Abu Nasr Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Tarkhan ibn Awzalagh al-Farabi

About Abu Nasr Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Tarkhan ibn Awzalagh al-Farabi

Medieval Islamic philosophy gave Al-Farabi the title al-Mu'allim al-Thani — the Second Teacher, second only to Aristotle himself. The honorific was not casual flattery. It marked a structural placement: Aristotle was the First Teacher, the source of demonstrative method and the philosophical sciences; Al-Farabi was the figure through whom the Aristotelian corpus entered Arabic in systematic form, fused with Neoplatonic emanationism, and was bent toward the political and prophetic questions of the Islamic civic world. Every later falsafi — Avicenna, Averroes, the Latin Aristotelians who read them in translation — wrote in the architecture Al-Farabi built.

He was born around 870 CE in Farab, a town in Transoxiana on the Syr Darya river, identified by modern scholarship with Otrar in present-day Kazakhstan. Older sources sometimes pointed to a Faryab in Khorasan, but the Otrar identification is now the academic standard. His ethnic origin is contested in the medieval biographies; Ibn Khallikan and others called him Turkic, while later Persianate sources claimed him as Persian. The name al-Farabi simply means "the man from Farab." Beyond the place of birth, almost nothing of his early life is recoverable. The biographical tradition that grew up around him in later centuries — that he wandered in shepherd's clothes, that he sat silent in courts before astonishing assemblies with extempore performance — belongs more to the genre of philosophical hagiography than to documented history.

What is documented is his education in Baghdad and the milieu in which he formed. He studied logic with Yuhanna ibn Haylan, a Nestorian Christian logician of the Baghdad school descended from the late Alexandrian Aristotelian tradition. The translation movement that brought the Greek philosophical corpus into Arabic was largely the work of Christians — Hunayn ibn Ishaq, his son Ishaq ibn Hunayn, and the circle of Matta ibn Yunus, who would later teach Yahya ibn Adi. Al-Farabi was a Muslim student of this Christian-led tradition, and his philosophical formation took place in a cosmopolitan intellectual world where the language of high theology was Arabic but the inheritance was Greek and the immediate teachers were often Syriac-speaking Christians. He is reported to have studied under Matta ibn Yunus as well, though the chronology is tight — Matta and Al-Farabi were near-contemporaries, and modern scholars often note that Al-Farabi himself names only Yuhanna ibn Haylan as his teacher.

From this Baghdadi training emerged the most ambitious philosophical project the Islamic world had yet produced: the integration of the entire Aristotelian Organon into Arabic, accompanied by an introduction to philosophy as a structured curriculum, a metaphysics keyed to Neoplatonic emanation, and a political philosophy modeled on Plato's Republic but worked out in explicitly Islamic civic terms. His commentaries on Aristotle's logical works became the standard logical curriculum in falsafa for the next several centuries. His political treatises gave Islamic philosophy a vocabulary for discussing the city, the lawgiver, and the relation between revelation and demonstration that would shape every later thinker who took the Greek inheritance seriously.

The centerpiece of his political philosophy is the Ara' Ahl al-Madina al-Fadila — the Opinions of the Inhabitants of the Virtuous City. The book treats the cosmos and the polity in a single arc: from the First Cause and the emanation of the cosmic intelligences down through the sublunary world, the human soul, and finally the structure of the human community. The Virtuous City is led by a philosopher-prophet who has actualized union with the Active Intellect, the tenth and lowest of the cosmic intelligences in Al-Farabi's emanationist scheme. This figure unifies the philosophical and prophetic functions: he grasps universal truths through demonstrative reason, and he can also receive them through the imaginative faculty in the symbolic-narrative form that allows them to be communicated to non-philosophers as religious law. Set against the Virtuous City is a graded typology of imperfect cities — the Ignorant City in its various species (the City of Necessity, the City of Meanness or Vile City, the Timocratic or Honor-Loving City, the Tyrannical City, and the Democratic City), the Wicked City, the Mistaken City, the Errant City — a diagnostic taxonomy that prefigures later political-typological thinking and reads, in places, like a medieval extension of Plato's Books VIII and IX.

