Abu Tammam and His Kitab al-Shajara: a New Ismaili Treatise From Tenth-Century Khurasan

Book Chapter in "Fatimid History and Ismaili Doctrine"

Abstract: The Syrian group to which Abu Firas belonged did not follow the same line of imams that eventually produced the Aga Khans. Rumors of this had led W. Ivanow, perhaps the foremost of the modern scholarly pioneers in the effort to recover and catalog the literature of the Ismailis, to attempt to obtain detailed information about this community’s literary holdings. Tamir, however, did not do this but rather, through his silence, left the matter hanging. Once all of this material was assembled in one place, further pieces of the puzzle quickly came to light. The overlapping of the two texts for so many pages is both curious and yet somewhat fortunate. It allows us an opportunity to examine carefully the relationship between them and therefore to draw a few tentative conclusions about the material in the later sections where we have no text of Abu Tammam’s own version.

Author: Paul E. Walker
Link to Chapter: Taylor & Francis

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