Al-Fārābī

Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī was one of the founders of Islamic philosophy (falsafa), known in the Arabic tradition as “the Second Teacher” (al-muʿallim al-thānī) — second only to Aristotle, “the First Teacher”. Working in Baghdad and later in Aleppo and Damascus in the first half of the tenth century, he wrote commentaries on Aristotle’s logic that became the foundation of logic in Arabic; a Neoplatonic cosmology of emanation that Avicenna developed; and a political philosophy, inspired by Plato‘s Republic, of the Virtuous City ruled by a philosopher who is also a prophet. He argued that religion presents in symbols what philosophy knows by demonstration — a thesis that shaped the whole debate about reason and revelation in Islam, Judaism and Christianity.

Life

Little is known for certain. He was born around 870, probably at Fārāb on the Syr Darya in present-day Kazakhstan (some sources say Fāryāb in Afghanistan), of Turkic or Persian origin. He studied in Baghdad with the Christian logicians Yūḥannā ibn Ḥaylān and Abū Bishr Mattā, heirs of the Aristotelian school of Alexandria, and became the leading philosopher of the city. Around 942, amid political turmoil, he left for Syria, spending time at the court of the Ḥamdānid prince Sayf al-Dawla in Aleppo and in Egypt, and died in Damascus around 950. Biographers describe him as an ascetic who cared nothing for wealth, and as a fine musician.

Logic

Al-Fārābī wrote commentaries on all of Aristotle’s logical works (the Organon, extended in the Arabic tradition to include the Rhetoric and Poetics). Against grammarians who mocked logic as “Greek”, he argued that logic is to thought what grammar is to language: grammar gives the rules of a particular language, logic the universal rules of all reasoning. His Enumeration of the Sciences classified all knowledge, from language and logic through mathematics, physics and metaphysics to politics and theology.

Cosmos and intellect

Al-Fārābī combined Aristotle’s cosmology with Neoplatonic emanation. From the First Cause — one, perfect, eternally thinking itself — there emanates a first intellect, which, thinking of its source, produces a second intellect, and, thinking of itself, the outermost heavenly sphere; and so on down through ten intellects and nine spheres to the moon. The tenth, the Active Intellect, governs the sublunary world and illuminates human minds: human knowledge occurs when our potential intellect is actualised by the Active Intellect, as sight occurs when light actualises colour. Human happiness (saʿāda), the final end of life, is the soul’s conjunction with the Active Intellect, achieved through theoretical knowledge and virtue.

The Virtuous City

Human beings cannot attain perfection alone; they need a community. In The Principles of the Opinions of the People of the Virtuous City and The Political Regime al-Fārābī describes the virtuous city (al-madīna al-fāḍila) as one in which people cooperate to attain true happiness, ordered like a healthy body or like the cosmos, with a ruler at its head. The first ruler must be both philosopher and prophet: one whose intellect is united with the Active Intellect, and whose imagination is so perfect that he can translate philosophical truths into images, symbols and laws that ordinary people can understand and follow. He must be intelligent, of good memory, eloquent, a lover of learning and truth, temperate, magnanimous, just and courageous — Plato’s philosopher-king, made also the lawgiver-prophet.

Against the virtuous city stand the ignorant cities, which pursue false ends — necessities alone, wealth, pleasure, honour, domination or unrestricted freedom (his “democratic city”) — and the wicked, errant and changed cities, which know the good but turn from it or distort it.

Philosophy and religion

Al-Fārābī held that philosophy is prior to religion in time and in rank. Philosophy grasps the truth through demonstration; religion presents the same truths through persuasion and imaginative representation, adapted to the understanding of the many. Different religions may symbolise one truth in different images, as different peoples have different languages. Theology (kalām) and jurisprudence serve to defend and apply religion. This was a bold claim in a Muslim society, and it shaped the work of Avicenna, Ibn Ṭufayl, Averroes and Maimonides — and provoked the critique of al-Ghazālī.

In conversation

• The philosopher-prophet — the ruler of the Virtuous City.
• Religion as imagery of philosophy — two languages for one truth.
• Avicenna’s three dirhams — the essay that unlocked Aristotle.