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Ep 1: Nasir Khusraw's travels and spirituality with Alice Hunsburger | Muslim Footprints | The Ismaili | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: Ep 1: Nasir Khusraw's travels and spirituality with Alice Hunsburger | Muslim Footprints
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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.
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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
In old Cairo, they make all types of porcelain so fine and translucent
that you can see your hand behind it when held up to the light.
From this porcelain, they make cups, bowls, plates and so forth.
They also produce a glass so pure and flawless that it resembles crystalite
– and it is sold by weight.”
One of the things that he talks about
and gives great detail is the fabrics, and fabrics have sometimes been described
as one of the major, major products of the whole Islamic world.
The the innovation that they evidenced and creativity of design and quality
so that a lot of fabrics are named for the place, like damask.
a damask breuer's brocade is obviously from Damascus, but shustari
– I think it's a kind of a silk – comes from Shush and
Mosul is the source name for muslin.
So a lot of the Islamic world is producing fabrics
and the Fatimids are famous for having several islands in the Nile Delta
devoted to fabric production and embroidery,
for example, the island of Tinnis and the island of Damietta.
If you've been to Venice, you see how you can take islands and devote them to one.
So like in the island of Burano in Venice
that's devoted to lace, you see, you go there, they have lace.
You buy lace.
If you go to Murano, it's all for the glass factories.
So we have Tinnis producing these most glorious fabrics
and embroidery, which is in most of the biggest museums of the world.
I want to share a couple of anecdotes
from Nasir Khusraw about this island, Tinnis,
that show how desirable its fabrics were.
It was like the Italy of today.
You have the King of Fars in southern Iran, for example,
sending 20,000 dinars to buy one suit of clothing.
Apparently, his agent stayed there several years but failed to procure the suit,
and the King of Byzantium once offered 100 cities in exchange for the island.
What he wanted was “bukalemun”.
It means chameleon because it changes colour.
Bukalemun is, that iridescent fabric, gold and blue, for example,
and so it looks a little bit more gold, depending on how it moves.
But for Nasir Khusraw, this becomes a symbol of changeability
and he says the world is bukalemun.
The world, you should not trust it
because it is like bukalemun – sometimes it’s a little gold, sometimes a little blue.
What we want to be focused on is something more long lasting and eternal and spiritual.
Nasir Khusraw lived in Cairo for three years.
Then he decided it was time to go home,
and he went home via Mecca.
Altogether, he went to Mecca four times,
as Fatimid rule extended to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina as well.
And he would accompany the caravans that the Fatimids would send there with provisions
and the cloth to cover the Kaaba.
His description of the Hajj is one of the earliest that we have.
What he points out is the dangers.
He doesn't whitewash it,
but he shows you could get robbed along the way.
You certainly could die along the way.
It would take years to get there.
But I like to tell my students in college it’s like the trains out west in America.
These outlaws would stop the train or stop the stagecoach and rob it.
And so you have a caravan filled with hundreds of people,
maybe a thousand camels going along, and they can easily be robbed
and killed along the way.
So he shows that as a definite reality of the sacrifice
that actually making the physical Hajj was.
And the Hajj is one example of where he reveals his basic premise
that there's this physical world and this spiritual world,
and our actions in the physical world all have an inner meaning or consequence.
He expressed this in a poem where he basically reprimands
one of his friends for not doing the Hajj in this way.
“I said to him: ‘When you are throwing stones at the accursed demon,
did you throw out of yourself all your blameworthy habits and actions?’
He said: ‘No.’
I said to him: ‘When you went to pray at the station of Abraham,
did you surrender your inner self to God in truth, faith and utter certitude?’
He said: ‘No.’
I said to him: ‘When it came to the time for circumambulation,
which you ran trotting like an ostrich,
did you think of the angels who circled round the throne of God?’
He said: ‘No.’
I said to him: ‘When you made the run between Safa and Marwa,
did you see within your own purity
the two worlds and your heart become free of both hell and heaven?’
He said: ‘No.’
I said to him: ‘Now that you have returned,
is your heart bleeding from separation from the Kaaba?
Did you prepare a grave there for your carnal soul,
just as if now you turned into decomposed bones?’
He said: ‘Everything you said about all this, I haven't known the right from wrong.’
Then I said: ‘In that case, my friend, you have made no Hajj.
You have not become a dweller in the station of self-effacement.
You have merely gone to Mecca, seen it and come back
and bought the suffering of the desert with silver.
After this, if you really want to make the Hajj,
then go and do as I have taught you.’ ”
The rest of the episode continues in just a moment after this message.
On behalf of the team at The Ismaili,
we'd like to thank you for tuning in to this first episode
of our brand new podcast, Muslim Footprints.
