ABSTRACT
What little information there is about the life of Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī comes mostly from medieval Arabic biographers whose writings date from the fourth/tenth to the seventh/thirteenth centuries. The earliest account in Ibn al-Nadīm’s (d. 380/990) Kitāb al-fihrist gives only minimal information about al-Fārābī’s life; later accounts add to these bare bones extensive lists of his writings, information about his teachers and pupils and a few anecdotes of dubious reliability. 1 Al-Fārābī was probably of Turkish origin, born around 257/870 in Fārāb in Turkestan. Although the details of his early education are murky, he is reported to have studied logic in Baghdad under the Christian scholars Yuḥannā ibn Ḥaylān (d. 910) and Abū Bishr Mattā (d. 940), one of the translators of Aristotle’s works into Arabic. Since the School of Baghdad was the principal heir in the Arabic world to the philosophical and medical tradition of Alexandria, al-Fārābī’s connection with these teachers forged one of the earliest links between Greek philosophy and the Islamic world. 2 Al-Fārābī himself is listed as the teacher of Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī (d. 974), another of the important Christian translators and a noted logician in his own right. Al-Fārābī is also reported to have taught logic to the grammarian Ibn al-Sarrāj, who in turn instructed al-Fārābī in the science of Arabic grammar (Ibn Abī Uṣaybi‘ah (1965): 606; Zimmermann, Introduction to al-Fārābī (1981a): cxviii—cxxii). Although there are numerous anecdotes told about al-Fārābī’s subsequent life and death by the later biographers, their historical accuracy is suspect. 3 Al-Fārābī appears to have left Baghdad for Syria in 330/942, travelling to Aleppo and Damascus, and perhaps also to Egypt, between 330/942 and 337/948. He then returned to Damascus, where he died in 339/950.
