A case study in Arabic doxography: Šahrastānī’s account of Pythagoras and its Ismāʿīlī background

The Arabic scholarly tradition produced several doxographies and gnomologies of ancient Greek thought in the Arabic language. In this paper, I will focus on al-Šahrastānī’s (d. 548/1153) Religions and Sects (al-Milal wa-l-niḥal). Despite the popularity of the work and the scholarly attention it attracted, the final evaluation of Šahrastānī’s doxography in terms of its method and sources still remains a desideratum. I will avoid the generalizations inherent in the previous characterizations of the work. Instead, I will focus on the chapter on Pythagoras, carefully reading it sentence by sentence, attentively considering the philosophical import of each passage alongside its potential sources as well as the traces of (and reasons for) Šahrastānī’s reworking them. I will argue that Šahrastānī provides a systematic reconstruction of Pythagorean philosophy based on quotations and paraphrases from previous doxographies and of what he considers as contemporary Pythagoreanism (i.e. Ismāʿīlīsm). Religions and Sects will reveal itself both as a source for the Greek philosophical tradition and as a source of information on the Arabic philosophical tradition as such.