The Role of the Neoplatonic Intellect in the Thought of the Brethren of Purity and Mandaean Texts

One of the most often mentioned groups throughout the fifty-one treatises of the Brethren of Purity is the Sabeans (or Mandaean) of Ḥarrān. They are mentioned about a dozen times throughout the treatises and the Brethren dedicate an entire section of their fifty-first treatise on magic to them. The Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’) were a ninth-tenth century Shīʾite philosophical movement from Baṣra, Iraq. Little is known about the actual group or its members, and their only remains are fifty-one treatises with two summaries. However, their works played an influential role in various intellectual trajectories throughout Islamic and Jewish philosophical history. This paper argues that the Brethren’s philosophical and religious conception of the Intellect stands in between that of the Sabian-Mandaean, Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, and Shīʾite Islamic thought.