Revisiting ‘The Barāhima’s Enigma’

SLIDE 1

If you open a text on Islamic theology or doxography that dates from the 10th century onwards, you’ll

probably come across a reference to this little-known group called the “Barāhima”. Within our sources,

they are often presented as prophecy-deniers and also the source for a particular critique of prophecy,

that takes the form of a two-horned dilemma:

SLIDE 2

1) Either the prophet conveys what is in accordance with reason, so they would be superfluous

2) or a prophet conveys what is contrary to reason, so they would be rejected

This is designed as a reductio ad absurdum. In either scenario, the sending of prophets to humanity

would be futile, and therefore a wrong act on behalf of God. The Barāhima’s own solution to the paradox

is simple – they reject the need for prophets entirely, because humans can in fact obtain all the

theological and moral knowledge they need by the means of reason alone. But for any theologian who

does believe in the necessity of revelation, this dilemma poses the question of precisely why humans

need prophets or revelation– especially if you believe that humans can gain theological and moral

knowledge rationally, by their own means.

SLIDE 3

My dissertation aims to explore the broader background to the Barāhima’s dilemma - how it came to

be, what kind of role it came to play in Islamic theology – but today I wanted to address a broader

debate about the Barāhima’s origins. Who are these Barāhima exactly? Are they Brahmans from India

as the orthography of their name would suggest? If so, why are they depicted as these ‘arch-rationalist

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prophecy deniers’? Or do they actually represent an entirely different group? In his 1987 article,

Binyamin Abrahamov adopted the term “the Barāhima’s Enigma” to describe the widespread confusion

that these Barāhima have caused modern scholars. So, let’s see if we can demystify the Barāhima a little

today.

SLIDE 4

Over the past few decades, scholars have been teasing out potential solutions to the Barāhima’s

enigma. In a pair of articles from the early 1930s, Paul Kraus argued that the “arch-rationalist prophecy-

denying” Barāhima that you see here represents a vestige from the now lost Kitāb al-Zumurrud, by the

renegade theologian, Ibn al-Rāwandī. According to Kraus, Ibn al-Rāwandī employed the Barāhima as a

“cover” for his own heretical views – for his own rejection of prophecy. A careful reconstruction of the

Kitāb al-Zumurrud, however, suggests that the Barāhima had in fact intended to serve as a foil for Ibn

al-Rāwandī’s opponents among the Muʿtazila – and the Barāhima’s dilemma had been cited within the

text as a discursive device through which to expose the contradictions between Muʿtazilite

epistemology and prophetology. The Kitāb al-Zumurrud could have very feasibly been the source for

the original Barāhima’s dilemma – but this does mean that buck stops with Ibn al-Rāwandī. It is highly

likely that the Ibn al-Rāwandī had cited the Barāhima as pre-existing topos that was already known to

theologians – one that clearly had a reputation for the kind of ‘prophecy-denying rationalism’ with

which he had intended to impute the Muʿtazila.

SLIDE 5

The Barāhima certainly had an existence long before the Kitāb al-Zumurrud and this is further

suggested by very mixed way in which they appear in the sources that cite them. More often or not, the

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Barāhima are appear as denying prophets all together – the vein in which they apparently appeared in

the Kitāb al-Zumurrud. But sometimes they also appear as recognising certain pre-Mosaic prophets.

Here are two examples from texts dating to the late 10th and 11th centuries: Kitāb al-Tamhīd and the

Mabādiʾ al-Adilla. Now on the surface level, these accounts of the Barāhima appear to be mutually

contradictory – sometimes they are prophecy denying and sometimes they are prophecy affirming. But

what this apparent amalgam suggests is that these accounts drew on different ‘versions’ of the Barāhima

- ideas and legends that had been extracted from other sources, that could very well predate the Kitāb

al-Zumurrud.

SLIDE 6

Several theories have been offered to explain these prophetic connections. Shlomo Pines

argued that references to Adam may have reflect a reconfiguration of Manu as the first man and

progenitor of humanity in Sanskrit lore. References to Abraham may have resulted from textual

corruptions of the name ‘Barāhima’, as they are closely related to consonantal form of “Ibrāhīm”.

