SOURCE: Mahdi, Muhsin S. “The Foundation of Islamic Philosophy.” In Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy, pp. 47-62. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001.

[In the following essay, Mahdi explains the uniqueness of al-Fārābī's political works and their thematic concern with the salvation of civilization.]

Alfarabi established the main tradition of Islamic philosophy as we know it today. The respect with which he has been regarded by his successors has not always been matched with a clear understanding of his role as a founder or with a comprehensive appreciation of his achievement as a philosopher. Great philosophers like Avicenna, Averroes, and Mullā Sadrā consistently remind us that we need to know more about this towering figure. But they do not always help us grasp his central concern or the path he charted for himself. Being philosophers themselves, they had their own concerns and charted their own individual paths. We must go back to his own writings. Only then can we appreciate fully his relation to his Islamic and Hellenistic predecessors and how he went about establishing the main tradition of Islamic philosophy. Since Alfarabi's writings are still in the process of being recovered and studied, the following remarks cannot claim to be more than first impressions.

ALFARABI, AL-KINDī, AND AL-RāZī

Historians of Islamic philosophy usually approach Alfarabi by starting with the question of translations and the translation literature. They enumerate the books that were translated from Greek or Syriac or both, describe the techniques of translation, and summarize and paraphrase such important texts as the Theology of Aristotle or the so-called Liber de causis. What they do not usually do, and what we need to do more often, is ask what Muslim philosophers did with this translation literature. A book like the Theology of Aristotle was used by Alfarabi, al-Suhrawardī, and Mullā Sadrā, among others. Was it simply absorbed by them, or did they attempt to study, understand, modify, complete, and make use of this book in different ways? More generally, is the history of Neoplatonism in Islam a history of ideas that could not help, so to speak, but run through the riverbed provided by Islam? Among many Muslim philosophers, at least, it is a history of conscious and many-sided use. And it was Alfarabi who showed them how and for what purposes they could use the Neoplatonic literature.

Next, historians of Islamic philosophy move to early Islamic theology (kalām). So far as philosophy is concerned, one can say that the major contribution of Islamic theology was to prepare the ground for philosophy, to soften up the thought and attitude of the Muslim community and instruct it in the use of reason to the point that philosophy could take root and begin to grow. What this means is quite simple in a way. When one looks at the beginnings of any religious community, one finds that it is completely taken up with revelation and a divine message. This is not the time for quiet reflection or for working out the implications of the revelation. It takes some time before this latter stage can be reached; and here theology plays an important role.

Theology accepts the message, the divine law, or the revelation and slowly moves farther and farther away from that original source. (The history of Islamic theology, I think, is quite instructive in this respect.) It elaborates the many problems posed by the revelation. It attempts to harmonize apparently inconsistent statements and make explicit things that are only implicit in the revelation. For instance, the Mu‘tazilites came to the conclusion that it is a condition of true faith that one should on his own (by his own reason and independently from faith) know all of the following: God's existence, essence, and attributes; the possibility of prophecy and revelation; what is right and wrong in human action; and the structure of the physical world and its relation to its maker. All this, according to the Mu‘tazilites, must be known by a man through his own reason before he can call himself a true believer; otherwise, they reasoned, he believes on the basis of authority and the imitation of others—and this is not true belief.

When one remembers the starting point—the miraculous revelation and the power of its claim on men—it is understandable, I suppose, that a community should need a century or two to reach such conclusions. In traveling this road, Islamic theology prepared the way for Islamic philosophy, even though this was by no means its intention. From the very beginning, Muslim philosophers, in turn, paid careful attention to theology. This was the religious discipline they found closest to their own discipline, and they found it profitable to reflect on its problems, methods, and conclusions.

Finally, historians come to the two thinkers who seem to present the beginnings of Islamic philosophy and therefore to deserve a role as Alfarabi's predecessors: al-Kindī and al-Rāzī. In the case of al-Kindī, there is no evidence, at least not in his books that have survived, that he was a theologian or a Mu‘tazilite, even though he lived in a period during which the Mu‘tazilites of Baghdad were playing an important public role and was connected with the court that encouraged this theological movement and to some extent even sponsored and patronized it. Further, his concern with what may be thought to have been a central Mu‘tazilite question—the theological question of knowledge both human and divine—seems to take a somewhat different form from theirs.

He seems to say that, in principle, all knowledge is accessible to man as man, even though there is another way to that same knowledge, which is the way of divine revelation. The latter cuts short the long, hard way that man has to follow when trying to acquire this knowledge by his own effort. One could say that all this seems to be quite possibly in agreement with the theological position of the Mu‘tazilites. But as one looks more closely at what al-Kindī writes, it is easy to see that the spirit, intention, and substance of his thought are quite different from those of the Mu‘tazilites. The most important difference is his acknowledgment of what he calls the contribution to truth made by the ancients whom he sees as his predecessors, and the openness and gratitude with which he accepts their contribution.

Here we have for the first time a man who is explicitly concerned with what philosophers like Plato and Aristotle or with what the Sabians thought and contributed to knowledge. This does not mean that he accepts everything given to him by these traditions. As he says in a famous passage, it is his duty to understand, assimilate, complete, and modify what is given in these traditions in terms of his own language, custom, and so forth. Furthermore, his thought differs from that of the theologians in that he is concerned with and practices what we call the “hard” sciences and sciences that require special skills and practical training.

