On God and the World ― An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistles 49-51

The Brethren of Purity, the anonymous adepts of a tenth-century esoteric fraternity based in Basra and Baghdad, hold an eminent position in the history of science and philosophy in Islam due to the wide reception and assimilation of their monumental encyclopaedia, the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity. This compendium contains fifty-two epistles offering synoptic accounts of the classical sciences and philosophies of the age; divided into four classificatory parts, it treats themes in mathematics, logic, natural philosophy, psychology, metaphysics, and theology, in addition to didactic fables.

The texts presented here, from the section on divine and legal sciences, work towards the conclusion of the world-view of the Epistles. In Epistle 49, the Brethren of Purity utilize their usual array of sources - Islamic, Hellenic, and far beyond - in probing the entire hierarchy of existence, from the nature of God to the most basic elements. Epistle 50 describes the 'proper attitudes' towards body and soul, for the attainment of wellness in this world and the hereafter, before addressing religious and philosophical worship. Finally, in Epistle 51, the Brethren consider the arrangement of the world as a whole, restating the Pythagorean theory that all existents are analogous to numbers, knowledge of the characteristics of which is therefore necessary for understanding the world. In advance of the final epistle, on magic, the vast encyclopedic project thus comes full-circle, directing the reader back to the topic of numbers with which the corpus begins.

Wilferd Madelung was Laudian Professor of Arabic at the University of Oxford from 1978 until 1998, since which time he has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Ismaili Studies, London. He has published widely over his distinguished career, including many encyclopaedia articles. He is the author of Der Imam al-Qasim ibn Ibrahim und die Glaubenslehre der Zaiditen (1965), and The Succession to Muhammad; A Study of the Early Caliphate (1998), as well as being Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia Islamica (2008-) and holding other editorial positions.


Cyril Uy holds a BA in Religious Studies from Yale University and an MPhil in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Cambridge. He is currently pursuing a PhD at Stanford University, where his research focuses on mystics and philosophers in the medieval Islamic world, examining ways in which these thinkers grapple with multifarious, often conflicting, modes of knowledge and expression in pursuit of the ineffable.


Carmela Baffioni is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Ismaili Studies, having previously been Professor of the History of Islamic Philosophy and of the History of Muslim Philosophies and Sciences at the University of Naples "L'Orientale" until 2012. Her publications include several monographs on the transmission of Greek thought into Islam and translations of works by the Brethren of Purity, al-Farabi, Averroes, and al-Shahrastani; in addition, she has written a monograph on Aristotle's Meteorologica IV (1981), and books on the history of Islamic philosophy.


Nuha Alshaar (Phd Cambridge University) joined the Institute of Ismaili Studies as a Research Associate, where her focus has been on ethical concepts in early Qur'an interpretation, and on the relationship between the Qur'an, tafsir and classical literary traditions (adab). She also teaches Islamic Intellectual History and Thought as well as Arabic Literature at the American University of Sharjah. Her publications include Ethics in Islam: Friendship in the Political Thought of al-Tawhidi and his Contemporaries (2015) and, as editor, Qur'an and Adab: The Shaping of Literary Traditions in Classical Islam (2016).