Illustration from Charles William Wilson's Picturesque Palestine, Sinai, and Egypt, 1883
Nasir Khusraw was around 40 years old when he experienced the vision that turned his life onto a new path and sent him out on the road in search of wisdom.
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Sources:
Hunsberger, Alice C. Nasir Khusraw, the Ruby of Badakhshan: A Portrait of the Persian Poet, Traveller and Philosopher. Bloomsbury Academic, 2002.
Khusraw, Nasir. Nāṣer-e Khosraw's Book of Travels, translated by Wheeler McIntosh Thackston. Bibliotheca Persica, 1986.
Khusraw, Nasir. Diary of a journey through Syria and Palestine, translated by Guy le Strange. Palestine Pilgrims' Text Society, 1893.
Script:
Quote:
“Thus writes … Nasir son of Khusraw … in the district of Merv:
I was a clerk by profession and one of those in charge of the sultan’s revenue service. In my administrative position I had applied myself for a period of time and acquired no small reputation among my peers.”
And with those modest beginnings our protagonist’s tale was set in motion.
His life story was one with a few distinct periods, and one of them had just come to an end. The text he was writing was what would go on to become the Safarnama, “The Book of Travels,” hardly the only text this Persian writer would produce. His verses of poetry would range to the thousands, and his works would cover philosophy, religion, and math. But that was after his time in the sultan’s service, after he experienced his visionary dream and the awakening that followed. The Book of Travels, for obvious reasons, is the text that we shall focus on today,
Nasir had been born in the year 1004 in a town outside the city of Merv, present-day Mary, Turkmenistan, then ruled by the Ghaznavid dynasty but conquered during his time by the Seljuks. Wheeler Thackston Jr. describes “Sizeable Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist communities [there] liv[ing] side by side with Muslims of both Sunni and Shi‘i persuasions, producing a society rich not only in material wealth but also in intellectual, religious and artistic products,” and all of it fed by the steady flow of trade.
Like others in his family, Nasir had entered the government bureaucracy, possibly in tax collection, Thackston supposes. He was among the, quote, “clerical/administrative class that regularly supplied the bureaus of state with those of its young men who had attained through rudimentary schooling a competence in [reading, writing, and arithmetic].” He had “enjoyed a life of travel, study, poetry, wine, women and friends” until his life took its great turn.
Nasir was away on official business when it happened, when Jupiter was in conjunction with the lunar node, an event at which god was said to grant any request. He took himself aside to pray that he be granted true wealth, and when he returned to his companions he found that one of his friends was reciting poetry. Immediately, he was struck by a line of his own and scribbled it down for them to recite, but before he could deliver it to them, they spoke the line’s words exactly and unprompted. This, he decided, was surely a sign that god would grant his wish.
He was in northern Afghanistan next, and for the next month was “constantly drunk on wine.” As the prophet says, Nasir wrote, “Tell the truth, even if on yourselves.” That was his state right up until the point when he was visited in his dreams by someone who asked him why he drank. “The wise have not been able to come up with anything other than this to lessen the sorrow of this world,” went his answer, but the other insisted that no one who led people to senselessness was wise and that he must instead seek out true wisdom. And where could he find such a thing? He would find it if he searched, answered the other, pointing in the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca, and then Nasir woke up. You have woken from last night’s sleep, he said to himself, but when shall you wake up from the last forty years? He washed and went to the mosque, praying for assistance in what he must do, and then he returned to Marv, where he settled his debts, took leave from his job, and announced his plans to make the pilgrimage.
In one of his poems, he would frame his period of awakening this way:
“When the heavens had measured out forty-two years of life to me,
My conscious self began to search for wisdom.
I listened to the learned, or read books in which they explained
The constitution of the celestial spheres, the movement of time and elements.”
His poetry finds him with “soul full of sad thoughts” as he “began to ask questions from thinking people of their opinions” and at every turn was disappointed. Perhaps it was that disappointment that led him to the road and a search for more fulfilling answers. It’s something to keep in mind as we go, for he will not necessarily speak of such a purpose himself.
Whether it was a conscious search or sleeping vision that had provided the impetus, Nasir’s journey was about to begin. He would be covering some of the same ground as travellers who we’ve previously gotten to know, but as we’ve often followed crusaders or those who came after them, and mostly Latin Christians at that, he would be going significantly earlier and with different goals in mind. He would go to Mecca and to many other places besides, and we will go with him.