So far as we know, none of the theologians of the earlier period were proficient, or even halfway proficient, in such things as mathematics, astronomy, physics, or music. It is characteristic of the philosophic tradition that from the very beginning it understood philosophy or wisdom as something more than an interminable disputation in which everyone is welcome and all men can sit down and figure things out by means of “right reason.” Philosophy consists of a number of relatively independent sciences that had been thought through in detail and whose principles had been discussed, subjected to criticism, and commented on by a succession of classical authors whose works were available to be studied in detail and with precision; and it is concerned with the relation among these sciences and the problem of the organization of knowledge.

Already in al-Kindī, the atmosphere and the literary genealogy are quite distinct from anything we know among the theologians of this period, for whom philosophy is a collection of largely anonymous doctrines. For instance, they would say: we do not believe X as the philosophers—en masse—believe. This is not what al-Kindī does. On the other hand, and perhaps because al-Kindī poses the question of the parallelism between human and divine knowledge and sees divine knowledge as a more direct way to the knowledge of everything, he bequeaths to later philosophers a number of questions that persist in Islamic philosophy. (1) The creation of the world: what it means; how it differs from emanation on the one hand and natural causality (say, the four causes in Aristotle) on the other. (2) The immortality of individual souls: what it means; how it can be proved. (3) Divine knowledge of particulars: whether it has anything to do with astrology; how it takes place, whether through the stars or directly. (The stars, by the way, begin suddenly to play a much greater role as we move away from theology to philosophy. Theologians were not particularly concerned with the stars or the heavenly bodies. But for the philosophers—whether in connection with some sort of pagan star worship, understanding the principles of the physical world, or the attribution of souls and intellects to them, the reasons may vary—the question of the nature of the heavenly bodies becomes important, if not central.)

When one considers al-Rāzī, one finds that questions like the creation of the world or the immortality of the soul are by no means the special concern of the theologians or of so-called religious philosophers. Even a man who presumably did not believe in revelation and reportedly considered prophecy to be a hoax is still concerned with defending the creation of the world and the immortality of individual souls, in his own fashion. More generally, most of the questions raised by al-Kindī—questions that appear to be of special concern to a Muslim philosopher or a religious philosopher so called—were in fact raised (and quite analogous stands regarding them were taken) by pagan philosophers in pre-Islamic times as well as by nonreligious philosophers in Islamic times. Whether a philosopher took his stand for or against what is commonly believed to be the standard biblical or Quranic view of creation, for example, does not seem to be closely related to whether or not he was a believer in revelation. (This question is treated in a complex yet illuminating fashion in Maimonides' Guide.)

Unlike al-Kindī, however, al-Rāzī took a somewhat novel stand in relation to the philosophic and scientific tradition. Like al-Kindī, he was concerned with the thought and the writings of the major ancient authors. But whereas al-Kindī was content to pick and choose among those writings, selectively adapting them to what he saw as the new needs of his own time, al-Rāzī saw his relation to earlier thinkers as one of continuity and progress. In the process, he did not single out any ancient author—be it Aristotle, Plato, or Galen—for the honor of having found the truth, so that philosophy or science would forever consist of commenting on this author, understanding him, explaining him, and defending his ideas. (This kind of dogmatism is almost never found in Islamic philosophy. The only possible exception is thought to be Averroes, but even here I doubt very much that what is generally said about his relation to Aristotle is in fact borne out by a careful study of his works.) Thus al-Rāzī held a number of important doctrines (regarding time, place, and so forth) in opposition to Aristotle. His criticisms of Aristotle were ignored for a while, but reemerge soon thereafter as part of a non-Aristotelian and anti-Aristotelian tradition in Islamic philosophy.

Finally, al-Rāzī held a rather strict (and apparently scandalous) view regarding the difficult problem of the relation of divine revelation, the divine law, and the religious community to science and philosophy. He seems to have radicalized the theological doctrine that all knowledge is in principle accessible to man as man. He is reported to have said that human reason is the only way to knowledge of the physical world and of what is good and bad and that every other source of knowledge is simply pretension and deceit.

One must remember, however, that we possess only a small portion of the philosophic works of these two philosophers and that we are forced therefore to reconstruct their thought on the basis of fragmentary evidence. It is of course uncertain whether their works were as complete or thorough as their titles suggest to us, who think of the contents of books with similar titles by later philosophers; a number of the works that have survived appear to have been hastily written epistles. Still, there is no way of telling what a book that we do not possess may or may not have contained. Alfarabi is the first Muslim of whom we have in our hands a substantial number of complete philosophic books. We do not have all of them. If we think in terms of sheer bulk, we do not have even half of them. But compared to al-Kindī and al-Rāzī, much more has survived, especially in the fields of politics and logic.

Just as it is not possible to explain the thought of al-Kindī and al-Rāzī as an extension of Islamic theology or of the Mu‘tazilite movement, it is impossible to explain Alfarabi's thought as an extension or simple development of the thought of al-Kindī and al-Rāzī. Alfarabi wrote a book in refutation of al-Rāzī's metaphysics that is not extant. Normally, he ignores al-Kindī completely; and in this he was followed by al-Ghazālī, Avicenna, Averroes, and many other philosophers. In a book on music (Mahdi 1976, 76-78), where he does speak of al-Kindī, Alfarabi accuses him of discussing musical theory and musical practice without knowing what he is talking about.

