The Hagiography of Nasir-i Khusraw and the Ismailis of Badakhshan

This dissertation examines Badakhshānī Ismāʿīlī hagiographical texts written between approximately the late 16th and the late 20th centuries in their socio-political context. It analyzes the narratives by drawing attention to how their authors expressed ideals, values, beliefs, practices, and concerns through the medium of hagiography. Unlike much previous scholarly work on the Badakhshānī hagiographical tradition, which dismisses this substantial body of valuable material as entirely “fictional,” and, therefore, useless as a source of “historical” information, the present study approaches the data in a novel manner, and analyzes it for clues about the ideological, polemical, apologetic, pedagogic, moral, and didactic concerns of Badakhshānī Ismāʿīlīs. This dissertation focuses on the hagiographies of Nāṣir-i Khusraw (d. after 462/1070), the celebrated Persian Ismāʿīlī thinker, poet and missionary.
Badakhshānī Ismāʿīlīs, a minority Central Asian Muslim community concentrated primarily in the Afghan Badakhshān Province and Tajik Gorno-Badakhshān Autonomous Oblast, revere Nāṣir-i Khusraw as the founder of the Ismāʿīlī Shīʿī tradition, calling their religious tradition the daʿvat-i Shāh Nāṣir, or “Nāṣir-i Khusraw’s summoning.” Upon analyzing the persistent and transient elements of Nāṣir-i Khusraw’s portrayals in Badakhshānī hagiographies of the said period, this dissertation concludes that, although Nāṣir-i Khusraw’s sanctity takes an “idealized” form in the hagiographies, it was never fully solidified or standardized, but was constantly negotiated between the hagiographers and the narratives about him. What the sources say about Nāṣir-i Khusraw changes throughout the period under study. Hagiographies of the Soviet period differ from those written by the pre-Soviet Ismāʿīlīs in motives and agendas, in their selection of the material, and in their views on sanctity. In the earliest sources, produced in the 16th century, Nāṣir-i Khusraw is represented as a Muslim wrongly accused of unbelief and as a person with ambiguous sectarian affiliations. In the hagiographical works created in the early 18th century, he emerges as a great Shīʿī saint on par with the last Twelver Shīʿī Imām. In middle hagiographical works composed between the late 18th and early 20th centuries, he is presented as a foundational figure and a great saint in the service of the Ismāʿīlī Imām, whom he followed. The late sources, written in the Soviet period, present him as a saint championing the rights of ordinary people and an opponent of oppressors. The author argues that this difference in the representation of Nāṣir-i Khusraw in the hagiographical sources is related to the dictates of the changing historical environments to which the writers responded.