The theory of prophecy embedded in this work is among the most consequential doctrines in the history of Islamic philosophy. Al-Farabi argues that prophetic revelation and philosophical demonstration are routes to the same truth, distinguished by epistemic mode. The philosopher receives universal truth directly through the rational faculty, in conceptual form. The prophet receives the same truth through the imaginative faculty, which represents universals in particular, narrative, symbolic form so that they can be intelligible and motivating to non-philosophers. Religion, on this account, is not a lower truth than philosophy; it is the same truth in the form a city of human beings can absorb. Avicenna would inherit and refine this doctrine. Al-Ghazali, two centuries later, would attack it as a covert reduction of revelation to allegory.

In logic, Al-Farabi gave Arabic philosophy a five-fold typology of reasoning that his successors absorbed almost unchanged. He distinguished demonstrative reasoning (yielding certain knowledge from necessary premises), dialectical reasoning (proceeding from generally accepted premises), rhetorical reasoning (aiming at persuasion through likely premises and emotional resonance), poetic reasoning (operating through imaginative representation), and sophistical reasoning (the deliberately misleading imitation of demonstration). This was not a peripheral classification. It allowed Al-Farabi and those who followed him to map the kinds of discourse a polity in fact contains — scientific argument, theological dispute, public speech, poetry, sophistry — onto Aristotle's Organon and to give each its proper place. The hierarchy ran from demonstration at the top down through the others, and it framed the way philosophers in the falsafa tradition understood the relation between scientific knowledge and the looser modes of public reasoning that any actual community uses.

His metaphysics was Aristotelian in vocabulary and Neoplatonic in shape. From the First Cause — pure intellect thinking itself — emanates the First Intellect; from the First Intellect, by the act of self-knowledge and the knowledge of its source, emanates the Second Intellect and the outermost celestial sphere; the process continues through ten intelligences, ending with the Active Intellect that governs the sublunary world and serves as the source of intelligible forms for the human mind. Human knowledge, on this scheme, is the result of the Active Intellect's illumination of the human potential intellect; the philosopher in his highest state, and the prophet, achieve a kind of union (ittisal) with the Active Intellect itself. This emanationist metaphysics, refined by Avicenna a generation later, became one of the central targets of Al-Ghazali's Tahafut al-Falasifa.

Al-Farabi was also one of the great medieval music theorists. The Kitab al-Musiqa al-Kabir, the Great Book of Music, runs to several hundred pages in modern editions and treats the mathematical theory of intervals, the construction and tuning of instruments, and the analysis of melodic and rhythmic systems with a thoroughness that has no rival in surviving Arabic music theory. He was reportedly an accomplished lutenist himself, and the biographical tradition has him performing at court to the astonishment of his hearers — a story plausible in outline if not in its hagiographical embellishments.

He spent his last years, from around 942 until his death in 950, in Syria at the court of the Hamdanid amir Sayf al-Dawla, who held Aleppo and parts of northern Syria and was the most lavish Arabic literary patron of the mid-tenth century. The poet al-Mutanabbi belonged to the same court. Al-Farabi died in Damascus in 339 AH / 950 CE. The biographical tradition reports that Sayf al-Dawla led his funeral prayer and walked behind his bier — a story that, whatever its literal truth, registers the place his contemporaries assigned him: not a court philosopher entertaining a prince but a teacher whose presence was understood to honor the court that hosted him.