In general, later historians of Islamic philosophy followed the lead of Alfarabi and Avicenna in criticizing al-Kindī and al-Rāzī; and their criticisms are largely derived from judgments passed by these philosophers or their students. In the case of al-Rāzī, these historians say that he was a naturalist rather than a metaphysician or general philosopher. In the case of al-Kindī, they say that his knowledge of logic was incomplete. These and similar criticisms became part of the lore handed down by historians of Islamic philosophy in later times. But the point is not just that Alfarabi adds metaphysics or logic to the philosophic syllabus or that he is a better student of metaphysics or logic. The texture of his thought is more coherent and distinctive, and the quality of his knowledge of Plato and Aristotle is on quite a different level. All three philosophers had the translation literature and access to some of the same primary sources. Alfarabi and al-Rāzī were contemporaries (Alfarabi outlived al-Rāzī by about twenty years), so that Alfarabi did not have the advantage of significant advances in translations or scientific inquiries beyond al-Rāzī. Therefore, we must look for the explanation elsewhere.

ALFARABI'S ON THE RISE OF PHILOSOPHY

There are a few details of a historical nature that appear to be crucial for understanding the origins of the new tradition in Islamic philosophy. The surviving fragments from Alfarabi's lost book On the Rise of Philosophy are our primary source for reconstructing this important episode in the history of philosophy, but there seems to be no good reason to doubt its main features. Alfarabi explains that he belongs to a particular philosophic school. This school, according to him, is a direct continuation of a tradition of philosophic learning that existed in Alexandria in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. He gives an account of the movement of that school from Alexandria to Antioch, to Carrhae (Harrān), and then farther east to Iran and down to Baghdad. He provides some information about the teachers, students, and books that represent this line of scholarship. The school became almost extinct except for two or three students who kept the tradition alive. He gives the name of his own teacher, Yūḥannā Ibn Haylān, a Christian cleric, who is otherwise unknown as a teacher, scholar, or writer.

It seems certain that neither al-Kindī nor al-Rāzī, nor any other earlier philosopher in Islam, had access to this school tradition, which does not mean access just to men but also to books and conversely does not mean access just to books but also to men: it was a dual tradition, both oral and written. An important part of that tradition was the reading of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, the logical work of Aristotle that deals with the question of science and the method of science. Alfarabi relates that church authorities had forbidden the study of various books, especially this one, because they were thought to be dangerous; the church had limited the study of logic to certain parts (i.e., to formal logic up to certain chapters of the Prior Analytics) and had forbidden study of the rest in public. Presumably, this means that one could obtain permission to study these other chapters in private, so that some sort of a tradition of studying the rest did continue.

Alfarabi then states that he was the first (Muslim) to have studied the Posterior Analytics. What Alfarabi perhaps means here is that he was the first to read this book with a man who had spent years, perhaps a lifetime, studying and trying to understand it with a master, who in turn had done so with an earlier master, and so on. There is, then, the connection with the school at Alexandria. This connection was evidently very important. More important, however, is what Alfarabi learned from this Alexandrian tradition and how he in turn understood and interpreted it.

The connection with the school of Alexandria reveals itself in many ways in Alfarabi and his colleagues, students, and successors. One can see it, for instance, in the writing of so-called great, or large, commentaries (we have two of them by Alfarabi), in the care with which Aristotle's text is analyzed and interpreted, and also in the continuity of the scholarly tradition. Aristotle had written the book. Earlier thinkers expressed their own ideas about the subject; all of these are discussed. There were significant disagreements among them. These are explained. Earlier commentators are cited and their explanations are approved of, criticized, or developed in detail. The commentary becomes a depository of a thousand years of thought and reflection on the questions discussed in Aristotle's text. It pays a great deal of attention not just to the text but also to the recently translated writings of earlier commentators.

Here, again, paying attention to earlier commentators does not mean that one accepts the views of these commentators or tries to synchronize these views. One can accept the view of one commentator, reject the view of a second, discuss the view of a third, and show that this one is superficial or that the other one is profound. It is an open field in which the thinker inquires into all the alternatives and considers the possibilities embedded in the tradition. In the end, he has to make up his own mind. Such, at least, are the external features of the tradition of Alexandria.

In contrast, al-Kindī may be connected with the Hellenistic-Roman Athenian school rather than the school of Alexandria. The great name that is usually mentioned in connection with the Athenian school is that of Proclus. People who talk about Neoplatonism sometimes do not realize that they are referring to a long, complex, and many-sided tradition. In a way, all philosophy since Plato is Neoplatonic. But there are Neoplatonists and Neoplatonists.

There were, for instance, the Middle Platonists, who paid some attention to Plato's political teachings and who incorporated much of Aristotle's logic and metaphysics into the Platonic tradition. There was also the Neoplatonism of Plotinus, who tries on almost every page to tackle problems that had been posed by Plato and Aristotle—the two great masters. When we talk about Neoplatonism, we should not think of it as necessarily syncretic or necessarily anti-Aristotelian or anti-Platonic. Then there was the Neoplatonism of Plotinus's successors, especially the Neoplatonism of the scholars who were at the head of the philosophic schools in Athens and Alexandria. As heads of these philosophic schools, they were primarily teaching the works of Plato and Aristotle. The notes they wrote for, or the notes their students took from, their lecture courses are in the form of large or middle commentaries on works by Plato or Aristotle. Most of their own ideas, different as they may have been from those of the two great masters, are contained in these commentaries and take the form of developments of certain notions in the Platonic and Aristotelian texts.

