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Unlike Pascal, who famously opposed the God of the philosophers to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian philosophers in the medieval Islamic world claim that the God of the patriarchs and the God of the philosophers is one and the same. Let me illustrate their approach through the Muslim philosopher Averroes (d. 1198) and his Jewish colleague Maimonides (d. 1204), who were the two last important representatives of falsafa—the main medieval school of Arabic philosophy—in Muslim Spain. For them the main demonstration for God’s existence is the physical proof that Aristotle worked out at the end of the Physics and in Metaphysics, book 12. In a nutshell Aristotle argues that motion is eternal and that the instantiation of eternal motion in the universe is the celestial spheres which eternally move stars and planets around the earth. Since the celestial spheres are finite bodies, they cannot contain the infinite force required to eternally keep moving. And since an infinite body is impossible, the spheres must be moved by an incorporeal mover—that is, God. Apprehending God in this way, Averroes and Maimonides argue, is the highest good for human beings, for the main component of the human good is intellectual perfection which is acquired through knowledge of the natural order, culminating in knowledge of God. Leaving aside the technical details of Aristotle’s proof, the important point for my purpose is that both Averroes and Maimonides claim that the first to establish God’s existence in this way was not Aristotle, but Abraham!1 This is precisely the point on which Abraham broke with the star worshipping idolaters of his time: they did not understand that the celestial spheres require an incorporeal mover and thus took them to be the deity itself. Abraham is, of course, the founding father of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. What Averroes and Maimonides are trying to do, therefore, is to embed the beliefs about the world and the good that, upon careful reflection, they came to see as true at the very foundation of their religious tradition by portraying Abraham as an accomplished philosopher. It is easy to see why they do this: they are philosophers, but Averroes is also a Muslim and Maimonides a Jew. Hence they interpret their religious tradition in light of their considered beliefs about the world and the good. This form of philosophical reinterpretation is typical for Muslim, Jewish, and Christian philosophers in the Islamic world: it is their way of doing justice to the truth they take to be embodied in their religious tradition.
The label ‘philosophers’ (falāsifa) became a kind of intellectual trademark that identified its bearers as the heirs of the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle and set them apart from other intellectual currents in the Muslim world, most importantly ‘theology’ (kalām). It is important to stress that the opposition of falsafa and kalām which represents a key intellectual axis in the medieval Islamic world does not imply that proponents of falsafa give priority to reason and proponents of kalām to revelation. Of the two main schools of medieval kalām, the Muʿtazila and the Ashʿariyya, the former is in a sense as fond of reason (ʿaql) as the falāsifa. Since reason proves, for example, that God is not only numerically one, but also incorporeal and without composition, the Muʿtazila are not shy to interpret figuratively all passages of their religious texts that entail any form of multiplicity in God (besides corporeal features, this also includes attributes like wisdom, power, life, compassion, and so forth if these are taken to refer to different aspects of God’s nature). And yet for the mutakallimūn the role of philosophy remains instrumental: its twofold purpose is to clarify the prophetic religion, whose truth has been established independently through miracles, and to refute every opinion that contradicts it. For the falāsifa, by contrast, the prophet is first of all an accomplished philosopher who conceived God philosophically, while the representation of God in the religious sources is an ‘imitation’ of the philosophical conception that by means of parables and metaphors aims at conveying an approximate idea of God to non-philosophers. Although the philosophical conception of God thus coincides with the allegorical content of the parables and metaphors representing God in the religious sources, only philosophy can conceive God as he truly is and as he was conceived by the prophets. True philosophy thus constitutes the core of religion rather than being an instrument to confirm and defend independently existing religious doctrines.
