Diary of a Journey through Syria and Palestine

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Description

In January 1047, a Persian court official named Nasir-i-Khusrau set out from Merv on a journey that would remake his life. Over the next seven years he crossed the length of the Islamic world — Aleppo, the Syrian coast, Jerusalem, Fatimid Cairo, Mecca — and returned home a convert to Ismaili Shi'ism, having witnessed the Fatimid caliphate at the height of its wealth and learning. His travel diary, the Safarnama, is one of the most precise and vivid eyewitness accounts to survive from the medieval Islamic world, almost entirely free of the pious padding that fills so many chronicles of its age.

This edition presents the Syria-and-Palestine portion of the diary, in Guy Le Strange's 1888 translation for the Palestine Pilgrims' Text Society. It follows Nasir-i-Khusrau down the Syrian coast from Aleppo to Acre, inland to Jerusalem — where he spent months measuring and describing the Haram al-Sharif stone by stone, gate by gate, twenty years before the First Crusade would seize the city — and south to Hebron, before he took ship for Egypt. It is a far less famous account than Ibn Battuta's later travels, but an earlier one, and in its description of eleventh-century Jerusalem, an even more detailed one.

Author & Genre

Nasir-i-Khusrau (1004 – c. 1088) was a Persian poet, philosopher, and Ismaili missionary. Genre: medieval travel diary, in Guy Le Strange's 19th-century English translation.

"There are years when as many as twenty thousand people will be present at Jerusalem during the first days of the pilgrimage month... From all the countries of the Greeks, too, and from other lands, the Christians and the Jews come up to Jerusalem in great numbers in order to make their visitation of the Church and the Synagogue that is there." — Nasir-i-Khusrau, on Jerusalem's pilgrims of all three faiths, 1047 A.D.