The Brethren of Purity (Ikhwan al-Safa’) were the anonymous members of a fourth-century AH (tenth-century CE) esoteric fraternity of lettered urbanites that was principally based in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, while also having a significant active branch in the capital of the ‘Abbasid caliphate, Baghdad. This secretive coterie occupied a prominent station in the history of scientific and philosophical ideas in Islam due to the wide intellectual reception and dissemination of diverse manuscripts of their famed philosophically oriented compendium, the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity (Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa’).
Ismailimail 