UMMUL KITAB - How can I find it?

[Qizilbash]

Hello dear friends!

I am looking for the Ummul Kitab.. Is there anyway I can find this book?
Is it translated to English?

I am talking about the one that is attributed to Imam Muhammad Baqir.

[Qizilbash]

somebody, please help? I really want this book..

[Admin]

The book has not been translated into English. It has been however in other languages.

Pio Filipani Ronconi has translated it and there is an article in French on it, I think by Ivanow and if I recall it was translated by the French Consul in Egypt decades ago and published. You may also find the Persian language publication in some jamatkhana or University libraries

You may want to search the Library-->Author Index under Ronconi to find the exact reference.

Admin

[Qizilbash]

Thank you very much Admin.. Unfortunately I do not speak French, is there other translations of the work? Can you tell me to which languages that you know it has been translated? Is there a German translation? Turkish?

Best regards
Qizilbash

[Qizilbash]

It has been two and a half years since I started looking for Ummu'l Kitab in an understandable language.

For the Turkish speakers, I can share the news, that this book has recently been translated to Turkish for the first time by the Alevi researcher Ismail Kaygusuz. I will buy it in the near future.

It can be bought online at KitapYurdu.com:
http://www.kitapyurdu.com/kitap/default ... a=50873720

Or at Simurg.com.tr:
http://www.simurg.com.tr/default.asp?pa ... ion=113157

[kmaherali]

The book has not been translated into English. It has been however in other languages.

Pio Filipani Ronconi has translated it and there is an article in French on it, I think by Ivanow and if I recall it was translated by the French Consul in Egypt decades ago and published. You may also find the Persian language publication in some jamatkhana or University libraries

You may want to search the Library-->Author Index under Ronconi to find the exact reference.

Admin

There is a translation of a section of it in the 'Ismaili Thought in The Classical Age' , an anthology of Philosophy in Persia. It is available in at the literature counter $38.00 Can. Below is the introduction.

Umm al-kitab

Umm al-kitab is a major work of the early Shi'i Imami tradition of Central Asia. It was originally written in Arabic in the second half of the second/eighth century by a Shi'i ghulat sect called al-Multhammisah (the Pentadists), and then rendered into an eccentric Persian style and preserved by the Nizarl Ismailis of Central Asia. Its origin is evident not only in the doctrinal and cosmologkal features of the treatise but also because of such nuances as its attribution of a major role in the rise of Islam to Salman al-FarisI, whose gnostic name here is al-Salsal and who is regarded as a gate through whom one could gain access to Mubammadan Light.

The treatise contains a discourse of the fifth Shi'i Imam, Muhammad al-Baqir (d. 114/732), who appears here as a five-year-old child, the situation strongly re­sembling certain apocryphal Gospels relating to |esus. Imam al-Baqir responds in this treatise to thirty questions raised by a group of disciples among whom Jabir ibn <Abd Allah al-Ansan, Ja'far al-Ju'fi, Abu'l-Khattab, Abu'l-Khalid al-Kabili, and Muhammad ibn al-Mufaddal can be named.

Umm al-kitab offers an esoteric hermeneutics (ta'wil) of the nature of man and his place in the universe, as well as of questions concerning cosmology, epistemol-ogy, and Islamic worship within a Qur'anic context. The analysis and interpreta­tions offered in this treatise seem to be a synthesis of many different pre-Islamic religious traditions and schools of thought, such as Manichaeism, Buddhism and Valentinian Gnosticism, with Shi'i teachings.

The central idea in the work is the psychological and philosophical interpreta­tion of cosmological symbols, and the faithful are asked to engage themselves in acts of inner purification and transformation. Throughout the work, the 'theology of light' pervades every doctrine. An extraordinary number of colours are displayed to symbolize different theurgies and the corresponding levels of consciousness that man must realize within himself.

This text, which remains part of the corpus of the Central Asian Ismaili literature to this day, is held in high esteem particularly by the Nizarl Ismaili communities living in Afghanistan, Tajikistan and northern areas of Pakistan and more generally in the Pamir range. The selection deals primarily with the subject of man and the esoteric and philosophical significance of the Qur'an and the symbolic significance

M. Aminrazavi

[pyth7]

http://books.google.com/books/about/The ... blJQozG60C

I'd like to fine a complete English translation myself!

Pyth7

[Sobairo]

As noted by P. F. Ronconi, "Ivanow's edition of the Umm'ul-Kitàb originally appeared in the journal Der Islam, no. 23, Leipzig 1936. To this edition refer the numbers of the pages of the text acquired by Ivan Zarubin in 1914 from Shughnan, later kept at the Asiatic Museum of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg."

Cf. Pio Filippani-Ronconi, Note sulla soteriologia e sul simbolismo cosmico dell Ummu'l Kitàb, 1964.

As for Pio Filippani Ronconi’s translation of the U.K., please refer to the review by Robert A. Bütler published in the Magazine of Islamic Studies, vol. 15, no. 4, 1976.

“The U.K., i.e. "The Mother of the Book", or "The Archetype of the Book", is a work, perhaps dating back to the 8th / 9th century, written in archaic Persian with Indian nuances, preserved by an Ismaili sect from Pamir. According to Henry Corbin, it is the oldest document that testifies the passage from ancient gnosis to Ismaili gnosis. The text of the U.K. that we have translated and commented (Naples 1966) has been published by Vladimir Ivanow ("Der Islam", Band 23, Heft ½, 1936) after obtaining a copy from Ivan Zarubin in 1914. V. Ivanow had first written a summary of the work along with other information regarding its origin in the Revue des Etudes Islamiques (1932, p. 419-482). According to Vladimir Ivanow - with whom I had an interview on this topic - the U.K. would not even be, originally, an Ismaili work, but, theoretically, a work that presents the ideas of a heretical environment typical of the Qarmatians, ideologically very close to the Ismailis…”

Cf. Pio Filippani-Ronconi, Quelques influences indiennes dans la redaction de I'Ummu'l-Kitàb, 1969.