Contributions

Al-Farabi's first major contribution was to give Arabic philosophy a curriculum. Before him, Aristotle existed in Arabic largely as a set of translated texts circulating in the milieu of the Christian-led Baghdad school. Al-Farabi imposed an order on this material — what to read, in what sequence, and what relation each text bore to the others. His introductions to philosophy, including the short treatise Tahsil al-Sa'ada (The Attainment of Happiness) and Risala fi ma yanbaghi an yuqaddama qabla ta'allum al-falsafa (The Treatise on What Should Precede the Study of Philosophy), set out the propaedeutic curriculum that became standard in falsafa for centuries. The Aristotelian sciences began with logic, ascended through natural philosophy and mathematics to metaphysics, and culminated in political philosophy as the science of the practical good of human communities.

His commentaries on the Organon worked through the entire logical corpus point by point: the Eisagoge of Porphyry, the Categories, De Interpretatione, the Prior and Posterior Analytics, the Topics, the Sophistical Refutations, the Rhetoric, and the Poetics. Many of these commentaries survive only in fragments or in later citations, but the framework they imposed on Arabic logic was decisive. Avicenna read them, Averroes read them, and the basic structure of Arabic logical pedagogy — the five-fold typology of demonstrative, dialectical, rhetorical, poetic, and sophistical reasoning, the integration of the Rhetoric and Poetics into the Organon as parts of the logical sciences rather than peripheral arts — comes from Al-Farabi.

In metaphysics, Al-Farabi inherited the Aristotelian categories and the Neoplatonic emanationism that had reached the Arab world through such pseudonymous works as the Theology of Aristotle, an Arabic adaptation of portions of Plotinus's Enneads attributed in error to Aristotle himself. Al-Farabi's contribution was to weld these inheritances into a single coherent scheme: a First Cause that is pure intellect thinking itself, an emanationist cosmology of ten intelligences, a doctrine of the Active Intellect as the source of human intelligibility, and a theory of human felicity (sa'ada) as the perfection of the rational faculty through union with the Active Intellect. This scheme would be refined and made philosophically tighter by Avicenna, but its essential outline is Al-Farabi's.

His political philosophy is his most original contribution. Where the Aristotelian Politics was barely available in Arabic — only fragments of it ever reached the Arabic-reading world — Plato's Republic and Laws were known in summary form, and Al-Farabi worked through them with a thoroughness no earlier Arabic writer had attempted. The Virtuous City, the Political Regime (al-Siyasa al-Madaniyya), the Aphorisms of the Statesman (Fusul al-Madani), and the Compendium of the Laws of Plato (Talkhis Nawamis Aflatun) together form a body of political-philosophical writing without precedent in Islamic letters. Their central move is to fuse the Platonic philosopher-king with the Islamic prophet-lawgiver: the supreme ruler of the Virtuous City is the figure who has perfected both the rational and the imaginative faculties, who knows the truths of philosophy through demonstration and can communicate them to non-philosophers through prophetic-religious symbolism.

The theory of prophecy that follows from this is doctrinally consequential. By making prophecy a mode of access to the same truths philosophy reaches by demonstration, Al-Farabi gives religion a clear function in the rational order of things — the function of communicating universal truth in the form a non-philosophical community can absorb — but at the cost of subordinating revelation, in epistemic standing, to philosophical demonstration. This is precisely the move Al-Ghazali would later attack as a covert reduction of revelation to allegory and a denial that prophets know more than philosophers. The argument over Al-Farabi's prophetology runs through the entire history of falsafa.

In music theory, the Kitab al-Musiqa al-Kabir treats the mathematical foundations of pitch, the theory of intervals and consonances, the construction of the lute (ud) and other instruments, the practice of melodic composition, and the rhythmic systems of Arabic and Persian music. Its mathematical sophistication is real — it operates with ratios and proportions in the Pythagorean and Ptolemaic tradition — and its descriptions of instruments and performance practice make it one of the principal sources for the music of the early Abbasid period. No comparable medieval Arabic music treatise survives.

