NISHAPUR: A TALE OF TWO SUFIS

Richard W. Bulliet

Farid al-Din Attar (1145?-1221) is both the best known and the least known

Sufi from the city of Nishapur. He is the best known because Manteq al-Tayr

(Conference of the Birds), a parable about the human quest for God, is one of the

world’s most widely read and admired expressions of the Sufi vision and way. But

he is the least known because so little information has been preserved regarding the

details of his life. Writing in the Encyclopedia Iranica, B. Reinert tells us the

following:

While ʿAṭṭār’s works say little else about his life, they tell us that he

practiced the profession of pharmacy and personally attended to a

very large number of customers . . . He evidently started writing

certain books . . . while at work in the pharmacy . . . Anyway he was

fortunate in not depending on his muse for his livelihood. He could

afford to spurn the art of the court eulogist . . . His placid existence

as a pharmacist and a Sufi does not appear to have ever been

interrupted by journeys. In his later years he lived a very retired

life . . . He reached an age well over seventy . . . He died a violent

death in the massacre which the Mongols inflicted on Nīšāpūr in

April, 1221.1
1
B. Reinert, “AṬṬĀR, FARĪD-AL-DĪN,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, III/1, pp. 20-25, available
online at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/attar-farid-al-din-poet (accessed March
2017).

1
 As respectable as this account is in assembling stray bits of lore scattered

through Attar’s writings and elsewhere, it fails to take into account the history of the

city where he spent his life. The purpose of this essay is to fill in that history and to

suggest how the urban environment of Nishapur may have affected Attar’s

experience as a Sufi. A comparison with the life of another of Nishapur’s Sufis, Abu

al-Qasim al-Qushairi, will reinforce the contention that Attar’s relation to his

hometown had a powerful influence on his spiritual career.

Al-Qushairi had a greater impact on the history of Sufism than Attar did, but

as a theoretician, not as a poet. His work, most notably his Risala (Epistle), which

focused on how individuals seeking to pursue the Sufi path should comport

themselves and relate to other travelers on the way, became a widely used summary

of the many facets of behavior and mental attitudes that contributed to the Sufi life.

In a more worldly sense, he was also influential because of his many personal links

with important figures of his day. By contrast, no mention survives of any of Attar’s

family, friends, or acquaintances.

The city of Nishapur, where both men lived their lives, suffered radical

change between the days of al-Qushairi (986-1072) and those of Attar’s youth a

century and a half later.2 In the year 1010, when al-Qushairi was a young man,

2
Information about Nishapur and the important figures who lived there comes from
several of my publications, most importantly, The Patricians of Nishapur: A Study in
Medieval Islamic Social History, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972; "The
Political-Religious History of Nishapur in the Eleventh Century," in D.S. Richards, ed.,
Islamic Civilization 950-1150, Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, pp. 71-91; Islam: The View

2
Nishapur was at its peak. Its population almost certainly topped 150,000, making it

the second largest city in the caliphate after Baghdad, the Abbasid capital. By the

1160s, however, Nishapur was a city in ruins. It’s central area with its grand

mosques, schools, and markets had been abandoned, and the surviving population

had found shelter in a walled suburb on the city’s outskirts. Al-Qushairi, in other

words, pursued his career in a great and bustling metropolis, while Attar was

surrounded by the ghost of that metropolis, its ruins providing a daily reminder of

the fragility of human existence.

From the early days of the Arab conquest of Iran, the northeast province of

Khurasan played an immensely creative role in defining Islam as a foundation for

social relations. A host of scholars, writers, legists, and Sufis were native Khurasanis,

and virtually all of them lived or sojourned for at least some period of time in

Nishapur. They played innovative roles in creating institutions, notably, schools

(madrasas) and Sufi convents (khangahs), that spread from Khurasan to the rest of

the Islamic world. And Nishapur in eleventh century was the core locale from which

the Shafi‘i law school and the Ash‘ari interpretation of theology disseminated,

despite the fact that the eponyms of both schools had lived in Baghdad, al-Shafi‘i

dying in 820 and al-Ash‘ari in 936.

