and Samuel Stern, but also to the philosophic interpreter Leo Strauss, whose two most mature works on Alfarabi examine his treatment of Plato (Strauss 1945; 1959, 134–54). These extremely fruitful efforts have laid the groundwork for further research on Alfarabi. I do not wish to deny or even downplay the link between Alfarabi and the ancients, which I will discuss at some length in Chapter 1 and return to throughout the book. However, I do hope to make the case for a more Muslim-oriented approach to Alfarabi, as especially suited to both Alfarabi’s concerns and our own.
While Alfarabi learned from the Greeks, he wrote primarily for Muslims and minorities living under Islamic rule.5 An excessive emphasis on Alfarabi’s Greek and Hellenistic sources risks losing sight of this simple and banal fact. It might have been easy enough to gloss over Alfarabi’s contribution to the understanding of Islam while the religion seemed dormant, and its adherents were still reeling under the yoke of various kinds of colonial rule. Yet with the resurgence of Islam as a religious and political force in the world, and the sharpening of the debate, among both Muslims and non-Muslims, over the interpretation of its doctrines, Alfarabi’s stature as the first great philosophic interpreter of Islam cannot be overemphasized.6
The futility of much Hellenistic source-hunting is already apparent in Franz Rosenthal and Richard Walzer’s pioneering edition of the Philosophy of Plato. Rosenthal and Walzer assume a Hellenistic source for almost everything in this work and attempt to uncover it, but often reach the riveting conclusion that “nothing can be determined” (Rosenthal and Walzer 1943, xii–xvi). Residues of this preoccupation can still be found in Walzer’s landmark 1985 edition of the Virtuous City, where he attempts to track Hellenistic sources for every doctrine in the work, without any “certain results” (VC, trans. Walzer, 9). Muhsin Mahdi’s review of this edition includes a thorough critique of Walzer’s “source-hunting” (Mahdi 1990, 696–705). With regard to our topic, the Umma, Walzer readily admits that “our evidence of the Hellenistic theory of language is very scanty” (VC, trans. Walzer, 431), but nonetheless concludes that Alfarabi’s manifest political interest in the Umma can be traced to Hellenistic sources, “pieced together by scraps of miscellaneous information” (487). Walzer assembles an impressive array of sources, but most of them are fragmentary. Furthermore, they demonstrate little, as long as Alfarabi’s access to them, and interest in their contents, remain unproven. As Mahdi points out, Alfarabi seems much more concerned with acknowledging his debt to Plato and Aristotle, whom he mentions regularly, than to later Hellenistic authors whom he seldom mentions at all (Mahdi 1990, 696, 703–5). The meager results of Walzer’s quest for sources might rather point to the conclusion that Alfarabi was an original thinker in his own right, who did far more than merely transmit the ideas of the earlier authors to whom he happened to have access.
Walzer is hardly oblivious to historical change, admitting that “the political structure of the territories which make up the Islamic world has basically changed” since Hellenistic times (VC, trans. Walzer, 433). He also observes that Alfarabi “assumed his readers to be familiar with the religious, political, and local situation” (13). But he does not appear to draw the obvious conclusion from these premises: the meaning and significance of the Umma changed drastically with the coming of Islam, and this change is reflected in the thought of Alfarabi. The new empire, despite being just as multiethnic as its Hellenistic predecessors, was grounded in a religion that called itself an Umma and sought to spread its faith to all humankind. The term Umma thus came to acquire a double meaning: the old, ethnic Ummas of blood and language coexisted with the new, Islamic Umma of religion and faith. This dual meaning of Umma had no precedent in pre-Islamic times, and therefore could not have appeared in any Hellenistic source.7 It fell to Alfarabi, the great heir to the Greek tradition within Islam, to grapple with the new historical situation on his own. Alfarabi succeeded in applying what he learned from the Greeks to a world that was in so many respects alien to them. In Chapters 4 and 5, I analyze Alfarabi’s view of the new Umma in considerable detail.
I cannot conclude this introduction without raising an important objection: if Alfarabi’s teachings are in fact intended for Muslims, why have they found relatively few Muslim readers? Alfarabi’s influence in the Islamic world has for centuries been eclipsed by any number of later philosophers and theologians. He does not hold a central place in the curriculum of most Islamic countries today, as indicated by the paucity of studies in Arabic cited in the bibliography. And yet many Muslims seem to think that there is nothing more to study: a prominent Egyptian academic once told me that Alfarabi was ma‘rūf, that is to say, already well understood. Such an attitude is sure to discourage any deeper exploration of Alfarabi.
A full answer to this question would require a far more thorough examination of Islamic intellectual history than I can possibly provide. I will therefore limit myself to repeating a useful suggestion made by Joshua Parens. The audacity of Alfarabi’s praise of philosophy, along with his disregard of the particularities of Islamic doctrine and law, might have won him many admirers among the medieval philosophers, but few within the broader Islamic community (Parens 2006b, 45–46). As a non-Muslim, I am in no position to justify Alfarabi before the court of Islamic law. But I will argue, on many different occasions, that his subtle, sober teachings about the Umma could foster greater intellectual freedom, religious tolerance, and political stability, among both Muslims and non-Muslims. I am therefore inclined to agree with the claim of Muhsin Mahdi, that Alfarabi always had the best interests of his community at heart (Mahdi 2001, 62). Alfarabi may still represent, to most Muslims, the road not taken, but to a religious community whose recent history has been plagued by tyranny and tumult, precisely the road not taken may begin to warrant a second look.
Chapter 1
The Nation in Plato and Aristotle: An Obstacle to Virtuous Rule
I have suggested that most political philosophers apart from Alfarabi did not take the nation very seriously. This does not mean that they ignored it completely, or that it would not be worth our while to examine the reasons for their relative neglect. Since Alfarabi presents himself above all as a disciple of Plato and Aristotle, and frequently comments, directly or indirectly, on their works, an examination of the significance of the nation for these two Greek philosophers may serve as a useful segue into Alfarabi. We will begin by discussing Plato’s Republic, followed by Alfarabi’s interpretation of this dialogue, and then do the same with Aristotle’s Politics. It will become clear that neither Plato nor Aristotle was as indifferent to the significance of nations as is sometimes believed, but that Alfarabi’s interest in the Umma extends farther.
A comparison of Alfarabi and Plato ought to begin with a surprisingly difficult question: did Alfarabi in fact have knowledge of Plato’s works? Since Alfarabi mentions most of the Platonic dialogues in the Philosophy of Plato, it is tempting to take his knowledge of Plato for granted. But an examination of the existing scholarship on the question reveals how little we know for certain about Alfarabi’s actual exposure to Greek texts and Arabic translations of them. However dry and scholarly the issue of Alfarabi’s access to Plato may appear to outsiders, it has spawned a number of polemics, especially with regard to Plato’s Laws, on which Alfarabi wrote a commentary. Since I am not considering the Laws in any detail here, I wish to take the liberty of consigning this particular debate to the footnotes.1 Yet I can hardly evade the question of Alfarabi’s knowledge of the Republic, and of Plato in general.
The biggest obstacle to demonstrating Alfarabi’s knowledge of Plato is that we do not know of any extant medieval Arabic translations of the dialogues, as Franz Rosenthal and other scholars had long noted (F. Rosenthal 1940, 390–93, 410–11). Yet the late David Reisman made a careful review of the available material in light of his recent discovery
