Hadith, the Path of Blame, and the Year 1221

Nishapur was one of the four great cities of Khurasan and, for two centuries, one of the most productive scholarly centres in the Muslim world. Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, whose collection of hadith stands beside al-Bukhari's as one of the two most authoritative in Sunni Islam, was of this city and is buried in its outskirts. Its madrasas included a foundation of the Seljuk vizier Nizam al-Mulk, and al-Ghazali, who came from a nearby town, taught there before and after the crisis of confidence that made him abandon his chair for a decade of wandering and produce the reconciliation of law with inner practice that shaped Sunni piety afterwards.

The city also produced a distinctive spiritual movement. The people of blame held that any outward sign of devotion risks becoming vanity, and that a seeker should therefore conceal his practice and even court the contempt of others in order to keep the account with God private. It was a corrective aimed at the professionalisation of piety, and the idea reappears in later Sufi literature and in the wandering dervish traditions.

The Mongol army destroyed Nishapur in 1221 with a thoroughness the sources dwell on, and the city never regained its standing. Much of what its libraries held is known only because later writers quoted it. Omar Khayyam, mathematician, astronomer and calendar reformer, was born and buried there, and a garden pavilion now marks the grave.