Epistles of the Brethren of Purity

Abstract

Since I and others have already commented on this project’s significance interms of producing critical editions and annotated translations of the intriguingcorpus of texts produced in southern Iraq during the tenth century by a collectivecalling itself the Brethren of Purity, I shall not focus on that or evenrepeat my quibble that I would far prefer to have the Arabic on the facing pageto the English translation (whether on the left like the Library of Arabic Literatureor on the right like the Islamic Translations Series is immaterial).With this publication, the project has now published at least one epistlefrom 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 apreparation for the higher theology of the last quartile. The epistles’ arrangementis progressive, from the exact sciences moving onto the observable sciencesand then from the external phenomena to those internal to the humansubject. The five relatively short epistles collected here cover the Brethren’smetaphysics, philosophical anthropology, psychology, and cosmology. Eachepistle is introduced by the editor/translator with comments on the text followedby the annotated translation. The Arabic texts are then gathered at theend of the volume ...