ISLAM, PLATO and the IKHWĀN AL-ṢAFĀʾ1 Ian Richard

PRIVATE CAVES AND PUBLIC ISLANDS: ISLAM, PLATO AND THE IKHWĀN AL-SAFẠ̄ ʾ1

Ian Richard Netton*

Medieval Islamic philosophy may usefully be compared with a large cauldron containing a diversity of ingredients. Some blend with others, some retain their own individual identity throughout the cooking process. Let me now interpret my image: the cauldron is the Islamic Middle Ages in the 10th and 11th centuries A.D. The brew which it contains is, in large measure, the Islamic religion of one kind or another. But this Islam shares the pot, happily sometimes, uneasily at others, with a number of other potent ingredients: Neopythagoreanism, Aristotelian- ism, Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, Mazdaism, astrology, folklore, magic.2 The intellectual cosmopolitanism of the age is mirrored in miniature in the cosmopolitanism of the City of Basra in what is now modern Iraq.3 Basra is famous in the intellectual history of Islam as having been one of the cradles of Arabic philology. But it had other claims to fame as well. It was here that many of the foundations of Arab culture were laid. The City stood at a commercial crossroads; it had come under the influence of civilizations as diverse as those of Persia and India; it was familiar with the peoples of Sind and the Malay peninsula. Its inhabitants included Jews and Christians as well as Muslims and it boasted an expertise in numerous industrial and agricultural crafts. And just as its cosmopolitanism and eclecticism mirror the broader cosmopolitanism and eclecticism of Dār al-Islām, culturally, religiously and intellectually, so too we may say that the encyclopaedic Epistles (Rasāʾil)4 of the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān al-Safạ̄ ʾ) neatly mirror the

* Exeter University. 1 This article was originally published in Volume 15 ofSacred Web: A Journal of Tradition and Modernity, published in Vancouver, Canada, June 2005: ISSN 1480-6584. 2 For a general orientation, see inter alia, Majid Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy 2nd edn., (London: 1983). 3 Ch. Pellat & S. H. Longrigg, art. “al Basra”, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn. (EI2), (Leiden, 1960), vol. 1, pp. 1085–1087. See also Ch. Pellat, Le Milieu Basrien et la for- mation de Gahiz, (Paris, 1953). 4 Ikhwān al-Safạ̄ ʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4 vols, (Beirut, 1957) [Hereafter referred to as R.] For a general orientation and introduction in English, see Ian Richard Netton, 108 ian richard netton cosmopolitanism and eclecticism of the City of Basra. The majority of scholars today believe that Basra was home to this group of 10th or 11th century A.D. philosophers whom we call the Brethren of Purity. Their writings, collected in fifty-two Epistles (Rasāʾil), are indeed eclectic, purveying a dual and, at times, incoherent vision of God5 who is by turns the Creator God of the Holy Qur’an and the Unknowable One of classical Plotinian Neoplatonic thought. The text of the Epistles is saturated not only with the key doctrines, elements and motifs of Islam—most notably derived from the Qur’an—but also with Greek, Judaeo-Christian, Persian, Indian, Buddhist, Zoroastrian and Manichaen references as well. The most casual reading of the text convinces us that the Eastern world (al-Mashriq) was as familiar to the Brethren as the Western (al Maghrib): indeed, their encyclopedic scope trascended the imperial ḥudūd of the Pax Islamica to embrace lands as far afield as China. And as intellectual magpies they thought nothing of deploying elements of Greek and Persian vocabulary as well as anecdotes deriving from classical Indian sources which survey the life of the Buddha.6 I do not propose here to enter the perennial debate about the author- ship and dating of the Rasāʾil.7 Such debates can be sterile. I propose, instead, to concentrate on the textual and the intertextual, taking as a frame the text of the fifty two Rasāʾil of the Brethren, a group of, probably, Basran encyclopaedist philosophers of the 10th or 11th centuries A.D. who, like Denis Diderot (1713–1784) many centuries later, articulated their manifold interests in encyclopaedic form. Those interests may be collected neatly under the broad headings of mathematica, the natural sciences, the rational sciences and theology. Within those groupings they embrace subjects as diverse, difficult and diffuse as arithmetic, music, logic, mineralogy, botany, embryology, philosophy and magic. TheEpistles may have been the product, even minutes, of the Brethren’s meetings which they held every twelve days; such was

Muslim Neoplatonists: An Introduction to the Thought of the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ), (London, 2002). [ Hereafter referred to as Netton, MNP] 5 See Ian Richard Netton, “Foreign Influences and Recurring Ismāʾilī Motifs in Rasāʾil of the Brethren of Purity” in idem, Seek Knowledge: Thought and Travel in the House of Islam, (Richmond, 1996), pp. 27–41. 6 E.g. see R. 1, p. 414, R. 2 p. 249. R. 4 pp. 162–164. 7 For a succinct summary of the general state of scholarship in these areas, see Netton, MNP, pp. 1–8.