Intellectual Traditions in Islam - Seventh essay

The seventh essay in this book is about "Nasir Khusraw: Fatimid Intellectual" by Alice C. Hunsberger.

Alice has focussed her essay on Nasir Khusraw who was a well known philosopher and poet of 11th century. He is one of the beloved figure in Persian Literature. All his literary contributions are in Persian. He left three genre of writings. "Safar-nama" is a prose memoir of his travel. Safar nama is admired by the readers for its simplicity and straightforwardness in writing. It has his detailed observations of cities and their administrations, and sometimes added historical details to his narratives. Alice gave many wonderful stories from Safar Nama as examples.

The other genre of writing is his Diwan which is a collection of poetries of Nasir Khusraw. He uses poetries to give moral advice and hidden meaning of philosophies. His poetries make it possible to see his personality more completely. Main themes of his poetries are reason or intellect, and after his period of exile began, emotion of sadness reflect clearly through his poetries.

Nasir Khusraw shows clearly how he doesn't like ignorance in people. He is intolerant towards such people and uses words like donkeys, asses, silent fishes and noisy little birds etc. for them. In his poetries he reflects the conflicting emotions of man about this physical world which traps him but he still needs to be actively involved in this world as this world carries the important tools of learning true wisdom; those tools are reason and knowledge (aql and ilm).

His philosophies reflects the same theme of reason and knowledge in Wajh-e-Deen (Nasir Khusraw's philosophical work). He explains that "....animals act without knowledge, while angels know without acting. But humans must combine both knowledge and action, just as they represent a combination of animal bodies and angelic knowledge." That's where he also differs from Sufis. In Sufism reason or aql is considered as boundary and has to overcome or surpass it to get united with God. For Nasir Khusraw, reason is not something to be surpassed, in fact, it is a tool to increase knowledge and strengthening faith.

Alice, in this essay, gave many beautiful examples of Nasir Khusraw's work which are worth reading. I am feeling tempted to quote them all over here, but if I will do so then my review will turn into re-writing Alice's essay. So, I will avoid that and ecourage readers of this review to read the original essay of Alice C. Hunsberger. It is definitely an essay you must read - it's really worth reading.