This content explores the life and philosophical contributions of the 11th-century Persian Ismaili thinker Nasir Khusraw, emphasizing his doctrine of balancing the physical and spiritual worlds to achieve spiritual perfection.
Mind Map
انقر للتوسيع
انقر لاستعراض خريطة الذهن التفاعلية الكاملة
This is Muslim Footprints,
an opportunity to deep dive into Muslim civilisations through the ages,
accompanied by some of the best experts and academics in their field.
My name is Ayesha Daya.
Over the centuries, Ismaili thinkers have stressed the importance
of maintaining a balance between the physical world and the spiritual world
to achieve perfection of the soul.
Among these thinkers is the Persian intellectual, Nasir Khusraw,
an 11th century traveller, a poet and a philosopher.
His works include a travelogue, the Safarnama, poetry,
including works called The Book of Enlightenment
and the Book of Happiness, and Philosophy on Ismaili Doctrine.
Nasir Khusraw explained that through the Qur’an and its various physical requirements,
regular prayer, for example, or alms for the poor, or making the pilgrimage
esoteric matters are transformed into a state that can be understood by humankind.
To recognise the true purpose or intellectual reality of these physical acts,
a believer must look for their inner meaning.
So the external would be, for example,
the Qur’an as a book and his speech and the Prophet brings the book
that Shia theology says, it's great that God brings a book, sends a book,
but there needs to be an explainer for the book.
That's Alice Hunsburger.
She's written a book about the life of Nasir Khusraw.
And so that explainer: Moses had Aaron and Muhammad had Ali,
who is divinely inspired to explain the external book.
And so you have an external reality of a book, and then you have the internal explanation.
So and you have a prophet, and you have an Imam who will explain it.
The overall idea is that everything external or apparent
has a deeper meaning that's internal or veiled.
So you have a physical world and a spiritual world.
You have a body and a soul.
You have knowledge and action.
And these polarities, the external and the internal work in parallel.
I spoke to Alice from New York, where she teaches at the State University of New York College at Old Westbury.
You've divided Nasir Khusraw's life up into four periods,
the years leading up to this turning point,
this epiphany he had at the age of 40.
The seven year journey he undertook through the Muslim world
documented in the Safarnama or book of travels,
his return home to Khorasan as a missionary for Ismailis in the region,
and finally his exile in the Pamir Mountains of Badakhshan.
Let's talk about this turning point, which happened around 1050.
What were the circumstances which prompted Nasir Khusraw to change his life?
Yes... Nasir Khusraw is from the city of Marv in the area of Qubadiyan of Khorasan,
and so was very, very Persian, very clear sense of itself, as this is where the
Abbasid Revolution started against the Umayyads and very sure of its
history of having many empires and its culture, its high culture.
But the Seljuks had taken over,
and so he witnessed this and was part of this Turkic
taking over of the Persian Islamic lands.
And he comes from a very cultured family,
they had worked in the administration,
and so he was educated and certainly learned poetry
and he studied the sciences very well and was working as a tax collector for the Seljuks
and he tells us this in his Safarnama on the first pages of his Safarnama
and he says: I was pretty good at my job.
I had obtained no small fame for my for my work.
But he's on this business trip with some other men and they're travelling around,
going to pick up the taxes from different towns.
And it's on this trip that he has this epiphany.
So one night they're all sitting around a campfire playing poetry games,
and on that night, there's this auspicious conjunction of planets.
So he goes away from the group and he says a prayer asking for true wealth.
Then he goes to sleep and he has a dream.
And in his dream, a voice comes and says:
“What are you doing, being drunk all the time?”
And he says:
“Well, the world has not given us anything else to lessen the sorrows of this world.”
And the voice, the man, says:
“To be without your intellect is no relief.”
He points down toward the Qibla and says:
“Seek and ye shall find.”
So Nasir wakes up and he is astounded by this dream.
He realises right then, he lets the dream speak to him
as a sign that he should change his life.
And he does immediately.
He records the date in two calendars.
