Pir Nasir-i Khusraw's Book of Enlightenment

Excerpts from "The Rawshanāʾī-Nāma and the Older Iranian Cosmogony."

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AI image of Pir Nasir-i Khusraw writing The Book of Enlightenment

Excerpts from “The Rawshanāʾī-nāma and the Older Iranian Cosmogony” by Mohsen Zakeri.

Pearls of Persia: The Philosophical Poetry of Nāṣir-i Khusraw. Edited by Alice C. Hunsberger, I.B. Tauris in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2012, pp. 103-116.

In this chapter, I take a close look at the content and structure of Nāṣir-i Khusraw’s verse Rawshanāʾī-nāma (Book of Enlightenment)…, a sententious moralising sequence of rhyming couplets, a form of Persian poetry known as a mathnawī….

[…] The poet’s intention in composing his work – which he explained as something like a revelation occurring to him in a dream during which he experienced a spiritual metamorphosis – was to help the reader to know himself and forsake the concerns of earthly life, the transient world of darkness, and concentrate instead on the requirements of the permanent residence, the heavenly world, the world of eternal light (Rawshanāʾī-nāma 540:6). Until man fathoms his own universe, he cannot understand God. ‘Know thyself’ was still as applicable in Nāṣir’s day as when the famous, immortal and mystic utterance was inscribed on the portal of the temple at Delphi.

According to the poem, knowing oneself is the golden key to true wisdom, which prepares the soul for its higher life and brighter destiny (Rawshanāʾī-nāma 528:7–18). It is the still, small voice of the awakened soul that purges the conscience from suffering, and the spiritual body from earthly dross. It is wisdom that treasures not the corrupting, delusive wealth of the world, nor the ephemeral powers of Mammon (Rawshanāʾī-nāma 535–536). Thence, The Book of Enlightenment presents itself as a means of finding the way of gradual purification of the soul, freeing it from its primordial defect; it shows the path to the city of light and Eternal Bliss (dār-i mulk-i rawshanāʾī) (Rawshanāʾīnāma 528:1).

[…] While explaining the circumstances leading to the writing of the verse Rawshanāʾī-nāma, Nāṣir speaks of his dreamlike journey to the eternal ‘city of heart’ where he woke up ‘from the sleep of negligence’. Wishing to awaken others ‘from the slumber of ignorance,’ and ensure the success of his message, he decided to present the result of this experience both in prose and verse (Rawshanāʾī-nāma 541:1).

[…] The Rawshanāʾī-nāma contains an exposition of a number of Ismaili doctrines about the nature of the world and creatures, from the primal creation until the end. It is a concise systematic treatise on the cosmogonic-philosophical doctrines of Ismailism. For Nāṣir, God is beyond estimation, intellection or understanding. The intellect (Ar. ʿaql, Pers. khirad), being phenomenal, is bewildered (ḥayrān) when contemplating Him (Rawshanāʾī-nāma 517–519). Intellect (‘aql-i kull), residing in the highest sphere and being the highest part of the Soul, has charge of or emanates the Soul and through it puts everything in motion. Hence, it is the force behind the obligatory movement of all the spheres and stars. In other words, it is the innate Love of the Soul for The One and the desire to return to Him that has put the universe in motion. This idea, expressed frequently in Islamic mystic literature as ‘desire’ (shawq), is found here in the Rawshanāʾī-nāma (520:12). Thus, Ethé (p. 647) speaks of the Shiʿi-Sufi character of the poem. Nāṣir and the Sufis drew on the same fount of older Iranian-Muslim gnostic ideas.

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