ABSTRACT
As the principal bibliographies immediately indicate, the scope and quantity of Isma'ili literature is vast.1 This chapter will not - indeed, could not! - attempt to survey the entire corpus. What it will do is take, chronologically, certain key authors who achieved prominence in the medieval period AD 900-1162 (which includes the Golden Age of Isma'ili literature2) and examine the picture of God and the related cosmology as they appear and are developed in these authors' major works.3 Isma'ili doctrine underwent a considerable change during the whole period and it would, indeed, be foolish to suppose that early Isma'ili doctrine was the same as that of later stages.4 With the advent of Abu '1-I:Iasan Mul)ammad b. AI:unad alNasafi (died AD 942/3), its key component became the philosophy and doctrines of Neoplatonism with all that meant in the way of emanation, hierarchy, and negation. And it is precisely because of the infiltration of Neoplatonism into Isma'ili Islam, and the wholesale adoption and adaptation of it by that sect, that the Isma'ili God is treated here without apology as part of a book purporting to discuss the philosophers' God in Islam.