Now the Athenian school, at least in some periods of its long life, was characterized by the teachings of Proclus and others who seem to have gone wild in developing a cosmology consisting of many layers of angels or spirits, which is not present in Plotinus. They were concerned with the interpretation of things like magic and oracles and alchemy, with which other Neoplatonists were not concerned. The Alexandrian school seems to have been particularly sane and moderate in this respect. It tried to meet the challenge of the time, which was Christianity, and succeeded in harmonizing some of the basic differences between philosophy and Christianity. The Athenian school, on the other hand, seems to have gone to extremes in trying to support the pagan religious movement against Christianity, and its members wrote pseudophilosophic, pseudoscientific works on things like magic and pagan religious practices of various kinds. Broadly speaking then, it makes sense to say that there was a difference in attitude in the way the two schools looked at such questions as the relation between philosophy and religion, at least during a certain period in the history of the two schools—when one compares Athens and Alexandria in, let us say, the period from the fourth to the sixth century A.D. I say “broadly speaking” because there was a great deal of movement between the two schools. A bright young man from Alexandria would go to Athens, study under Proclus, then return to become the head of the school or the successor to the chair of philosophy at Alexandria, and vice versa; the two schools did not represent two traditions hermetically sealed from each other.

The Alexandrian scientific and philosophic traditions are historically crucial to everything that happened later on in science and philosophy in the Islamic world, in Byzantium, as well as in the Latin West. These philosophers, commentators, and thinkers—“Alexandrine” though they were in certain respects—were the ones who handed down to the Muslims the books and the tradition of reading or studying these books and interpreting them; this took the form of a clearly defined scholarly tradition, not vague connections with earlier thought as was the case in the first stages of Islamic theology. But although this Alexandrian connection between the Muslims and classical Greek thought is extremely important, we must realize that the tradition of Alexandria (and Athens) was available to Byzantium and later to the Latin West from the renaissance of the eleventh-twelfth century onward. Yet these three heirs to the Alexandrian tradition and, through Alexandria, to the classical Greek tradition did not understand or develop philosophy in the same way. Alfarabi, who was the first philosopher to claim that he represented this Alexandrian tradition in Islam, was not a translator or a historian of philosophy, not merely a carrier of a philosophic tradition, but a philosopher in his own right; and if one is to believe such men as Avicenna, Averroes, and Mullā Sadrā, he was a philosopher who must be ranked next to Aristotle himself. It is therefore important that we begin to understand how Alfarabi himself understood, interpreted, and presented the tradition of philosophy to his Muslim readers.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND METAPHYSICS

The vast majority of Alfarabi's surviving writings fall into two major divisions: logic and politics. (There are of course also his writings on music, which are substantial and not without philosophic interest.) Political science or political philosophy is absent from the works of al-Kindī and al-Rāzī that we know. Both deal with something called ethics, but not with political science. In fact, when al-Kindī mentions political science, he seems to be thinking of an ethical work by Aristotle. There is thus no preparation in earlier Islamic thought for the emergence of political science as a major philosophic discipline. But, curiously, in the earlier traditions in Alexandria and Athens also, there is no preparation for the appearance of political science as a major philosophic discipline, or for the introduction of Plato as primarily a political thinker. For the most part, the earlier so-called Neoplatonists had looked at Plato's Timaeus as a mystical work and had shown no interest at all in any of Plato's political writings—for instance, the Republic and the Laws—as political writings; their interest in these works centered on the myths, metaphysical doctrines, and supposed mystical notions.

All of a sudden Alfarabi presents to us a Plato who is neither mystical nor metaphysical but who is primarily and massively political. Here is a Plato whose Timaeus is not a work on cosmology but a political work meant to instruct the citizens in correct opinions. And then this account of Plato, which is presented in a book called the Philosophy of Plato, is followed by an account of Aristotle, in a book called the Philosophy of Aristotle, in which again metaphysics seems to be absent. And these two accounts are preceded by an account of philosophy in Alfarabi's own name, in a book called the Attainment of Happiness, whose main theme is the dilemma or tension and even conflict between theoretical knowledge and realization—a description not only of practical knowledge or knowledge of practical things such as virtue and happiness but also of how to realize or attain virtue and happiness.

To know is one thing; to realize what is known—that is, what is known to be possible or realizable—to bring it about, to have it actually exist among humans and cities and nations, that is something else. Or, to know is to realize a thing in a certain way, to realize it in the mind; but realization has yet another dimension, which is to see the thing exist in others and in cities and nations. This is not attained by knowledge alone. How does one realize things outside one's own mind? And what kind of additional knowledge and action is required for this? “Do you suppose,” Alfarabi asks his reader, “that these theoretical sciences have also given an account of the means by which these four [virtues] can actually be realized in nations or cities, or not?” How do you bring into being in cities and nations the things you know? Can you bring them into being outside your mind exactly as they are known, or do they have to be modified according to certain conditions? What are the conditions that make realization possible?

All of a sudden, theoretical knowledge and knowledge in general become a prolegomenon to action, ethics, and politics. In the book called the Enumeration of the Sciences one again finds the same scheme. One moves from language to logic, mathematics, and physics and metaphysics, and then one finds a break within metaphysics. Metaphysics does not simply crown the sciences. It does this, to be sure, but it also becomes a preface to political science; and political science studies everything that is necessary for realization, preservation, and reform. It is in this sense that political science includes jurisprudence and theology and deals with questions like prophecy, the divine law, and revelation, for these are seen in terms of realization rather than simply as theoretical matters.

One must admit that this is a wholly new and radical perspective on metaphysics on the one hand and revelation, the divine law, and prophecy on the other. Alfarabi seems to urge his reader to make the question of realization the central question of philosophy and to pose and try to resolve the questions “What is philosophy?” and “Why philosophy?” in the perspective of realization rather than in the perspective of knowledge simply, although the perspective of knowledge is never really absent. The simple and perhaps simplistic way in which people nowadays pose the question of realization is in terms of the relation between what is revealed and what is known by reason. Alfarabi, too, is concerned with this relation.