Perhaps the Barāhima are another guise for the Sabians of Harran, who were known to have recognised

the prophetic status of both Adam and Seth, or perhaps they represent a nascent Abrahamic movement

from within the Muslim community, which called people to return to back primordial law of Abraham

and renounce all subsequent revelations.

SLIDE 7

Although productive avenues of inquiry, some of these theories end up raising more questions

than they answer, and to date, the “Barāhima’s Enigma” has been far from solved. So, can we navigate a

way out of this conundrum? What may be required, at least as a starting point, is a new approach to the

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material, which is less concerned with finding the “real” identity of the Barāhima, than with seeing them

Barāhima as a pliable amalgam of different traditions, which were absorbed from Late Antiquity and

subsequently reinterpreted within an Islamic idiom. In my dissertation, I argue that the reason why the

Barāhima appear to play such varied, and seemingly contradictory roles within the Islamic tradition is

precisely because they played varied, and seeming contradictory roles, in the literature of the Near and

Middle East prior to the Arab conquests. Here they appeared under various guises, but most commonly

as Brahmans or Gymnosophists – known famously as the group of sages who Alexander the Great

encountered during his expedition to India.

SLIDE 8

Today we will focus on only one strand of this material, which connected the Brahmans, as a group of

eastern sages, with the figure of Seth, the son of Adam – a connection that we see in the Mabādiʾ’ al-

Adilla in the previous slide. Although Seth is only briefly referred to in Genesis, he would come to play

much more prominent role within the exegetical Jewish traditions of the Second Temple period, and

subsequently within the Christian literature of Late Antiquity. Perhaps the most important exegetical

theme to evolve during this period was about the “Descendants of Seth” – a community of pure and

holy humans who maintained close proximity to God and lived on a mountain close to the Garden of

Eden. Although many held that the Descendants of Seth were eventually corrupted by the daughters of

Cain and wiped out with the rest of humanity in the Flood, an alternative tradition developed, which

claimed that the Descendants of Seth had indeed survived the flood, and that they continued to live on

a distant mountain in the East.

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SLIDE 9

A 5th century Latin commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, the Opus Imperfectum in Matthaeum,

provides an intriguing testimony to this alternative tradition.1 It recounts the story of the Magi, who are

represented as a tribe who live in the East near the Ocean, who are the guardians of the writings of Seth.

According the text, the books of Seth had been consulted by twelve scholars, generation after

generation, who observe an annual rite of climbing to the top of the Mountain of Victory, where they

offer prayers to God. One year, a star appears before them in the form of the child, which they follow

on their journey to Bethlehem. After their return to the home by the mountain, they are visited by the

Apostle Thomas, who subsequently baptizes them into the Church. Although in Late Antiquity, the

Magi were most frequently associated with Persia, their location near the Eastern Ocean and their

association with the Apostle Thomas, would appear to locate them in the land of India or Indo-China.

And this story of the Magi appears to have enjoyed some popularity across the centuries. In fact, a more

detailed Syriac version of this story was incorporated into another work, the Chronicle of Zuqnin of

Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel Mahre. This chronicle was produced in a monastery near the upper Tigris in

the late 8th century – which shows that it was still in circulation during the early decades of the ʿAbbasid

caliphate.

SLIDE 10

Now does any of this have to do with the Barāhima? Apart from a possible setting in the region

of India, there is nothing within the Opus Imperfectum in Matthaeum or the Chronicle of Zuqnin that

identifies the Magi with Brahmans, but there is an intriguing line of evidence, however, that suggests

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Originally ascribed to John Chrysostom (d. 407 CE), but is mostly likely a work from the fifth century.

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that the “Descendants of Seth” were eventually fused with the Brahmans of the Alexander legend within

the Christian folklore of the Near and Middle East. It is precisely this hybrid legend that eventually made

its way into the Arabic tradition and led Muslim authors to connect the Barāhima with the prophet of

Seth. To trace this line, however, we will need to fast forward a number of centuries to the medieval

Ethiopia.

