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full size Al-Kirmani, Hamid al-Din. Uspokoyeniye razuma (Rahat al-`aql). Vvedeniye, perevod, kommentarii A.V.Smirnova (Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani. Rahat al-`aql "Peace of mind". Introduction, translation and commentary by A.Smirnov). Moscow: Ladomir, 1995, 510 p.
 
        Rahat al-‘aql (‘Peace of the mind’) was written by Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani (10-11th century A.D.), the most prominent Isma‘ili thinker of his time. Not much is known about the life of that author, whom Mustafa Ghalib, the publisher of the Arabic text of Rahat al-‘aql, called Shaykh al-falasifa al-isma‘iliyya ‘The Shaykh of Isma‘ili philosophers’. It is due mostly to the spirit of secrecy, that has certainly remained one of the most characteristic features of the Isma‘ili community for many centuries. Yet we know that it was al-Kirmani who was summoned in 1017 A.D. to Cairo to deal a blow to the heresy of al-Darazi, who was claiming that imam al-Hakim was an embodiment of God. Al-Kirmani was a high-ranked Isma‘ili da‘i (homilist, missionary), hujjat al-‘Iraqayn (the hujja of Iraq and Persia). He wrote a number of treatises that deal with the important issues of Isma‘ili doctrine. Yet Rahat al-‘aql is unparalleled in the way it presents the Isma‘ili philosophy in its full scope.
 
         The book consists of seven chapters. The first introduces the reader to the importance of learning the Isma‘ili wisdom and warns him against all other ideologies and systems of thought. The second treats the uncognizable Divine essence and describes the way to construct a meaningful proposition about God that does not imply His ‘being’ (wujud) but refers to the ‘fixedness’ (thubut) of His ‘He-ness’ (huwiyya). The third and the forth chapters deal with the concept of the created First Intellect, its attributes, emanation, first matter and form. The fifth presents the doctrine of the first mover, ten celestial spheres, celestial bodies and their influence on the terrestrial life. The sixth treats the theory of four elements and their qualities, as well as the three classes of being that emerge out of their intermixture. The seventh chapter is the most voluminous, taking up to half of the book. It elaborates the Isma‘ili philosophy of history, the doctrine of the seven hypercycles, and soteriology.
 
        Though much in al-Kirmani’s philosophical teachings can be traced back to Aristotelian, Neoplatonic, and Pythagorean influence, they cannot be reduced to these evident borrowings. Al-Kirmani is a highly systematic thinker, and all these elements are fused into an integral system resulting out of rather original synthesis of Greek philosophical doctrines and Islamic theoretical reasoning about God’s essence, the role of the human being in history, and the ways of salvation. In al-Kirmani’s philosophy, it is the mankind that accomplishes, through its collective history with its strife and quest for ethical perfection, the creation of the universe: the souls of the just and righteous make up at the end of time a unified perfect form, which is absolutely similar to the most perfect and most happy First Intellect, thus creating ‘the second extreme’ of the universe, of which the First Intellect is ‘the first extreme’.