206 | CHAPTER 7
The Brethren of Purity’s fifty- two (or fifty- one) Letters present themselves
as the product of circles (majālis) that gathered to hold philosophical discus-
sions. It is generally assumed, though nowhere explicitly stated, that several
different authors were involved in their composition. The Letters have never
been seen as belonging to the elite milieu of Arabic philosophy as repre-
sented by Kindī, Fārābī, and Ibn Sīnā (who is often said—on no good
grounds—to have read the Letters in his youth^35 ). The most telling analogies
to them in the better- known realm of Greek philosophy would be the Py-
thagorean or Hermetic texts, which conveyed a general and relatively com-
prehensive philosophical worldview in an accessible language infused with
religious values, without seeking to push back the frontiers of thought.
The Letters propose an ascending scale of knowledge divided between the
“mathematical,” “physical and natural,” “psychological and intellectual,” and
“theological and religious” sciences. They minutely classify the various
branches of human learning, largely according to the Aristotelian model,
though their emanationist vision of knowledge and reality is redolent of late
Platonism. Beyond these Greek philosophical debts, the Letters draw exten-
sively on the whole intellectual heritage of the First Millennium, building a
wide range of allusion to Babylonian, Iranian, Indian, Jewish, and Christian
learning on a broad (albeit rather imaginatively deployed) bedrock of
Qurʾanic allusion. Their ideal man was
learned, accomplished, worthy, keen, pious and insightful... Persian
by breeding, Arabian by faith, a pure monotheist [hanīf ] by confes-
sion, Iraqi in culture, Hebrew in lore, Christian in manner, Damascene
in devotion, Greek in science, Indian in discernment, Sufi in allusive-
ness of expression [ishārāt], regal in character, masterful in thought,
and divine in awareness.^36
The Letters are by no means uncritical in their treatment of the various
strands of thought on which they draw, even the Qurʾanic. But the general
impression conveyed is of a tolerantly eclectic approach to the whole spec-
trum of knowledge accessible to an educated tenth- century Iraqi. Since Iraq
was still at this time close to being the center of the Eurasiatic world, or at
least recalled having been that in the very recent past, the intellectual pan-
orama offered by the Letters takes in the whole of the First Millennium. Note
in particular the Brethren’s tendency to treat the Jewish and Christian scrip-
tures as more or less on a par with the Qurʾān.
The acquisition of this universal and comprehensive encyclopedia is to
one single and undisputed end, namely the soul’s salvation and its liberation
35 Gutas, Avicenna [5:150] 24 n. 7.
36 Rasāʾil Ikhwān al- Safāʾ 22.42 [ed. B. Bustānī, Beirut 1957, 2.376; ed. and tr. (here slightly ad-
justed) L. E. Goodman and R. McGregor, Epistles of the Brethren of Purity: The case of the animals versus
Man before the King of the Jinn (Oxford 2009) ٢٧٨/313–14].