Epistles of the Brethren of Purity

Abstract

Since I and others have already commented on this project’s significance in terms of producing critical editions and annotated translations of the intriguing corpus of texts produced in southern Iraq during the tenth century by a collective calling itself the Brethren of Purity, I shall not focus on that or even repeat my quibble that I would far prefer to have the Arabic on the facing page to the English translation (whether on the left like the Library of Arabic Literature or on the right like the Islamic Translations Series is immaterial). With this publication, the project has now published at least one epistle from each of the four parts of the corpus. The present volume is from the third quartile on the “sciences of the soul and the intellect,” which constitutes a preparation for the higher theology of the last quartile. The epistles’ arrangement is progressive, from the exact sciences moving onto the observable sciences and then from the external phenomena to those internal to the human subject. The five relatively short epistles collected here cover the Brethren’s metaphysics, philosophical anthropology, psychology, and cosmology. Each epistle is introduced by the editor/translator with comments on the text followed by the annotated translation. The Arabic texts are then gathered at the end of the volume ...