Introduction

Abū al-Makārim Rukn al-Dīn Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ‘Alā’ al-Dawla al-Biyābānakī al-Simnānī was an important Sufi master and writer under the Mongol Īlkhānid dynasty that ruled Iran from 1256 to 1335. Born into a family of wealthy landlords in Simnān, in north central Iran, al-Simnānī joined his father in the service of the Īlkhānid prince Arghūn. Arghūn, like others of his dynasty, displayed great tolerance toward Christianity but is himself said to have a been a follower of Buddhism; Buddhist priests were in any case among his closest advisers. Al-Simnānī was raised for a life at court: both his mother's and his father's lineages included courtiers of the Khwārazmshāhs, the dynasty that had come to an end with the arrival of the Īlkhānids; his maternal uncle served as chief judge under the Īlkhānids until his execution in 1301; his paternal uncle rose to the rank of chief minister of Iran before falling from favor and being executed in 1299; and his father served intermittently as master of the guards, master of the treasury of Iraq, and governor of Baghdad until his execution in 1295/96. Al-Simnānī served as a companion of Prince Arghūn, who was six to ten years older, from the time they were both children.

Al-Simnānī appears to have been increasingly dissatisfied with court life as he entered young adulthood and began to be drawn to a mystical career, but he was strongly dissuaded by his family from giving up royal service. Following a dramatic mystical experience on the battlefield, however, al-Simnānī abruptly left the court in 1286 and thereafter devoted himself to a life of seclusion in his hometown, Biyābānak. He devoted himself entirely to mystical endeavors and experienced a great deal of success; by the time of his death in 1336, he had become one of the most respected religious scholars of the Īlkhānid empire. He used his considerable wealth to construct a large Sufi complex called Ṣūfiyābād-i Khudādād, where he instructed a large group of disciples including several Īlkhānid princes and courtiers.

Al-Simnānī had a keen sense of the narratability of his life and wrote several autobiographical tracts, some of which constitute complete treatises; others take the form of subsections in larger works. The bulk of his autobiographical writings are in Persian, but a number of Arabic texts exist that range from highly structured apologiae pro vita sua to detailed anecdotes of his life at court and the process by which he secured permission to retire to Simnān and devote himself to Sufism. The selection translated here is taken from one of his two most important works, al-‘Urwa li-ahl al-khalwa wa-l-jalwa (The Bond for the People of Reclusion and Unveiling), written in 1320–21, which contains the longest of his Arabic autobiographical writings. This selection describes al-Simnānī's conversion experience, his establishment of a large endowment to support Sufi teaching establishments—khānqāhs—and a confrontation with Satan in which al-Simnānī is almost tempted to abandon his ascetic life and return to the pursuit of wealth and position.

There are several references in the text to the creation and preservation of charitable endowments (sing. waqf, pl. awqāf). This singular development of Islamic culture allowed a benefactor to endow an institution, such as a school or a hospital, with the income from a specific source, such as a parcel of land or the rent from a building, in perpetuity. Such endowments often included provisions for the salary of one or more employees: the endowment's executor, teachers, bookkeeper, cleaning staff, and the like. In al-Simnānī's time, these salaries were often transformed into sinecures from which family members or descendants of the benefactor could derive a tax-free income, and were even bought and sold, though this was a clear abuse of their original purpose. The detailed account al-Simnānī gives of the care with which he set up his religious endowments, prohibiting relatives, descendants, and political figures from being involved and preventing the executorship of the endowment from passing down within one family, contrasts sharply with the young al-Simnānī he describes earlier whose only concern was the accumulation of wealth and power. His chagrin at the hereditary executorship of religious endowments in his day perhaps echoes his wealthy landowning roots and an alienation from his family.

By his own account, al-Simnānī's many short autobiographical pieces are intended to serve the didactic function of illustrating his teachings through examples from his personal experience and demonstrating the way to the True Path: “for it [is] impossible for anyone to understand [how I came to know the True Path] without hearing the account of my life from beginning to end.”^[1]