The Ismaili-Sufi Sage of Pamir: Mubarak-i Wakhani and the Esoteri ...

What, nevertheless, makes Mubārak’s approach different from that of Sufism is the equal importance of the physical vision (dīdār-i jusmānī) of the Beloved with its spiritual manifestation (dīdār-i ruhānī) occurring in the mystic’s imaginative consciousness. In other words, there did really exist an Ismāīlī Imam of the Time for whose dīdār Mubārak could have hoped in the realm of the physical world besides the quest for his spiritual vision.

In an effort to balance the Ismāīlī esotericism and Sufi mysticism, he developed the existing ‘Sufisised’ (to use Ivanow’s expression)¹⁴ Ismāīlism of Pamir in terms of intellectual representation and doctrinal canonisation. Mubārak was probably one of the pioneers of the indigenous religious literary tradition; he not only codified the oral tradition, but also evaluated and put it in an intellectual framework. This argument is mainly presented in chapter 4, where one of his famous books, the Chihil Dunyā (the Forty Worlds), a didactic narrative poem (dāstān), is examined to show the indigenous perception of such Islamic notions as creation, prophethood and sainthood (or Imamate).

Mubārak’s poetic legacy constitutes over sixteen titles, including sixty thousand verses (bayts) that have been detected so far. His works cover a wide array of topics, of which a brief summary is provided in the next section. This is, thus, the first attempt to explore the hitherto unheard voice of Mubārak, which may be regarded as that of a caged nightingale in Persian poetic heritage. Mubārak was a prolific Persian writer, who also had a good command of the Arabic language. Nevertheless, his writing is also noticeably influenced by the Badakhshani dialect of the Tajik language (his native language).¹⁵ The words taken from this context, which are present in Mubārak’s works and which have been employed in this study, are explained appropriately throughout this work.