ABSTRACT
The reputation of Abu Na~r Mul}ammad b. Mul}ammad b. Tarkhan b. Awzalaghl al-Farabi (AD 870-950) has come down to us untarnished and undiminished from medieval times. It became a cliche in the study of Islamic philosophy to refer to him as the 'Second Teacher' or 'Master' after Aristotle. Ibn Khallikan lauded al-Farabi as the greatest Muslim philosopher and one who was unrivalled in the study of the philosophical sciences. He states that al-Farabi became an expert on Aristotle and underlines the debt that the great Ibn Sina later owed to him.2 (It is worth noting here, however, that it is the Aristotelian Farabi who is praised by Ibn Khallikan and that his biographical sketch ignores the Neoplatonism of that philosopher). The medieval admiration for al-Farabi has been repeated in our own age: Nicholas Rescher ranks him among 'the five or six greatest philosophers of Islam. '3 And Badawi believes that all later currents of thought in Islamic philosophy found their source in al-Farabi.4 Furthermore, it was not only the East, in the form of Ibn Sina and many others, which was indebted to al-Farabi. The West too, as we shall see, particularly in its development of scholastic theology, could not afford to ignore those works of his that were translated into Latin in the Middle Ages.s
The veneration of al-Farabi in both past and present reflects the calibre of the man. And it is not surprising. Just as Aristotle, the 'First Master,' had endeavoured, so many centuries before, to impose some kind of orderly framework on man and beast with his categories and hierarchization, so the 'Second Master'
made a quest for theological and political order the focus of his philosophy. And this analogy with Aristotle is more than merely happy or fortuitous. We are told that al-Fiiriibi read the De Anima two hundred times and the Physics forty times.6 It is not, therefore, strange that his work has been described as 'saturated' with Aristotelianism.? Furthermore, al-Fiiriibi's achievement in writing his philosophy in Arabic is the more remarkable since this was not his native tongue: his first language was Turkish and he only learned Arabic when he went to study in Baghdad. It is claimed that he achieved a complete mastery of the language8 but this has been disputed by modern scholarship.9 (What his other languages were is also a matter of some debate: 10 it seems unlikely that he knew much, or indeed any, Greek,11 but he may well have known Persian.12)
AI-Fiiriibi's search for order proceeded on two main fronts: political and theological. His chosen method was the establishment of a hierarchy for each. The first sphere does not conern us directly here, though it must be noted that scholars have commented on the considerable unity between the theological and political writings of al-Fiiriibi,13 The philosopher himself provides the basic clues to, and impetus behind, this truism: the wise ruler in the virtuous city ranks its citizens in the same way in which God has arranged all the natural phenomena14 of His universe in ranks, beginning with Himself and descending to prime matter and the elements.1s The link between theology and politics is rarely casually done. Indeed, in what is often regarded as al-Fiiriibi's most Platonic reflection, The Book of the Opinions of the People of the Virtuous City (Kitab Ara' Ahl al-Madina al-Faf/,ila), 16 supposedly modelled on Plato's Republic,1? the theology appears to take over from the political intent of the title and the work is utterly dominated by alFiiriibi's well-known description of the First Being and related Neoplatonic matters. Only the last twelve, out of a total of thirty-seven chapters (f~al), may be described as purely political - or, at least, more overtly political than religious in the light of the politico-theological link in al-Fiiriibi's thought stressed above.18
