Al-Farabi

Abu Nasr al-Farabi (c. 870–950/951) was one of the founders of the philosophical tradition of the Islamic world, known in Arabic as falsafa. He wrote in Arabic and worked mainly in Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid caliphate. Later generations gave him the honorific title “the Second Teacher”, placing him right after Aristotle, “the First Teacher”.

Al-Farabi was a builder of systems. He wanted to show how all knowledge fits together: from grammar and logic to mathematics, the natural sciences, the study of God and the heavens, and finally ethics and politics. For him, all these sciences led to one goal: true human happiness, which could be reached only in a well-ordered community guided by wisdom.

He is especially remembered for three things. First, his commentaries and handbooks on Aristotle’s logic, which set the standard for later Arabic philosophers. Second, his political philosophy, above all his picture of the “virtuous city”. Third, his Great Book of Music, the most important medieval treatise on music written in the Islamic world.

Very little is known for certain about al-Farabi’s life. His name means “from Farab”. Many sources identify this with Farab, also called Otrar, a town on the Syr Darya River in present-day southern Kazakhstan; others point to Faryab in present-day northern Afghanistan. He was probably born around 870.

As a young man he moved to Iraq and settled in Baghdad, where he spent most of his life. There he studied logic with a Christian scholar, Yuhanna ibn Haylan, and was part of a circle of Aristotelian philosophers, many of them Syriac-speaking Christians, such as Abu Bishr Matta ibn Yunus. The Christian philosopher Yahya ibn ‘Adi, who later led the Baghdad school, is said to have studied with him.

Around 943, when Baghdad was troubled by political chaos, al-Farabi left for Syria. He spent time in Aleppo and Damascus and enjoyed the patronage of the Hamdanid prince Sayf al-Dawla, ruler of Aleppo. He may also have visited Egypt. He died in Damascus in December 950 or January 951, at about eighty.

Later biographers describe him as a modest, unworldly man who cared little for money or fine clothes. One story says that in Damascus he worked as a garden watchman and read philosophy at night by the watchman’s lamp. Such stories fit the ideal of the philosopher and cannot be checked, but they show how he was remembered.

Al-Farabi’s most famous book is usually called The Opinions of the People of the Virtuous City (Mabādiʾ ārāʾ ahl al-madīna al-fāḍila). It begins with God and the order of the universe and ends with the best way to organise a human community. The idea is that people can only become fully good and happy by living together in the right way.

He compared the virtuous city to a healthy body. Just as the heart rules the body and each organ serves the whole, in the best city a wise ruler guides the community, and every person, according to his or her abilities, helps everyone reach happiness. The ruler must be someone who truly understands what is good, like the philosopher-king in Plato’s Republic.

Al-Farabi also described the opposite kinds of cities. Some are “ignorant”: their people do not know what true happiness is, and chase only wealth, pleasure, honour or power. Some are “immoral”: their people know what is good but do not act on it. Others are “erring”: they have been given false ideas about happiness. These comparisons were a way of asking what a society is really for.

Al-Farabi was born into a world already transformed by the Graeco-Arabic translation movement. By the late ninth century, most of Aristotle’s works, much of Galen and many other Greek texts were available in Arabic, often translated via Syriac by Christian scholars. The philosopher al-Kindi (d. c. 873) had begun to write original philosophy in Arabic.

In Baghdad, a school of Christian Aristotelians continued the teaching methods of late antique Alexandria, reading Aristotle’s logical works (the Organon) in a fixed order with commentaries. Al-Farabi himself told a story, preserved by the biographer Ibn Abi Usaybi‘a, of how philosophical teaching had passed from Alexandria to Antioch, then to Harran and finally to Baghdad, placing himself at the end of this chain. Scholars treat the story with caution, but it shows how al-Farabi saw his own role: as heir to an unbroken Greek tradition.

Greek logic was controversial. In 932 a famous public debate took place in Baghdad before the vizier Ibn al-Furat, between al-Farabi’s associate Abu Bishr Matta and the grammarian Abu Sa‘id al-Sirafi. Sirafi argued that logic was just Greek grammar in disguise and that Arabic speakers needed Arabic grammar, not a foreign tool. The debate, recorded later by Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi, forms an important background to al-Farabi’s careful discussions of how logic and grammar differ.

Al-Farabi wrote commentaries on nearly every part of Aristotle’s Organon; his large commentary on On Interpretation survives, while many others are lost or fragmentary. He also wrote shorter introductions and paraphrases that made logic accessible. For him, logic was the “tool” (ālā) of philosophy, and the path to certainty.