Yet despite its economic vitality and cultural importance, Nishapur was

seldom the capital of a dynastic state. It’s cotton goods and ceramics found buyers

well outside its immediate vicinity, and the Silk Road caravans that brought luxury

from the Edge, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993; and Cotton, Climate, and
Camels in Early Islamic Iran: A Moment in World History, New York: Columbia
University Press, 2009.

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goods from China and Central Asia passed through it on their way to Baghdad. Its

agriculture was based on irrigation by underground canals, which also supplied the

city’s drinking water. Nishapur may then have been the largest city in the world not

on a navigable waterway. Though the city’s dependency on land transport—

thousands of pack animals a day bringing in foodstuffs and other necessary

commodities—made it vulnerable to rural unrest or invasion, it was unwalled in its

heyday and rarely subjected to military assault.

Abu al-Qasim al-Qushairi was born in Ustuva, a district north of Nishapur

known as a place where some of the Arab tribal groups who brought Islam to Iran in

the seventh century settled. Al-Qushairi was descended from such a group on both

his father’s and his mother’s side, but he was not from a particularly distinguished

or wealthy family. When he came to Nishapur as a young man, it was to seek his

fortune, not to assume a position to which he was entitled by birth or family

connections.

The two most eminent Sufis in Nishapur at that time were Abu Abd al-

Rahman al-Sulami and Abu Ali al-Daqqaq. They are among the earliest Sufis known

to have had lodgings and/or meeting houses, called duwaira or khangah, that

continued to function after their deaths. Al-Daqqaq also had a madrasa, which was

probably part of or synonymous with the same building. Al-Sulami collected lore

about earlier Sufis and exemplars of piety, publishing their inspiring quotations and

biographical tidbits in books about Sufism and a less known group called the

Malamatiya. Another book, dealing with the virtues of young manhood (futuwwa),

4
left a trace in al-Qushairi’s Risala, which lists futuwwa as contributing to the Sufi

way.

Writings by Abu Ali al-Daqqaq have not survived, but his reputation for

spiritual excellence has, along with that of his daughter Fatima, who seems to have

been Nishapur’s paramount female Sufi. Fatima was born in 1001, the year her

father’s madrasa was built, and was fourteen at the time of his death. Al-Qushairi

succeeded Abu Ali as head of the madrasa, which was henceforth called the madrasa

Qushairiya, and some years later married Fatima. The oldest of their several

children was a son born in 1023.

Like his father-in-law and most other Sufis of that era, al-Qushairi became a

devoted adherent of the Shafi‘i legal faction and made the pilgrimage to Mecca in the

company of two of the foremost Shafi‘is, Abu Bakr Ahmad al-Baihaqi and Abu

Muhammad al-Juwaini. Sixteen of al-Baihaqi’s works on the traditions of the

Prophet, Shafi‘i law, and Ash‘ari theology have been published, and Imam al-

Haramain al-Juwaini, the far-famed son of his pilgrimage companion, wrote of him:

“There is no Shafi‘i except he owes a huge debt to al-Shafi‘i, except al-Bayhaqi, to

whom al-Shafi‘i owes a huge debt for his works which imposed al-Shafi‘i’s school

and his sayings.”3 Al-Baihaqi lived in a madrasa that was quite near to that of al-

Qushairi.

As for Abu Muhammad al-Juwaini, whose Sufi brother spent so many years in

Arabia that he was known as the Shaikh of Hijaz, his voluminous scholarship on

3
Jibril Haddad, “Imam al-Bayhaqi 384-458,”
http://www.sunnah.org/history/Scholars/imam_bayhaqi.htm (recovered March,
2017)

5
Shafi‘i and Ash‘ari topics was exceeded only by his son, Imam al-Haramain. One of

al-Qushairi’s sons reportedly said of the father: “In his time our . . . companions saw

in him such perfection and high merit that they used to say: ‘If it were permissible to

hold that Allah should send another prophet in our time, it would not have been

other than he.’”4

A continued detailed exposition along these lines would reveal that Abu al-

Qasim al-Qushairi knew everybody of importance in Nishapur. He was a central

figure in an extensive network of scores of prominent figures from a dozen or so

interrelated families that all shared a devotion to Shafi‘i law, Ash‘ari theology, and,

in many instances, Sufi piety. Indeed, this social group, which eventually came to

include the famous theologian al-Ghazali (d. 1111), a student of Imam al-Haramain

al-Juwaini, powerfully influenced the subsequent intellectual, spiritual, and

institutional development of Islam.

