A compendium of lost ideas and secret theories, Secret Philosophies is a strikingly original history of ideas from the Middle East.

The book traverses hidden archives and forgotten movements that have been lost to time, exploring their philosophies of rumour and conspiracy through a revolving collection of ancient, medieval, and futuristic sects in the Middle East. Taking a new approach to the production of knowledge, Jason Mohaghegh unfolds a labyrinth of texts from vanished libraries, underground circles and the authors of enigmatic codes and ciphers. Each chapter features the intersection of two near-identical words separated only by a single letter in the Persian or Arabic alphabet. These mirror terms – A for Intigham/Intighal (vengeance/transmission), B for Bazakh/Barzakh (sound/limbo), T for Takassur/Takassul (brokenness/fatigue) – form a double-gate that swings between conceptual universes, and yet share a single object of fascination. These traversals between phonetic dimensions – however episodic, rogue, or fragmentary in nature – accumulate invaluable insights into the logic of secrecy at the heart of thought itself.

Each micro-section is its own looking glass into the rarest traditions of secrecy in both writing and thought: from the oldest Babylonian tablet of apocalyptic warnings to a prophet's last words in a cave of delirium; from books of sleep to books of plague; and exiled tongues to forbidden alphabets. The main body chapters are composed as a sequence of encounters with the Palestinian artist and writer Dana Dawud, who curatorially opens each instalment like a subterranean gallery full of codes, prompts, and questions, and the renowned Iranian visual artist Raha Raissnia has offered original calligraphic drawings that stand like portals before each chapter of the book.