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We appreciate your support and look forward
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Now back to the show.
Nasir Khusraw's journey home is quite eventful.
He's destitute for some reason,
and the journey this time through Iraq is quite unpleasant.
Yes.
I love this story that he tells.
It’s a Persian background.
He does not like drinking camel milk
and he does not like eating lizards from the desert.
He considers this barbaric.
So he has to wait there in Falaj,
and he says it's the most awful place
and there's nobody he can talk to there,
no intellectuals around and out of perhaps boredom one day, he says:
So I took out the paints from my bag and I started painting the Mihrab,
the part around the the arch in the in the mosque.
And he paints some plants, some leaves and probably flowers and things
and again, it’s this little detail he just throws out.
The people are so excited by this great art that he's making,
and they say: paint it more, paint it more,
we'll pay you with what we have and what we have is dates.
So he said: well, we have enough dates to eat forever and ever
But at least we weren't starving anymore.
But I want us to step back a second.
We never heard he was an artist.
We never heard he was a painter.
I mean, of course he would have his pens as a writer.
He would have his pen case and and ink,
and all the tools that a writer needs.
But here he also has colours and paint brushes,
so he can paint.
So we get to learn more about his personality.
And you say that's part of the reason you bring in all these anecdotes
to show that you can't put a label on him as this or that.
He's someone with many layers and nuances.
What I wanted to do in Ruby of Badakhshan was to counter
some of the things I had read about him.
There was one article that I read, the title of it was “The Scowling Poet”,
because his poetry, he's often saying:
Don't think about this world. Think about the next world.
You know, don't stay around with stupid friends.
Be with good friends, right? He’s preaching.
If you want love, or if you want just roses and nightingales,
you're not going to get them from him – and he complains about that.
He says, how many roses and nightingales you want?
You know, we have to be focused on other things.
So showing these little details of the rose and painting of the Mihrab,
and then, oh, there's the joke of the grocer that is starting out his journey,
he sends his brother in to get to the grocery shop to get some things,
go see what they have and he comes back and says that he doesn't have anything.
So they go in and they check,
and whatever they asked him, you know,
– You have some bread? – No.
– You have you have apples? – No.
– You have meat? – No.
– You have potatoes? – No.
And so he looks at his brother and he's like, whoa,
what kind of a grocer is this who has nothing in his shop to sell?
And he says that forever after, throughout the whole journey,
whenever we saw a guy that looked like that, we said,
oh, there's that grocer from Kharsavil.
And so they have a joke, an ongoing joke.
So if we want to see little of his personality, who is this character
that is driving this whole trip and this journey?
Also, he meets somebody who's teaching math.
He says, you studied it from Avicenna?
And he says, of course, he dropped that name because he just wanted me
to be impressed with him that he'd studied with Avicenna, but then he didn't know anything.
He is, you know, sharp and critical and isn't going to take anybody
acting like a fool or trying to show off
without right to show off.
Presumably because of his proselytising,
he’s forced to spend his final years in exile in Badakhshan.
And so how do you fill in these other years?
And what happened in one of his books, he says, I send out a book a year,
a book a year I send out into the world.
So he's producing.
He's producing all kinds of different Ismaili texts.
And he said, I even wrote a book on mathematics,
not because there's anybody here who would understand it.
I'm writing it for the researchers of the future.
And I found that so tender,
and I think this is where we start getting more into his personality
that even when things are not going well for us,
even when we're not where we want to be,
the job is to keep working and to keep sending things out, even not for this time.
But perhaps someone in the future will understand this
and will draw some lessons from it.
Speaking of lessons,
one legacy of Nasir Khusraw’s writing for people today is this search for knowledge.
At a Qur’an colloquium organised by the Institute of Ismaili Studies in 2003,
the Aga Khan, the 49th hereditary Imam of the Ismailis, who refer to him as Mawlana Hazar Imam,
cites Nasir Khusraw as well as another Muslim philosopher, al-Kindi, in this context:
The Qur’an itself acknowledges that people upon wisdom has been bestowed
are the recipients of abundant good.
They are the exalted ones.
Hence, Islam's consistent encouragement to Muslim men and women
to seek knowledge wherever it is to be found.
We are all familiar that al-Kindi, even in the ninth century,
saw no shame in acknowledging and assimilating the truth – whatever its source.
He argued that truth never abases,
but only enables its seeker.
Poetising the Prophet’s teaching,
Nasir Khusraw, the 11th century Iranian poet-philosopher,
also extols the virtue of knowledge.
For him, true jihad is the war that must be waged against the perpetrators of bigotry,
through spreading knowledge that dispels the darkness of ignorance
and nourishes the seed of peace that is innately embedded in the human soul.
So it's not just about seeking knowledge, then.