His answer to critics like Sirafi was subtle. Grammar, he argued, gives the rules for the correct use of a particular language, such as Arabic or Greek; logic gives rules for correct thinking that apply to the meanings behind all languages. Logic therefore shares something with grammar, since it studies expressions, but its concern is universal. This made logic a science for everyone, not a Greek import.

In the Book of Letters (Kitāb al-ḥurūf), al-Farabi discussed the meanings of basic philosophical terms, such as “being” and “substance”, and how they are expressed in Arabic, where some Greek grammatical structures have no direct equivalent. He also offered a remarkable account of the origins of language: people first create words for things they perceive, then develop rhetoric and poetry, later dialectic and finally demonstrative science. In the same work he argued that philosophy, in the natural order, comes before religion, which expresses philosophical truths in images for the whole community.

His Enumeration of the Sciences (Iḥṣāʾ al-ʿulūm) classified all branches of knowledge: the science of language, logic, the mathematical sciences (including optics, astronomy, music, the science of weights and mechanics), natural science and metaphysics, and finally political science together with jurisprudence and theology (kalām). It was translated into Latin in the twelfth century and helped shape how medieval Europeans organised learning.

Al-Farabi combined Aristotle’s physics and astronomy with Neoplatonic ideas that had reached Arabic partly through texts misattributed to Aristotle. At the top of reality is the First Cause, God, perfectly one and perfectly intellect. From the First, reality proceeds, or “emanates”, not by choice or effort but necessarily, like light from the sun.

From the First comes a Second Intellect, and from it a series of further intellects, each associated with one of the heavenly spheres: the outermost sphere, the sphere of the fixed stars, and the spheres of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury and the Moon. The tenth and last intellect is the Active (or Agent) Intellect, which governs the world below the Moon, the world of change, where humans live.

In his Letter on the Intellect and other works, al-Farabi explained human knowledge in terms of this structure. The human mind begins as a potential intellect, able to receive the forms of things. When it actually thinks them, it becomes an actual intellect; when it has made them its own, it becomes an “acquired intellect”. The Active Intellect makes this process possible, like light that makes colours visible. The highest human happiness is a kind of closeness or conjunction with the Active Intellect, when the soul becomes like the pure intellects above it.

This was a grand, hierarchical vision in which cosmology, psychology and ethics were joined. It also had a political side: just as the First Cause orders the heavens, the ruler of the virtuous city orders the community, and just as the universe forms a hierarchy, so does the ideal city.

Al-Farabi was the first major philosopher of the Islamic world to make political philosophy central. He knew Plato’s Republic and Laws, at least in summaries (he wrote a Summary of Plato’s Laws), as well as Aristotle’s ethics. His main political works are The Virtuous City, The Political Regime (al-Siyāsa al-madaniyya), The Attainment of Happiness (Taḥṣīl al-saʿāda), The Book of Religion (Kitāb al-milla) and the Selected Aphorisms (Fuṣūl muntazaʿa).

The first ruler of the virtuous city must be a person of exceptional gifts: a philosopher whose intellect is joined to the Active Intellect, and whose imagination is so powerful that he can express truths in images, symbols and persuasive speech. Such a person is at once philosopher, prophet, lawgiver and imam. In this way al-Farabi connected Plato’s philosopher-king with the Islamic ideas of prophecy and religious leadership, without naming any particular prophet.

Religion, in this account, presents the same truths that philosophy knows by demonstration, but in a form that everyone can grasp: through symbols, stories and laws suited to a particular people. Philosophy speaks in proofs; theology uses dialectical arguments; scripture speaks rhetorically and poetically to ordinary people. Because different nations have different symbols, there can be several virtuous religions that express the same truth in different ways.

Al-Farabi did not think only in terms of small city-states. He wrote of the virtuous nation and even of a virtuous world community made up of many nations. Some scholars see here a reflection of the vast, multi-ethnic and multi-religious Abbasid world in which he lived.

The Great Book of Music (Kitāb al-mūsīqā al-kabīr) is one of al-Farabi’s most original achievements and is considered the most important medieval treatise on music in the Islamic lands. It covers the nature of musical sound, intervals, scales, rhythm, composition and the instruments of his time, especially the ‘ūd (lute), whose frets and tunings he described in detail.

Al-Farabi drew on Greek harmonic theory but did not simply repeat it. He insisted that the ear, rather than purely theoretical reasoning, is the final judge of musical principles, and he was aware, for example, that a semitone is not exactly half of a whole tone. He also connected music with poetry and speech, seeing melody as a way to strengthen the effect of words on the soul.

