Who is Nasir-i Khusraw?

Harith al-Kubadhiyani, was born in 1004, by the Western calendar, in Kubadhiyan, in the region of Marw to a family of lan slashers and officials. The slender that is known about his early life derives from his writings, primarily the Safarnama and the poems in the Diwan. Such details, rather than constituting any strictly ordered autobiography, however, reverberate "Nasir's own retrospective arrangement of his life to reflect what he regards as phases in his moral and spiritual evolution."

Legendary accounts of Nasir's life, including a counterfeit autobiography, "absurdly inflated" his background, describing him as "the most learned man; who occupie[d] a very high position in the state." But Nasir was not an extremely wealthy man and he notes in his travel book that he was employed by the sultan's revenue service and later mentions that his brother Abul-Fath Abd al-Jalil was in the rooms of the vizier of the prince of Khorasan. It is likely, therefore, that they were members of the permanent bureaucratic class and Nasir probably entered the state's service at a fairly early age after receiving the elemental education appropriate to his level of work. His "early interest in philosophy, science, mathematics and poetry" would have been "pursued while maintaining an supple social life in court circles." He was not, however, " purely trained in the religious and theological 'Arabic' sciences of a arrogant Islamic education" and this "is evident in his philosophical wor

Nasir ibn Khusru. "An Account of Jerusalem Translated . . . from the Persian text of Nasir ibn Khusru's Safar-namah." Translated by A. R. Fuller. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society n. s. 6 (1873): 142ff.

Naser-e Khosraw. Naser-e Khosraw's Book of Travels (Safarnama). Translated and with an Introduction by W. M. Thackston. New York: Persian heritage Association, Bibliotheca Persica, 1986.

Earlier scholars who neglected the importance of Ismailism in the context of Nasir's trip ignored one of the principal elements that do "the age in which Nasir lived . . . one of commotion and turmoil.

" All the lands of Islam were rent by battles among diverse dynastic factions and, in theocratic Islam, all such conflicts had essential religious connotations. The principal conflict was between the Abbasid Caliphs who ruled at Baghdad and the Fatimids who ruled a vast domain in Egypt. In Nasir's native Khorasan the struggle was between two enemy Turkic tribes, the Ghaznavids and the Seljuks--both of whom expressed fealty to the Abbasid Caliph.

Daftary, Farhad. The Ismailis: Their History and Doctrines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Translation into informal prose generally seems to be the aim of the two translators, but where Thackston resists the excite to adapt what is either the more convoluted syntax of the pilot burner to English or, as may be the case, to adopt an 'antique' tone, Le Strange is less reliable. Choices between "they told me" and "said to have been" were made on the basis of what might sound best to the coeval ear. But the phrase "should any desire to throw it down" seems unnecessarily obscure given the fact that Thackston communicates the same subject without creating a sentence that might cause the reader to hesitate. But, for the most part because it is such a lucidly written text, no transparent disagreements about content or meaning emerge when the two translations are compared.

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