The Encyclopedia of the Epistles of Purity is an esoteric Islamic text written by an unknown group of mysterious writers called the"Having been hidden within the cloak of secrecy from its very inception, the Rasa'il have provided many points of contention and have been a constant source of dispute among both Muslim and Western scholars. The identification of the authors, or possibly one author, the place and time of writing and propagation of their works, the nature of the secret brotherhood the outer manifestation of which comprises the Rasa'il - these and many secondary questions have remained without answer." Nasr (1964), pg 25. Brethren of Purity during the Buyid era."The work only professes to be an epitome, an outline; its authors lay claim to no originality, they only summarize what others have thought and discovered. What they do lay claim to is system and completeness. The work does profess to contain a systematized, harmonious and co-ordinated view of the universe and life, its origin and destiny, formed out of many discordant, incoherent views; and it does claim to be a 'complete account of all things' - to contain, in epitome, all that was known at the time it was written. It refers to more profound and special treatises for fuller information on the several sciences it touches upon, but it does claim to touch on all sciences, all departments of knowledge, and to set forth their leading results. In effect, it is, by its own showing, a 'hand-encyclopedia of Arabian philosophy in the tenth century'. It is not easy to exaggerate the importance of this encyclopedia. Its value lies in its completeness, in its systematizing of the results of Persian study." Stanley Lane-Poole (1883), pages 190, 191. Composed of 52 treatises, it had a great influence on later intellectual leading lights of the Muslim world"It is probable that they have influenced some of the most prominent thinkers of Islam, such as al-Ghazzali (d. 1111A.D.) and Ibn al-Arabi (d. 1240 A.D.)." van Reijn (1995), pg. "v"."The Rasa'il were widely read by most learned men of later periods, including Ibn Sina and al-Ghazzali, have continued to be read up to our own times, and have been translated into Persian, Turkish, and Hindustani. From the number of manuscripts present in various libraries in the Muslim world, it must be considered among the most popular of Islamic works on learning." Nasr (1964), pg. 36 and was transmitted as far abroad within the Muslim world as al-Andalus.Van Reijn (1945), pg "v""But they produced this enormous encyclopaedia, and um, everybody read it and we know that it was widely read by mathematicians in Spain, and by philosophers in Spain. Most crucially of all, it was read by Muhyi-I-din - Ibn al-Arabi, er, the most famous Sufi that Spain produced, or indeed one of the most famous Sufis in the history of Islamic mysticism - er, he died in 1240. Er, he absorbed a lot of their ideas and he was in turn read by these ministers of the Nasrid monarch Ibn al-Khatib, and Ibn al-Zamrak, both of whom had strong, mystical tendencies." Robert Irwin; "In the Footsteps of Muhammad", transcript of a BBC program
The identity and period of the authors of the Encyclopedia have not been conclusively established,Ikhwan as-Safa'. (2007). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved April 25, 2007, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online though the work has been mostly linked with Isma'ilism. Idris Imad al-Din, a prominent 15th-century Isma'ili missionary in Yemen, credited the authorship of the encyclopedia to Muhammad al-Taqi, the 9th Isma'ili Imam, who lived in occultation in the era of the Abbasid Caliphate at the beginning of the Islamic Golden Age.
Some suggest that besides Isma'ilism, the Brethren of Purity also contains elements of Sufism, Mu'tazilism, Nusayrism and others.Brethren of Purity, Nader El-Bizri, an article in Medieval Islamic Civilization, an Encyclopedia, Vol. I, p. 118-119, Routledge (New York-London, 2006). Retrieved from ."Ibn al-Qifti, giving his own view, considers the Ikhwan as followers of the school of the Mu'tazilah.... Ibn Tamiyah, the Hanbali jurist, on the other hand, tends towards the other extreme in relating the Ikhwan to the Nusairis, who are as far removed from the rationalists as any group to be found in Islam." Nasr (1964), pg 26. Some scholars present the work as Sunni Sufi.
The subject of the work is vast and ranges from mathematics, music, astronomy, and natural sciences, to ethics, politics, religion, and magic—all compiled for one, basic purpose, that learning is training for the soul and a preparation for its eventual life once freed from the body.Walker, Paul E. "EḴWĀN AL-ṢAFĀʾ". In Encyclopædia Iranica. December 15, 1998.
Authorship
Authorship of the Encyclopedia is usually ascribed to the mysterious "Brethren of Purity" a group of unknown scholars placed in Basra, Iraq sometime around 10th century CE .Ikhwan al-Safa', Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy"Not everyone accepts the contemporary evidence that gives the Brethren as inhabitants of Basra. V. A. Ivanov, in The Alleged Founders of Ismailism (Bombay, 1946), says that "I would be inclined to think that this was a kind of camouflage story being circulated by the Ismailis to avoid the book being used as a proof of their orthodoxy. [sic]". As quoted by Nasr (1964), pg 29. While it is generally accepted that it was the group who authored at least the 52 rasa'il,Unsurprisingly, other authors have been proposed: "Between these two extremes there have been the views expressed over the centuries that the Rasa'il were written by 'Ali ibn Abi Talib, al-Ghazzali, Hallaj, Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq, or various Isma'ili da'is, or "missionaries"." Nasr (1964), pg 26 the authorship of the "Summary" (al-Risalat al-Jami'a) is uncertain; it has been ascribed to the later Majriti but this has been disproved by Yves Marquet (see the Risalat al-Jami'a section). Since style of the text is plain, and there are numerous ambiguities, due to language and vocabulary, often of Persian origin.Baffioni, Carmela. "Ikhwân al-Safâ’", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), First published April 22, 2008; Retrieved May 12, 2012.
