Detail of a camel in 13th century English bestiary - Royal MS 12 F XIII, f. 38v
The conclusion of Nasir Khusraw's story, following his repeated trips from Cairo to Makkah, his struggles in crossing the Arabian Peninsula, and then his journey toward Khorasan.
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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.
Script:
“In the year [1048] an edict of the sultan to this effect was read to the people: ‘The Prince of the Faithful proclaims that in this year, owing to drought and the resulting scarcity of goods, which has caused the deaths of many, it is unwise for pilgrims to undertake the journey to the Hejaz. This we say in Muslim commiseration.’ Therefore, the pilgrims were held in abeyance until the next year, although the sultan did send the covering for the Ka‘ba as usual, which he does twice a year. This very year, since the covering was being sent via the Red Sea,” concluded Nasir, “I went along.”
It was mid-April of that year when they departed, Nasir writing that they reached the Red Sea and then, 15 days after that, had crossed it to arrive at the port of Al-Jar, south of modern Yanbu. Overland, they went next, reaching Medina in four days and finding it there “on the edge of a salty barren desert,” with its palm grove and running water, though not very much of that. He wrote of the Prophet’s Mosque and Muhammed’s tomb there, though if you were to look up photos, you would not be seeing the same sights. There would be 13th-century construction, 15th-century fire and renewal, and 19th-century additions before you got to the very striking Green Dome that can be viewed there now.
Nasir and the others were only two days in Medina, for time was short. In eight more, they had reached Mecca and entered through Baba Safa, the al-Safā Gate, but there too there was little time. The edict in Egypt discouraging pilgrimage had not been made lightly. Drought had struck the region, bread was costly, and “no pilgrims,” Nasir wrote, “had come from anywhere at all.” Many people were leaving Mecca, were fleeing the entire area, he wrote, “because of hunger and misery.” They completed their pilgrimage and delivered what they’d brought, and just two days later they left. As before, when he’d travelled to Mecca from Jerusalem, Nasir wrote that he wouldn’t properly describe Mecca this time, not just yet. They returned to Egypt, having been away for 75 days. It had been a bad year, and Nasir wrote that 35,000 had fled to Egypt from the Hejaz region and required clothing and a pension, but the following year appears to have been little better.
Again, in 1049, it was announced that there was famine in the Hejaz and that pilgrims should not go, but again, there were substantial obligations to keep up: “the covering for the the Ka‘ba, servants, retinue for the emirs of Mecca and Medina, the gift for the emir of Mecca … a horse, and a robe of honour, which [were] sent twice yearly.” Again, it all had to be taken, whether it was a good time for travel or pilgrimage or not. Again, this time in the company of a qadi from Syria, Nasir chose to make the journey, and again, he would not yet say much as to Mecca. He was getting close to that though. He would make his final pilgrimage there soon, and we will go with him, travelling to Mecca and beyond, to conclude our story of Nasir Khusraw.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast that covers that world through the stories of those who travelled it, from friar-diplomats to poet-administrators and everything between and around. And it is a podcast that is supported by a Patreon at patreon.com/humancircus, where you can enjoy your listening earlier, sans advertising, and with extra bonus mini-episodes to tide you over.
All of that said, let’s get back to the story, to the next part of the Nasir Khusraw story and also, as it happens, to the conclusion of it.
The last time we talked, Nasir had been spending time in Egypt. He had been making trips to Mecca, something that he said he was going to tell us all about later on. He had, as you just heard, been spending quite a bit of time in Egypt, not just passing through on his travels. He had repeated the pilgrimage to Mecca a couple of years in a row and then returned from the 1049 trip because he still had his books in Egypt and the next time he was to leave it was going to be for good.
Nasir had been in Egypt for a few years at this point and apparently amassed some books in the process, which raises the question of what he was actually up to there in Egypt. We are reading from and following his Book of Travels, but pilgrimage aside, the actual travelling itself was clearly on pause here in the late 1040s while Nasir did…well, what exactly? The answer, it seems, was studying.
He had, you may remember, set aside his comfortable life and set out to travel with the intention of finding wisdom, and here in Fatimid Egypt was where he mostly seems to have found it. As an Ismaili scholar in the one place where Ismailis wielded real power, he learned from the chief missionary and the “Gate of Gates,” Al-Mu'ayyad fi'l-Din al-Shirazi. He perhaps attended lectures at the al-Azhar Mosque or studied at the Dar al-‘Ilm, the “House of Wisdom.” And then he was gone, taking those books with him, taking what he’d learned and also taking on a new responsibility, a new role as the hujjat of Khurasan, the head of Ismaili missionary efforts. A little more on that later.