Philosophers and theologians were not the only ones who claimed to represent the truth of their religious tradition. A good introduction to the competing currents of thought in the medieval Islamic world is the Deliverance from Error, the intellectual autobiography of the great Muslim theologian al-Ghazālī (d. 1111). Al-Ghazālī’s quest begins after he experiences the breaking of ‘taqlīd’—the loss of trust in the beliefs and values of his religious tradition that he had accepted on the authority of ‘parents and teachers’. The bonds of taqlīd broke, al-Ghazālī writes, when he realized that he would have been just as fervent a Jew or Christian as he was a Muslim, had he been brought up in a Jewish or Christian community:
As I drew near the age of adolescence the bonds of mere authority [taqlīd] ceased to hold me and inherited beliefs lost their grip on me, for I saw that Christian children always grew up to be Christians, Jewish children to be Jews, and Muslim children to be Muslims.2
If al-Ghazālī cannot rely on the authority of his religious tradition, can he rely on his own cognitive faculties—the senses and the intellect? He finds reasons to cast doubts on both. The senses tell us, for example, that the sun is the size of a dinar coin. Here the intellect can identify and correct the mistake. But can we trust the intellect? We can conceive of a higher cognitive faculty, al-Ghazālī argues, that would identify the mistakes of the intellect in the same way as the intellect identifies the mistakes of the senses. The fact that we do not have such a faculty or know about such mistakes does not mean that we do not make them, since we also would not know about the mistakes of the senses without the intellect. Al-Ghazālī’s sceptical crisis only ends when God casts light into his heart, restoring trust in his cognition. The quest for knowledge thus cannot begin without God’s help. Then al-Ghazālī describes how he ‘scrutinized the creed of every sect’ and ‘tried to lay bare the inmost doctrines of every community’ in order to ‘distinguish between true and false, between sound tradition and heretical innovation’.3 He examines the four main interpretations of Islam in his time, proposed by theologians, philosophers, Sufis, and Ismāʾīlis, which all claim to represent true Islam.
Theology or kalām (literally ‘speech’ or ‘debate’) for al-Ghazālī is, above all, an apologetic discipline. The aim of the mutakallimūn is to defend the orthodox faith through rational argument against heretics and rival religions. While he does not deny that this defence is important, it does not offer a secure path to knowledge because the truth of the orthodox faith is taken for granted.
By contrast, Muslim philosophers (falāsifa) such as al-Fārābī and Avicenna, whom al-Ghazālī describes as the heirs of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, claim to accept only that which has been strictly demonstrated according to Aristotle’s logic. While al-Ghazālī agrees that a demonstrated claim—that is, the conclusion of a scientific syllogism as set forth in the Posterior Analytics (‘burhān’ in Arabic, translating the Greek apodeixis)—must be true, he denies that the falāsifa have, in fact, made good on their promise. The disciplines that al-Ghazālī recognizes as apodictic are logic and mathematics. Aristotle’s physics and ethics also contain much that is true, although in ethics Aristotle took over much from ancient Sufis without crediting them. (Like the falāsifa, who claim that in following Aristotle they are actually following Abraham, al-Ghazālī here claims to be following old Sufi traditions.) In metaphysics, by contrast, the falāsifa simply kowtow to the authority of their Greek teachers and defend doctrines that are often at odds with Islam. In three cases he goes so far as to declare the falāsifa unbelievers (kuffār), a charge that carried no less than the death sentence with it: for denying the creation of the world, God’s knowledge of particulars, and the resurrection of the dead. Hence falsafa not only fails to deliver certain knowledge, but also leads its adherents astray. Note that al-Ghazālī does not claim to be able to prove that the claims of the falāsifa in metaphysics are wrong. He only disputes that they can offer a demonstration. In a scientific syllogism, the logical inference must be valid and the premises necessarily true—that is either self-evident or deduced from self-evident propositions. According to al-Ghazālī, however, many of the premises used by the philosophers can be disputed. Consider the proof for God’s existence that, as we saw above, relies on the premise that the world is eternal. The first and longest discussion of the Incoherence of the Philosophers—the work in which al-Ghazālī spells out the critique of falsafa sketched in the Deliverance—is devoted to showing that the falāsifa were unable to prove the eternity claim. But if from the standpoint of reason the world can be both eternal (Aristotle’s position) and created (Islam’s position), who decides that Aristotle is wrong and Islam is right? If reason cannot settle questions about God’s existence, nature, and relation to the world, the authority of revelation must be based on something else.
The third school that al-Ghazālī examines is the ahl al-taʿlīm, the adherents of authoritative instruction. By this he means the branches of Shiʿite Islam who claim that knowledge can only be attained through unconditional submission to the infallible imam. The imam is the successor of the prophet and must be of his family which ensures his unique connection with God. He is the only person able to grasp the true hidden meaning (bāṭin) of the Quran and provide guidance to the religious community. Can the imam, then, unlike the philosopher, decide whether the world is eternal or created and other disputed questions? Al-Ghazālī’s main problem with the ahl al-taʿlīm is that they cannot defend the supposedly infallible teachings of the imam against the slightest objection. When put to the test they turn out not to have real knowledge at all.
