Nuskhat al-sijill alladhi wujida mu'allaqan 'ala al-mashahid fi ghaybat Mawlana al-Imam al-Hakim.

4to (170 x 223 mm). 142 ff. Arabic manuscript on paper. Black naskh script in 13 lines ruled in red, with important words and phrases picked out in red, yellow, and green; commentary in red naskh in the margins. With titles in thuluth script on vibrant coloured bands, including two full pages done in this style to start the text, to striking effect. 19th century dark brown morocco with flap, elaborately ruled and tooled in blind, medallions stamped in blind. One of fewer than ten known manuscripts of the primary holy text of the Druze: a scarce and beautiful copy of the first volume of the Epistles of Wisdom. - The Druze faith, founded in 11th century CE Egypt, survives today among roughly 1,000,000 adherents in the Levant. The Epistles last appeared at auction forty years ago at Sotheby's (Fine Oriental Manuscripts and Miniatures including Property from the Estate of King Umberto II of Italy, London, 1984), and known manuscript copies are otherwise limited to four institutions: two at the Biblioth que Nationale de France (one of which was said to be given to Louis XIV in 1700 by a Syrian physician) and the remainder at Princeton, Columbia, and the National Library of Israel. Some sections of the Epistles of Wisdom are considered lost by scholarship, with no known surviving texts. - This manuscript presents the first fourteen epistles, comprising texts 1-14 in Sylvestre de Sacy's description in "Expos de la religion des Druzes" (1838). The writings themselves are based on declarations and correspondence attributed to the Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah (985-1021), a ruler considered the incarnation of the One God by the Druze, and as an eccentric by historians on account of several records of arbitrarily cruel edicts, such as an order to kill all dogs in the city of al-Fustat on account of their barking. - Only four years after Druze doctrine was first publicly preached in 1017 (apparently resulting in riots in Cairo), Caliph al-Hakim mysteriously disappeared, and the movement was persecuted under his successor. The faith survived instead among converts in the Levant, where despite a relatively insular outlook, the Druze have often figured prominently in history: Druze aided Mamluk and Ayyubid forces in defending the Lebanese coast from Europeans during the Crusades, and under the Ottomans challenged the authority of Istanbul by forging a coalition with Maronite Christians and Tuscany. Their written record, however, remains much harder to trace, and any manuscript of these works is incredibly precious. - Some repairs to spine, light soiling to text and endpapers; altogether a beautiful manuscript, nicely preserved. - German private collection.