Three scholars from The Institute of Ismaili Studies (IIS) presented papers at the Fifteenth Biennial Conference of the Association for Iranian Studies (AIS) held at Utrecht University, 5-8 August 2026. Dr Daryoush Mohammad Poor and Dr Rahim Gholami co-chaired a panel on ‘Reason, Revelation, and Revival: Esoteric Hermeneutics from Nāṣir-i Khusraw to Rūmī and the Present’. They were joined by Dr Maryam Rezaee of IIS and Dr Alice Hunsberger (State University of New York at Old Westbury), author of the IIS-published Nasir Khusraw, the Ruby of Badakhshan (2000).
Rahim Gholami’s Paper on Rūmī’s Mathnawī
Dr Rahim Gholami opened with ‘Striking with Part of It: Rūmī’s Re-readings of Qurʾan 2:67–73 in the Mathnawī’. Dr Gholami described how, in the story of Moses and the cow, the Israelites press for detail after detail, and the animal is described almost exhaustively. Then, where a concealed murder is to be exposed, the command turns vague. It states: ‘strike him with part of it (bi-baʿḍihā)’, although the part is never identified. The dead man rises, the crime comes out,, and the passage closes, hoping its hearers may come to reason.
Rūmī returns to the scene three times in the Mathnawī, taking apart its elements – command, sacrifice, fragment, blow, disclosure, resurrection – and re-distributing them in what Dr Gholami describes as a kind of esoteric pedagogy.
Dr Gholami argued that bi-baʿḍihā becomes a grammar of divinely authorised efficacy. The body-serving intellect loses its mastery, and discursive reason works under the light of what Rūmī calls the Intellect of intellect (ʿaql-i ʿaqlReason, intellect, mind. This noun does not appear as such in the Qur’an, although the verb ʿaqala is used (as in Q. 2:44, ‘Do you not understand?’). See also ʿaql–i…): the intellect is the husk, the Intellect of intellect the kernel.
Women Facing Barriers to Education
Dr Maryam Rezaee moved the panel to present-day Iran with ‘Empowerment under Constraint: Ismaili Women’s Responses to Educational Barriers in Iran’. Her paper drew on interviews and questionnaires among Ismaili women in Mashhad and Tehran who wanted to complete a university education but had not managed to do so.
These women faced a combination of barriers: families could not always finance study away from home; daughters were required to care for younger siblings; and economic pressures sometimes meant that they had to take up jobs straight after secondary school. Another issue the women faced was the national entrance examination, which could be used as a tool for ideological vetting rather than determining academic merit. Women who were unable to pursue higher education paid the price in restricted mobility, economic precarity and social invisibility.
Dr Rezaee’s paper also focussed on what the women did next: some took up vocational courses or places in private institutions, while others turned to voluntary service inside their communities. Drawing on Kabeer, Sen, and intersectional feminist theory, Rezaee argued that empowerment is a process of negotiating constraint, not a destination reached only through a degree. She understands taqiyyaPrecautionary dissimulation of one’s religious beliefs, especially in time of persecution or danger, a practice especially adopted by the Shi’i Muslims., religious discretion, in the same light: a working strategy for moving safely through public institutions while keeping one’s faith intact.
The Egypt Nāṣir-i Khusraw Did Not Describe
Dr Alice Hunsberger’s paper, ‘“Are you in obeisance or not?” Navigating Egyptian Politics with Nāṣir-i Khusraw’, concerned accounts in the medieval Persian author’s Safar-nāma. She described how Nāṣir-i Khusraw spent three years in Fatimid Egypt (439–442/1047–1050) and was chosen each year to accompany the imperial HajjThe word Hajj usually refers to the annual pilgrimage by Muslims to the Kaʿba in Mecca, also called the Great Pilgrimage, in contrast to the ʿUmra, the Lesser Pilgrimage. More caravan with the kiswa and the caliph’s payments to Mecca and Medina. He praised almost everything he saw: the Cairo bazaars, the Fatimid justice system, the salaried army, and the management of the Nile flood. Yet at Aydhab, before he had even left Egypt on the road home, Nāṣir found himself with an empty purse, for which he gives no explanation.
