Metaphysics, until a chance encounter with Alfarabi’s short commentary on the work unlocked its secrets for him (Gutas 1988, 28). Maimonides, in a letter to Ibn Tibbon, extols “the wise Abu Nasr Alfarabi” for his writings on logic, as well as his treatise “The Principles of the Beings,” otherwise known as the Political Regime; he even goes so far as to contrast Alfarabi favorably to Avicenna (Maimonides 1987, 552–54). Averroes freely incorporates paraphrases of Alfarabi’s Attainment of Happiness and Political Regime into his commentary on Plato’s Republic, implying that Alfarabi may be no less an authority on political matters than Plato (Averroes 1974, 29.31 ff., 80.17 ff.). These citations are by no means comprehensive, but they suffice to show how highly regarded Alfarabi was among medieval philosophers in fields as diverse as metaphysics, logic, and political science.
By the nineteenth century, however, Alfarabi had fallen into relative obscurity, to the point where most of his writings seemed lost. This was the culmination of a long process of neglect. Alfarabi was less widely translated into Latin during the European Middle Ages than Averroes and Avicenna (Fakhry, 148–50). Many of the Latin translations of Alfarabi cited by medieval authors such as Roger Bacon and Albert the Great never seem to have been printed, a clear sign of diminishing European interest in them (Salmon, 245–61). None of the modern European philosophers, from Machiavelli to Nietzsche, seem to have had any access to Alfarabi, even in translation. Meanwhile, the leading intellectual authorities in the Islamic world also appear to have gradually lost interest in Alfarabi, failing to preserve many of his works. The important late nineteenth-century Muslim reformers, such as Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī, would have been able to read only the small selection of Alfarabi’s works that were still available. These included the Virtuous City, Political Regime, and Harmonization of the Opinions of the Two Sages, but not the Book of Religion or Book of Letters, which will play so crucial a role in this book.
Owing to the diligence of leading philologists such as Franz Rosenthal, Richard Walzer, and Muhsin Mahdi, several additional works have been unearthed in the past century, and edited in competent critical editions. Translations into major European languages have gradually followed. Muhsin Mahdi has observed that although we still have less than half the works attributed to Alfarabi in medieval catalogues, we already have enough to appreciate the power of his thought (Mahdi 2001, 51–52).2 I would add that some caveats still apply: most importantly, whenever one says that “Alfarabi never treats a subject,” one must continue, implicitly if not explicitly, “in the works that have come down to us.” We should continue to look forward to the discovery of new works by Alfarabi with the greatest anticipation, but we may already proceed to interpret him on the basis of extant works.
The increased availability of new editions and translations of Alfarabi has spawned further scholarly research. Several books and articles written on Alfarabi in recent years are of very high quality, but they have hardly covered all the bases.3 The topic of this book is a case in point. There is remarkably little scholarship on Alfarabi’s treatment of the Umma, despite its intrinsic interest. While themes related to the Umma have been examined, the Umma itself has somehow slipped between the cracks. Muhsin Mahdi has treated Alfarabi’s views of politics and religion in great depth, but he has left only some preliminary reflections on the Umma (Mahdi 2001, 142–43). The same can be said of Joshua Parens, although he does discuss the subject at somewhat greater length than Mahdi (Parens 2006a, 88–90, 1995, 51–52, 166 n. 4). Miriam Galston provides a useful but inconclusive discussion, where she openly confesses that the subject “needs to be studied further” (Galston 1990, 153). All three scholars focus on the treatment in the Political Regime without examining the more thorough account of the development of the Umma in the Book of Letters. Ilai Alon, coauthor with Shukri Abed of a lexicon of Alfarabi’s philosophical vocabulary, gives a cursory definition of the term, which observes that Alfarabi never seems to speak of the Umma in the traditional Muslim fashion (Alon, 12; cf. Vajda, 250). The most comprehensive treatment of the subject exists in Arabic: Nāṣīf Naṣṣār has devoted an entire chapter to Alfarabi’s concept of the Umma in his book on the meaning of Umma in classical Islamic thought (Naṣṣār 1978, 31–53). This chapter contains many interesting insights, but it too fails to give adequate consideration to Alfarabi’s most fundamental discussion of the Umma in the Book of Letters (BL 39, 41–42, 46–47), and accepts the prevailing view that Alfarabi “does not use the term Umma in a religious sense” (40).
