqʿāt-e Amān-Allāh Ḥosayni on mysticism addressed to the leading Sufis of the time, and Enšāʾ-e Ḵānzād Ḵān on political and social matters in four chapters (faṣl). He is also the author of Tāriḵ-e salātin-e ʿālam and an Arabic and Persian lexicon, Čahār ʿonṣor-e dāneš, which has been described as based mostly on Farhang-e jahāngiri, a Persian dictionary by Mir Jamāl-al-Din Ḥosayn Enju Širāzi (Marshall, p. 69; Ṣafā, V/1, pp. 389-90; Rieu, II, pp. 509-10).

Amān-Allāh Khan was also a poet with the pen name Amāni. He left the Divān-e Amāni, a collection of panegyrics addressed to Šāh-Jahān. Nur-al-Din Širāzi, the other leading Indo-Muslim medical writer of the first half of 17th century, dedicated to Amān-Allāh his dictionary of medical terms, called Qosṭās alaṭebbāʾ.

Bibliography:

ʿAbd-al-Ḥayy Ḥasani, Nozhat al-ḵawāṭer wa bahjat al-masāmeʿ wa'l-nawāẓer...tarājem olamāʾ al-Hend wa aʿyānehā men al-qarn al-awwal ela'l-qarn al-sābeʿ, 2nd ed., 8 vols., Hyderabad, 1962-81, V, p. 86.

Amān Allāh Khan, Omm al-ʿelāj, Kanpur, 1873.

Šāhnavāz Khan Awrangābādi, Maʾāṯer al-omarāʾ, tr. H. Beveridge as The Maāthirul-umarā, revised and annotated Raini Prashad, 2 vols. in 3, New Delhi, 1979, I, pp. 212-19.

D. N. Marshall, Mughals in India: A Bibliographical Survey, Bombay etc., 1967, 5 I. p. 69.

Charles Rieu, Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the British Musium, 3 vols., London, 1966.

Ḏabiḥ-Allāh Ṣafā,Tāriḵ-e adabiyāt dar Irān, 5 vols. in 8, Tehran, 1959-92.

(Fabrizio Speziale)

Originally Published: December 10, 2010

Last Updated: August 2, 2011

Cite this entry:

Fabrizio Speziale, “AMĀNI,” Encyclopædia Iranica, online edition, 2012, available at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/amani-physician (accessed on 16 October 2012).