SLIDE 11

Now, there’s an Ethiopic version of the Alexander Romance, which was composed by the 16th century,

if not earlier, which introduces the Brahmans that Alexander encounters on his journey through India

in quite an unusual way. Here they present themselves to Alexander as the “remnants of the children

of Seth, the son of Adam” a description that is highly significant since it marks an explicit mergence

between the “Descendants of Seth” and the “Alexandrian Brahmans”. But even more importantly,

Faustina Doufikar-Aerts, who has written a comprehensive study of the Arabic Alexander materials,

argues that the Ethiopic Romance is directly dependent upon an earlier Arabic original. She has

identified this Arabic original as the Sīrat al-Mālik Iskandar Dhī l-Qarnayn, otherwise known as the

Quzmān codex, because only surviving copy was produced in Egypt in the 17th century by a Coptic

scribe, called Yūsuf b. ʿAṭīya Quzmān. Just like in the Ethiopic Romance, the Brahmans of the Quzmān

codex (in the Arabic, Brukhmāniyyūn) present themselves as, quote, “the remnants of the children of

Seth, (baqiyya awlād Shīth), son of Adam, whom God concealed in his hidden treasure cove when He

sent the flood upon the earth (khabbaʾnā Allāh fī khizānatihi al-maktūma haythu baʿtha Allāh al-ṭūfān

ʿalā l-arḍ)”.

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SLIDE 12

Now the Quzmān codex seems quite late for the purposes of our investigation. However, Faustina

Doufikar-Aerts has argued that Quzmān’s copy is probably based on a much earlier Arabic text, which

itself was probably a ‘Christianised’ adaptation of one of the many Arabic translations of the Syriac

Alexander Romance (a.k.a. Pseudo-Callisthenes), which were likely in circulation by the 9th century if

not earlier. So, it’s entirely possible that this association between the Brahmans and the descendants

of Seth arose from this much earlier period. However, when we look at early translations of the

Alexander Romance by Muslim authors, we don’t see this association, so it likely that the association

between the Brahmans and the descendants probably first appeared within the ‘Christianised’

adaption.

SLIDE 13

This seems most likely, not in the least since the reference to the ‘hidden treasure cove’ (khizāna

maktūma) clearly alludes to an extra-biblical legend of the Cave of Treasures, which had been popular

among Christians of the Near and Middle East for centuries before the Arabic conquest. Within the

Syriac tradition, in particular, the “Cave of Treasures” had served as the first refuge for Adam and Eve

on the mountain top where they first fell to earth. It was the site where Adam’s body would eventually

be buried, along with the gold, myrrh, and frankincense that would eventually be gifted to Jesus by the

Magi. It would also be remembered as a sacred shrine that had been guarded by Seth and his

descendants. The legend Cave of Treasures was well known to Arabic-speaking Christians, and

information about the cave appears to have circulated at an early date among Muslim scholars.

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SLIDE 14

One of the earliest references to the cave appears in the “Book of Idols” by Ibn al-Kalbī, who

cites a report that describes how Seth buried Adam in a cave on the mountain of Nod (quote) ‘whereon

Adam alighted when he was sent to the land of India’ and how the children of Seth would subsequently

visit the cave to show their respects and pray for his soul. Intriguingly, a passage about the very same

mountain, “where Adam fell to earth”, is described in detail in an early Arabic version of the Alexander

Romance called the Qiṣṣat al-Iskandar. However, in this case, it is the Brahmans who give Alexander

directions to Adam’s mountain, as the final stop on his journey east to Land of Darkness, at the very

edge of the known world. As a group of pious people who lived in the East adjacent Eden, one can easily

see how stories about the Descendants of the Seth and the Brahmans could have been merged together

by the Christian communities of the Near and Middle East.