Hello and welcome to this final episode of 2024. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast which wanders that world in the footsteps of its travellers and does so with the support of a Patreon, where you can listen to podcasts earlier, more often, and in the blissful absence of advertising, my own rambling about the Patreon aside. You can do so for as little as a dollar a month, and you can do so at patreon.com/humancircus. Thank you very much, all of you who have already done so. I really do appreciate it.
That having been said, let’s get back to the story of Nasir Khusraw, which we pick up as he prepares to embark on his travels.
In one of his poems, he would describe those travels like this.
“Then I rose from my place and started on a journey,
Abandoning without regret my house, my garden, those whom I was accustomed to see.
From the Persian and Arab, Indian and Turk,
From the inhabitants of Sind, Byzantium, a Jew, from everyone,
From the philosopher, the Manichee, Sabaean, from an atheist,
Did I inquire as to what interested me, with much persistence.
Very often I had to spend nights sleeping on hard stones,
With no roof or cover over my head except clouds.
Now roaming low, swimming as a fish in the sea,
Now high in the [loftiest of mountains].
Now I passed through countries where frozen water was as hard as marble,
Now through countries in which the earth was as hot as embers.
By sea, by land, sometimes even if there were no roads,
By hills, by sandy desert, across streams and precipices,
Now with the camel’s halter rope over my shoulder as a true camelman,
Now carrying my belongings on my shoulders as a beast of burden.
In this way did I wander from town to town, making inquiries,
Wandered in search of the truth over this sea to that land.”
In the spring of 1046, at the age of about 42, Nasir departed on that journey, and he was not alone. His brother, who was an employee of the prince of Khorasan’s vizier, would be with him, along with someone mentioned only in this translation as a slave from India. Together they would be journeying first to northeastern Iran, to Nishapur where the founding Seljuk figure, Tughril, had ordered construction of a school near the bazaar of the saddlers. The Seljuks were spreading through this region then or had in recent years, and their rising power was a hostile one to Nasir’s Ismailism.
As Thackston notes, Nasir would not be going about this pilgrimage in the most direct of ways—he would not be joining a caravan headed for his destination. Instead, he would embark on a roaming tour that took him much further west before only then cutting south along the Syrian coast. Indeed, Thackston terms it an “eccentric skirting of the central Islamic world” that there would be little to justify were it not for that Ismailism. His conversion must have occurred by this point, for that “eccentric skirting” was in effect a, quote, “tour of every important center of Ismailism west of [his birth region].”
In June, Nasir would reach Semnan, more than 200 kilometres east of modern Tehran. He was “seeking out the learned” there and finding a scholar and teacher who had attracted groups of young men who read Euclid, medicine, and mathematics. However, his conversation with Nasir was peppered with remarks of Ibn Sina this and Ibn Sinia that, convincing Nasir that this man was absolutely desperate to let him know that he had most certainly read Ibn Sina. Then, as they talked further, the man announced that he knew very little of arithmetic and would like to know more on the subject. Nasir went away wondering how someone who apparently knew nothing himself could have any business teaching others. He was not impressed, and one gets the impression that this was fairly often the case.
His journey took him past Mount Damavand, a spectacular sight visible from Tehran and the highest peak to be found in western Asia. Nasir writes of leather skins being hauled up to the top, filled with ammonia, and then just rolled down the mountainside for lack of roads. He writes of the punishing price of barley bread in one of the villages, bad enough to make him leave and bad enough that we can still read him grumbling about it a millennium later like some kind of eternal google review, and there would be more food related disappointments to come.
At one village where they stopped in to replenish supplies, the local grocer enacted the Monty Python cheese shop sketch for their enjoyment. They were there for whatever the grocer had available, they told him. They were simple travellers away from home and certainly weren’t picky. But then, at whatever edible they listed off, the man would reply that he had none of that particular item just then. After that, Nasir wrote, whenever they saw someone who looked even vaguely similar, they would each exclaim “It’s the grocer from Kharzavil!”
On they went, the Caspian sea, into which he wrote that 1400 rivers were said to flow, ever to their north, though I have read that the number of rivers is closer to 130.
