Umm al-Kitab (Ismaili book)


The Umm al-Kitab is a major work of Ismailism from the late eighth century, from the town Kufa. The treatise contains a discourse of the fifth Shi'i Imam Muhammad al-Baqir responding to thirty questions raised by a group of disciples. Umm al-Kitab offers an esoteric hermeneutics concerning cosmology, the nature of man and worship within a Qur'anic context.