ʿAzīz Nasafī and Ismailism

Ismaili Studies / IHTLS . Register to Attend Online  : https://www.iis.ac.uk/events/aziz-nasafi-ismaili-cosmology-lecture/

The Institute of Ismaili Studies (IIS) will host an online lecture on 22 April 2026 as part of the Islamic History and Thought Lecture Series (IHTLS). Dr Mohammad Amin Mansouri will examine the thought of ʿAzīz Nasafī, a major Muslim intellectual of the Mongol period, and explore his conceptual affinities with Ismaili cosmology.

ʿAzīz Nasafī (fl. 7th/13th century) was one of the most prominent Muslim thinkers of the Mongol period, whose works circulated widely and were translated from Latin and Ottoman Turkish to modern languages such as English, French, and German. Nasafī’s writings offer a particularly revealing case study of the intellectual entanglements and complexities of the Persianate Mongol world. Although a Sunni thinker, his work shows striking conceptual affinities with Ismaili cosmological texts from the Alamut period. Nasafī’s cosmological vision was not merely an abstract intellectual exercise detached from reality, but a peace-oriented response to the sectarian fractures and political upheavals of his time. In this sense, Nasafī’s project reflects what shall be described as cosmological kinship, a shared intellectual grammar that traversed sectarian lines, even if deployed to different ends. As will be argued, although Nasafī is often celebrated as an early authority who established monism (waḥdat al-wujūd) as an independent intellectual school, little attention has been given to his possible engagement with Ismaili sources from the Alamut era, which articulated similar intellectual and cosmological models and used almost identical language. This presentation situates Nasafī’s thought in conversation with the Ismaili tradition, and aims to re-center Shiʿi intellectual traditions, which are often relegated to the margins, as integral to the broader debates in Islamic intellectual history during the Mongol era.