The study of the Book of Letters has developed rather slowly since Muhsin Mahdi published the first critical edition in 1969, but has recently picked up pace. Georges Vajda responded to that publication with an excellent summary of the second chapter, in which he observes the importance of the Umma several times, but does not really elaborate on it (Vajda, 250–51, 256–58). The section is discussed in greater detail by Jacques Langhade, who provides a very thorough summary of Alfarabi’s account of the development of language, as well as some illuminating background to it (Langhade, 190–311). Deborah Black explains Alfarabi’s inclusion of poetics and rhetoric in the Organon (Black, 63–71). Shukri Abed provides some good insight into the linguistic and philosophical teachings of the Book of Letters (Abed, 59 ff.), while Stephen Menn conducts an intelligent inquiry into its meta-physical teachings (Menn, 59–97). Emma Gannagé, Thérèse-Anne Druart, and Luis Xavier López-Farjeat have also written useful articles on its middle section (Gannagé, 229 ff.; Druart 2012, 51–56; López-Farjeat, 193–215).
These scholarly contributions all contain some helpful suggestions, but never anything resembling a detailed analysis of the term Umma, or an exploration of its broader role within Alfarabi’s philosophy. In short, there is an evident lacuna in scholarship that the present work aims to address. Before addressing it, however, I need to say a few words about reading Alfarabi in general, and briefly discuss his use of Greek and Hellenistic sources in light of the new political and intellectual challenges posed by the rise of Islam.
How Should One Read Alfarabi?
This question is fundamental for approaching most major philosophers, and Alfarabi is no exception. While I do not expect to resolve this question here, I do hope to justify my own interpretative procedure. The works of Alfarabi that have come down to us contain no direct cross-references or comments on Alfarabi’s own manner of writing. They do include, however, several comments on the manner of writing employed by Plato and Aristotle, which should provide at least some indications about Alfarabi’s own (Galston 1990, 35 ff.). Yet these references do not provide a single, unified account of how a philosopher should write. Although Plato and Aristotle both wrote obscurely in order to conceal their teaching, each did so in his own particular manner: in the Harmonization of the Opinions of the Divine Sages, Alfarabi suggests that Plato proclaimed his use of riddles more openly than Aristotle (HS 131–32, #12–13, Ar. 84–85).4 In keeping with his own suggestion, Alfarabi’s clearest exposition of the use of riddles comes in his Summary of Plato’s “Laws” (SL 130–31, Intro. 2, Ar. 125), while there is no comparable passage in any of his summaries of Aristotle. If Alfarabi’s two most revered philosophic predecessors each employed his own distinctive manner of writing, it is plausible to infer that Alfarabi may have developed his own as well.
Some scholars of Alfarabi, such as E. I. J. Rosenthal, decry much of his writing for being “diffuse, repetitive, and lacking in clarity and precision” (E. I. J. Rosenthal, 158). Yet such criticisms tend to ignore what Alfarabi says about the riddling ways of his philosophic predecessors, and the possibility that he followed in their footsteps. I hope to cast doubt on such charges by carefully and profitably analyzing Alfarabi word by word, showing that many of his apparent repetitions and imprecisions in fact have a deliberate meaning. In so doing I build on two noteworthy attempts by Leo Strauss and Miriam Galston to elucidate Alfarabi’s obscure writing style.
Leo Strauss, in a seminal 1945 article titled “Farabi’s Plato,” presents a very detailed interpretation of one of Alfarabi’s most important texts, which had just recently become available to scholars. The interpretative techniques developed by Strauss, which pay careful attention to contradictions