He also wrote on physics, on the agreement between Plato and Aristotle (the Kitab al-Jam' bayna Ra'yay al-Hakimayn, an attempt to harmonize the two great Greek authorities that, like the Theology of Aristotle, partly relied on inherited Neoplatonic conflations), on the soul, and on a wide range of more specialized topics in logic and metaphysics. The corpus is substantial, scattered, and partly lost; modern editions and translations have been produced piece by piece over the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with significant work still proceeding.

Works

Ara' Ahl al-Madina al-Fadila — The Opinions of the Inhabitants of the Virtuous City — is the work for which Al-Farabi is most read today. It treats the structure of the cosmos, the human soul, and the human polity in a single emanationist arc. The standard scholarly edition with English translation is Richard Walzer's Al-Farabi on the Perfect State (Oxford 1985), which prints the Arabic alongside an annotated translation and a long introduction. The book is a synthesis rather than a polemic; it presents Al-Farabi's mature political philosophy in its most accessible form, which is one reason it became the canonical entry point into his thought for both medieval and modern readers.

Al-Siyasa al-Madaniyya — The Political Regime, sometimes translated as The Principles of the Beings — is the companion political-philosophical treatise. It overlaps with the Virtuous City in much of its metaphysical and cosmological material but treats the typology of cities and the analysis of political regimes in greater detail. Charles Butterworth's English translation in Alfarabi: The Political Writings, Volume II (Cornell 2015) is the standard contemporary version. With the Virtuous City and the shorter Fusul al-Madani (Aphorisms of the Statesman), it forms the core of Al-Farabi's political corpus.

The Talkhis Nawamis Aflatun — Compendium of the Laws of Plato — is Al-Farabi's summary and interpretation of Plato's Laws. The text he used was almost certainly a Galenic synopsis rather than the full dialogue, but his summary is original in its selection of themes and its placement of the Laws within the architecture of his own political philosophy. Together with the shorter Falsafat Aflatun (Philosophy of Plato) and Falsafat Aristutalis (Philosophy of Aristotle), it forms the trilogy known in modern editions as Al-Farabi's Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, translated and edited by Muhsin Mahdi (Cornell, originally Free Press 1962).

Ihsa al-Ulum — The Enumeration of the Sciences — is a short but historically important classification of the philosophical and religious sciences. It treats the language sciences, the logical sciences, the mathematical sciences, the natural and metaphysical sciences, and the political-jurisprudential-theological sciences in turn, with an analysis of the subject matter and method of each. The work was twice translated into Latin in the twelfth century, by Gerard of Cremona and by Dominicus Gundisalvi, and shaped the medieval Latin classifications of the sciences that fed into the Scholastic curriculum.

Kitab al-Huruf — The Book of Letters — is one of his most original works, a treatise on philosophical language and the relation between Arabic philosophical vocabulary and the underlying Aristotelian categories. It treats the historical emergence of philosophical terminology, the relation between religion and philosophy, and the differences among languages in their capacity to bear philosophical thought. Muhsin Mahdi's Arabic edition (Beirut 1969) is the standard text. The work has been increasingly studied since the late twentieth century as a document of Al-Farabi's understanding of what philosophy in Arabic requires.

Kitab al-Musiqa al-Kabir — The Great Book of Music — is the major medieval Arabic music-theoretical treatise. Modern French and German translations (notably Rodolphe d'Erlanger's six-volume La musique arabe, Paris 1930-59, which translates Al-Farabi alongside other Arabic theorists) make it accessible to non-Arabists. The work treats acoustics, the theory of intervals, the construction and tuning of instruments, melodic composition, and rhythm. Beyond these major works, the Tahsil al-Sa'ada (Attainment of Happiness), the Kitab al-Burhan (Book of Demonstration, his commentary on the Posterior Analytics), the Kitab al-Jam' (the work on Plato-Aristotle agreement, whose ascription to Al-Farabi has been disputed by some recent scholars), and a wide range of shorter logical treatises round out the corpus.