For now, he was finally going to tell us about Mecca and the journey there and beyond.
I don’t know if Nasir’s brother, who was along for the journey, had accompanied him on those last few trips to Mecca, but he would have gone with him now. They departed on May 9th of the year 1050, no mention this time of announcements as to drought or conditions too severe for making pilgrimage. They went south, as he had before, and this time he wrote of the banks of the Nile being packed with too many towns and villages to describe, a statement which was immediately followed by his describing a few of them.
There was Asyut, with its wonderful sheep wool fine enough that you would think it was silk, “an opium producing region,” he says, briefly describing the poppy’s “small and cumin-like” seeds and the molasses-like syrup that oozed out to be preserved. There was Akhmim, with its “huge stone edifices that would amaze anyone who saw them” and its “ancient [stone] town with a stone wall,” all that stone needing to have been brought in from elsewhere, and he wondered at this, for there were no quarries anywhere nearby. And then there was Qus, at about the point where the Nile bends furthest east. They dawdled a full 20 days there in that “crowded and prosperous place” with its “many date groves and orchards,” undecided as to whether to cross the desert there or to first travel further south.
The southern crossing does look like it would have been longer, but that was what they chose, making their way past Luxor to Aswan, all strong defences and a garden-like island opposite in the river full of “date groves, olives, and other trees and crops.” There too, they spent 20 days, though this time not in indecision. Pilgrims were due to return by camel, and Nasir and the others waited to hire those camels. He mentions by name an Abu ‘Abd Allah Mohammad who he befriended then, a “pious and righteous man [who] knew something about logic,” and who would help Nasir inspect and hire one of those returning camels. I guess you’d want to be pretty certain about the animal that you were trusting with your life in that kind of desert crossing.
They’d put that crossing off by a little in not going east from Qus, but they couldn’t delay it any longer. It was 15 days, and the camels seem to have taken care of most of it. “It was almost,” Nasir wrote, almost “as though the camels themselves knew that if they poked along they would die of thirst; they did not need to be driven and, setting their own direction, went of their own accord, although there was no trace whatsoever of a road.” They only paused every 24 hours or so, and they travelled through the night.
There were stretches with only brackish water, or none at all. There were few stopping places, all of them known, where camel dung was to be found that you might burn for fuel—I suppose you couldn’t depend on the timing of your own camel’s production. There were stations where water was plentiful, like at one where a well had been dug in a valley between two wall-like mountains, or at another where the water was good but someone had to go “inside one of the holes to bring out water for the camels,” perhaps something like a cave or tunnel. Eventually, after those 15 days or so, there was ‘Aydhab, there on the coast of the Red Sea.
We’ve been through this place before on the podcast, one through which goods flowed west from “Abyssinia, Zanzibar, and the Yemen,” from beyond those locations, from India and farther east, reaching Egypt by desert caravan and boat or further to the Mediterranean world it opened onto. An important place in other words, but a surprisingly small one, home to a permanent population of only 500 by Nasir’s assessment. I suppose it was more a place that you passed through if you could rather than staying, the lack of water sources other than rain being a good reason if there was no other. Nasir mentions that they had to buy rainwater by the jug while they were there, and they were there for quite a while, a full three months as they waited on the winds to change and allow them to carry on.
Nasir was at the very limits of his resources here, but fortunately he had a letter from that Aswan friend, Abu ‘Abd Allah Mohammad, informing Abu’s agent in ‘Aydhab that Nasir was to be given anything he needed and that the costs would be covered. When Nasir took advantage of this generous offer to purchase a large quantity of flour, Abu wrote again, reiterating that Nasir was to have whatever he wished and it would be made good. Nasir included this anecdote, he explained, to show his readers that, quote, “generosity exists everywhere, and … there have been and still are noble men.”
When Nasir was able to cross the Red Sea, he evidently did so without difficulty, incident, or other reason to mention the passage at all. He reached Jeddah, with its strong walls and good bazaars, its one gate facing the sea and its other turned toward the desert and Mecca. Nasir left the port city on Friday, during the afternoon prayer. He reached Mecca on Sunday.
