Download PDF | Godefroid de Callataÿ - Ikhwan al-Safa'_ a Brotherhood of Idealists on the Fringe of Orthodox Islam-Oneworld (2005).
145 Pages
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The first and greatest debt I owe is, of course, to Patricia Crone. Not only did Patricia offer me the opportunity to write a book in the Makers of the Muslim World series, she also spent a tremendous amount of time and energy to supervise it at every stage of its making. I am grateful to Charles Burnett and Nader el-Bizri, for many valuable comments and suggestions on various points of the discussion. I also wish to express my gratitude to Oneworld Publications, for the excellent work they have done on my manuscript. Finally, I have much pleasure in thanking Paula Lorente Fernández for her unfailing trust, constant assistance, and loving encouragement throughout. Este libro está dedicado a ella y a Gabriela, nuestra hija recién nacida, con quien tantas cosas tendremos que aprender.
INTRODUCTION
This book is concerned with a collection of around fifty epistles published anonymously in Iraq in the tenth century by people who called themselves the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwan al-Safa’). Exactly who they were is disputed. Most probably they were secretaries from the local bureaucracy in Basra, a city in southern Iraq, but not everyone agrees. Whoever they were, it is not possible to write a biography of any one of them, or of all of them together. If they have been included in this series even so, it is because one can still produce a spiritual portrait of them. Their work puts forward a coherent intellectual system, a view of the world that many deemed to be heretical, but which none the less never ceased to find readers over the centuries. The influence of the Brethren, albeit not often publicly acknowledged, on many great figures of Islamic thinking was considerable.
The Epistles (Rasa’il) of the Brethren of Purity, as the work is usually referred to, survive to this day in a great number of manuscripts. There are two reasons why the Epistles were unacceptable to most Sunni Muslims (who constituted the majority then as now). First, they were clearly Shi‘ite in nature, and second, they were patently philosophical, more precisely Neoplatonist or, as the great theologian Ghazali (d. 1111) would have it, Pythagorean. They were in fact a characteristic product of the tenth century, a period of extraordinary intellectual activity in the Muslim world. In the rest of this Introduction I shall say more about these three features.
SHI‘ISM
Shi‘ism originated in a disagreement over the succession to the caliphate. All Shi‘ites hold that only members of the Prophet’s family were qualified for the leadership of the Muslim community, known as the imamate or, almost synonymously, the caliphate. The disagreement soon broadened to include different views of the imam’s functions. The Shi‘ites saw him as much more of a religious guide than did other Muslims, claiming that one could not achieve salvation without him since he alone had the faculty of understanding the secret meaning of the Revelation. By the tenth century the Shi‘ites had divided into four main groups. The most important, numerically speaking, was Imami Shi‘ism, which believed that a succession of twelve imams had led the devotees from the Prophet’s time until 874, when the twelfth went into hiding. Waiting for his reappearance as a messiah at the end of time, and simultaneously exalting the martyrs of the past, the Imami Shi‘ites soon abandoned any hope of playing a political role. But as a depoliticized creed it was attractive to the various rulers who followed the break-up of the caliphate.
The Abbasids, who had previously dominated most of the Muslim world and who had represented Sunni orthodoxy up to that time, were from now on powerless. Since 945, they had fallen under the control of the Buyids, Iranian mercenaries from the Caspian coast who had established themselves in Iraq and western Iran. They patronized Imamism after their arrival in Iraq. The Hamdanids, a minor dynasty in Syria, were also Shi‘ite, probably Imami as well. The second type of Shi‘ism was Zaydism, a more militant form, which by the tenth century had managed to occupy Yemen and Daylam. The Buyids had probably professed Zaydism before their arrival in Iraq. The third type was made up of extremists of various kinds, whose range of beliefs generally included such “exaggerated” convictions as the transmigration of souls or the assimilation of such or such imam to divinity. And the fourth was Ismailism, which had grown from Imami and extremist roots, to emerge in full towards the end of the ninth century.
Ismailism was a complex set of religious, social, and intellectual doctrines, whose purpose was to offer a unified and global theory about God, the world, and the place of humankind in history. Like Imamis, Ismailis exalted their martyrs as well as their own lineage of seven imams – the last of whom had disappeared in the second half of the eighth century. But Ismailism distinguished itself by promoting a particularly elaborate doctrine about the division of world history, which it divided into seven cycles, each allegedly heralded by a prophet. Unlike Imamism, it was also a virulently political branch of Shi‘ism which made remarkably efficient use of both military force and propaganda. One may recall here the many troubles caused in Iraq and the Gulf by a group of Ismaili revolutionaries known as Qarmatis, who on one occasion even succeeded in stealing the Black Stone from Mecca. But the greatest triumph of Ismailism occurred when another group, which had earlier appeared in Tunisia, took control of Egypt in 969.