Nishapur’s centrality in the world of Islam was to change, however, by the

middle of the twelfth century. Not only was it physically destroyed and largely

depopulated, but its learned families died off or emigrated leaving a vacuum where

once a score of madrasas had combined to make the city Islam’s leading center of

education. The causes of the Nishapur’s collapse are several. In 1037 Tughril Beg,

the leader of the Oghuz Turks from Central Asia, peacefully occupied the city after

defeating the forces of the Ghaznavid ruler based in eastern Afghanistan. Thus

4
G. F. Haddad, “Abu Muhammad al-Juwayni,”
http://www.sunnah.org/history/Scholars/al_juwayni_al_kabir.htm (recovered
March, 2017)

6
began the Seljuq dynasty that would dominate and rearrange the political landscape

between Afghanistan and the Mediterranean over the next two centuries.

Tughril’s vizier, Amid al-Mulk al-Kunduri, began his career as a protégé of

Imam al-Muwaffaq al-Bastami, the leader of Nishapur’s Shafi‘i faction. Al-Kunduri

seems to have retained his Shafi‘i affiliation until his mentor died in 1048, passing

the leadership of the faction on to his son, Abu Sahl Muhammad al-Bastami. At

nineteen, Abu Sahl Muhammad was a decade younger than al-Kunduri. It is reported

that this succession did not go uncontested. Did al-Kunduri feel his mentor had

given his son a position that should have passed to him? The historical record is

silent as to the details, but that may have been why al-Kunduri conceived a great

dislike for the new Shafi‘i chief. To be sure, the Seljuqs and their Oghuz followers are

described as adhering to the Hanafi school of law, to which al-Kunduri now shifted

his allegiance. But no historian believes that Tughril Beg was knowledgeable about

the points of dispute between Hanafis and Shafi‘is. Otherwise it would be hard to

understand how the Shafi‘i Nizam al-Mulk, al-Kunduri’s successor, who hailed from

the city of Tus just east of Nishapur, could have served as the Seljuqs’ most powerful

and influential vizier from 1063 to 1092.

Al-Kunduri’s animus against the Shafi‘i-Ash‘ari faction was so personal and

so intense that he ordered the arrest of four persons: 1) Abu al-Qasim al-

Qushairi, who was then around 65 years of age; 2) Abu al-Fadl Ahmad al-

Furati, Nishapur’s ra’is (roughly “mayor”), a prosperous man from of

provincial background who had taken wives from two leading families, one

Shafi‘i and the other Hanafi; 3) Abu Ma‘ali Abd al-Malik al-Juwaini, the

7
eminent son of al-Qushairi’s pilgrimage companion, who escaped into exile

where he would earn the title Imam al-Haramain (Imam the the Two Holy

Sanctuaries); 4) and the faction chief Abu Sahl Muhammad al-Bastami. Being

about 25 and of a combative temperament, Abu Sahl Muhammad withdrew

from town, raised a private army, and returned to fight a pitched battle in the

main market to spring al-Qushairi and al-Furati from jail.

Though the Hanafi and Shafi‘i factions in Iran had been at odds for

decades, this outbreak of fighting raised their competition to a new level.

When Nizam al-Mulk succeeded al-Kunduri as vizier after Tughril Beg’s death

in 1063, the persecution of the Shafi‘i-Ash‘ari faction was lifted, but the

damage had been done. By the middle of the twelfth century, there was open

factional warfare. In 1158, the Shafi‘is, led at that time by a great-

grandnephew of Abu Sahl Muhammad brought in fighting men from other

parts of Khurasan to make nightly forays against their Hanafi opponents,

burning madrasas and the homes of factional leaders. A renewal of fighting in

1161 resulted in the destruction of 8 Hanafi and 17 Shafi‘i madrasas and the

burning or dispersal of their libraries.

Adding to the immense damage done by this intraurban civil war,

Nishapur suffered attacks by marauders. Some were bandits (ayyarun), but

the most rapacious were Ghuzz tribesmen who had freed themselves from

Seljuq control by defeating the sultan in battle in 1153. Famine immediately

8
followed the first Ghuzz attack, and prices were still extraordinarily high four

years later. A third attack occurred in the midst of the factional fighting in

1158-9.