Some philosophers and historians such as Tawhidi, Ibn al-Qifti, Shahrazuri disclosed the names of those allegedly involved in the development of the work: Abu Sulayma Bisti, Muqaddasi, 'Ali ibn Harun, Zanjani, Muahmmad ibn Ahmad Narhruji, 'Awfi. All these people are according to Henry Corbin, Ismailis Other scholars, such as Susanne Diwald and Abdul Latif Tibawi have asserted a Sunni-Sufi nature of the work.
Further perplexities abound; the use of pronouns for the authorial "sender" of the rasa'il is not consistent, with the writer occasionally slipping from third person to first-person (for example, in Epistle 44, "The Doctrine of the Sincere Brethren")."The Prophets and those of the Philosophers who have the right view... maintain that the body is only a prison of the soul, or a veil, an intermediary path or an isthmus.... The sages of India called Brahmins cremate the bodies of the dead, but ignorant and cunning as they are, they do not do it for the reasons I have given. It would be proper to say that the term "sages" applies to only a few among them." van Reijn (1995), pages 24–25. This has led some to suggest that the rasa'il were not in fact written co-operatively by a group or consolidated notes from lectures and discussions, but were actually the work of a single person. Of course, if one accepts the longer time spans proposed for the composition of the Encyclopedia, or the simpler possibility that each risala was written by a separate person, sole authorship would be impossible.
Contents The subject matter of the Rasa'il is vast and ranges from mathematics, music, logic, astronomy, the physical and natural sciences, as well as exploring the nature of the soul and investigating associated matters in ethics, revelation, and spirituality.From the introduction of Muslim Neoplatonists: An Introduction to the Thought of the Brethren of Purity, Ian Richard Netton, 1991. Edinburgh University Press,
Its philosophical outlook was Neoplatonic and it tried to integrate Greek philosophy (and especially the dialectical reasoning and logic of Aristotelianism) with various astrological, Hermetic, Gnostic and Islamic schools of thought. Scholars have seen IsmailiSome have claimed that the Brethren were Ismaili, though this may be unlikely because of their very lukewarm embrace of the Imamate and other aspects of Ismailian theology, in addition to the lack of solid evidence in favor of such a hypothesis. This is not to say that there aren't some suggestive links between the Brethren and the Isma'ili. Heinz Halm notes in his "The cosmology of the pre-Fatimid Isma'iliyya" (as printed in Medieval Isma'ili History and Thought, ed. Farhad Daftary, 1996, ) that the Sunni theologian Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) asserted that the doctrines of the Brethren were exactly identical to the Ismaili's in one of his fatwas. Halm further notes that Paul Casanova had shown that the infamous Hashshashin had approved of the Encyclopedia and that their missionaries in Yemen even made use of it. Other sects apparently drew upon the Encyclopedia as well: "The theological treatises of the Tayyibi Ismailis of the Yemen contain ample quotations from the Rasa'il Ikhwan al-Safa', and in the 'Uyun al-akhbar by the Yemenite da'i Idris 'Imad al-Din (d. 1468), Ahmad b. 'Abd Allah b. Muhammad b. Isma'il b. Ja'far al-Sadiq, the ninth imam and the second of the leaders of the Isma'ili da'wa residing in Salamiyya, is explicitly named as the author as the Rasa'il." (pg 76) Indeed, the respect of some Ismaili was great indeed, some referring to it as "a Quran after the Quran" (Nasr, 1964, pg. 26). V. A. Ivanov remarks in his The Alleged Founders of Ismailism (Bombay, 1946), that "the work is accepted by the Isma'ili as belonging to their religion, and is still regarded as esoteric..." But there are more reasons to reject an identification of the Brethren with Isma'ili, such as the failure of Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani, an extremely important Islamic theologian, to make any mention of them. And other authors agree with this: "... the well-known modern Isma'ili scholar, H. F. al-Hamdani, although emphasizing the importance of the Rasa'il in the Isma'ili mission in the Yemen, disclaims Isma'ili authorship of the work and instead attributes the treatises to the 'Alids." (Amusingly, V. A. Ivanov attributes sponsorship of the work to the 'Alids' enemies, the Fatimids, instead, in his A Guide to Ismaili Literature, London 1933) From pg 26–27 of Nasr (1964). From pg 8 of Tibawi: "There is sufficient evidence in the tracts themselves to prove Isma'ili sympathies. Indeed, such sympathies have long been pointed out by Muslim authors, medieval and modern, who tried to turn sympathy into actual relationship. However, the balance of evidence tends to show that such relationship was a later development. There is as yet no proof that the formation of Ikhwan as-Safa and the publication of their Rasa'il was an Isma'ili movement, or even a movement concerted with any of the contemporary agitation of the Shi'a." From page 9: "A glaring example of the Ikhwan's independence is their advocacy of the principle that the office of imam need not be hereditary, for they argue that if the desired good qualities are not found in one single person but scattered among a group, then the group and not the individual should be 'the lord of the time and the imam. More surprising still is the denouncement of the belief in a concealed imam as painful to those who hold it and the discredit of the significance of 'number seven' and those who believe in it as contrary to the Ikhwan's creed."