On the Composition and Early Circulation of the Rasā’il Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’: New Insights from the OUP-IIS Epistles of the Brethren of Purity Series

De Callatay, Godefroid [UCL]

The collaborative project of a critical edition of the whole corpus of Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ is about to be completed in the ‘Epistles of the Brethren of Purity’ series at Oxford University Press in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London. Based on a set of about twenty manuscripts, this project has revealed a great complexity in the transmission of this corpus — a complexity that the contributors to the volumes published so far have all highlighted. In particular, in the ultimate five epistles of the corpus as we have it, the OUP-IIS project reveals the existence of significant divergences between manuscripts. These include two families of manuscripts presenting a thoroughly different arrangement of the chapters in Epistle 48 (The Call to God), the existence of two or more versions, apparently mutually exclusive, of Epistles 49 (On the Spiritual Beings), 50 (On the Species of Governance), 51 (On the Arrangement of the World), and 52 (On Magic), as well as an exceptional ‘esoteric addition’ in one manuscript of Epistle 50. The present contribution emphasizes that this final part of the corpus is: (1) where the divide between an Ismaili-orientated group of manuscripts and the rest of the manuscripts is the most perceptible; (2) where the references to the Jāmiʿa (the Comprehensive Epistle) supposed to have been written by the same authors as the Rasāʾil, are least likely to have been interpolated. Additionally, we argue that the integrality of both Epistle 51 and Epistle 52, in any of their versions, to what could be regarded as the original encyclopaedic project, is to be discarded. The combination of these elements leads us to believe that the initial plan of the Ikhwānian corpus was limited to 50 epistles.