He records the date in the Islamic calendar and in the old Persian calendar
of the date that he goes to the mosque and washes himself
and cleanses himself and makes a commitment to his new life.
And then he sells all his things.
He gets rid of all his debts, quits his job, and he sets out on his journey.
His initial destination was Mecca,
which he doesn't tell us much about then.
He says he'll come back to it later.
And actually, he ends up in Fatimid Cairo,
the headquarters of the Ismaili Imam Caliph.
I would actually say
when the person – the man in the dream – points to the Qibla,
it's literally Mecca, but it's also Cairo, it's also the Imam,
and so he takes along with him his brother
and a servant, a slave from India.
And they set out.
They go rather quickly. I wish they'd gone more slowly.
But he's on a mission.
He's trying to get there.
It takes him a year to get to Cairo, but he passes–
what direction does he go?
He doesn't go the fastest way.
He doesn't go to Baghdad.
He goes across northern Iran.
So he stops first at Nishapur,
which, as you know, is the town of Omar Khayyam,
and it's also the town of the Sufi saint, Bastami,
who was one of the ones who are so bowled over and in ecstasy
with their connection with God that they say inappropriate things.
They say like Halaj says “Ana al-Haq”, which cost him his life
and Bastami also says, “Glory be to me.”
So Nasir Khusraw stops there, and this is a very important town
and pays his respects, and then keeps going.
He's interested in everything.
What struck me was how he described every town's walls.
He would say – he would actually walk them out and see exactly how wide they are,
what they're made of, how tall they are,
how big a city it is.
And the second thing he tells us is where they get their water.
And it's a fascinating description.
I was thinking of making a chart of it that which ones collect the rainwater?
Which ones have rain pipes, which unfortunately are made of lead,
which is considered very good at that time.
And which ones have the streams that go through?
Like – you build your house over a stream.
So the water is running through your basement and is cooling a room in the heat.
And then as he's continuing on, he gives us
one little detail that I'm like: “Wait, what did you just say?”
He says, on the way, you know, on the way toward Beirut,
he says, I saw a little boy holding a red rose in one hand and a white rose in the other.
And then we went on to Tripoli or wherever the next one is.
And I – wait a second.
Why did he tell us this?
It struck me that this is a little window onto Nasir Khusraw’s character, the things that he's noticing
and the things he's including.
He didn’t tell us lots of things, but he did tell us this little lesson.
I don't think there's a hidden meaning in it.
I think he's he thinks it's a delicate, beautiful moment.
I think he it he may be coming out of winter
and now it's nice, beautiful Mediterranean weather,
and they have roses in that month.
And the fact that there's a red one and a white one shows variety of things.
So I just think is a delightful little anecdote that he gives us.
And then he gets to Jerusalem and he stays there and he goes to Dome of the Rock
and the Holy Sanctuary, the farthest mosque,
and around there, he makes sure to go to all the shrines
of Abraham and Sarah and the others
and so he's paying his respects at
all the religious places that are important in Islam.
And you can tell he's really going toward Cairo because he said we just made a quick Hajj,
that his goal is not to end up in Mecca, but his goal is to get to Cairo.
But he's going to make a quick Hajj.
So eventually he arrives in Fatimid Cairo,
where he will spend three years.
And it sounds splendid.
Yes. Yes.
Well, he has – he can't praise Cairo enough, right?
He praises the political structure, the way that it is run.
They pay the judges so they can't be bribed.
They pay the soldiers so they won't bother people,
you know, stealing food from people or demanding food from people.
So this this leads to a happier citizenry.
He tells us all the details that are in a bazaar.
“I estimated that there were no less than 20,000 shops in Cairo.
Every sort of rare goods from all over the world can be had there.
I saw tortoiseshell implements such as small boxes, knife handles and so on.
I also saw extremely fine crystal,
which the master craftsman etched most beautifully.
I saw the following fruits and herbs all in one day: red roses, lilies, narcissus
oranges, citroens limes and other citrus fruits, apples, jasmine, basil,
quince, pomegranates, pears, melons of various sorts