Later tradition turned al-Farabi into a legendary musician. The biographer Ibn Khallikan tells how, at the court of Sayf al-Dawla, he took out an instrument and played so that everyone laughed, then played again so that everyone wept, and finally played so that everyone fell asleep, after which he quietly left. The story is almost certainly legend, but it shows how deeply his musical reputation impressed later generations.

Al-Farabi’s most famous reader was Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980–1037). In his autobiography, Ibn Sina says that he read Aristotle’s Metaphysics forty times and knew it by heart without understanding its purpose, until he bought a short treatise by al-Farabi on the aims of the Metaphysics from a bookseller for three dirhams, and suddenly understood. Much of Ibn Sina’s metaphysics and psychology develops ideas that al-Farabi had set out.

In al-Andalus, philosophers such as Ibn Bajja (Avempace), Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) read al-Farabi closely, especially his logic and his political philosophy. They also reported that in his lost commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics he had expressed doubts about the survival of the soul after death and the possibility of union with the Active Intellect, ideas that seemed to conflict with his other works.

The Jewish philosopher Maimonides (1138–1204) held al-Farabi in very high esteem, especially for logic, and recommended his works to his translator Samuel ibn Tibbon. Through Hebrew translations, al-Farabi became part of medieval Jewish philosophy. In Latin Europe, known as Alpharabius, he was read mainly through translations of the Enumeration of the Sciences (as De scientiis) and a few shorter works, which influenced the classification of sciences in medieval schools.

Today al-Farabi is honoured across many countries. Kazakhstan, which claims his birthplace at Otrar, has named its leading national university in Almaty after him; Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, Uzbekistan and the Arab world also celebrate him as part of their heritage. He is increasingly studied as a philosopher of language and politics in his own right, not only as a link between Greek and later thinkers.

The earliest notices of al-Farabi are brief. The Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadim (987/988) mentions him in the context of Baghdad’s logicians. Fuller biographies come from later writers such as Sa‘id al-Andalusi (eleventh century), Ibn al-Qifti and Ibn Abi Usaybi‘a (thirteenth century), and Ibn Khallikan (thirteenth century), who lived two to three centuries after him and sometimes disagree. Many details, including his teachers, travels and anecdotes, rest on these late accounts.

His origin is disputed. Ibn Khallikan describes him as a Turk and gives a genealogy that includes Turkic-sounding names, while other sources are silent or suggest a Persian background. Some modern scholars, noting that his writings contain glosses in Persian and Sogdian but not in Turkish, have argued for an Iranian (Persian or Sogdian) origin; the Stanford Encyclopedia entry notes that more recent research points in this direction. Others continue to support a Turkic origin. The location of Farab itself, in Transoxiana or in Khurasan, is also uncertain.

These questions have acquired modern political weight, since several nations claim al-Farabi as part of their national heritage. Historians caution that ethnic categories of the tenth century do not map neatly onto modern nations, and that al-Farabi wrote entirely in Arabic within a cosmopolitan scholarly culture. The limited evidence allows no final answer.

Esoteric or sincere? The political philosopher Leo Strauss argued in the mid-twentieth century that al-Farabi, like other medieval philosophers living under religious authorities, sometimes wrote “between the lines”, presenting unorthodox views cautiously and leaving his true teaching for careful readers. Scholars influenced by Strauss, notably Muhsin Mahdi and Charles Butterworth, emphasised al-Farabi’s political works and read his Neoplatonic metaphysics partly as a rhetorical accommodation. Other scholars, including Dimitri Gutas, Stephen Menn and Thérèse-Anne Druart, reject this approach and treat al-Farabi’s metaphysics and emanation scheme as central and sincerely held.

Which works are his? The Harmonization of the Opinions of the Two Sages, which argues that Plato and Aristotle agree on essential points, was long taken as a key text of al-Farabi’s thought. In 2009 Marwan Rashed questioned its authenticity, arguing that it belongs to a different milieu; Cecilia Martini Bonadeo and others have defended al-Farabi’s authorship. The answer affects how we understand his relationship to Neoplatonism.

Consistency across works. The reports that his lost commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics denied individual immortality, together with differences between The Virtuous City and The Political Regime, raise the question of whether al-Farabi changed his mind, adapted his message to different audiences, or has been misreported. Debates also continue about whether, for al-Farabi, human beings acquire universal concepts by abstraction from sense experience or by an emanation from the Active Intellect.

The state of the texts. Since the 1980s scholarship on al-Farabi has advanced greatly, but many works still lack reliable critical editions or full English translations, including important parts of the logical corpus and the Great Book of Music. New editions, such as recent work on the Book of Letters, continue to change the picture. Richard Walzer’s edition and translation of The Virtuous City (1985) and Muhsin Mahdi’s studies of his political philosophy remain standard reference points.