Islamisation on the Iranian Periphery: Nasir-i Khusraw and Ismailism in Badakhshan

It has long been recognised in the scholarship on Islamisation that Muslim governors and administrators in Iran and Central Asia under the early caliphate, with few exceptions, displayed little interest in instigating mass conversion to Islam. As research by Wilferd Madelung, Patricia Crone and others has demonstrated, the cause of mass conversion was taken up more directly by the early Islamic sectarian movements, who sought out new converts to their causes among non-Arab populations and who often combined their religious appeal with various political objectives in opposition to the caliphate.1 The competitive nature of these movements contributed in no small part to rapid Islamisation in the Iranian world from approximately the mid-second century of the Hijra onwards. Yet while many of these movements disappear from the sources in subsequent centuries, the populations among which they once held sway, by and large, retained an attachment to Islam.