 But the questions of the identity and ideology of the Ikhwân al-Safâ’ still remain unsolved. In recent times, Kacimi 2016 has come back to the relationship between the Ikhwân and the Sufi thought. Poonawala refuses them to have been Sufi, though some MSS, included the MS Atif Efendi 1618 (dated 1182, on which the new edition of the Institute of Ismaili Studies is based), bear in the title the mention of the Sufi school – or doctrines. Mayer thinks that to result from a later, Sunni manuscript tradition, “in which the acceptance, or at least toleration, of esoteric material was made likelier by presenting it as proper to Ṣūfī circles, whose respectability […] had been established by a figure of the magnitude of Ghazālī.” (Traboulsi et al. 2016, 7).