Nasir Khusraw - Works

Works

• Safarnama (Persian: سفرنامه‎)

Safarnama (The Book of Travels) is his most famous work. He visited dozens of cities in about seven years (1046, March 6 – 1052, October 23) and wrote comprehensively about them, including details about colleges, caravanserais, mosques, scientists, kings, the public, the population, the area of the cities, and, of course, his interesting memories. After 1000 years, his Safarnama is still readable for Persian-speaking people.

• Diwan (Persian: دیوان‎)

Among his other works, most of the lyrical poems in his Diwan were composed in his retirement, and their chief topics are an enthusiastic praise of Ali, his descendants, and al-Mustansir in particular, along with passionate outcries against Khorasan and its rulers, who had driven him from his home. It also explores his immense satisfaction with the quiet solitude of Yumgan, and his utter despondency again in seeing himself despised by his former associates and excluded from participation in the glorious contest of life. Scattered through all these alternating outbursts of hope and despair, there are lessons of morality, and solemn warnings against the tricks and perfidy of the world, the vanity of all earthly splendour and greatness, the folly and injustice of men, and the hypocrisy, frivolity and viciousness of fashionable society and princely courts in particular.

• Gushayish wa Rahayish (Persian: گشایش و رهایش‎)

Another work of Nasir Khusraw is the Persian philosophical work "Gushayis wa Rahayish" which has been translated into English by F.M. Hunzai under the title: "Knowledge and Liberation". The work discusses creation, questions related to the soul, epistemology, creation, and Ismaili Islamic doctorines. From a linguistic point of view, the work is an example of early philosophical writing in new Persian.

It is the same strain which runs, although in a somewhat lower key, through his two larger mathnavis, the Rawshana-i-nama (Persian: روشنایی نامه‎) (or Book of Enlightenment, also known as Shish Fasl), and the Sa'datnama (Book of Felicity). The former is divided into two sections: the first, of a metaphysical character, contains a sort of practical cosmography, chiefly based on Avicenna's theories, but frequently intermixed both with the freer speculations of the well-known philosophical brotherhood of Basra, the Ikhwan al-Safa, and purely Shi'ite or Isma'ili ideas; the second, or ethical section of the poem, abounds in moral maxims and ingenious thoughts on man's good and bad qualities, on the necessity of shunning the company of fools and double-faced friends, on the deceptive allurements of the world and the secret snares of ambitious men craving for rank and wealth. It concludes with an imaginary vision of a beautiful work of spirits who have stripped off the fetters of earthly cares and sorrows and revel in the pure light of divine wisdom and love.

If we compare this with a similar allegory in Nasir's Diwan, which culminates in the praise of Mustansir, we are fairly entitled to look upon it as a covert allusion to the eminent men who revealed to the poet in Cairo the secrets of the Isma'ili faith, and showed him what he considered the heavenly ladder to superior knowledge and spiritual bliss.

A similar series of excellent teachings on practical wisdom and the blessings of a virtuous life, only of a more severe and uncompromising character, is contained in the Sa'datnama; and, judging from the extreme bitterness of tone manifested in the reproaches of kings and emirs, we should be inclined to consider it a protest against the vile aspersions poured out upon Nasir's moral and religious attitude during those persecutions which drove him at last to Yumgan.

Of all other works of the author, the Zaad al-Musafirin (or Travelling Provisions of Pilgrims) and the Wajh-i-Din (or The Face of Religion) are theoretical descriptions of his religious and philosophical principles; the rest of them can be dismissed as being probably just as apocryphal as Nasir's famous autobiography (found in several Persian tadhkiras or biographies of poets), a mere forgery of the most extravagant description, which is mainly responsible for the confusion in names and dates in older accounts of our author.

• Book on Mathematics (Arabic: عجایب الحساب و عرایب الحساب‎)

Nasir Khusraw wrote a book on mathematics which has now been lost. He states in his other work that he could: not find one single scholar throughout all of Khorasan and eastern lands like myself could grapple with the solutions to these problems. But he felt it his responsibility to take the task for readers he would never see, 'those yet to come, in a time yet to come'