the banquet of the brethren: a medieval treatise on ismaili esoteric teachings: part 1 a persian critical edition of nasir-i khusraw’s khwan al-ikhwan

I.B. Tauris in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies

The Ismaili missionary and poet, Nasir-i Khusraw (d. after 1070), wrote Khwan al-ikhwan (The Banquet of the Brethren) when he was living in his remote mountain refuge of Yumgan in Badakhshan. A work of philosophical theology, it consists of a sequence of dynamic arguments for divine unicity (tawhid), the authority of the Prophet Muhammad, his legatee, ’Ali b. Abi Talib, and his descendants, the imams from the line of Isma’il b. Ja’far al-Sadiq. This new edition is based on two extant manuscripts of Khwan al-ikhwan making it a more comprehensive resource.

Written in Persian, Khwan al-ikhwan includes a precis of ideas found in a work by an earlier missionary, Abu Ya’qub al-Sijistani (d. ca. 971), the Kitab al-Yanabi’, which Nasir-i Khusraw recast and then extended in 100 chapters. The current publication consists of a new Persian critical edition of the text, with an introduction that discusses Khwan al-ikhwan in the context of both Nasir-i Khusraw’s other works and al-Sijistani’s Kitab al-Yanabi, in addition to notes throughout. The book is an important example of Ismaili theology and a reflection of the learning of the age including the conception of a geo-centric cosmos, Aristotelian physics, and Neoplatonic philosophy, which greatly influenced the Ismaili missionaries (or da’is) of the Iranian lands. The editorial apparatus in this edition brings Khwan al-ikhwan to an even wider readership advancing the field of Ismaili Studies.

Rahim Gholami is Research Associate at The Institute of Ismaili Studies, UK. He received his PhD in Arab and Islamic Studies from the University of Exeter, UK in 2021.