Anonymous Works and Their Ascription to Famous Authors

The false attribution of anonymous works to famous authors is not unique to Islamic tradition in general and to Ismāʿīlī tradition in particular. Rather it is a very old problem dating back to ancient Greeks. The students of philosophy are familiar with this question as a number of spurious books circulated in the Middle Ages known as “pseudo-Aristotelian” or “pseudo-Ammonius.” However, the scholars have succeeded to disentangle the genuine from the counterfeit by using various critical tools at their disposal. In what follows I have tried to demonstrate that both Minhāǧ al-farāʾiḍ and Kitāb al-Yanābīʿ are falsely ascribed to the famous Ismāʿīlī law giver al-Qāḍī l-Nuʿmān. Any scholar who is fully familiar with the whole corpus of al-Nuʿmān’s works, especially with his numerous works on jurisprudence, would reject Cilardo’s claim to the contrary

Aesthetics · Art · Ascription · Authorship attribution · Counterfeit · Epistemology · Falsity · Fiqh · Greeks · Identity (music · Islam · Linguistics · Literature · Political science · Sharia · Theology · Classics · Families in Therapy and Culture · Islamic Studies and History · Islamic Thought and Society Studies · Law · Philosophy