They were the Fatimids, who were powerful enough to claim the supreme title of the caliphate for themselves. In all, Shi‘ism was clearly gaining ground in the tenth century, in spite of its inner divisions. The Sunnis, though numerically the majority, were forced to share power in many places. It has often been assumed that the Brethren of Purity were Ismailis. But this is clearly more problematic than their general affiliation to Shi‘ism. For while the Epistles do have much in common with Ismaili tenets, it also seems impossible to link the authors with any historical faction of Ismailism that we know about. The present essay will add a few elements to discussion without providing any definitive answer. This does not mean that I view the problem as trifling. I am convinced that the corpus of epistles should be looked at with the least possible degree of prejudice, and that regarding it simply as a pure product of Ismailism (as various scholars have done in the past) inevitably has an adverse effect on one’s interpretation. Besides, as should become increasingly clear in the course of the discussion, it seems to me that so restrictive a definition is in itself incompatible with the very eclecticism shown by the Brethren throughout their work.
PHILOSOPHY
Before the rise of Islam, the Near East had already served as a center in which philosophy, or in other words the whole corpus of rational wisdom inherited from antiquity, continued to be cultivated as it receded from the western Mediterranean. Communities of philosophers, mostly but not exclusively Christians, were found in cities such as Mosul, Edessa, Jundishapur, and Harran. A rich tradition was maintained in Greek, Syriac, and Persian, a tradition which continued to develop even after the sudden arrival of the Arabs. The irruption of Islam and, as early as the beginning of the eighth century, its rapid expansion as far as Spain and India, did not at first fundamentally affect this order of things. Towards the end of the Umayyad caliphate (750 CE), however, and especially under the first Abbasids, there began an unprecedented movement to translate this tradition into Arabic, the new ruling language. This formidable undertaking would not be over before the end of the tenth century when, with the exception of a limited amount of specific literature not deemed by the scholars of Islam to be of interest, nearly all Greek sources accessible in that part of the world seem to have been made available in the Arabic language.
The breadth of the field, which ranges from logic and metaphysics to ethics and politics, from medicine and the natural sciences to the sciences of number (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy), and the technical sciences, is impressive. There was an unusually rich melting pot of cultures, races, and religions in which diverse groups of translators, copyists, and scientists were able to work with one another for more than two centuries. Much of their work was commissioned by the caliphs, especially in the beginning, but there was no single sponsor and no centralized program. This makes their achievement all the more impressive. Among the translators, Christians, once again, were in the majority, but there were also Jews, Persians, Arabs, and even idolaters, for pagans still survived in the city of Harran, where a cult of planetary divinities continued until at least the tenth century. Needless to say, this multiculturalism was also to favor significantly the incorporation of sources that did not ultimately derive from Greece, but rather from India, Iran, and ancient Mesopotamia. Philosophy and the rest of rational sciences did not easily find their place in the already well-structured building of Islamic thinking. At the moment when they finally made their appearance, the field of theoretic knowledge was still largely the prerogative of traditional sciences, in other words sciences which, like jurisprudence (fi qh) and theology (kalam), could be viewed as grounded in the Qur’an and the traditions of the Prophet.
A certain evolution was perceptible, though. Prompted, as it were, by its own queries, Islamic theology slowly began to open itself to the outcome of independent reasoning. Mu‘tazilism, a school of theologians with avowed rationalist bias, became very influential. For some time in the first half of the ninth century, it even received the support of the caliphs in Baghdad, then at the height of their power. It is no accident that the great figure of Kindi (d. c. 870) came into view in that period, too. Kindi, closely involved in the translation movement of works from classical antiquity, was the first among the great philosophers writing in Arabic. As such, he and his circle went down in history as the first thinkers to try to harmonize the pagan heritage of Greece with the divine truth revealed in the sacred text of Islam and the life of Muhammad. Kindi’s monumental work, of which only a fraction has survived, bears witness to the fact that he was much more a polymath than a philosopher in the narrow sense. He wrote on nearly all topics, from mathematics to physics, from history to magic. What is also apparent in his treatises is that among the various philosophers of antiquity he had the greatest admiration for Plato and Aristotle (both fourth century BCE). This was true of most philosophers in the tenth century. But in his case as later, one of the two masters tended to have the preponderant influence, so that it is customary to distinguish between Aristotelians and Platonists. The Brethren of Purity are clearly to be ranged among those who were mostly influenced by Platonist, or more exactly Neoplatonist, philosophy.