Nestled between mountains so that you could not see it until you were right on top of it, Mecca was not a large city. Nasir estimated it as being about two bow shots squared in area and in populace about 2000 citizens and 500 more counting foreigners and temporary residents, a category within which he counted himself for the six-ish months he spent there. There were hospices there to serve travellers of each region—Khorasan, Transoxiana, Iraq, and so on—but they were crumbling, fallen into disrepair and worse, and this was a wider theme. “The Baghdad caliphs had built many beautiful structures,” wrote Nasir, “but when we arrived, some had fallen to ruin and others had been expropriated.”
The only trees to be seen were those around the Bab Ibrahim, or Abraham’s Gate, to the west of the Great Mosque from which radiated city lanes and bazaars. The walls of the mosque itself did not meet at right angles at the corners, instead rounded, for people within would face the Kaaba from all angles. Nasir numbered its 184 marble columns and its 18 doors, out of one of which you came to the Druggists’ Market, where Muhammed’s house had been.
Within the mosque, the Kaaba was double-doored in teak, with large silver rings placed well out of reach and smaller ones within, along with Quranic inscriptions in gold burnished with silver. “Verily,” the inscription read, “the first house appointed unto men to worship in was that which was in Mecca.” Behind those doors were columns of teak, floors of white marble, planks of wood said to have come from Noah’s ark, and niches of silver set high into the wall. Behind the black stone itself was a cabinet draped in red brocade.
“All around the Kaaba [were] columns, each pair of which [was] spanned with wooden beams carved in decorative designs. These beams [had] rings and hooks for suspending lamps and candleholders at night… Between the Kaaba and [those columns] … is where the circumambulation [was] performed.”
Nasir noted the place where Abraham’s feet had left their imprint on a rock, the well from which ablutions were poured, and the figure whose role it was to open the Kaaba door. He described the steps of the umrah, or the lesser pilgrimage, all the way up to the bazaar where you had your head shaved at one of 20 barbers. He wrote of the dangers that sometimes befell people there, far from home.
For one example, there was the large caravan from the Maghreb that had been pressed for protection money outside Medina, and when they had refused had lost some 2,000 of their number in the fighting that followed. For another, there were the six travellers from Khorasan who had arrived in Medina and with only three days in which to reach Mecca had promised 40 dinars to any who could get them there on time, a kind of anticipation of countless cab scenes in films to come. Some locals had taken them up on the offer and taken it very seriously. They’d tied the travellers to fast camels and driven them on without rest or mercy. Two of the travellers had actually died, and the others had begged their “guides” to keep the money but just release them there and not push them on any further. But those guides would not listen. The surviving four travellers reached Mecca in two and half days, completed their pilgrimage, and returned home via Syria.
As for Nasir, he wrote that on April 24th, 1051, he completed his own fourth pilgrimage. Having hired himself a camel, he also departed, and after this quick break, we will go with him.
…
“On Friday the [4th of May], … I traveled seven parasangs from Mecca. There was an open plain with a mountain visible in the distance. Heading toward that mountain, we passed by fields and villages. There was a well called [the Well of Husayn … after the prophet’s companion]. The weather was cold. We continued eastward, and on [May the 7th] arrived in Taif, which is twelve parasangs from Mecca.”
Taif, now with a population of about half a million and renowned for its roses, was not then to Nasir’s liking. He found it too cold, cold enough that you had to sit only in the sunshine and a harsh contrast to the melon-growing weather of Mecca. There may have been running water and an abundance of pomegranates and figs, but to his eyes it was a “wretched little town with a strong fortress … a small bazaar and a pitiful little mosque.” It all starts to sound a bit personal, as if our guide may have clashed with someone there or otherwise felt wronged, but he makes no mention of any such thing, only saying that they left.
It was mountains and rubble all along the way from there, and “small fortresses and villages everywhere.” There was danger, as they passed through areas said to have no ruler or sultan, for “The people are robbers and murderers,” Nasir wrote, “and constantly fight among themselves.” And Nasir and his brother would have a bit of a brush with some of those people themselves, seeing them approach with every appearance of violence and theft in mind but fortunate enough to be in the company of the men’s leader and able to watch them walk harmlessly past. “Had he not been with us,” Nasir noted, “they most certainly would have destroyed us.”
In each of these territories, they went on only when they had a local travelling with them who could offer them safe conduct, waiting where they needed to in order to make sure they had that local guarantee and in at least one case paying men ten dinars each to provide it. “Thus I was taken and handed over from tribe to tribe,” wrote Nasir, “the entire time in constant mortal danger. God, however, willed that we come out of there alive.”
