An interesting story is told in connection with his studies under the Imam Abu Nasr al-Ismaʾili. He took copious notes under this celebrated teacher, but neglected to memorize what he had written. This seems to have been a characteristic of his, according to Macdonald, because his quotations are often exceedingly careless; and one of the charges brought against him by his assailants afterwards was that he falsified tradition. “On his way back to Tus from Jurjan, however, he got his lesson. He tells the story himself. Robbers fell upon him, stripped him, and even carried off the bag with his manuscripts. This was more than he could stand; he ran after them, clung to them though threatened with death, and entreated the return of the notes—they were of no use to them. Al-Ghazali had a certain quality of dry humour, and was evidently tickled by the idea of these thieves studying law. The robber chief asked him what were these notes of his. Said Al-Ghazali with great simplicity: ‘They are writings in that bag; I travelled for the sake of hearing them and writing them down, and knowing the science in them.’ Thereat the robber chief laughed consumedly, and said: ‘How can you profess to know the science in them, when we have taken them from you and stripped you of the knowledge, and there you are without any science?’ But he gave them him back. ‘And,’ says Al-Ghazali, ‘this man was sent by God to teach me.’ So Al-Ghazali went back to Tus, and spent three years there committing his notes to memory as a precaution against future robbers.”[29] Shortly afterwards Al-Ghazali left Tus a second time to pursue his studies at Nishapur under the most celebrated teacher of that period in this great literary centre. Nishapur was situated forty-nine miles west of Tus, and was captured by the Arabs in A. H. 31. Yakut, in his geographical dictionary, says that of all the cities he had visited this was the finest. It was in this city that Hamadhani wrote his four-hundred _Maqamat_ and vanquished his great literary rival. Other great names are connected with the city, among them Omar Khayyam the poet, the Koran commentator Ahmed al-Thaʾlabi, and Maidani the author of the well-known collection of Arabic proverbs.