On top of this came natural catastrophes, most devastatingly an

earthquake. One source puts it in 1145 and another in 1160, remarking that

in the aftermath the people of the city moved to the suburban quarter of

Shadyakh. Since it is quite clear that the main city had not been abandoned

for Shadyakh by 1145, the latter year is more likely to be correct. Even

without the earthquake, however, Nishapur was suffering from a catastrophic

shift in its winter weather pattern that had set in early in the eleventh

century. For more than a hundred years there was an unusual frequency of

extremely cold winters that contributed, along with nomadic depredations in

the countryside, to crop failures, famines, and epidemics.

But what does this tale of woe have to do with Sufism? Possibly a great

deal. Though we do not know the year of Attar’s birth, he is thought to have

been born around 1145. If so, he would have been 16 in 1161, the year in

which Nishapur’s surviving population abandoned the heart of their city and

regrouped in Shadyakh. This was the result not of a conquest, but of the

inability of the citizens of Islam’s second greatest city to control their

factional feuding and concentrate on rebuilding in the aftermath of the

destruction wrought by earthquake and marauders.

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 Attar, in other words, knew the greatness of Nishapur only through the

vast post-apocalyptic landscape that occupied several square kilometers

outside the eastern wall of Shadyakh. While it is probably true that he

followed the trade of a druggist, as implied by the name Attar, there is specific

mention that in 1158 Nishapur’s Street of the Druggists, where it is likely that

Attar’s father had a shop, was deliberately burned down. When we think of

Attar’s childhood, in other words, the image that should come to mind is not

that of a lad growing up in a stable society and learning an honorable trade

from his well-to-do father, but of the refugee children from Afghanistan and

Syria who have shown us the human face of despair in recent decades.

We don’t know who Attar’s friends were, but we know who they

weren’t. They were not learned scholars teaching hundreds of students in

famous madrasas. The madrasas were gone. They were not bourgeois

merchants pursuing their trades in conditions of peace and prosperity.

Nishapur’s bazaars lay in ruins, their customers mostly migrated elsewhere.

The city’s greatness had clearly passed by the time Attar was born. Members

of some leading families had emigrated to Iraq, Syria, and Anatolia where

they started new lives as scholars. Others had relocated to still functioning

cities elsewhere in Iran. Our sources do not extend far enough into the twelfth

century to tell us much about who remained in Shadyakh, but that in itself is

evidence that the scholarly milieu that had fostered the preservation of a vast

10
amount of information about Nishapur in the ninth through eleventh

centuries was no longer thriving.

As Attar grew to adulthood and carried on to some degree the family

trade, he would surely have wandered around the old city’s ruins, first

probably in play, but later perhaps to visit the graves of famous scholars in

the old city’s cemeteries. Later sources list some of their names and give

instructions as to where to look for their tombstones. A somewhat pompous

contemporary of Attar from the city of Hamadhan in western Iran wrote of

post-apocalyptic Nishapur: “Where had been the assembly places of

friendliness, the classes of knowledge, and the circles of patricians were now

the grazing grounds of sheep and the lurking places of wild beasts and

serpents.”5 Well and good, perhaps, for someone living a few hundred miles

away; but for Attar, Nishapur, including its sad ruins, was home.

Now let us look comparatively at the Sufi outlook of al-Qushairi, a

larger than life figure at the hub of Nishapur’s religious network during its

heyday, and that of Attar, the forlorn refugee living his life in Shadyakh and

hearing stories from old folks about what his hometown had been like before

its devastation. An extensive comparison of their works is beyond the scope

of this article and the competence of this writer, but a juxtaposition of their

5
Muhammad al-Rawandi, Rahat al-sudur wa ayat al-surur: Being a History of the
Seljuqs, ed. M. Iqbal, E.J.W. Gibb Mmorial Seris, n.d. II, London: Luzac, 1921, p. 182.

11
most famous works suggests that the milieu each of them was writing in

affected their spirituality.

