Nasir Khusraw

Nasir Khusraw was born in 1004 in Qubadiyan near Balkh (its ruins lie today in Tajikistan's Shahritus district), into a family of officials and landowners. In his Persian works he called himself Abu Mu'in Hamid al-Din Nasir ibn Khusraw al-Qubadiyani al-Marvazi. Little is known of his youth, but his later books show an educated man at home in Arabic, literature and the learning of his day.

He spent the first half of his life as a Khurasan official, working in finance and taxation in Marv and Balkh, with access to the court under the Ghaznavids. When Khurasan passed to the Seljuks in 1040 he kept his post. Later he remembered these years as a life spent in wine and amusement.

Around the age of forty he went through a deep spiritual crisis: after a dream-like vision he left office and set out to look for true knowledge and a guide. In December 1045 he decided to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, and in March 1046 he left with his brother Abu Sa'id and an attendant. The journey lasted almost seven years: he crossed northern and western Iran, Armenia, Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine and Arabia, performed the hajj, and described what he saw in the «Safarnama» («Book of Travels»).

In 1047 he reached Cairo, the capital of the Fatimid caliphate, and stayed about three years. There he studied Isma'ili doctrine, met the leading Isma'ili missionary al-Mu'ayyad fi'l-Din al-Shirazi, and was named «hujjat» — the head of the Isma'ili mission in Khurasan, a word he later used as a pen name. In 1052 he returned to Balkh and began preaching Isma'ili ideas openly.

His preaching met fierce resistance from Sunni scholars: he was accused of heresy and of Qarmatian sympathies, his house was wrecked, and he had to leave Khurasan. He made his way to the Yumgan valley in the mountains of Badakhshan in the Pamirs, where the local Isma'ili ruler Abu al-Ma'ali Ali ibn Asad gave him shelter. He spent the rest of his life there and gathered many followers; the Isma'ilis of Badakhshan still revere him as the founder of their community.

He kept writing in Yumgan. His Persian divan consists of qasidas and quatrains; his prose includes the «Safarnama», «Zad al-Musafirin», «Jami' al-Hikmatayn», «Wajh-i Din», «Khwan al-Ikhwan» and «Gushayish va Rahayish», and he wrote the verse romances «Rawshana'i-nama» and «Sa'adat-nama». That he wrote his Isma'ili philosophy in Persian rather than Arabic was a rarity for the time. In his poems he condemned unjust rulers, the ignorant and the greedy, and praised the labour of the farmer and the craftsman.

The exact date of his death is unknown: scholars place it after 1072, some in 1088. His mausoleum stands in Badakhshan, in the village of Hazrat-i Sayyid near Fayzabad in Afghanistan; an inscription records that it was renovated in 1697. Local Isma'ilis call him «Pir» and «Shah Sayyid Nasir». His poems and the «Safarnama» have been translated into Uzbek, among others by Munirkhon Muinzoda and Shoislom Shomuhamedov.