By late August, they were in Tabriz, still centuries away from being home to its Blue Mosque. Nasir described it as “the principle town of Azerbaijan and…in a flourishing state,” even after the terrible earthquake of four years earlier that had destroyed parts of the city and killed as many as 40,000. He met a poet there, saying of the man that his poetry was decent but his Persian was not very good, something of a theme of intellectual disappointment for Nasir that was soon mirrored by his encounter with an older Arab who could not be made to learn to recite a single chapter of the Quran. A reasonable enough failure, I think, given that the man had only one night to work on it, but Nasir didn’t think so.
In one village, he remarked on the pork and the lamb being sold in the marketplace, along with the men and women “drinking wine in the shops without the slightest inhibition,” something it seems he would have enjoyed not long before. Outside another, they travelled through punishingly cold weather and over planks that had been laid out on the ground so you could find your way on blizzardy days. They bought honey and they saw great quantities of grapes for sale. They saw men cutting trees like cypress and burning one end to produce pitch from the other, sending their product in containers to be sold far away.
By Nasir’s account, there is little in the way of the logistics of travel—that’s hardly a surprise in these accounts—but he will say at one point that there were two paths forward, the one shorter with no settlements and the other longer with many villages and many Christians, and they would travel by caravan along the longer, more settled route. He will mention that the way became so rocky at points that the animals could hardly make progress.
By his account of this region, there is not a great deal of description as to walls, buildings, and dimensions, but for Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey he makes an exception, giving its length and breadth in paces, remarking on the black stone of its walls and mosque, listing its gates—the Byzantine, the Armenian, the Tigris, and the Tell—commenting on the pleasant spring water and plentiful orchards it fed. The mosque received Nasir’s particular attention, especially its “enormous ablution pool [which was] the most beautiful thing.” Entering Syria, Aleppo was “a nice city,” but it does not seem to have struck him the same way.
In Ma‘arrat al-No‘man, on the way to Hama and Homs, he acknowledged that it was a populous place with a substantial wall, but he focused more on the column of stone beside the gate with non-Arabic script on it, a charm against scorpions, he was told, that would send them fleeing from the town. He talked of the plentiful wheat, the pistachios, almonds, figs, olives, and grapes, and the thriving bazaars. He wrote of how the Friday mosque was on a raised area in the centre so that whenever you wanted to go there you had to ascend to reach it. It’s not totally clear to me whether he meant this to be significant in a spiritual sense or merely that one was always needing to walk uphill.
Nasir also wrote of a scholar there, and the rare one who wouldn’t disappoint him, a wealthy man who shared his wealth with all others, one who lived a simple existence of coarse cloth and meager barley bread for himself, and who said, when asked why he did so, that in truth he counted himself the owner of nothing more than he ate. Some 200 gathered to hear his readings every day, and his poetry was renowned among the learned. One text of his in particular was “eloquent and amazing,” but its “enigmatic parables” were “understood only by a very few.”
Nasir passed fields of narcissus that covered the land in white, and in February he reached Tripoli with its orchards and gardens, its “sugar cane and many groves of oranges, citron, bananas, lemons, and dates. Just at that time they were making molasses.” It was guarded on three sides by water outside its walls and on the other by a moat and strong gate, and its people, he said, lived in constant dread of Byzantine attacks. This was earlier than other visitors we have followed to this area, still 50 years before the first crusade when he went, more than 60 before the city fell to the crusader siege. It was still garrisoned by Fatimid soldiers, their upkeep paid by customs charged to passing ships from “Byzantium, Europe, Andalusia, and the Maghreb.” Its buildings were four to six stories tall, its walls lined with ballista, and its streets and bazaars “so nice and clean you would think each was a king’s palace.”
Travelling on, he saw the triangular city of Byblos surrounded by date palms and other trees, and he saw a child holding a red rose and a white one, both in bloom. He saw the towns along the coast all built on raised ground so as not to be inundated by the waters, saw that they each had what he termed a “stable for ships,” with walls built out into the sea and the one side open but for a chain that could be loosened to let ships pass over it. He saw many ancient marble columns, capitals, and bases in carved stone of a sort that was not quarried anywhere nearby. “In the outlying regions of Syria there are more than five hundred thousand of these [artifacts],” he wrote, “and no one knows what they were or from where they were brought,” adding an enjoyable note of mystery to the whole thing.
At the now Lebanese city of Sidon, he saw a bazaar “so nicely arrayed that when [he] saw it [he] thought the city had been decorated either for the arrival of the [caliph] or because of the proclamation of some good news.” But when he asked, he was told that this was just how the city always was. “The gardens and orchards were such that one would think an emperor had laid out a pleasure garden,” he wrote, “and most of the trees were laden with fruit.”
