The Authorship of al-Risāla l-Ǧāmiʿa Re-Examined

Abstract

Rasāʾil Iḫwān al-Ṣafāʾ and its summary, al-Risāla l-Ǧāmiʿa, are commonly attributed to the same authors. The strongest argument for this is the presence of references from the former to the latter. The aim of the present article is to analyze all of these references to establish their import for the theory of common authorship. When the fourteen references in the Beirut edition are compared with the oldest manuscripts, the result is that only six of these references appear in the latter, and even among these two are highly ambiguous. The only references from Rasāʾil Iḫwān al-Ṣafāʾ to al-Risāla l-Ǧāmiʿa unambiguously confirmed by the oldest manuscripts are the four references in version B of epistle 52, which is itself of dubious authenticity. Since all or most of the references outside epistle 52 are then clearly later interpolations, the conclusion is that the references in Rasāʾil Iḫwān al-Ṣafāʾ do not support the theory of common authorship.