But the question as he poses it is not that simple; he urges us to understand also the context within which we must look at this relation. For if prophecy, revelation, and the divine law are in fact the primary nexus between knowledge and realization, one will have to understand them, not simply as another way of achieving the same kind of knowledge that can be achieved by reason or even a higher kind of knowledge than can be achieved by reason (as al-Kindī, e.g., understood it), but as a special kind of knowledge that already embodies the conditions necessary for realization, for making what is known exist among men and cities and nations. In this way one can understand more fully the miraculous character of the divine law, its mode of communication, its concreteness, and its concern with various types of opinions and actions. This is why one can say that with Alfarabi we have for the first time an adequate or a more adequate philosophic approach to the divine law, perhaps the central question in Islamic philosophy.

CITY, SOUL, AND COSMOS

There are various ways in which one may proceed with the study of political philosophy in the context of a revealed religion. One may think that the proper way is to start with an elaborate discussion of political science, look at the human condition, and try to understand and explain what is needed to improve the lot of human beings on earth and why improving their lot should take this particular form. Or one could start with psychology and ask how it is that a human, the prophet, has special powers that enable him to receive a revelation and give a divine law. Or one could start with cosmology and ask how the universe is structured, from the highest principle down to man, and how this structure makes possible such phenomena as prophecy, revelation, and the divine law. But these three approaches are not independent from each other. Political science, psychology, and cosmology seem somehow to be related; one needs to work out the structure of the city, the structure of the soul, and the structure of the universe and see how they are related to each other. This leads to what one may call a comparative structural study of the city on the one hand and the soul and the cosmos on the other, a study that must be concerned with the question of whether these three are identical, similar, or comparable in their structure. This kind of study is at the same time political, psychological, and cosmological.

The fact is that, of these three structures, the only one that we know well is the structure of the city, the political structure. You cannot penetrate a man's heart and see the way his soul is structured. You can observe it through human action; and since action takes place in the city, one can say that the structure of the soul is projected into the structure of the city as its larger image, and therefore that it can be studied best by observing this larger image. As to the third structure, that of the universe, it cannot for the most part be observed directly; it is too vast and too distant to be seen or experienced as a whole. Now if we follow the advice of Aristotle that we are better off if we move from what we know to what we do not know, or from what is better known to us to what is less known to us, we must in effect move from the structure of the city, which we experience directly and in which we live our lives, to the structure of the soul, which again we experience directly to some extent and indirectly in the city—that is, to what we do not see but experience—and from there to the structure of that third thing, the whole universe, which for the most part we neither see nor experience, or which we see and experience only to a limited extent. This approach may not lead us very far, but it at least has the advantage of being based on a solid foundation: not jumping into the unknown but moving carefully and step-by-step from what is known toward the unknown.

However, the ordinary citizen would rather have things arranged the opposite way—that is, first be told what the universe is like and how it is structured, then be told how the soul is structured and what is going to happen to it in the future if one does the right things and avoids the wrong things, and finally be told why he ought to become a member of a particular community and be advised as to how he can become a member in good standing of such a community. This is the direction that is more desirable and convincing so far as the citizen is concerned. For this reason Alfarabi's political writings move in this way. They begin with a cosmology, with the structure of the universe, the character of each of its main parts, and how they function together, given to the reader as a preacher would give an account of the universe to his audience—this is how it is! Then he gives an account of the structure of the human soul and the human body, their parts, and how they function together. Finally, he proceeds to give an account of the structure of the city, its parts, how they ought to be organized and the various ways in which they are in fact organized in actual cities and nations, and a description of the opinions and actions of each of these cities.

Ever since Alfarabi wrote these political works (and this includes the last hundred years, in which attempts have been made to revive these works and study them), they have baffled and mystified their readers. Nobody could ever figure out easily what they are. Here is a book that begins with metaphysics or cosmology, goes into psychology and physiology, and ends up with politics. During the past ten centuries, philosophers and scholars must have looked at books such as the Virtuous City, whose full title is the Principles of the Opinions of the Inhabitants of the Virtuous City, and the Political Regime and asked themselves, what kind of books are these? Their structure appears to be unique.

No one before or after Alfarabi has written a philosophic book with such a structure. They are not treatises on logic or physics or mathematics or psychology or metaphysics or even politics, they are not dialogues, and they are not strictly speaking philosophic investigations. No Muslim philosopher attempted to imitate him. His successors must have somehow suspected that one could not take what is said in these books as philosophic investigations or doctrines—that one could not, for instance, consider that anything said in these books forms part of Alfarabi's psychological or metaphysical doctrine. And because they did not fully understand the nature and purpose of these writings, Muslim philosophers referred to them with a great deal of caution. Even today, one cannot quote any portion of these books as representing Alfarabi's philosophic doctrines without first explaining why they are presented in this strange manner.

Fortunately, Alfarabi himself wrote an explanation, in a book called the Book of Religion, which is a programmatic indication as to how and why such books should be written and for what purpose. Perhaps the best way to characterize these political works is to say that they are “letters” addressed to the enlightened citizens in the Muslim community, to potential philosophers and potential rulers. During his long and colorful life, Alfarabi traveled to many strange and wonderful lands to which his fellow Muslims had not traveled, opened many gates locked to them, and entered many delightful places that they had never entered. The political works are his letters to the folks back home—simple, straightforward accounts that do not even mention the long journey, let alone its perils; concise descriptions couched in the language of those who had never left their homeland but whose ears were not sealed and whose sense of wonder had not been completely dulled. Let me now conclude with a few remarks on the importance for contemporary Islamic thought of Alfarabi's central concern, the question of realization.