Dr Hunsberger described how Nāṣir recounts two major events of Fatimid history but deliberately refrains from mentioning their contexts. In the first of these, two months after Nāṣir arrived in Cairo, soldiers murdered the influential Jewish jeweller, Abu Saʿd al-Tustarī. Twenty thousand horsemen then amass before the palace until a servant emerges with one question: ‘Are you in obeisance or not?’ Nāṣir-i Khusraw’s description omits crucial explanations and context for this event. Namely, that the caliph’s mother Rasad, a Nubian former slave, had been brought to the palace by al-Tustarī, who later became her key ally at the head of the Fatimid treasury, while she ruled as regent for al-Mustanṣir (r. 427–487/1036–1094). The vizierA high officer of state, equivalent of a chief minister. al-Fallāḥī and the Turkish guard murdered al-Tustarī, but within a year Rasad had al-Fallāḥī imprisoned and killed.
The second event was the Aleppo campaign of 441/1049–50. Nāṣir’s sparse account in the Safar-nāma reports that the ruler of Aleppo rebelled, so the caliphIn Arabic khalīfa, the head of the Muslim community. See caliphate. sent out ʿUmdat al-Dawla but he was killed at Aleppo. From her reading of the chronicles, Dr Hunsberger identified the Aleppan rebel as the Mirdāsid Thimāl b. Ṣāliḥ, and ʿUmdat al-Dawla as the general Rifq, an African eunuch in his seventies, who led thirty thousand men on the Fatimids’ third failed campaign against the city.
Dr Hunsberger noted that Nāṣir never names al-Mustanṣir, al-Zāhir or Rasad, but he was a witness to the early cracks in Fatimid rule – factional armies, a contested vizierate and a strained treasury – that would later erupt as the Mustanṣiriyya crises, as epitomised by his own empty purse at Aydhab.
Reconciling Faith and Intellect
Daryoush Mohammad Poor’s paper, ‘Reconciling Faith and Intellect: Nāṣir-i Khusraw’s Rationalism’, concerned questions of philosophy and epistemology. He asked how far a mind can travel on its own and noted that an intellect that inquires, tests and criticises must be squared with a revelation that requires assent to truths it does not submit for inspection.
Nāṣir-i Khusraw attempted to answer these questions in his Jāmiʿ al-ḥikmatayn, composed in exile in 462/1070 in the valley of Yumgān in Badakhshān. Dr Mohammad Poor’s paper concerned the theme of nourishment of the human intellect. The intellect needs feeding from two sources: philosophy, including the natural sciences and metaphysics, and revelation, as interpreted by taʾwīlThe elucidation of the inner or esoteric meaning, bāṭin , from the literal wording or apparent meaning of a text, ritual or religious prescription.. These are the ‘twin wisdoms’ of the work’s title, and the soul’s progress towards perfection depends on their reconciliation.
The argument runs in two directions. Against the literalists, Nāṣir defended the spirit of inquiry. Against the philosophers, and Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. Zakariyyāʾ al-Rāzī in particular, he defended revelation. Al-Rāzī held prophecy to be superfluous, since philosophers can recall souls to their true world. Nāṣir’s reply was that the philosophers who do that are the prophets.
The contemporary point is that faith and reason are still presented as opposites, by secularists who take religious commitment as a failure of rationalism, and by fundamentalists who see critical inquiry as a threat to faith. Nāṣir-i Khusraw argues against this false opposition: intellect is a divine gift, so neglecting it fails the Giver, but reason is only complete under an illumination that it cannot itself generate.
The Thread
In closing, Dr Mohammad Poor traced intellect as the thread running through all the papers. Although Rūmī is not generally considered an Ismaili, he followed in Nāṣir-i Khusraw’s footsteps given the prominence he grants to the intellect. In Dr Rezaee’s account, the role of intellect can be seen in the women’s striving for higher education and the value they place upon the pursuit of learning. The value of intellect is also upheld by the various institutions of the Ismaili Imamat, such as The Institute of Ismaili Studies, the Aga KhanA title granted by the Shah of Persia to the then Ismaili Imam in 1818 and inherited by each of his successors to the Imamate. University, the University of Central Asia, and the wide network of educational institutions built over the past 150 years. Finally, Dr Mohammad Poor’s paper showed how Nāṣir-i Khusraw identified the substance of intellect as joy (shādī): joy comes with the removal of ignorance, ignorance is removed by knowledge, and knowledge is what intellect produces.
The papers are a tribute not only to the figure of Nāṣir-i Khusraw, a towering figure for the Iranian and Central Asian IsmailisAdherents of a branch of Shi’i Islam that considers Ismail, the eldest son of the Shi’i Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (d. 765), as his successor., but also to the role of intellect in the Ismaili tradition, throughout history and down to our own contemporary times.
