VIEWPOINTS AROUND 1000 | 205worldview imposed a revision of the antique heritage.^32 The Alexandrian
conspectus of human knowledge, filtered through the Qurʾanic vision, re-
mained influential in the Caliphate too.^33 Philosophers from Kindī onward
pursued reconciliation of religious and rational studies, believing instruction
in the sciences leads the soul to purification. Programmatic and classificatory
statements were gradually fleshed out in treatises on individual sciences, in-
cluding the vast translated library of Greek medicine, mathematics, astron-
omy and philosophy. Fārābī (d. 948) was a fundamental guide in all this ac-
tivity, and his whole oeuvre can be seen as an encyclopedia founded on a
macro- microcosmic vision of the divine and human spheres, revealed to the
Prophet and designed to impart salvation. Ibn Sīnā’s original, encyclopedic
synthesis in The cure, based on the summation of the entire Alexandrian cur-
riculum in his earlier work, was also evoked in chapter 5.
But to end the First Millennium with such as Ibn Sīnā and Bīrūnī begs
accusations of intellectual elitism. Encyclopedism usually involves some at-
tempt to make knowledge more available. That was a hard goal to achieve
before printing, or indeed the circulation of cheap books in the twentieth
century. But the largely anonymous milieu of the Brethren of Purity in Basra
and Baghdad, around the 970s and 980s, gets us nearer the circles we are
looking for.^34 The rich manuscript tradition of their Letters shows they
were widely read, not in the orthodox Sunni world—for the Brethren were
Shiites—but at least in the Ismaʿili communities which took them up about
two centuries after their composition, have continued to revere them to the
present day, and to which they may themselves have belonged. (The enclosed
and tightly defined Ismaʿili community, with its well- guarded libraries only
recently opened to—or at least exploited by—scholars, and bound to yield
more surprises, can be placed alongside the yemeni Zaydis and the Karaite
Jews with their Muʿtazilite manuscripts, as another instance of a First Millen-
nium literary and exegetical tradition’s power to mold community identity
and sustain it over long centuries.)
32 For a similar analysis of the imperially inspired compilation/encyclopedic literature of tenth-
century East Rome, see Magdalino in van Deun and Macé (eds), Encyclopedic trends [5:86] 156.
33 G. Endress, “The cycle of knowledge: Intellectual traditions and encyclopaedias of the rational
sciences in Arabic Islamic Hellenism,” in id. (ed.), Organizing knowledge [5:87] 103–33, on what follows.
More generally on Arabic encyclopedism, see G. J. van Gelder, “Compleat men, women and books,” in P.
Binkley (ed.), Pre- modern encyclopaedic texts (Leiden 1997) 241–59. On the literary trope of the encyclo-
pedically learned slave girl (some compensation, however fictional, for the absence of women from the
present book), see A. Talmon, “Tawaddud—The story of a majlis,” in H. Lazarus- yafeh and others (eds),
The majlis: Interreligious encounters in medieval Islam (Wiesbaden 1999) 120–27.
34 C. Baffioni, “Gli Iḫwān al- Safāʾ e la loro enciclopedia,” SFIM 449–89; G. de Callataÿ, Ikhwan
al- Safaʾ (Oxford 2005); F. Daftary, The Ismaʿīlīs (Cambridge 2007^2 ) 234–37; N. El- Bizri and others,
Epistles of the Brethren of Purity (Oxford 2008–); D. de Smet, “Die Enzyklopädie der Iḫwān as- Safāʾ,”
PIW 531–39, 551–54. On the Brethren’s activities in Baghdad, see Kraemer, Humanism [4:82]
165–78.