THE QUESTION OF REALIZATION

Alfarabi's concern with realization is not confined to personal salvation but directed to the salvation of the community at large, to social or political salvation. Even here Alfarabi's concern is not just with one city or nation or with a particular community but with humanity at large, with civilized men everywhere. These are the central subjects of his political science or political philosophy. The very fact that Alfarabi makes political philosophy, which deals with man's public life in cities and nations and religious communities, one of the central concerns, and ultimately perhaps the central concern, of his philosophy means that he was not satisfied with the alternative approach prevalent among earlier Muslim philosophers and their Neoplatonic predecessors in Hellenistic and Roman times: the concern for personal or private salvation as against public salvation, for private virtue as against public virtue, and for only such public action as leads to one's private virtue and salvation.

The philosopher who concerns himself only or primarily with his private salvation is a man who has given up on the body politic, on the community at large. He may think that he understands it, but he does not think that he can contribute to improving or reforming it. But public life does not lose its importance merely because the philosopher neglects it or turns away from it. It is always there. It determines everyone's life, including everyone's—even the philosopher's—private life. Furthermore, the urge to live in a virtuous, decent, honorable, and humane city and community and to contribute to improving the quality of public life is not a perversion or an unnatural urge. It is, on the contrary, a most natural human urge. It is an expression of man's concern, his philanthropic spirit, and his delight in living in a good community. Such public-spiritedness is to be expected of every good citizen.

So the question is whether the philosopher is to be more or less public-spirited than the good citizen. It may be true that the philosopher's main contribution to the quality of public life takes the form of improving public understanding of the nature and purpose of public life. This means that he must first understand it as a philosopher and then communicate this understanding in an effective way to the citizenry at large. This is precisely what is at the center of Alfarabi's political philosophy. And it is a mystery that his followers did not carry forward the brilliant beginning that he bequeathed to them and instead turned philosophy back into the concern with private, personal salvation. Theologians and jurists continued to struggle with the problem of the leadership of the community and other questions of public law. But theology and jurisprudence, as is made clear by Alfarabi, are not substitutes for political philosophy. They lack the necessary breadth of vision, freedom of spirit, and ability to confront and understand radically new situations.

The neglect of political philosophy is damaging to the quality of philosophy as well as to the quality of public life. It leads to a narrowness in the community's horizon, to the impoverishment of public discussions of the aims and alternative forms of public life, to resignation, to the absence of rational discourse on public issues, and ultimately to narrowing the choice before the citizen to crusty conservatism or blind faith in tradition on the one hand and the destructive pursuit of change for its own sake on the other. The community is deprived of the necessary enlightenment regarding various forms of government, the way they change one into the other, and the way they can be improved. This is the price the community pays when philosophy turns away from public life.

There have always been philosophers who think that they can pursue wisdom as private men regardless of the quality of public life; that they should tend exclusively to their own private gardens; and that their task as philosophers is to explore the depths of their own souls, imaginations, and intellects. Perhaps there are times and places that necessitate these views. Yet one need not make a virtue out of necessity. Alfarabi was aware of a fundamental tension between the pursuit of private and public salvation. But he is almost the only Muslim philosopher who chose to explore this tension and in the process brought to the fore philosophy's philanthropic spirit and the philosopher's high-minded devotion to the true welfare of his community. In this he performed an immense service to the Islamic community.

Unfortunately, there were many others, great and famous men in their own right, who, out of ignorance or despair, turned their backs on public life and on their communities. Even today there are respectable thinkers among us who cannot understand what the expression “political philosophy” means and therefore cannot write it down without placing it in quotation marks, as if to say that these are meaningless words or that the expression represents the frivolous pursuit of men who have not yet discovered true philosophy. These thinkers may teach us many things, but they will never teach us how to reason well about public issues, how to improve the lot of our fellow men, or how to establish and preserve a polity in which philosophy and science can be pursued without grave danger to the seeker of knowledge or the rest of the community.

References

Primary Sources

Alfarabi

Attainment of Happiness. Arabic text: Taḥṣīl al-Sa‘āda (Hyderabad, a.h. 1345). English translation in Alfarabi: The Political Writings, “Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle,” translated and with an introduction by Muhsin Mahdi, rev. ed. (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001), pt. 1. References in the present volume are to the sections of the English translation and to the pages and lines of the Hyderabad edition. See notes to the Arabic text of the Attainment of Happiness in Alfarabi: The Political Writings, “Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle,” 149-56. The Attainment of Happiness, the Philosophy of Plato, and the Philosophy of Aristotle make up a trilogy.

Book of Letters. Arabic text edited by Muhsin Mahdi, Alfarabi's “Book of Letters” (Kitāb al-Hurūf): A Commentary on Aristotle's “Metaphysics” (Beirut, 1969). Revised Arabic text by Muhsin Mahdi (Beirut, forthcoming). English translation by Muhsin Mahdi, Alfarabi: The Political Writings, “Political Regime” and Other Texts, edited and with an introduction by Charles E. Butterworth (Ithaca, N.Y., forthcoming). References in the present volume are to the sections as well as the pages and lines of the Beirut edition.

Book of Religion. Arabic text edited by Muhsin Mahdi, Alfarabi's “Book of Religion” and Related Texts (Kitāb al-Milla wa Nuṣūṣ Ukhrā) (Beirut, 1968). English translation in Alfarabi: The Political Writings, “Selected Aphorisms” and Other Texts, edited and translated, with an introduction, by Charles E. Butterworth (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001). Reference in the present volume are to the sections as well as the pages and lines of the Beirut edition.

