A Persian official's dreamlike awakening sent him on a seven-year journey
Around the age of 41, Nasir Khusraw, a financial administrator in Khurasan, had a sudden spiritual awakening he likened to a dream. He quit his post, converted to Isma'ili Islam and set out for Mecca, a journey of nearly seven years that produced the Safarnama, a travel book Persian speakers can still read today.
Born in 1004 in Qubadiyan, near Balkh, into a Persian family of bureaucrats and landowners, Nasir probably followed Twelver Shi'ism before his conversion. He worked as a scribe and then a financial administrator in Marw, and kept his office after the Seljuks conquered Khurasan in 1040.
He set off in March 1046 with his brother Abu Sa'id and an Indian attendant, crossing Iran, Armenia and Asia Minor before heading south through Syria and Palestine to Arabia. In August 1047 he reached Cairo, capital of the Isma'ili Fatimid Caliphate, where the chief missionary al-Mu'ayyad fi'l-Din al-Shirazi taught him Isma'ili philosophy. The Safarnama describes the dozens of cities he saw, with notes on colleges, caravanserais, mosques, rulers and populations.
Appointed a missionary with the title Hujjat of Khurasan, he returned home in 1052 but met such hostility that he eventually fled. Around 1060 he found refuge at Yamgan in the mountains of Badakhshan, where he spent his final decades and gathered devoted followers. Isma'ili communities in Badakhshan, a region divided today between two countries, along with related groups in northern Pakistan, revere him as Pir and regard him as their founder. His tomb stands on a hill in the Koksha Valley.
Unusually for Fatimid Isma'ili writers, who mostly used Arabic, he wrote all his philosophical works in Persian and championed it as a language of art and science. He taught that revelation translated intellectual truths into a form humans could grasp, and that esoteric interpretation, guided by the Imam of the Time, was needed to recover their original meaning. His Diwan, written largely in retirement, alternates praise of Ali's line with bitter attacks on Khurasan's rulers and warnings about the vanity of courts.
Source: Nasir Khusraw