Controversies

The most persistent controversy around Al-Farabi concerns the orthodoxy of his prophetology. By making prophecy and philosophy two epistemic routes to the same truth — philosophy through demonstrative reason, prophecy through the imaginative faculty's symbolic representation of demonstrated truths — he gave Islamic philosophy an account of revelation in which the prophet's distinctive function is communication, not access to truths beyond philosophy's reach. To later critics, beginning with Al-Ghazali in the Tahafut al-Falasifa (Incoherence of the Philosophers, 1095), this looked like a reduction of the Qur'an to allegory and a denial of the prophet's superior knowledge. The defense, which Avicenna would refine, is that the prophet's imaginative faculty is itself a higher cognitive perfection than the philosopher's discursive reason, and that the unity of the truths so reached does not diminish the prophet's status. The debate has not closed; modern scholarship continues to read Al-Farabi's prophetology in different ways, with Muhsin Mahdi's Straussian reading emphasizing the gap between exoteric and esoteric meanings and other readings (Walzer, Druart, Janssens) finding the integration of religion and philosophy more genuinely meant than concealed.

A second area of dispute is the question of the soul's immortality. Several passages in works ascribed to Al-Farabi appear to deny the personal immortality of imperfect souls, suggesting that only those who have actualized union with the Active Intellect achieve a kind of survival, while souls that have failed to acquire intelligible forms simply perish with the body. Other passages and works seem more committed to a generalized doctrine of personal survival and reward and punishment. The Ibn Tufayl tradition reports that Al-Farabi denied the afterlife of the imperfect soul outright, in works now lost. Whether this is an accurate report or a polemical reconstruction by later writers is unresolved; the surviving texts admit of multiple readings, and modern scholars (Reisman, Vallat, Janos) have offered competing reconstructions.

A third controversy concerns ethnic and biographical identification. Medieval biographers gave him various origins — Turkic in Ibn Khallikan, Persian in later Persianate sources — and the very location of Farab was disputed for centuries. The modern academic consensus identifies Farab with Otrar in present-day Kazakhstan, but the underlying ethnic question remains open and is occasionally inflamed by modern nationalist appropriations. The hagiographical material that grew up around him in later Arabic and Persian biographical writing — the wandering shepherd, the silent philosopher who astonishes the court, the lutenist whose playing makes the room weep and laugh in turn — is more useful as evidence of his reputation than of his life.

Finally, the attribution of certain works in his corpus is contested. The Kitab al-Jam' bayna Ra'yay al-Hakimayn (the harmonization of Plato and Aristotle) has been doubted by some recent scholars (Marwan Rashed prominently) on internal evidence and what they argue are anachronistic positions. Other works long assumed to be Al-Farabi's have been reassigned, in part or whole, to Yahya ibn Adi or other Baghdad-school figures. The corpus that confidently belongs to him remains substantial, but its precise edges are being redrawn by contemporary editorial work.

Notable Quotes

"Religion is an imitation of philosophy. Both comprise the same subjects and both give an account of the ultimate principles of the beings. For both supply knowledge about the first principle and cause of the beings, and both give an account of the ultimate end for the sake of which man is made — that is, supreme happiness — and the ultimate end of every one of the other beings. In everything of which philosophy gives an account based on intellectual perception or conception, religion gives an account based on imagination." (Attainment of Happiness; Mahdi translation, Cornell)

"The virtuous city resembles the perfect and healthy body, all of whose limbs cooperate to make the life of the animal perfect and to preserve it in this state. Now the limbs and organs of the body are different and their natural endowments and faculties are unequal in excellence, there being among them one ruling organ, namely the heart, and organs which are close in rank to that ruling organ, each having been given by nature a faculty by which it performs its proper function in conformity with the natural aim of that ruling organ." (Ara' Ahl al-Madina al-Fadila, chapter 15; Walzer translation, Oxford)