SLIDE 15

This development would certainly help explain one of the earliest references to the Barāhima

that we see in Islamic literature which was first identified by Shlomo Pines. In his polemical tract against

the Rāfiḍa, the Zaydite Imam, al-Qāsim b. Ibrāhīm al-Rassī (d. 246/860), makes a surprising reference

to a group in India called the Barhamiyya. He claims the doctrines of the Barhamiyya are the inspiration

behind the assertion, made by certain Rāfiḍa, that each prophet who bore a written revelation had to

be accompanied by legatee (waṣī) who held knowledge of the inner meaning of that revelation. Here

he is apparently referring to the nascent teaching of the Ismāʿīlīs. And it’s worth quoting al-Qāsim’s

passage in full here:

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 That which the Rāfiḍa endorse regarding legatees (awṣiyāʾ) is the same position as that of a

group of disbelievers from among the people of India called the Barhamiyya. They claim that

under the leadership of Adam (bi-imāmat Ādam), they can suffice without any messenger and

guidance (rusūl wa-hudan), and that anyone who claims prophecy or messengership after

Adam has made an untrue and erroneous claim. They also claim that Adam bequeathed his

prophecy to Seth (awṣā bi-nubuwwatihi ilā Shīth) and that Seth bequeathed it to his offspring,

and that they had directed his testament (waṣiyya) by the means of legatees (awṣiyāʾ) to them

SLIDE 16

The roots of this narrative appear to lie in the Testament of Adam, a Syriac work with a terminus ante

quem of the 5th century, which describes the final testament of Adam, recorded by Seth upon his

deathbed, and the various ritual instructions and prophetic visions that God had dispensed to Adam

during his lifetime. Now, the Testament of Adam was translated into Arabic at some point in the Abbasid

period, and these translations circulated independently or as part of the ‘Book of the Rolls’ Kitāb al-

Majāll. In the Arabic translation, written testament imparted to Seth is likewise called a waṣiyya, but is

then sealed for posterity within the Cave of Treasures along with the gifts of the Magi. As you might

remember, the legend of testament is embellished in the Opus Imperfectum in Matthaeum and the

Chronicle of Zuqnin, where the written legacy that Adam had bequeathed Seth is now studied and

protected by the Magi, who return annually to the cave on the top of the mountain in the distant East.

By the time that al-Qāsim b. Ibrāhīm composed his refutation, these legendary figures – the

Descendants of Seth-cum-Magi appear to have morphed into the so-called Barhamiyya of India –

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possibly through the influence of variations of the Alexandrian Brahman legend, as witnessed in the

Quzmān codex, where the Brahmans are identified explicitly with Seth’s Descendants.

SLIDE 17

Given the evidence we have examined so far, I would argue that al-Qāsim b. Ibrāhīm most

probably extracted his knowledge of the Barhamiyya from exegetical material that was circulation in

the Christian circles of Egypt, Syria, or Iraq during his lifetime. The way in which al-Qāsim b. Ibrāhīm

uses this legend, however, as a screen for problematising and debunking the views of the proto-

Ismāʿīliyya, leads to a new kind of emphasis – on the Barhamiyya’s rejection of all prophets that came

after Adam. Al-Qāsim insists that the Rāfiḍiyya’s belief in the need for awṣiyāʾ is erroneous, not only

because they cannot sufficiently prove that humans require a waṣī to receive guidance, but also because

their devotion to legatees ultimately lowers the status of the prophets and risks making them defunct.

This has clearly occurred in the case of the Barhamiyya, who are happy to content themselves with

guidance of the first prophet and his legatee, so do not feel the need to embrace the revelations of

subsequent prophets. Although they recognised a legitimate prophet, they remain kuffār, whose

exclusive adherence to antediluvian prophecies threatens the very cornerstone of the Islamic

prophetology – the idea that subsequent revelations can and have superseded previous ones.

The employment of the Barhamiyya here provides a really interest example of how Muslim

scholars could adopt a tradition from Late Antiquity, but recast it with a new context, a new

significance, and a new spin, which reflected the immediate narrative and ideological concerns of the

Muslim authors who referenced them. Under al-Qāsim’s hand, the pious and exemplars Brahmans of

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Late Antiquity could thus, in a few steps, transform into a nearly unrecognizable challengers to the

accepted institutions of prophecy.

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