The Deconstructive Hermeneutic of Tasattur in the Epistle of the Creation of Animals of Rasā'l Ikhwān al-Ṣafā'

Abstract

Academia has some misconceptions about the Epistle of the Creation of Animals of Rasā’il Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’. This article addresses these misconceptions by offering a new hermeneutic to interpret the denouement of its story. This hermeneutic is called tasattur, which incorporated the mechanics of Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction a thousand years before this theory was proposed by him. The article also demonstrates how this interpretive framework of tassatur helps us glean from this epistle an archetypal code for the upcoming Fatimid Empire.