Where there wasn’t threat of assault on the road, there were hardships of another kind, though it seems like Nasir could have avoided them if he’d chosen. He spoke to 70-year-old men who drank nothing but camel milk and he travelled with people who ate any lizards they came across. “They actually imagined that the whole world was like this!” he exclaimed, then saying that he refused to eat those lizards himself, evidently not finding them to his taste and choosing instead to subsist on the small berries that they occasionally came across. It seems unwise, but then he obviously did make it in the end.
By early July, the travellers were in the middle of the desert in what Nasir says had once been an important region but had crumbled due to internal strife. They found fourteen fortresses there in quite a narrow strip about a mile wide, split between two factions, and populated, in Nasir’s opinion, by a “bunch of filthy, ignorant, bandits,” his words, not mine. He spent four months there, under the, quote, “worst possible conditions.” His resources were reduced to two satchels of books, and these were people who came to prayer with sword and shield. They were “hungry, naked, and ignorant people,” he said, and even if he may have been exaggerating here or there, the key factor was that they had no interest in buying books.
What seems to have saved them was that Nasir had a little blue and red paint with him, something which sounds wildly unlikely but then it is what he says. He says that he painted a line of poetry on the mosque wall and embellished the lettering with some leaves on a branch, and luckily for him, the locals loved it. They actually insisted that he do some more painting and offered to pay him 100 measures of dates for the work, a fortune for the area and quite fortuitous, as Nasir had not otherwise been able to acquire food.
For those four months, the travellers were stuck, despairing, Nasir would write, of ever finding a way out of there. It was “fearful, devastating desert” in any direction they might go to reach the world beyond, and the crossing was not something you attempted as an unfamiliar visitor without expert help. But eventually that help would come, in the form of a caravan carrying goat leather. A camel could have been hired for one dinar or bought outright for two or three, but Nasir and his brother didn’t have that on hand. They had little option but to instead go with the caravan on credit and agree to pay 30 dinars when they reached Basra, and Nasir didn’t even get his own camel in the deal. He says that his books were bundled up aboard along with his brother—perhaps the less physically fit of the siblings—while he went on foot.
It was not ideal, but at least they were leaving, and it doesn’t seem like they would have made it by themselves. He was amazed by the people they travelled with, the way they went night and day without any sign of mountain, hill, or road, the way they seemed, so far as he could tell, to navigate by instinct alone. He was equally amazed by the people he met who he said told him that they had never seen a bath or running water.
By late December, they had travelled north to Basra in what is now southeastern Iraq, and neither themselves nor the city, in its 20 districts, were in good shape. Though “the walls were strong and well kept, the populace numerous, and the ruler with plenty of income,” “most of the city lay in ruins, the inhabited parts being greatly dispersed.”
Meanwhile, the travellers themselves were, quote, “as naked and destitute as madmen,” badly in need of a bath but also looking very much like people bound to be turned away at the door. “Who would let us in, in this state?” asked Nasir. Not the attendant at the bathhouse who was decidedly not persuaded by the few coins Nasir had managed to fetch for his book satchel. “Even the children who were playing at the bathhouse door thought we were madmen and, throwing stones and yelling, chased after us,” Nasir wrote. “We retired into a corner and reflected in amazement on the state of the world,” and, most likely, at their own fallen state within it.
Fortunately for Nasir, who still owed that 30 dinars for having been brought there, he did have one resource still at hand. He had an acquaintance, a Persian scholar who could hardly afford to give them any money himself but who did have standing sufficient to put their situation before the local vizier. The connection was made, and the vizier promptly sent a rider around for Nasir, but Nasir sent him away with a note of apology, saying that he would present himself to the vizier shortly. He wanted to be judged first on the basis of that written note, as a scholarly figure of expression and intellectual worth, not on the basis of his rather rough and road beaten appearance, his ragged and minimal clothing. That way, he wrote, he need have no shame when he did finally present himself.
Maybe the vizier would always have been generous, or maybe he would have ordered Nasir ushered off in disgust if he’d seen him first, unmediated by that note. But fortunately for the travellers, he immediately sent 30 dinars for clothing and, once he’d welcomed Nasir into his presence, another 30 to pay off their debt in getting there. Then, once they were ready to leave, he was going to arrange for that also, putting them aboard a ship with “gifts and [unspecified] bounteous good things” to take with them. Nasir and his brother had really landed on their feet, or at least on the vizier’s kindness.
