Abu Ishaq Quhistani

Few biographical details are available on Abu Ishaq Ibrahim Quhistani, a prominent Nizari Ismaili author and missionary (da‘i), who flourished in the second half of the 9th AH / 15th CE century and died not too long after 904 AH/1498 CE.

He was born in the district of Mu’minabad, to the east of Birjand, in Quhistan, the medieval name of the south-eastern region of Khurasan. He evidently spent his entire life in that part of Persia.

As mentioned in his sole surviving work, Haft bab, or Seven Chapters (pp. 24, 63), a treatise written at the beginning of the 10th AH / 16th CE century and preserved by the Nizaris of Central Asia, Abu Ishaq was a contemporary of the thirty-fourth Qasimshahi Nizari imam, Mustansir bi’llah also known as Gharib Mirza (d. 904/1498), whose mausoleum is still preserved in the village of Anjudan in central Persia.

As explained in the first autobiographical chapter of his Haft bab (pp. 4-9), Abu Ishaq was born into a non-Ismaili (probably Ithna‘ashari) family and converted to Nizari Ismailism in his youth by a local da‘i. Subsequently, he was appointed to a post in the da‘wa or missionary organisation of the Quhistani Nizaris by the region’s chief da‘i, a certain Khwaja Qasim.