Persian Poetry, Sufism and Ismailism: The Testimony of Khwājah Qāsim Tushtarī’s<i>Recognizing God</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Khwājah Qāsim Tushtarī’s recently discovered Recognizing God (Maʿrifat-i Khudāy taʿālā) is one of the only texts known to have survived from the early Alamūt period of Ismaili Muslim history. This article analyses the work in the context of the “new Invitation” (daʿwat-i jadīd) to the Ismaili faith that al-Shahrastānī (d. 548/1153) tells us was inaugurated by the Fāṭimid Imam al-Mustanṣir billāh (d. 487/1094) and championed by Ḥasan-i Ṣabbāḥ (d. 518/1124). The text emphasises that the ultimate purpose of human existence is to know God, and that the path to this knowledge is through the Imam of the Time. The concepts of the ‘true teacher’ (muʿallim-i ṣādiq) and ‘sage’ (ḥakīm) are examined and the literary culture fostered at the Ismaili fortresses, particularly Girdkūh, is explored. Significantly, the article draws attention to the position of Sanāʾī Ghaznawī (d.circa525/1131) in Persian Ismaili literature and to the very early development of pious, devotional and homiletic poetry as well as the “mathnawīmetre” in Ismaili environments, which may have helped set the stage for some of the most significant poetic achievements of mystical Islam: the writings of Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār (d.circa618/1221) and Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (d. 672/1273).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".