Before they left, their “worldly condition [having] taken a turn for the better” that one could only say was substantial, the brothers went back to enjoy that bathhouse, and this time they would not be chased away. As they dressed and prepared to leave, the same attendant who had shooed them from the door spoke to his friend, not knowing that his Arabic would be overheard and understood by the travellers, pointing them out as the same men who’d recently been denied entry. “You are perfectly correct,” Nasir interjected in the same language. “We are the very ones who had old sacks tied to our backs,” and the attendant was suitably apologetic. Their first encounter at the bathhouse had been only 20 days earlier, wrote Nasir, explaining that he had, quote, “included the story so that men may know not to lament adversity brought on by fate and not to despair of the Creator’s mercy, for He is merciful indeed.”
In February of 1052, they left Basra, passing an uninterrupted series of orchards, gardens, and kiosks on either side of the channel. There was a stop at Abbadan, some taking the opportunity there to buy carpets and others food. They moved on the next morning, passing wooden structures out in the water, lit by lantern at night and placed to warn ships that they were nearing the shallows.
Next on the itinerary was Mahruban. It was a large coastal town with a bazaar, a fine mosque, and three large caravanserais, each as strong as a fortress, and here Nasir was stuck, or at least he felt that way, for there was violent strife further along the coast and the countryside was in confusion. Frustrated, he once more reached out for help to “a great and learned man” he had been told of “called Shaikh Sadid Mohammad.” He explained the situation in writing and pleaded to be removed to safety. Only a few days later, an armed escort of 30 foot soldiers presented itself to whisk them away to Arrajan in southwestern Iran, well away from any immediate danger, and immediately into opportunities for discussion of theology and mathematics before they journeyed on.
They travelled north-northeast toward Isfahan, going past mountains and great streams that were likely a jarring but welcoming sight after their recent time in the desert. Perhaps those past experiences were what led Nasir to enthuse over Isfahan’s “delightful climate” and the easy accessibility of “refreshing cold water.” That city itself was strong walled and blessed with “running water, fine tall buildings, and a beautiful and large Friday mosque,” the mosque, if that wasn’t clear, where Friday midday prayers would be held. The bazaars were many, the one which Nasir saw reserved for money changers alone having a full 200 stalls, and the caravanserais were abundant, clean, and spacious. There had been famine not long before their arrival, and though barley and bread were now, or still, selling in the markets, the locals complained at the unusually high prices. Still, to Nasir’s mind, it was the finest, most commodious and flourishing Persian speaking city he had seen, and he praised the young governor from Nishapur who the Seljuks had appointed as being a “good administrator with a fine hand, composed, well met, a patron of learning, well spoken, and generous.” He was obviously very impressive.
They left in late June, the road onward regularly marked by small towers with water tanks to collect the rain and large areas of shifting sands. No one who strayed from the markers would have been able to find their way back, Nasir remarked, and where there weren’t sands, there was what he termed “brackish earth” into which any who strayed would sink, presumably into very marshy ground.
By early July they had reached Tabas, village-like in appearance but actually quite large with desert to the south and “forbidding mountains to the east.” There were no city walls around it, but still the people did not bother locking their doors or bringing their animals in from the streets. There was neither theft nor murder, and Nasir counted it one of the four most secure and just places in the Arab or Persian worlds, but then he might have had a different way of thinking through such things than we would. “No woman dared speak to a stranger,” he wrote, just before offering his praise, “for if she did they would both be killed.” Not exactly what I’d call either just or secure, but Nasir was pleased by what he found and also by the hospitality of the ruler, who would send them onward 17 days later with gifts, apologies for any shortcomings, and a guide.
One town, while it had once been large and boasted more than 400 carpet workshops, had largely fallen into ruin, though it did have pistachio trees in the houses. Another, where they spent a month due to nearby rebellion, was well fortified and all its buildings were domed. Nasir conversed with a local “who knew something of medicine, astronomy, and logic,” discussing the celestial spheres and how there must be nothing beyond the final one, a hard finite limit upon the universe, though questions still remained. “If it then be finite, up to what point does it exist?” the man pondered. “If it is infinite and without end, how then can it ever pass out of existence?” “I have suffered much perplexity over all this,” he concluded after further questions of the sort, to which Nasir simply replied, “Who hasn’t?”
In September and October, they hopped from one caravanserai to the next, at times adjusting their route to avoid unsafe roads, and as they neared the end of their journey, they, Nasir and his brother, heard word of their other sibling, a brother who they were told was currently employed by the vizier of the Seljuk prince of Khorasan.