It's not enough to just sit around reading books all day.
You have to spread that knowledge through action.
That's something that Nasir Khusraw insists on:
the role of the body and the physical world in achieving perfection of the soul.
And he says these two things, knowledge and action, go together at all times.
And for example, he has a poem that says:
“Moisten the seed of action with knowledge for the seed will not grow without moisture.”
He says they have to go together.
It can't be that they just sit there, learning, learning, learning.
You must then go into the world and use that knowledge
and do something with it.
And then a poetic one about the image of light, he says:
“If you would light a lamp within your heart, make knowledge and action your wick and oil.”
Which is, if you want to have this light within your heart,
your wick and oil for your lamp must be knowledge and action.
He takes another image, he says:
“Your body is like a mine, diamond mine or a ruby mine.
He says: “Your body’s a mine, your spirit, the buried jewel.”
So exert yourself, both body and soul.
Again, the same lesson that you mustn't just do one or the other.
You have to involve both your body and your soul.
And another point that he pushes is using intellect in your faith.
So using your mind,
not just to learn what other people say is important,
but to find it yourself.
And he says, because of our minds, we are the overlords over donkeys.
But also those same minds of ours make us slaves to the Lord.
So the very thing – having a mind, having an intellect that makes us over donkeys.
Yes, we're better than donkeys.
It makes us also the slave to the Lord.
And then he has a great line, right?
Why do you suppose God gave you a mind – for eating and sleeping like donkeys?
Why did you choose to make Nasir Khusraw the focus of so much of your career?
It's a long story.
My parents are American Christians.
They both come from very religious families
and we would always go to church every Sunday and say blessing before the meal,
and my father even comes from a family of missionaries.
So American missionaries that went in the 1800s to Bombay and then another branch went to China.
So the going out into the world was a big part of the family.
And then since my college days in the sixties,
JFK, Kennedy, was saying: don't ask what your country can do for you.
Ask what you can do for your country.
And he started the Peace Corps to go out into the world.
So it was a national movement for Americans to go out into the world.
And I thought I would do that.
And your way of going out into the world was to study Persian?
So my whole undergraduate was studying Middle East
languages and cultures with the goal toward getting to Persian,
and every time I had to choose a course or write a paper, it always had to do with religion.
So because I'm so steeped in religion and prayer
and going to church and asking questions,
and then when it came time to choose a doctoral dissertation, I said, what can I do?
And so I said, Nasir Khusraw, everybody says, he's so good.
But what does he say?
What did he say?
And so I said, well, then that what you're going to look at.
And so my dissertation became a focus on his on his soul.
And what is Nasr Khusraw's doctrine of the soul?
Oh, where we can find it...
Look, what I did for the dissertation was to look at his prose,
philosophical text that had been edited and
for Nasir Khusraw, it's the one is at the top.
That would be God at the top.
And then God emanates out
universal intellect and it emanates out
the next entity, which is universal soul.
And then soul suddenly says, oh my God, I'm now separated from the One!
Between me and the One is a universal intellect.
So I want to get back.
I don't want to be separated. I want to get back to the One.
And so that desire to get back generates the physical world.
And then we must take action.
We take action to go back toward the One.
God, intellect, soul, nature.
A model of creation which follows closely the new platonic philosopher Plotinus.
And Nasir Khusraw also connected this model to the name of God, Allah.
So Allah consists of four letters in Arabic.
Aleph.
Lam.
Another lam, and a ha.
And those letters correspond to these four levels or dimensions.
God, the universal intellect, the universal soul and nature or the material world.
I'm simplifying, but that's just another example of esoteric
or inner interpretation of something literal.
Anyway, so then you send your dissertation off
to the head of the Institute of Ismaili Studies at the time, who was Dr. Farhad Daftary?
Because you thought Ismailis might be interested in your work?
And he sent an answer back.
He said, that's an excellent dissertation
but could you also write about his his life and his travels and his poetry?
And so that's how we ended up with this book, The Ruby of Badakhshan.
What's next in your Nasir Khusraw journey?
What I'd like to do is see if I can look more at
The Ismaili world to the east of where Nasir Khusraw might have gone.
Like the towns in Pakistan today of Multan and Mansouria and Lahore,
but even up into Samarkand and Bukhara and
also even in the different towns in Badakhshan one day.
So like Nasir Khusraw, I hope to make another trip to the east and
see what else he left there.
Alice’s book is called Nasir Khusraw: The Ruby of Badakhshan.
Muslim Footprints is developed and produced by Kalima Communications, in partnership with The Ismaili.
Our theme tune is Mola Mamad Djan, performed by Blaak Heat.
If you enjoyed this episode, we'd be delighted
if you leave a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Thank you for listening to Muslim Footprints.
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