Kufa
Keywords: Esoteric, Basra, Baghdad, compendium, mathematics, music, logic, astronomy, physical sciences, natural sciences, soul, ethics, revelation, spirituality, philosophy, Ikhwan, shi‘a, Ismaili, Fatimid, Qur’an, Abrahamic monotheism, Torah, Canonical Gospels, ancient Indian and Persian classics, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Euclid, Ptolemy, syncretism, history of ideas in Islam, Muslim civilisation.
Abstract: Ikhwan al-Safa’ (the Brethren of Purity) were the affiliates of an esoteric coterie that was based in Basra and Baghdad around the last quarter of the tenth century CE. The learned adepts of this fraternity authored a compendium, Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa’ (The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity), which was structured in the form of an encyclopaedia.
This voluminous work grouped fifty-two tracts that treated themes in mathematics, music, logic, astronomy, and the physical cum natural sciences, as well as exploring the nature of the soul and investigating associated matters in ethics, revelation, and spirituality. This series offered synoptic elucidations of the classical traditions in philosophy and science of the ancients and the moderns of the age. It was also accompanied by a dense treatise titled al-Risala al-jami‘a (The Comprehensive Epistle) and further complemented by an appendage known as Risalat.jami‘at al-jami‘a (The Condensed Comprehensive Epistle).
Author
Professor Nader El-Bizri
Professor Nader El-Bizri is a philosopher and architect. He is currently affiliated with the University of Cambridge, and he was until recently the Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Sharjah. Prior to that he was a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Durham University and a tenured Professor at the American University of Beirut, where he served as the Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and as the Director of General Education. Before that he taught and conducted research across the academic ranks at the universities of Harvard, Nottingham, Lincoln, and at the CNRS in Paris and the IIS in London. He serves on various academic boards internationally and is the General Editor of the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity series that is published by Oxford University Press in association with the IIS. He has acted as advisor to the Science Museum in London, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Geneva, the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in Berlin, UNESCO in Paris, and Expo2020 in Dubai. He has been interviewed by the BBC and France Culture cultural programs, and in recognition of his contributions to the field, he has received awards and honours, including the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences Prize.