"The philosopher who has reached the level of the Active Intellect through union, and who can also receive its emanation in his imaginative faculty in such a way that he becomes a prophet warning of what will be and informing of what is — this man possesses the most perfect rank of humanity and has reached the highest degree of felicity. His soul is perfect and united with the Active Intellect." (Ara' Ahl al-Madina al-Fadila, chapters 14-15; paraphrased from the Walzer translation, not a direct quotation)

"The art of logic gives, in sum, the rules whose office is to direct the intellect and guide man on the right path of truth in everything in which he may err among the things that he tries to perceive intellectually, and the rules that safeguard him and protect him against error in whatever he tries to know intellectually." (Ihsa al-Ulum, chapter on logic; standard translation in McGinnis and Reisman, Classical Arabic Philosophy: An Anthology of Sources, Hackett 2007)

Legacy

Al-Farabi's most direct legacy is the Avicennan synthesis. Avicenna read Al-Farabi early and seriously — he reports in his autobiography that he had read Aristotle's Metaphysics forty times without understanding it, and only Al-Farabi's short commentary On the Aims of the Metaphysics finally opened the text to him. The emanationist cosmology, the theory of the Active Intellect, the prophetology, the typology of reasoning, and the integration of philosophy and political-religious questions that became canonical in Avicenna's Shifa and Najat all begin in Al-Farabi. Avicenna refined the philosophical machinery, made the metaphysics tighter, and added the famous proof of God as the Necessary Existent — but the architecture is Al-Farabi's.

Through Avicenna, this architecture reached Averroes in Andalusia. Averroes is more directly Aristotelian than Al-Farabi or Avicenna and explicitly rejects the emanationist cosmology in his mature commentaries, but his understanding of the relation between philosophy and religion in the Fasl al-Maqal owes a clear debt to Al-Farabi's earlier formulation, even where Averroes argues against the specific Farabian and Avicennan positions. The Latin reception of Averroes carried fragments of Al-Farabi into the medieval Christian universities, where his Ihsa al-Ulum, translated as De Scientiis, shaped Scholastic classifications of the sciences. The Latin form Alfarabius appears in Albertus Magnus and in Aquinas; Roger Bacon cites him; Domingo Gundisalvi leans on him heavily in the De Divisione Philosophiae.

In the Jewish philosophical tradition, his reception was deep. Maimonides told his student Joseph ibn Aknin in a famous letter that he should read "only the works of Al-Farabi" in logic, that Aristotle was the foundation of philosophy and Al-Farabi the most reliable interpreter of Aristotle, and that the works of all other philosophers, including Avicenna, should be read with caution. The Guide of the Perplexed reflects this assessment: Maimonides's prophetology, his theory of imagination, and his political philosophy of the law-giving prophet are saturated with Al-Farabi. Through Maimonides, Al-Farabi entered Jewish philosophical thought as one of its formative non-Jewish sources.

In the Islamic world, Al-Farabi's most intense modern revival came in the twentieth century, particularly through the work of Muhsin Mahdi at Chicago and his students. Mahdi's editions and translations — the Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, the Book of Letters, the Book of Religion, the Compendium of the Laws of Plato — and his interpretive book Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy (Chicago 2001) made Al-Farabi central to a Straussian-influenced reading of Islamic political philosophy that has been widely influential in the United States and contested in Europe. Richard Walzer's Oxford edition of the Virtuous City (1985), Charles Butterworth's translations of the political writings (Cornell 2001 and 2015), Therese-Anne Druart's many articles, and Joshua Parens's interpretive books have built on this foundation. The European tradition of Farabi scholarship — Rodolphe d'Erlanger on the music, Dominique Mallet, Philippe Vallat, Damien Janos — has emphasized the philological and historical reconstruction of the corpus alongside the more interpretive American work.

In the Turkic world, Al-Farabi has been claimed as a national figure since the late twentieth century, and Kazakhstan in particular has built monuments, named universities (Al-Farabi Kazakh National University in Almaty), and produced editions and translations on the basis of the Otrar identification. This is a real ongoing legacy, even if the medieval Al-Farabi himself wrote in Arabic, taught in Baghdad, and died in Damascus.

