foregoing discussion has uncovered some intriguing parallels between the role of the nation in Plato’s Republic and Alfarabi’s account of it. In both cases, the deeply ingrained customs of the nation emerge not only as an incontrovertible obstacle to the establishment of the good city, but also as a stimulus for education. Alfarabi was not the first political philosopher to investigate the nation, and does not claim that distinction for himself, but takes the investigation many steps farther. The various hints about the nation already present in Plato’s Republic, and picked up by Alfarabi’s Philosophy of Plato, are developed in great detail in Alfarabi’s own work. The Umma constituted a more formidable presence in medieval Islam than the ethnos or genos ever did in classical Greece, and thus requires a firmer, more comprehensive treatment. Yet its basic contours remain the same: a community staunchly devoted to ancestral languages and ways of life that have established themselves inexorably over many generations, whose authority the philosopher can ill afford to ignore.
Nation and City in Aristotle and Alfarabi
The political thought of Aristotle is perhaps even more closely associated than the thought of Plato with the polis. This follows from the title of Aristotle’s most important political work, as well as its manifest focus on Greek cities. And yet this focus is not exclusive, since Aristotle also treats the ethnos on several occasions. In addition, some of the passages that deal with the ethnos seem to have had some influence on Alfarabi. The same old question inevitably arises: did Alfarabi have knowledge of Aristotle’s Politics? This issue has not engendered as much controversy as that of Alfarabi’s knowledge of Plato, but it may be no less enigmatic.
It has been universally accepted since the nineteenth century that most of Aristotle’s works, including the Organon, Physics, Metaphysics, and Ethics, along with a number of shorter works, were translated into medieval Arabic.39 Alfarabi and Averroes both wrote numerous commentaries on them. The same cannot be said, however, of Aristotle’s Politics. No medieval translation of this work is known to have circulated, and Alfarabi never clearly refers to it.
I am aware of three important scholarly treatments of this subject. Taken together, they succeed admirably in bringing the principal questions surrounding it into focus. In 1975, Shlomo Pines examined the works of Alfarabi along with those of his less famous contemporary al-ʿĀmirī, finding a number of quotations reminiscent of Aristotle’s Politics; in one of them Alfarabi even mentions an Aristotelian “book on political science” (Pines, 154; BL 91.13–15). Yet these citations are highly imprecise, and all appear to come from Book I of the Politics. Another author from the same period, Miskawayh, states that either one or two books of the Politics are listed in the catalogue of Aristotle’s writings with which he was familiar (Pines, 153, 155). Pines suggests that only the first two books were available, and perhaps not in the form known to us, but rather in a Hellenistic or Roman paraphrase (155, 160). Pines also raises the possibility that Alfarabi could have altered Aristotle for his own purposes, especially in the Political Regime (156–59).
In an article written in 1993, Rémi Brague comes to a conclusion similar to that of Pines, although he adopts a somewhat more strident tone. Brague also calls our attention to some new pieces of evidence, most notably a couple of quotations from Averroes (Brague 1993, 428–30). According to the first, Aristotle’s Politics “did not fall into our hands” (Averroes 1974, 22.4–6). Whomever “our” may refer to, it evidently does not include Alfarabi, since a second passage, cited by Brague in Latin, suggests that in Averroes’s view Alfarabi did possess this work (Brague 1993, 429). But how could Averroes in twelfth-century Andalūs know what books Alfarabi would have possessed in tenth-century Baghdad? Averroes’s claim appears especially problematic given that Alfarabi has left us no explicit references to the Politics, even in his treatise titled the Philosophy of Aristotle.40 Brague shows, with painstaking philological analysis, that the passage in which Alfarabi invokes an Aristotelian work on political science in fact refers to the Ethics (430–32). He concludes by echoing and even citing Pines: the medieval Muslims had at best unreliable quotations and summaries of the Politics (432).
None of this circumstantial evidence ever convinced Muhsin Mahdi that Alfarabi was unfamiliar with the Politics (Mahdi 2001, 34–36). Mahdi observes that Alfarabi does not explicitly declare his unfamiliarity with the work, and silence does not prove ignorance (35). Yet doesn’t Averroes declare his unfamiliarity? True, but he never declares Alfarabi’s (cf. Brague 1993, 429). Furthermore, the context of Averroes’s claim is suspicious. He states that the presence of Plato’s Republic compensates for the absence of the Politics, since both contain the practical part of political science. But if Averroes was truly unfamiliar with the contents of the Politics, on what grounds could he claim that it contains the practical part of political science, or that Plato’s Republic represents an adequate substitute for it (Mahdi 2001, 35)? Finally, Mahdi doubts that a book which had simply been absent from the Muslim world could resurface so quickly and easily in medieval Europe (34). Mahdi accounts for the absence of the Politics by supposing that the philosophers concealed it deliberately, because they regarded the political philosophy of Plato as more suitable for their project of reviving philosophy in the Islamic world. In particular, Aristotle’s arguments for the self-sufficiency of practical wisdom would have seemed preposterous in a world dominated by divine law (35–36). Mahdi’s conjecture about Alfarabi pretending not to know the Politics resembles my earlier conjecture about Alfarabi pretending not to know Greek: he wished to conceal from his contemporaries his familiarity with something many of them would have viewed with suspicion. Such guesses are plausible and intriguing in both cases, but they hardly amount to certainty.
I regard Alfarabi’s knowledge of Aristotle’s Politics as more doubtful than his knowledge of Plato. As far as Plato is concerned, we should be inclined to take Alfarabi at this word, but in the case of Aristotle’s Politics, there is no such word, since Alfarabi neither betrays nor claims thorough knowledge of the work. Alfarabi certainly could have appreciated Aristotle’s stature as a philosopher, and even as a political philosopher, on the basis of his other works, including the Ethics (cf. Mahdi 2001, 35). I therefore remain somewhat skeptical about Alfarabi’s knowledge of the Politics, and do not attempt to show that he interprets its teachings in any detail. Nevertheless, the passages of Alfarabi that seem most reminiscent of Aristotle, leading both Pines and Brague to think that he must have had access to some summary of Book I (Brague 1993, 432; Pines, 157), can still be profitably compared and contrasted with Aristotle. This will at the very least shed light on the substantial difference between the politics and political philosophy of ancient Greece and medieval Islam, thus helping to explain why the Politics never gained much currency in the medieval Islamic world in the first place.
One of the passages adduced by Pines as having left some echoes in medieval Islam occurs in the very first chapter of the Politics. Pines makes a useful and sensible comparison between this passage and some parallel passages in Alfarabi (Pines 156–59), and I wish to build on his example. Aristotle famously claims that “man is a political animal” (Politics 1253b7–8), and a version of this statement recurs in Alfarabi, in both the Virtuous City and Political Regime (VC 228.1–8; PR 60.64, Ar. 69.16–17). Yet the terms used by each philosopher diverge already at this point. Aristotle speaks of humans as politikon, an adjective whose root is linked to the Greek polis, and takes care to distinguish the ethnē unfavorably from the developed polis (Politics 1252b19–20). Alfarabi speaks of humans as attaining perfection only in an ijtimā‘, or association, which in Arabic signifies a cooperative political community of undefined size: it could describe a household, city, nation, many nations, or even the entire inhabited world (PR 60.64, Ar. 69.17–19, VC 228.10–230.2). This points to a possible difference between the two philosophers: while Aristotle privileges the polis, in this chapter in particular and throughout the Politics in general, it is by no means clear that Alfarabi follows him on this point. Scholarly discussion of this question has been largely inconclusive. Let us
