Fifth biennial Symposia Iranica

From 10 to 12 April 2026, the University of St Andrews hosted the fifth biennial Symposia Iranica. On 10 April, Laura Tribuzio represented MOSAIC with the paper “Bridging the Unseen: The Mujmal al-ḥikma, Occult Sciences, and Political Imagination in the Persianate World.”

The paper explored ʿilm al-takwīn (the science of generation and artificial reproduction) through an unpublished Pseudo-Platonic text preserved in manuscript 64 in Hyderabad. The Risālat al-Fahm al-Thāqib, transmitted in Persian with an Arabic version in the margins, describes a three-stage alchemical operation in which a bird is generated and transformed through successive processes involving the Stone of the Sages. The procedure links artificial generation to specifically alchemical ideas of transformation, refinement, and the production of gold, while also insisting on the secrecy of this knowledge and warning against its appropriation by rulers.

This material was then brought into dialogue with the Mujmal al-ḥikma, an anonymous early-thirteenth-century Persian abridgement and reworking of the Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ. In the Mujmal, takwīn-i ḥayavānāt (the generation of animals) appears among a group of restricted sciences reserved for the ahl-i ḥikmat (the people of wisdom), alongside alchemy, talismans, occult properties, and other operative forms of knowledge. The paper therefore examined how older conceptions of takwīn as an alchemical science of generation were preserved and reshaped in the medieval Persianate world, contributing to MOSAIC’s study of the transmission and reorganization of scientific and occult knowledge.