Attar’s Manteq al-Tayr tells the story of the birds of the world being prodded

by the Hoopoe to undertake a perilous search for the divine Simurgh, a wonder-

working bird from Iranian legend that was Attar’s symbol for God. When one bird

after another complains that the way is too dangerous and that the life they are now

living grants them everything they wish, the Hoopoe refutes them with anecdotes

concerning a Princess, or a Miser, or a Handsome King, or whoever. He never names

real persons or indicates which of his stories are his own inventions. Eventually the

birds set off to traverse seven valleys, each more perilous than the one before. Most

of the birds fall pitifully by the wayside. So when they finally arrive at the court of

Simurgh, only thirty of them remain out of the millions that started. They then

discover that the Simurgh—literally Thirty Birds in Persian—mirrors them, the

thirty birds that have achieved enlightenment, and thus shows the divinity of spirit

that lies within them.

The contrast with al-Qushairi’s Risala could hardly be greater. Half of that

text is devoted to the stations (maqamat) and states (ahwal) of those who pursue

the Sufi path. Like Attar, al-Qushairi uses anecdotes and Sufi sayings to explicate

each station or state, citing in each instance the name of the Sufi who told the

anecdote or uttered the saying. Scores of sources and hundreds of anecdotes attest

to his vast erudition, but the ones that inarguably reflect al-Qushairi’s personal

association with the Sufis of Nishapur in its heyday are those he attributes to his

12
father-in-law, Abu Ali al-Daqqaq, the directorship of whose madrasa-khangah he

assumed upon Abu Ali’s death.

Al-Qushairi cites al-Daqqaq in 30 out of 43 chapters named for stations or

states for a total of well over 50 anecdotes and quotations. What do these quotations

reveal about the Sufi way of life when Nishapur was at its peak? And how do they

contrast with the tale of the birds that Attar penned over a century later?

In describing Visionary Insight [firasa], Al-Qushairi relates: “At the beginning

of my connection with the master Abu Ali al-Daqqaq, a class was convened for me in

the mosque al-Mutarriz. Once I asked permission for some time to go to Nasa [a city

to the north], and he allowed me to go. As I was walking with him on the way to his

class one day, it occurred to me, ‘I wish he would teach my sessions in my place

while I am gone.’ He turned to me and announced, ‘I will teach in your place in the

sessions while you are gone.’ I walked on a little. Then it occurred to me that he was

not in good health and it would trouble him to teach for me two days a week. I

wished that he would reduce the sessions to only once per week. He turned to me

and said, ‘If I am not able to teach two days a week for you, I will do it only one time

per week.’ As I walked on a little, a third thing occurred to me. He turned to me and

spoke the matter exactly.”6

Compare this commonplace exchange between a professor and his favorite

graduate student with Attar’s stark vision: “As soon as you set your foot in the first

valley, that of the Search, thousands of difficulties will assail you unceasingly at

every stage. Every moment you will have to go through a hundred tests . . . You will

6
Al-Qushayri, Principles of Sufism, tr. B.R. von Schlegell, Oneonta, New York: Mizan
Press, 1990, ch. 32.

13
have to perform arduous tasks to purify your nature. You will have to give up your

riches and renounce all that you have.”7

In speaking of Steadfastness [istiqama], al-Qushairi writes: “My master Abu

Ali al-Daqqaq said, ‘There are three degrees of steadfastness: setting things upright

[taqwim], making things sound and straight [iqama], and being upright [istiqama].

Taqwim concerns discipline of the soul; iqama, refinement of the heart; and

istiqama, bringing the inmost being near to God.’”8

Assigning subtly different meanings to three closely related Arabic words

was characteristic of the pedantic style of classroom instruction in Nishapur’s Sufi

gatherings. Attar, on the other hand, writes in Persian and displays no interest in

academic linguistic games.

In his chapter on Trust in God [tawakkul], al-Qushairi writes: “My master Abu

Ali al-Daqqaq said, ‘Trusting in God is the quality of the believers, surrender is the

quality of the saints, and assigning one’s affairs to God is the quality of those who

assert His unity.’ So trust in God is the quality of the common people, surrender is

the quality of the elite, and assigning one’s affairs to God is the quality of the elite of

the elite.”9

Later, when writing on Satisfaction [rida], al-Qushairi says: “The Iraqis and

the Khurasanis differ concerning satisfaction. Is it a state or a station? The people of

Khurasan assert, ‘Satisfaction is one of the stations. It is the culmination of trusting

God. This means that it is attributable to what the servant attains by his own effort.’

