Knowledge and Liberation

A Persian treatise in thirty questions and answers by Nāṣir-i Khusraw, the eleventh-century Ismaili poet, traveller and philosopher, probably written during his exile in the mountains of Badakhshan. Each chapter states a philosophical or theological question and answers it from within Ismaili Neoplatonism. The questions fall into five groups. The first concerns cosmogony: how a world in time comes from an eternal Creator. The second concerns ontology, including the nature of substance and the existence of the soul. The third covers physics: matter and form, motion, water and the growth of plants. The fourth treats theology, including God's oneness, the Qur'an as the speech of God, human service to God, and knowledge and ignorance. The last deals with theodicy and the afterlife: the liberation of the soul, the meaning of the straight path, the reckoning and the balance, and free will and accountability.

It is a compact, readable introduction to Ismaili philosophical theology and to the way medieval Neoplatonism was put to work in Persian prose.