Rustom/Sourcebook, 21. Nāṣir-i Khusraw: The Traveler’s Provision

In the seventeenth chapter of his Traveler’s Provisions, the Ismaili philosopher Nasir-i Khusraw presents an original theo-cosmological understanding of God’s Speech and God’s Writing by way of analogy with human speech and writing. Speech and writing each serve a different epistemic context: speech is a form of communication tailored to those present with the speaker while writing is for those people who are absent from the speaker. In Khusraw’s Ismaili Muslim Neoplatonic worldview, God’s cosmic Writing is the primary medium of divine guidance for human beings; this Divine Writing is the intelligible content of the Universal Intellect and Universal Soul, which are the two highest eternal creations of God and the proximate principles of the spiritual and material worlds. To support this claim, Khusraw observes that speech is a communication medium for those spatially and temporally present with the speaker while writing is more appropriate for those who are absent from him. By analogy, Khusraw reasons that God must communicate with human beings through writing and not through direct speech because humans are not temporally or spatially present with God.