7
Farid al-Din Attar, Conference of the Birds: A Seeker’s Journey to God, tr. R. P. Masani,
Boston: Weiser Books, 2001, p. 33.
8
Al-Qushayri, ch. 25.
9
Al-Qushayri, ch. 17.

14
The Iraqis state, ‘Satisfaction is one of the states, not something attained by the

servant. Rather it is something that alights in the heart, as with the other states.’ A

synthesis of the two views is possible. It would be stated thus, ‘The beginning of

satisfaction is attained by the servant and is a station, although in the end it is a state

and not something to be attained.’10

The odor of the academic classroom pervades both of these stories. In the

first, the professor makes subtle distinctions between the qualities of different social

strata. By contrast, Attar does not distinguish between the lowliest birds and the

greatest. In the second, the professor contrasts and explains two ideas and then

offers a clever solution that shows how both might be deemed correct.

How different the atmosphere of Attar where a bird says, “I apprehend that I

shall die of fear during the very first stage of the journey,” and the Hoopoe replies,

“We are foredoomed to death . . . Therefore renounce the world and prepare for the

journey to the realm of non-existence. Do not spoil the chances of Eternal Life for

the sake of this mean world.”11

When al-Qushairi takes up the subject of Remembrance [dhikr], he touches

on the central ritual of most Sufi groups, collective recitations affirming constant

remembrance of God, sometimes consisting simply of chanting the word Allah [God]

or Hu [He, namely, God]. “The sheikh Abu Abd al-Rahman [al-Sulami, al-Daqqaq’s

most famous Sufi contemporary] asked the master Abu Ali al-Daqqaq, ‘Is

remembrance or meditation better?’ He retorted, ‘What do you say?’ He answered,

‘In my opinion remembrance is better than meditation because God described

10
Al-Qushayri, ch. 22.
11
Attar, p. 23.

15
Himself as making remembrance but not as meditating. Whatever is a characteristic

of God is better than something that is peculiar to men.’ The master Abu Ali

approved of this view.”12

Attar’s birds do neither. They are not organized in Sufi congregations, and

their journey full of peril and distraction provides little opportunity for either ritual

remembrance or individual meditation.

Finally, on the subject of Correct Behavior [adab], al-Qushairi informs us that:

“The master Abu Ali al-Daqqaq said, ‘The servant reaches Paradise by obeying God,

He reaches God by observing correct behavior in obeying Him.’ He also said, ‘I saw

someone who was about to move his hand during prayer to pick his nose but his

hand was stopped.’ He refers, obviously, to himself here because it is impossible for

one man to know that the hand of another man was stopped.” Further on he tells us

that al-Daqqaq said: “Abandoning correct behavior results in expulsion. One who is

ill-mannered in the courtyard will be sent back to the gate. One who is ill-mannered

at the gate will be sent to watch over the animals.”13

There is no room for “correct behavior” in Attar’s tale of the birds, much less

stories about nose-picking and bad manners in the courtyard. The birds must

traverse seven valleys in their search for the Simurgh, and most of them will die.

Only thirty reach their destination. The lads seeking to advance along the Sufi path

in the classrooms of Abu al-Qasim al-Qushairi and Abu Ali al-Daqqaq had to study

hard and observe proper decorum, but none of them expected to perish along the

way. They surely would have enjoyed reading Attar’s parable, as Sufis of later

12
Al-Qushayri, ch. 30.
13
Al-Qushayri, ch. 40.

16
centuries invariably did, but they would no more have seen it as describing the

spiritual path they themselves were embarked upon than a graduate student in an

American university today would see his own likeness in Herman Hesse’s

Steppenwolf or Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

Attar himself, on the other hand, may well have looked at the devastation

that surrounded him—the disappearance of his city’s academic milieu; the grief that

must have afflicted every family in the wake of nomad and bandit attacks,

earthquake, and civil war; the emigration of the city’s spiritual elite—and seen

something much closer to the plight and near hopelessness of the birds. For him,

succeeding in the Sufi quest was a matter of life or (far more likely) death rather

than maintaining decorum in a classroom and parsing the nuances of Arabic

grammar.

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