Epistles of the Brethren of Purity. On Arithmetic and geometry

Abstract

The significance of the epistles on a range of intellectual disciplines by thegroup of scholars known as the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwan al-Safa’) has beenknown for some time, although one might argue that their significance for aproper assessment of Islamic intellectual history has been neglected. The116 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 31:1book under review is part of an exciting new project initiated by the Instituteof Ismaili Studies in London to re-edit the whole text with critical analyticaltranslations and annotations undertaken by a number of specialists aroundthe world. For those of us who specialize in Islamic intellectual history andneed texts to use in the classroom, this is an excellent and most welcome development.The companion volume edited by el-Bizri, which attempts notonly to make sense of who the Ikhwan were but also to assess their impact,demonstrates that their significance was recognized by later traditions evenwhen it was occluded. One small quibble – it would have been good to seethe Arabic and English on facing pages, which may have been logisticallyproblematic. As it is, it makes the comparison of the original text with theEnglish a bit more difficult.The two epistles translated here are the first in the sequence and constitutepart of the first section of the Rasā’il on the mathematical and propaedeuticalsciences (al-‘ulūm al-riyādīyah al-ta‘līmīyah). Nader el-Bizri, thetranslator and editor of the series, is a historian of philosophy and science inthe Islamic world and has recently been focusing on the history of geometry,mathematics, and optics and publishing widely on Ibn al-Haytham (d. 1040).These two epistles form part of the ancient quadrivium that constituted amore advanced stage of study associated with Boethius (d. 524) and wasbased upon the mathematics of Nicomachus of Gerasa, a Neopythagoreanof the first century CE: training in arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomywere considered to be the very heart of a scientific education. After the firsttwo epistles, epistle 3 deals with astronomy, epistle 4 with cosmography,epistle 5 with music, and epistle 6 with proportions (that ties the quadriviumtogether) – and that is before they move onto the next set of propaeduetics,namely the logical organon beginning with epistles 7 and 8 (the theoreticaland practical arts) that provide a classification of the sciences on which theapproach to holism is based ...