Enumeration of the Sciences. Arabic text edited by ‘Uthmān Amīn, Iḥṣā’ al-‘Ulūm, 2d ed. (Cairo, 1949). English translation of part of chapter 5 by Fauzi M. Najjar, “The Enumeration of the Sciences,” in Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook, edited by Ralph Lerner and Muhsin Mahdi with the collaboration of Ernest L. Fortin (New York, 1963; reprint, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Paperbacks, 1984), sec. 1. English translation of chapter 5 by Charles E. Butterworth, Alfarabi: The Political Writings, “Selected Aphorisms” and Other Texts. Two Latin versions of the work, one a translation, the other an adaptation, together with the Arabic text and a Spanish translation, can be consulted in Ángel Gonzalez Palencia, Al-Fārābī: Catálogo de las ciencias, 2d ed. (Madrid, 1953). The Latin translation (pp. 117-76), literal and generally accurate, is by Gerard of Cremona. The adaptation (pp. 83-115), first published by Camerarius, is ascribed on reasonable grounds to Gundissalinus (who made use of Alfarabi's classification of the sciences in his own work, “De divisione scientiarum”) and was edited under his name by Manuel Alonso Alonso, S.J., Domingo Gundisalvo: De scientiis (Madrid, 1954). References in the present volume are to the pages and lines of the Cairo edition.

Epistle on the Intellect. Arabic text edited by Maurice Bouyges, S. J., Al-Fārābī, Risāla fī-al-‘Aql (Beirut, 1938). English translation by Arthur Hyman, “Letter concerning the Intellect,” in Philosophy in the Middle Ages: The Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Traditions, edited by Arthur Hyman and James J. Walsh (New York, 1967). References in the present volume are to the sections of the Beirut edition.

Harmonization. The Harmonization of the Two Opinions of the Two Sages, Plato the Divine and Aristotle (Al-Jam‘ Bayna Ra’yay al-Hakīmayn, Aflāṭūn al-Ilāhī wa Arisṭūṭālīs). Arabic text edited by Friedrich Dieterici, Al-Thamarāt al-Marḍiyya (Leiden, 1890). New Arabic text edited by Fauzi M. Najjar and translated into French by Dominique Mallet, L'harmonie entre les opinions de Platon et d'Aristote (Damascus, 1999). English translation by Charles E. Butterworth and Fauzi M. Najjar, Alfarabi: The Political Writings, “Selected Aphorisms” and Other Texts. References in the present volume are to the pages and lines of the Leiden edition.

Introductory “Risāla” on Logic. Arabic text (Risāla ṣuddira bihā al-Kitāb) edited by D. M. Dunlop, “Al-Fārābī's Introductory Risālah on Logic,” Islamic Quarterly 3 (1957): 224-35.

On the Purposes of Aristotle's “Metaphysics.” Arabic text (Fī Aghrāḍ al-Hakīm) edited by Friedrich Dieterici, Al-Thamarāt al-Marḍiyya (Leiden, 1890).

On the Rise [or Reappearance] of Philosophy. Fragments. In Ibn Abī Uṣaybi‘a, ‘Uyūn al-Anbā’, fī Tabaqāt al-Aṭibbā’. Arabic text edited by August Müller (Cairo and Königsberg, 1882-84), 2:134ff.; Nachtragsband, pp. 49, 78. German translation in Franz Rosenthal, Das Fortleben des Antike im Islam (Zurich and Stuttgart, 1965), 74-76. (Translated into English by Emile Marmorstein and Jenny Marmorstein, The Classical Heritage of Islam [Berkeley, Calif., 1975].) Partial German translation in Max Meyerhof, Von Alexandrien nach Baghdad: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der philosophischen und medizinischen Unterrichts bei den Arabern, SPAW phil-hist. Kl. 23 (Berlin, 1930), 387-429. Partial German translation by Gotthard Strohmaier, “‘Von Alexandrien nach Bachdad’—Eine fictive Schultradition,” in Aristoteles: Werk und Wirkung—Paul Moraux gewidmet, edited by Jürgen Wiesner (Berlin, 1987), 2:380-89. English translation of a supplementary fragment by Muhsin Mahdi, “Al-Fārābī,” in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 4:523-26. French translation of fragments from al-Mus‘ūdī in Michel Tardieu, “Sābiens coraniques et ‘Sābiens’ des Harrān,” Journal asiatique 274 (1986): 1-44.

Philosophy of Aristotle. Arabic text edited by Muhsin Mahdi, Al-Fārābī's “Philosophy of Aristotle” (Falsafat Arisṭūṭālīs) (Beirut, 1961). English translation by Muhsin Mahdi, Alfarabi: The Political Writings, “Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle,” pt. 3. References in the present volume are to the sections as well as the pages and lines of the Beirut edition, all of which are indicated in the English translation.

Philosophy of Plato. Arabic text edited and translated into Latin by Franz Rosenthal and Richard Walzer, Alfarabius De Platonis Philosophia (Falsafat Aflāṭun) (London, 1943). English translation by Muhsin Mahdi, Alfarabi: The Political Writings, “Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle,” pt. 2. References in the present volume are to the sections of the English translation and to the pages and lines of the London edition, all of which are indicated in the English translation.

