 Grounding himself on the Sîrat ibn Ḥawshab of the Fatimid dâ‘î Ja‘far b. Mansūr al-Yaman (d. second half of the 10th century), Hamdani hypothesizes the epistles to have been written under Ahmad b. ‘Abd Allâh b. Muḥammad b. Ismâ‘îl’s imâmate, who was considered as the expected imâm. Ahmad, however, was not their author, but their munshi’ (“issuer”). Therefore, the Ikhwân al-Safâ’ would have been a think-tank at the service of the Fatimid propaganda, a secret organization with the function of gaining support from the non-initiates (Hamdani, Soufan 2019, 1–2). Moh. Jalub Farhan, however, describes the Ikhwân as opposed to the Buyid regime, in spite of the fact that it supported science (1999, 30, 31). The Brethren who cooperated in the final version of the encyclopedia in the tenth century might have been disguised adversaries of the Buyids, who were Shî‘ites, not Ismâ‘îlis. Poonawala also proposes the Rasâ’il to have been written by propagandists belonging to the entourage of Ahmad, half a century after al-Ma’mûn (Walker et al. 2015, 66; De Smet 2017, 157–158). More recently, Hamdani has noted in the encyclopedia also Sunni-Sufi elements; thereby, the Ikhwân would be a secret think-tank made up of tafḍîlî Sunnis (that is, they assert the superiority of ‘Alî over all the successors of the Prophet), who hoped to replace the ‘Abbasids with a ‘alid caliphate, displaying in their work also liberalism and religious tolerance (Hamdani, Soufan 2019, 32–33).