At one stop, they saw goods being loaded up for transport and asked whose it was. When told that it was the vizier’s, they asked about their brother by name and were directed to someone identified as one of his men. Where was it they were they coming from, the man asked them, and when told that they returned from pilgrimage, he said, “My master … had two brothers who went on the Pilgrimage [seven] years ago, and he still longs to see them, but no one he has questioned has had any news of them.”
Nasir’s brother told the man that he had a letter from one of those two long-absent brothers, from Nasir, but just then their caravan began to move. Wouldn’t they give him the letter, the man pleaded, for he knew his master would be terribly upset to have missed it, but Nasir’s brother answered him, would you rather have the letter or would you rather have Nasir himself, for here he is, and the man was so delighted that he did not know what to do.
It’s a charming little anecdote, and one Nasir gives a surprising amount of space in the context of the narrative. It was clearly of great personal importance to him, and understandably so. If we do not find agreement with him on what it means for a place and its people to have justice and security, we can perhaps more readily imagine what it’s like to lose contact with family for seven years and then find them again.
When word was taken to that third brother, it found him with the vizier in an Isfahani city and caused him to wait for the travellers at a particular bridge.
There, wrote Nasir, quote:
“On [October 23rd, 1052], after having had little or no hope and having at times fallen into perilous circumstances and having even despaired of our lives, we were all together again and joyful to see each other. We thanked God for that.”
Reaching the end of his travels, at least so far as this text was concerned, Nasir composed a few last lines of reflective poetry.
“Though the toil and travail of the world be long
An end will doubtless come to good and bad.
The spheres travel for us day and night:
Whatever has once gone, another comes on its heels.
We are traveling through what can be passed
Until there comes that journey that cannot be bypassed.”
This particular journey now at an end, he summed up his travels.
“The distance we traversed from Balkh to Egypt and thence to Mecca and then via Basra to Fars and finally back to Balkh, not counting excursions for visiting shrines and so on, was 2,220 parasangs. I have recorded my adventures as I saw them. If some of what I heard narrated by others does not conform to the truth, I beg my readers to forgive me and not to reproach me. If God grants me success in making a journey to the East, what I may see will be appended hereto, if God the One wills.
Praise be to God, the Lord of the Universe, and prayers be upon Mohammad and his House and Companions all!”
As to that 2,220 parasangs, I’ve seen the unit listed as 3-4 miles or as 6 kilometres, so by that last measure we get a distance of 13,200 kilometres or about 8,200 miles. That distance would take them back to Balkh, as he said, beyond the area of Isfahan and back to northern Afghanistan, where he had experienced that nighttime vision which had initially sent him on his way. The journey beyond that, the one to the east that he hoped to attempt and append, he would not make, or at least he would not be appending it to the version of the book that has come down to us. But that doesn’t mean his life after this would be uneventful.
On the contrary, Nasir Khusraw would look to apply what he’d studied in Egypt. He would attempt to act on his responsibility for Ismaili missionary efforts. However, that would not go entirely as planned. His Book of Travels had followed him back home, but he wouldn’t be able to remain there.
We don’t know the exact nature or extent of the persecution and threats he faced for his teachings and missionary activities, but we do know that they were sufficient to drive him from his home and cause him to find a new one with an Ismaili prince’s court in Yamgan, within what is now the northeastern Afghani province of Badakhshan. Photos of the area show it to be quite beautiful in a ruggedly mountainous kind of way, but then it was not where Nasir had chosen to be. As Alice Hunsberger writes, it was “remote, far from the intellectual centres of Cairo and his beloved Khurasan,” and he apparently viewed it as something of a place of exile and even imprisonment, a view that comes across very clearly in the lines of one of his poems:
“Pass by, sweet breeze of Khurasan
to one imprisoned deep in the valley of Yamgan,
Who sits huddled in comfortless tight straits,
robbed of all wealth, all goods, all hope.”
Nasir may have viewed his circumstances, at least in moments, as those of a prisoner, may have been far from those centres of intellectual activity, but he would build around himself something of a little centre of his own, becoming known as the “Ruby of Badakhshan,” gathering followers to his relatively remote home and writing poetry, theology, philosophy, and of course, that Book of Travels, making use of observations recorded along the way.
That is where we will leave Nasir. I hope you enjoyed his story. I’ll be back next time with something different, likely a standalone episode, and I’ll talk to you then.