Significance

Al-Farabi matters because he was the figure who decided what shape Greek philosophy would take in the Islamic world. The translation movement gave Arabic the texts of Aristotle, fragments of Plato, the Plotinian material that circulated as the Theology of Aristotle, and a wide range of late antique commentary. Al-Farabi gave them an architecture: a curriculum, a logical core in the Organon, a metaphysics that fused Aristotelian categories with Neoplatonic emanation, a political philosophy keyed to the Islamic civic situation, and a theory of prophecy that could speak to the Qur'anic religious world without abandoning the Greek demonstrative method. Every later falsafi worked inside the architecture he built, even when arguing against specific positions in it.

His political philosophy is the more original of his two great achievements. Islamic civilization had inherited the Aristotelian sciences in some abundance, but the Politics had not made it into Arabic in any sustained form, and the relation between philosophical reason and prophetic law was not a question the Greek inheritance directly answered. Al-Farabi made it the question, and he gave the answer that defined Islamic political philosophy: the philosopher and the prophet are continuous figures, the city is the scene of human happiness, and the right ordering of the city is the political extension of the right ordering of the cosmos. Whether one accepts this answer or rejects it as Al-Ghazali did, the question itself was Al-Farabi's gift to the tradition.

The title al-Mu'allim al-Thani is the precise registration of this. Aristotle was the First Teacher because he was the source. Al-Farabi was the Second because he was the figure through whom the source became an inheritance — a coherent body of philosophical thought that could be taught, written about, criticized, and extended, in Arabic, by Muslims and Christians and Jews together, for as long as the falsafa tradition lasted.

Connections

Al-Farabi's most important teacher was Yuhanna ibn Haylan, a Nestorian Christian logician of the Baghdad school descended from the Alexandrian Aristotelian tradition. Through Yuhanna, and reportedly also through study with Matta ibn Yunus (the older Christian translator and logician who founded the immediate Baghdad circle), Al-Farabi was placed inside the Christian-led translation movement that brought Aristotle into Arabic. His most consequential successor in the Baghdad school was Yahya ibn Adi, the Christian philosopher and theologian who studied with both Al-Farabi and Matta ibn Yunus and became the central figure of the school in the generation after them, going on to teach the next generation including the Muslim philosopher Abu Sulayman al-Sijistani.

His most consequential reader was Avicenna, born about thirty years after Al-Farabi's death. Avicenna's autobiographical report that Al-Farabi's short treatise on the aims of Aristotle's Metaphysics finally allowed him to understand a text he had read forty times without grasping it is one of the most-quoted moments in the history of Islamic philosophy. The Avicennan synthesis — emanationism, prophetology, the theory of the soul, the typology of reasoning — is in its essential outline a refinement of Al-Farabi.

His most consequential critic was Al-Ghazali (1058-1111), whose Tahafut al-Falasifa attacked the philosophical positions Al-Farabi and Avicenna held in common, particularly the eternity of the world, the impossibility of bodily resurrection on the falsafa account, and the doctrine that God knows particulars only in a universal way. Al-Ghazali's critique reshaped the relation between falsafa and Islamic theology for the rest of the medieval period. The biographical details of Al-Ghazali's life and the structure of his critique are treated on the Al-Ghazali page; here it suffices to say that Al-Farabi is one of his two principal targets.

In the Jewish reception, the central figure is Maimonides (1138-1204), whose endorsement of Al-Farabi as the most reliable interpreter of Aristotle and whose own prophetology and political philosophy are deeply Farabian shaped the place Al-Farabi occupies in medieval Jewish thought. In the Latin Christian reception, the figures who matter most are the translators Gerard of Cremona and Dominicus Gundisalvi, who put the Ihsa al-Ulum into Latin as De Scientiis, and the Scholastics — Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon — who cite Alfarabius among their Arabic-language authorities.

Further Reading