East of Acre, there were many pilgrimage sites and the shrines of holy men that Nasir wished to visit, but there was also the threat of active brigands that he was warned of. He writes that he left his valuables in an Acre mosque before proceeding. As it happened he’d encounter no brigands, only a helpful Persian man who would assist him when he became lost and confused around the tomb of Akka, said to be the city’s founder.
Nasir moved south then, visiting the tombs of the prophet Jonah, Jacob’s sons, and Moses’s mother and wife. He remarked on water along the way, of the situation of this spring or how that village flushed their sewage into the sea. How one brought their water by channel into a cistern while another had a hot spring-fed bathhouse next to their mosque that was too hot to bathe in unless mixed with cold. Solomon was said to have built it, and Nasir went in to try the experience out for himself.
He gave an impression of great lushness in parts, of groves of palm, orange, and citron near Caesarea, orchards on the way to Ramla, and many fig and olive trees along with the sumac and rue that seemed to grow everywhere. Massive amounts of olives were collected for export, and it was said that the region had never known famine, a rather sad and stark thing to read given the famine that is imposed not so very far south of there now. Around Ramla itself, there were superior grapes that were exported all over, and there was marble, cut with sand and a toothless saw, that was “speckled, green, red, black, white, and multicoloured.”
On March 5th of 1047, Nasir entered Jerusalem. He had been travelling for a year but never yet stopped anywhere for long enough to rest. On that note, we also will be taking a bit of a rest at this point, returning after this quick break.
…
Jerusalem in Nasir’s writing was first and foremost a destination for the thousands that could not make the pilgrimage to Mecca. It was, in addition to that, a place where Christians and Jews from Byzantium and other places would come to visit its churches and synagogues. The city’s bazaars were pleasant, its artisans plentiful, its buildings tall, and its streets paved with graded stone that was washed clean whenever it rained.
Near the mosque was a valley that Nasir was told was that of Gehenna, that it had been identified as such by the caliph Umar when he had come to Jerusalem in 637, and that if you went to the edge of it you could hear the voices of those in hell. Nasir, for his part, said that he went to listen for himself but heard nothing of the sort. Mostly though his attention was on the Temple Mount, the entire Al-Aqsa mosque complex, and the Dome of the Rock. And fair enough. There was a great deal just there to pay attention to, and many others have done so from this or that perspective. Here, I want to focus specifically on that of Nasir.
Our traveller really stretched his legs in getting into the details. He sketched and he made notes on site, he says, adding, somewhat oddly, that “Among the strange things [he] saw [there] was a walnut tree.” He would see more than that.
He wanted to get a measurement of the area first and wandered about to view it from different vantage points. Eventually, he found an inscription on an archway which informed him of the measurements: 455 cubits by 704. He found “The gateway, the facing of the wings, and the open hall of the gateway [all] adorned with designs and patterned with colored tiles set in plaster. The whole produced an effect dazzling to the eye,” just as an inscription of the sultan of Egypt’s titles on the gateway tiles would, when struck by the rays of the sun, leave the mind of the beholder stunned by what they saw.
Nasir walked his reader east from the bazaar and up to that splendid gateway, beneath its dome of stone and through its doors of Damascene brass, looking like gold and covered with designs. He showed them the two rows of marble columns topped by masonry arches, and the dome of Jacob supported by pillars and decorated by lamps. Elsewhere were to be found the domes of Zechariah, Gabriel, and the Prophet.
Nasir showed his readers the various gates, listing them each before taking them into the mosque with its many carpets, the place where David’s repentance was said to have been accepted and where Nasir himself now prayed before doing so again at the cradle of Jesus. He showed them the niches devoted to Mary and Zacheriah with their respective Quranic verses for inscriptions. He walked them over to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, where god had brought Muhammed during his night journey on the back of the winged Buraq.
Inside, he showed them the coloured marble tile and the 280 marble columns, the maqsura enclosure with its “Maghrebi carpets, lamps, and lanterns each hung by a separate chain.” There was the altar of Caliph Mu'awiya at one side that of Umar on the other. There was the wooden ceiling with its elaborately carved designs, and among all the gates one “done in such beautifully ornate brass that [you] would think it was made of gold burnished with silver. It ha[d] the name of the Caliph al-Ma’mun on it and [was] said to have been sent by him from Baghdad.” When the weather was free of wind or rain and all the gates wide, the space was as filled with light as an open courtyard.