Plato's “Laws.” Arabic text and Latin translation by Francesco Gabrieli, Alfarabius Compendium Legum Platonis (London, 1952). New edition and French translation by Thérèse-Anne Druart, “Le sommaire du livre des ‘Lois’ de Platon (Djawāmi‘ Kitāb al-Nawāmīs li-Aflāṭūn) par Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī,” Bulletin d'études orientales 50 (1998): 109-55. English translation by Muhsin Mahdi, Alfarabi: The Political Writings, “Political Regime” and Other Texts. References in the present volume are to the pages and lines of Druart's edition.

Political Regime. Arabic text edited by Friedrich Dieterici, Alfārābī's Abhandlung der Musterstaat (Leiden, 1895). Reprinted as Kitāb al-Siyāsāt al-Madaniyya (Hyderabad, 1927). Fauzi M. Najjar, Al-Fārābī's “The Political Regime” (al-Siyāsa al-Madaniyya: Also Known as the “Treatise on the Principles of Beings”) (Beirut, 1964). Partial English translation by Fauzi M. Najjar in Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook, sec. 2. English translation by Charles E. Butterworth, Alfarabi: The Political Writings, “Political Regime” and Other Texts. References in the present volume are to the pages and lines of the Beirut edition.

Rhetoric. Edited, with French translation, by J. Langhade and M. Grignaschi, Al-Farabi: Deux ouvrages inédits sur la Rhétorique (Kitāb al-Khaṭāba) (Beirut, 1971).

Selected Aphorisms. Edited by Fauzi M. Najjar, Al-Fārābī's “Fuṣūl Muntaza‘a” (Selected Aphorisms) (Beirut, 1971). Partial edition and English translation by D. M. Dunlop, Al-Fārābī: The Fuṣūl al-Madanī (Aphorisms of the Statesman) (Cambridge, 1961). English translation by Charles E. Butterworth, Alfarabi: The Political Writings, “Selected Aphorisms” and Other Texts. References in the present volume are to the aphorisms as well as the pages and lines of the Beirut edition.

Utterances. Arabic text, edited with introduction and notes by Muhsin Mahdi, The Utterances Employed in Logic (al-Alfāz al-Musta‘mala fī al-Manṭiq) (Beirut, 1968).

Virtuous City. Principles of the Opinions of the Inhabitants of the Virtuous City. Arabic text edited by Friedrich Dieterici, Ārā’ Ahl al-Madīna al-Fāḍila (Leiden, 1895). Arabic text and English translation by Richard Walzer, Al-Farabi on the Perfect State: Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī's “Mabādi’ Ārā’ Ahl al-Madīna al-Fāḍila,” revised text with introduction, translation, and commentary (Oxford, 1985). References in the present volume are to the pages and lines of Dieterici's edition unless followed by “Walzer.”

Aristotle

The Politics of Aristotle. Translated, with an introduction, notes, and appendixes, by Ernest Barker (London, 1972).

Averroes

Decisive Treatise (Faṣl al-Maqāl). Arabic text edited by George F. Hourani (London, 1959). Translated by George F. Hourani, On the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy (London, 1961).

Parva naturalia. Arabic text edited by Harry Blumberg, Averrois Cordubensis compendia librorum Aristotelis qui “Parva naturalia” vocantur (Cambridge, Mass., 1972). English translation by Harry Blumberg, Averroes Epitome of “Parva naturalia” (Cambridge, Mass., 1961).

Avicenna

On the Divisions of the Rational Sciences (Fī Aqsām al-‘Ulūm al-‘Aqliyya). Arabic text in: Tis‘ Rasī’il (Cairo, 1908). Partial English translation by Muhsin Mahdi in Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook, sec. 5.

“Condemnation of 219 Propositions.” Translated by Ernest L. Fortin and Peter D. O'Neill in Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook, sec. 18.

Falaquera

Reschith Chokhmah. Edited by M. David (Berlin, 1902).

Ghazālī, al-

The Deliverer from Error (Al-Munqidh min al-Dalāl). Arabic text edited by Jamīl Salība and Kāmil ‘Ayyad, 3d ed. (Damascus, 1939). Translated by Richard Joseph McCarthy, S.J., Freedom and Fulfillment (Boston, 1980).

Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahāfut al-Falāsifa). Arabic text edited by Maurice Bouyges, S.J. (Beirut, 1927). Translated into English by Sabih Ahmad Kamali (Lahore, 1958).

Ibn Tufayl

Hayy ibn Yaqzān. Arabic text and French translation in Léon Gauthier, Hayy ben Yaqdhân: Roman philosophique d'Ibn Thofaïl, 2d ed. (Beirut, 1936). Partial English translation by George N. Atiyeh, “Ibn Tufayl, Hayy the Son of Yaqzan,” in Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook, sec. 9.

Maimonides

Logic. Arabic text edited by Mübahat Türker, “Mûsâ Ibn-i Meymûn'in Al-Makāla fī Sinā‘at al-Manṭik: Inin Arabça Asli,” Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih Coğrafiya Fakültesi Dergisi 18, 1-2 (1961): 40-64. English translation of chapter 14 by Muhsin Mahdi in Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook, sec. 11.

Guide. Arabic text (Dalālat al-Hā’irīn) edited by S. Munk, Le guide des égarés, 3 vols. (Paris, 1856-66). English translation by Shlomo Pines, The Guide of the Perplexed, translated and with an introduction and notes by Leo Strauss (Chicago, 1963). Partial translation by Ralph Lerner and Muhsin Mahdi in Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook, sec. 12.

Sā‘id al-Andalusī

Classes of Nations (Tabaqāt al-Umam). Arabic text edited by Louis Cheikho (Beirut, 1912).

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