On a Quest for the Three Wise Men of Neyshabur
Of the cities I’ve visited in Iran, Neyshabur, or Nishapur, was the one I wasn’t familiar with beforehand. However, after visiting the tombs of its great citizens, I could imagine how this city used to be an intellectual and cultural center in Khorasan. In today’s maps, Khorasan straddles an area across Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
The Sasanid Empire of Persia (224-651 C.E.) named its province in the east Khorasan, which in Farsi means “the place where the sun rises.” King Saphur I of the Sasanids established Neyshabur in Khorasan in the third century and made it the capital of the province.
The city passed through the hands of different dynasties and empires, and reached its peak in the 10th century during Samanid Dynasty of Persia. The Samanids made Neysabhur the capital of its empire. It became the center of cultural and intellectual life as well as a transit for the trade that connected China in the east to Egypt in the west. In terms of intellectual life, Neyshabur rivaled Baghdad and Cairo. It also used to be the gateway to the east, where people of different ethnicities and religions lived.
I traveled to by car to Neyshabur, 115 kilometers west of Mashhad, the capital of Iran’s Razavi Khorasan province. On the way, I passed a mountain range. Neyshabur is famous for its fertile land and pleasant climate. It borders the high mountains of Bilanud to the north, from where the chilly morning breeze in Neyshabur blows. There’s an Arab saying that men’s sorrow is freed by two things: morning in Neyshabur, and sleeping in Baghdad.
Neyshabur was destroyed several times from severe earthquakes and attacks by warring rulers and dynasties.
The city today, with a population of 239,185 as of 2011, is a reconstruction of the destroyed city. The iconic places that draw visitors to Neyshabur include the mausoleums of its famous figures.
I arrived at the complex of the mausoleums of Attar and Kamal Al Mulk on a bright day. To my surprise, the mausoleums are located in a large, green, beautiful garden shaded by cypress and pine trees. In the middle of the garden, a prominent monument caught my eye: a hexagonal building decorated with beautiful tiles and topped with a turquoise dome inscribed with calligraphy. This is the mausoleum of Farid Oddin Attar Neyshaburi, one of the greatest Persian Sufi poets and philosophers of the 12th century.
Many people visit Neyshabur to pay respects at his tomb. Inside his mausoleum, I found I wasn’t the only person there, and so had to wait a while for my turn. On the wall inside the mausoleum, visitors can see some of his couplets written in Farsi and framed.
Attar was born in Neyshabur probably in the year 1110 and lived during the era when intellectual life prospered. He wrote 45,000 couplets and proses. Attar had journeyed to Egypt, Sham (Syria), Iraq, India and Central Asia to meet with the Sufis before finally settling back down in his hometown to put together the sayings of famous Sufis. His masterpiece is “Mantiq ut Tayr” (“The Conference of the Birds”), a metaphorical poem on the quest of birds. His ideas and thinking have not just influenced Persian literature but also Islamic literature.
Attar was dead by the time the Mongols ransacked the city in 1221. His mausoleum was built by Ali-Shir Nava’i in the 16th century.
In the same complex at Attar’s mausoleum lies the body of Mohammad Ghaffari (1845 to Aug. 18, 1940). Ghaffari was a well-known Persian painter, more popularly known by his title Kamal Al Mulk, meaning “the perfect one of the kingdom.”
Born in a family with strong artistic traditions in Kashan, Iran, Kamal Al Mulk started out working as a royal painter to King Nasereddin Shah of the Qajar Dynasty of Persia at the age of 18.
He worked until the king’s assassination. His realist style of painting is very delicate and articulate, and they mostly portray important figures from that era, landscapes and parts of the royal palaces.
In 1927, Kamal Al Mulk had a tragic accident and lost an eye. He secluded himself in Neyshabur and died in 1940. His beautifully designed mausoleum seems to reflect his works.
The lovely garden of the mausoleum doesn’t portray the resting places as gloomy, but as friendly. I saw a local family in traditional Khorasani dress who were willing to be photographed for visitors to the garden for free.
Another famous figure born in Neyshabur is Hakim Omar Khayyam (1047-1123), a mathematician, astronomer and poet. I visited his mausoleum, set amid a 21,500-square-meter garden of pine, cypress and acacia trees. Khayyam’s mausoleum is surrounded by open, geometrically designed, tall walls that may reflect his works as a mathematician and astronomer. In the neatly arranged garden lies the Omar Khayyam Museum that houses the books he wrote, some translations of his works, as well as demonstrations and models of his works on mathematics and geometry.
Khayyam studied science, philosophy and algebra in Neyshabur, Balkh and Samarkand. He discovered a geometrical method to solve cubic equations. In a book that is now lost, he wrote about Pascal’s triangle. He elaborated Euclid’s Elements, a book written by the ancient Greek mathematician, to solve linear and quadratic equations.
As an astronomer, Khayyam measured the length of a year to an outstanding degree of accuracy. Because of this work, he was employed in the royal court by Malik Shah I, the sultan of Seljuq, to reform the calendar. With other astronomers, he was also assigned to build an observatory in Esfahan.
As a poet, Khayyam wrote thousands of four-line verses, or rubaiya. The poetry community outside Persia came to know him as a great poet after his rubaiyat were translated into English. Edward FitzGerald made Khayyam famous in the West by translating and adapting his works into the “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.”
And it is Neyshabur, this little-known city in Khorasan, that was once home to intellectual giants of the likes of Khayyam and Attar.
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