Moving toward the Dome of the Rock, Nasir walked his readers to the platform up steps of hewn stone spaced to allow for ascent on horseback. He settled into painting a detailed picture in pillars and arches, columns and crenellations, with an eye for gold and enamel design “too beautiful to describe” and flecked green marble.
He took them within the Dome of the Rock. He had made sketches, but he knew that his reader wouldn’t see them, that they, unlike ourselves, had no recourse to reach for photo or video or online search. So he did his best to show them anyway, to let them see the “octagonal edifice” and its four teak doors kept shut, the stone pillars and piers within and the lead-roofed dome without, the latter’s shape making it seem, if viewed from a distance, that you approached a mountain and not a building at all.
Inside, you found carpets of silk. You found many silver lamps that had been sent by the sultan in Egypt, as had the many candles, some of them enormous. One candle, “as white as camphor and mixed with ambergris” with the sultan’s name in gold letters at the bottom, he estimates at seven cubits long, and just to put that in perspective, a single cubit is supposed to be the distance between the tips of your fingers and the joint of your elbow, or roughly one and a half feet, though the helpful appendix notes that Nasir’s practical application is sometimes closer to two. That candle then would have been some 10-15 feet high and very impressive even at the short end of the range. But of course, the candle was not the main event because that would be the rock, the “Noble Stone.”
It is, Nasir writes, “not a perfect shape; that is, it is neither circular nor square, but a rock of irregular form like any mountain stone.” For a more specific feel for the shape you have the luxury of consulting a photo, but for those who didn’t, Nasir showed them its “bluish rock that no one has ever set foot on,” or at least they weren’t setting foot on it at the time. They certainly had in the past and at times to rather damaging effect, but our guide points to one less so. A set of impressions like footprints, which he had heard resulted from Abraham’s son Isaac walking there.
“This place is the third most holy place of God,” Nasir wrote, “and it is well known among those learned in religion that prayer made in Jerusalem is worth twenty-five thousand ordinary prayers. Every prayer said in Medina is worth fifty thousand, and every prayer said in Mecca is worth one hundred thousand. May God grant to all his servants success in attaining this!”
“They say that on the night of the heavenly ascent,” he wrote, “the Prophet first prayed in the Dome of the Rock and placed his hand on the Rock. When he had come out, the Rock rose up because of his majesty. He put his hand on the Rock, and it froze in its place, half of it being still suspended in the air. From there the Prophet came to the dome that is attributed to him and mounted the Boraq, for which reason that dome is so venerated. Beneath the Rock is a large cave where candles are kept burning. They say that when the Rock moved to rise up, this space was left, and, when it froze, this cave remained.”
And that cave, the Well of Souls, does indeed still remain.
Before we finish up here, I’ll share one last bit of Nasir’s poetry with you, one that is a bit of a departure in tone and topic perhaps, but one I found quite amusing.
“Have you heard? A squash vine grew beneath a towering tree.
In only twenty days it grew and spread and put forth fruit.
Of the tree it asked: "How old are you? How many years?"
Then replied the tree: ‘Two hundred it would be, and surely more.’
The squash laughed and said: ‘Look, in twenty days, I've done
More than you; tell me, why are you so slow?’
The tree responded: ‘O little Squash, today is not the day
of reckoning between the two of us.’
‘Tomorrow, when winds of autumn howl down on you and me,
then shall it be known for sure which one of us is the most resilient!’
A gourd wrapped itself round a lofty palm and in a few weeks climbed to its very top.
‘And how old may you be?’ asked the newcomer; ‘About a hundred years,’ was the answer.
‘A hundred years and no taller? Only look, I have grown as tall as you in fewer days than you can count years.’
‘I know that well,’ replied the palm; 'every summer of my life a gourd has climbed up round me, as proud as you are, and as short-lived as you will be.’
Good deeds stand tall like a green pine, evil deeds bloom like flowers;
The pine is not as brilliant as the flowers, it seems.
But when the frost comes, the pine will still stand tall,
While the flowers, withered, can be seen no more.”
And with that, we’ll put aside Nasir’s travels for now. I hope you enjoyed them, and whether you count it a festive one or not, I do hope the current season is treating you well. Wishing you and those close to you all the best, I’ll say happy new year. Thank you very much for listening to the podcast this year. I hope to see you again in the next one.