Abstract
The article raises the question of the influence of the Arab-Muslim philosophical paradigm, explicated in the works of medieval Ismaili philosophers, on the choice of the path of development of the Ismaili community in the 21st century. In the first part of the article, the main categorical pairs of the Arab-Muslim discourse are considered: “explicit – hidden” and “basis – branch”. The creation of the world, according to Ismaili thinkers, is, in fact, the embodiment of “subtle” knowledge into coarse matter. The Universal Soul, the true demiurge of our world, has clothed the knowledge of the Universal Mind in matter both at the level of the physical world and at the level of the world of religion. The task of a person in the picture of the world given by these pairs of metacategories is to “reveal” the hidden knowledge and to know the “truth” of each phenomenon, which is achieved by balancing the hidden and explicit aspects. The second part examines the main activities of the Aga Khan Ismaili Network for development in the 21st century and analyzes the statements of the Ismaili imam that determine the direction of the Ismaili society in our days. The author concludes that the same categorical apparatus remains in the 21st century as in the 11th century, and it has a significant impact on the formation of the concepts of development and direction of the Ismaili community. The category of knowledge remains one of the fundamental categories of the modern Ismaili community and determines the vector of activity of an extensive network of foundations, institutions and organizations. At the same time, in the very structure of the structure of the Aga Khan’s Development Network, one can trace the influence of a pair of meta-categories “basis – branch”, which served as the basis for the formation of the Ismaili state in the 10–11th centuries.
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