IX
Efendi, now Teacher of Turkish in the University of Cam- bridge (whose help and advice was as much at my disposal as it had been at Gibb's), I was, through long acquaintance and sympathy of views, better placed than any other student of Oriental languages for understanding the plan, scheme and aim of the author of this book. In this belief I was con- firmed by a letter, dated September 24, 1900, which I had received from him after the publication of the first volume of this work, and in which, replying to a letter of mine, he wrote as follows:
"Pray accept my sincere thanks for your kind letter, which it has given me great pleasure to receive. You are the one man in the country to whose opinion I attach real weight, and your approval is the best assurance of success that I can have, as well as the strongest encouragement to push on with the work.
"When you read the book you will see how greatly indebted I am to your own . . . works. This is especially the case in the introductory chapter and in that on the Hurufis. In the first of these I had either to follow your account of Sufi philosophy or do worse . . . ; in the second, but for your studies, I should have been restricted to the meagre and unsatisfactory passages in the tezkires and whatever I might have tentatively deduced from the writings of Nesimi and his co-sectaries.
"I am glad that you have discovered what no one else has noticed or at least remarked -- my unexpressed aim to make the book useful to students not only of Turkish literature, but of Persian, and those others that are based on Persian."
This letter I cite in no spirit of self-laudation, for indeed I think that the writer over-estimated alike those of my writings to which he referred and his own indebtedness to