Indeed, for a substantial part, their way of thinking is closely reminiscent of certain theoretic constructions elaborated in late antiquity by Neoplatonists such as Plotinus (third century CE) or Proclus (fifth century CE). Like them, the Brethren made much of the idea that man is a sort of world in miniature, for example. Similarly, they held that the world was set in motion by the World Soul, and that among individual souls only those of true philosophers would be able to rise again to their divine origin. To a certain extent, one could even say that the Brethren went further than their Greek predecessors in their syncretism, which had been a notable feature of Neoplatonism in antiquity. All this is true, but it seems to me that there is some risk, if not some mistake, in reducing the Brethren’s philosophical conceptions to that dimension alone. The present essay will hopefully make this clear, especially when it comes to investigate the use the Brethren made of their sources.
THE TENTH CENTURY
At first sight, the Islamic world in the tenth century seems a paradoxical phenomenon. On the one hand, it was characterized by a striking political instability, of which the almost complete collapse of the caliphate is the most obvious example. On the other hand, it was also characterized by an intellectual effervescence and a cultural dynamism of a rare intensity – so much so that it is portrayed as a kind of golden age of Arab-Muslim thinking in many history textbooks, which usually illustrate this splendor by lining up the big names of the time: the philosophers Farabi and Miskawayh, the poet Mutanabbi, the historian Mas‘udi, the geographer Maqdisi, the astronomer Sufi, or the mystic Hallaj. In fact, the paradox we have to cope with is not as real as it seems. The decentralization of power may well have played a very positive role in the process. First, it most probably favored the resurgence of many local traditions, whether of an ethnic or a religious nature, which had for some time been dimmed by the Arab conquests. Second, it certainly contributed to the availability of patronage, as newly arrived rulers competed with each other to take the place of the Abbasid caliphs as protectors of the arts and sciences. Among these dynasties which became famous for their patronage of artists and scholars of all kinds one finds, in addition to the Sunni Umayyads in Spain, the names of several Shi‘ite ruling families such as the Buyids in Iraq, the Hamdanids in Syria, and the Fatimids in Egypt.
Amid the vast array of works produced during this golden age of Muslim literature in Arabic, the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity clearly stand out as a strange and unusual work, yet a work which reflects its own time as very few other contemporaneous creations do. For the authors conceived it as a sort of all-encompassing encyclopaedia of human knowledge, and this necessarily means that they had to acquaint themselves with both the historical background and the current debates in each of the disciplines they treated. A substantial part of the present book has been dedicated to the encyclopaedic nature of the Brethren’s project, since this obviously makes them unique in the history of Arabic literature and probably also in the history of literature tout court. It has seemed convenient to arrange this essay in six chapters, each illustrating a particular facet of our topic. • Chapter 1, “Esotericism,” provides a general overview. It highlights, above all, the striking contrast between the anonymous authors, whose greatest exploit must be to have managed to conceal their identity up to the present day, and their relatively well-defined corpus of texts which seems to have been passed down over the centuries without any notable changes. • Chapter 2, “Emanationism,” investigates those elements which appear to constitute the backbone of the Brethren’s intellectual system. It deals with issues such as the making of the world, the creation of time, the place of man in the great chain of being, and the reason why individual souls may hope to re-join their divine principle some day in the future. • Chapter 3, “Millenarianism,” looks at the way in which the Brethren used the controversial art of astrology to justify a particularly esoteric view of world history made up of prophetic cycles and completed by the coming of a messiah. More specifically, this chapter aims at clarifying how the Brethren situated their own undertaking with respect to the present cycle.
• Chapter 4, “Encyclopaedism,” explores the extraordinary efforts made by the Ikhwan to impose a coherent structure on the entire body of human knowledge and, consequently, to use their epistles as a program of moral and spiritual initiation intended for their followers. • Chapter 5, “Syncretism,” examines the Brethren’s impressive open-mindedness and eclecticism shown by their use of sources as they attempted to reunite the truth revealed in the sacred texts with the scientific and philosophical discoveries accumulated over the ages by scholars from throughout the world. • Chapter 6, “Idealism,” focuses on the Brethren’s conception of their own cause, emphasizing their resolutely elitist approach and noting their preference for thought over action. Both points suggest that their propaganda never was intended to lead to a religious revolution, let alone a political upheaval. At the end of the book, the Epilogue seeks to evaluate the influence that the work exerted in the following centuries. It is clear that the avenues taken in these chapters in no way exhaust the vast and complex range of issues raised by the Brethren of Purity and their Epistles. The book will have achieved its aim, however, if it reaches beyond the usual circle of experts to introduce a new audience to the dizzy heights of a group of thinkers firmly committed to saving humankind’s intellectual heritage for posterity.
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