Ikhwan al-Safa

Books on Ismailism, reviews etc..
Post Reply
From_Alamut
Posts: 666
Joined: Tue Jan 22, 2008 8:22 am

Ikhwan al-Safa

Post by From_Alamut »

The Book Ikhwan al-Safa (The Brethren of Purity), I heard is belong to US Ismailiya Esoteric Muslim. I also heard that it wrote by one of our Imam but I did not exactly know which one. They said when they book was publish in medieval time, it came without an author.

Please someone correct me and gave me the right information on this book.

Regard
kmaherali
Posts: 25105
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Post by kmaherali »

http://www.iis.ac.uk/SiteAssets/pdf/pub ... _lores.pdf

The Ikhwån al-Íafå’ and their Raså’il.
An Introduction
Edited by Nader El-Bizri

Ikhwån al-Íafå’ (The Brethren of Purity) were the anonymous adepts of a 10th-century esoteric fraternity of scholars principally based in Basra and Baghdad. This brotherhood occupied a prominent station in the history of
science and philosophy in Islam due to the wide reception and assimilation of their monumental encyclopaedia: Raså’il Ikhwån al-Íafå’ (The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity). This compendium contained fifty-two epistles that offered synoptic explications of the classical sciences and
philosophies of the age. Divided into four classificatory parts, it treated themes in mathematics, logic, natural philosophy, psychology, metaphysics and theology, in addition to moral and didactic fables. The Ikhwån were learned compilers of scientific and philosophical
knowledge, and their Raså’il constituted a paradigmatic legacy in the canonization of philosophy and the sciences in mediaeval Islamic civilization.

This present volume gathers studies by leading philosophers, historians and scholars of Islamic studies, who are also the editors and translators of the first Arabic critical edition and complete annotated English translation of the Raså’il Ikhwån al-Íafå’, which will be published in
association with Oxford University Press that this present volume initiates.

The chapters of this present volume explore the conceptual and historical aspects of the philosophical and scientific contents of the Raså’il and their classification, as well as investigating the authorship and dating of this corpus and the impact that the Ikhwån’s intellectual tradition exercised
in the unfolding of the history of ideas in Islam.
Admin
Posts: 6687
Joined: Mon Jan 06, 2003 10:37 am
Contact:

Post by Admin »

Lots written on the subject by Yves Marquet:

http://www.ismaili.net/ma0428.html

Some of the titles mentioned are already linked [those with a pair of glasses beside]

Some of the other authors that have written on Ikhwan al Safa re:

Diwald, Susanne
Fouchecour, Ch. H. de.
Mayer, A.
Stern, S. M
Stroumsa, Sarah

You can find their work referenced on http://www.ismaili.net/inbyauth.html
Post Reply