The Language of Adam and his Fall in an Unpublished Arabic Medieval Text

A manuscript addition to Epistle 50: ‘On the Quantity and the Qual‐ ity of the Species of Administration’ of the Rasāʾil Ikhwān al‐Ṣafāʾ, aims to dis‐ close secret knowledge about the scriptural story of Adam, with one section addressing the issue of the gift of language that God gave to Adam, in its exo‐ teric (scriptural) and esoteric versions. Starting from the well‐known article by Walter Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’, a strict link is demonstrated to exist between the Bible and the Qurʾan, and be‐ tween esoteric Jewish and Islamic thought. However, an ‘original’ component of the addition is its Ismaili character, proven by a comparison with the Is‐ maili thinker and dāʿī Abū Yaʿqūb al‐Sijistānī, approximately contemporary with the addition, whose affords the addition a special relationship with the Rasāʾil Ikhwān al‐Ṣafāʾ, further enhancing the Ikhwān’s Ismaili commitment.