Finally al-Ghazālī turns to Sufism which offers both a theory and a practical path. The two main steps consist in liberating oneself from the attachments to this world (the ‘mansion of deception’) and then turning to God (the ‘mansion of eternity’), culminating in the immediate experience or ‘taste’ (dhawq) of God. Not only does al-Ghazālī credit Sufism with a viable path to God, but he describes it as superior to knowledge, just as being drunk allows us to grasp drunkenness in a way that is superior to understanding its definition. According to al-Ghazālī, this is the foundation of prophetic revelation and the state that Muhammad attained when he is described as ‘passionately loving [ʿashiqa] God’. The authority of Islam, then, is based on the Sufi path to God. On account of this authority Islam trumps Aristotle when the two are at odds as in the question of the world’s eternity or creation.
The medieval Muslim world stretched geographically from India in the east to Spain in the west and was characterized by the political and religious hegemony of Islam and by Arabic as the shared language of its inhabitants. At the same time, it was a multi-ethnic and multi-religious world that included significant Jewish and Christian minorities. On the one hand, Jews and Christians were not on equal footing with Muslims. They were subject to a number of restrictions such as the jizya, a special tax that non-Muslims had to pay to their Muslim rulers. But they were also recognized as ahl al-kitāb—people of a divinely revealed (albeit superseded) book—and benefited from extensive rights and protections that were only rarely abrogated (as during the Almohad rule in twelfth-century Muslim Spain). As a consequence, Jews and Christians not only enjoyed communal autonomy, but also participated in all walks of social, economic, and cultural life: from fashion, cuisine, and commerce to science, poetry, and theology. This social fabric has been described as ‘creative symbiosis’ by S. D. Goitein.4 With respect to intellectual life, the case of the Jews is somewhat different from that of the Christians. The expansion of Christianity into the Graeco-Roman world led to the appropriation of Greek intellectual tools which in turn gave rise to a long tradition of systematic theological and philosophical reflection. This tradition has no parallel in rabbinic Judaism. Under Islam, by contrast, Jews were keen to take up and contribute to the emerging new intellectual discourses. As Shlomo Pines argued, up to the early modern period it is not possible to draw a meaningful intellectual boundary between Jews and Muslims: ‘in its decisive period mediaeval Jewish thought was an offshoot of Arabic thought: the debates of Jewish philosophers can only be understood if one refers to the doctrinal differences obtaining among Arabic philosophers.’5 Thus we find Jewish mutakallimūn like Saʿadia Gaon, Jewish falāsifa like Abraham ibn Daud and Maimonides, Jewish Sufis like Baḥya ibn Paquda and Abraham ben Maimonides, and Jewish appropriations of Shiʿite concepts—for example in Judah Halevi. While Christians, too, participated, they did so to a lesser degree than Jews, and in some disciplines—most importantly kalām and falsafa—more than others. As mentioned, Christians had a rich intellectual tradition of their own that not only long preceded the developments in the Muslim world, but also significantly helped to shape them.
The study of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian thought in the Middle Ages thus faces a number of challenges. For one thing neither of these traditions was monolithic. As al-Ghazālī’s Deliverance illustrates, they included very different schools each of which claimed to represent the truth (not to mention that the four schools described by al-Ghazālī were also internally diverse). In fact, the medieval attempts to define the boundaries of a religion—for example in al-Ghazālī’s Decisive Criterion for Distinguishing Islam from Unbelief or in Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles—are surely in part a response to the deep disagreements that al-Ghazālī documents. It is clear, moreover, that the different schools competed with each other, criticized each other, borrowed from each other, and so forth. Not being mutakallimūn, for example, is constitutive for the identity of the falāsifa. At times they appropriate and reinterpret concepts from rival schools. Thus al-Fārābī claims that the true imam is the philosopher-ruler in a work completed in Aleppo at the court of the Hamdanid ruler Sayf al-Dawla, a supporter of Shīʿite Islam centred on the authority of the imam.6 Or Maimonides uses the term ‘ʿishq’ that in Sufism refers to the passionate love of God to describe the intellectual love uniting the philosopher with Divine Reason.7 This may well be an implicit response to the increasing popularity of Sufism in Egypt’s Jewish community which Maimonides led. Hence studying each school in isolation—by writing, for example, a history of kalām or of falsafa or of Sufism—fails to capture the dynamic interaction between them. As Pines made clear, dividing the period up according to religious, rather than intellectual, affiliations is just as artificial. The characterization of Jewish philosophy as an ‘offshoot’ of Arabic thought, however, introduces another unhelpful division: that between original and derivation. Jewish thinkers in the Islamic world—Saʿadia Gaon, Judah Halevi, Baḥya ibn Paquda, Maimonides, and others—often stand out through the originality of their responses to the great philosophical, theological, and scientific questions of the time—regardless of the fact that they were Jews who wrestled with these questions within a Jewish framework. And the same can be said for Christian thinkers. Yet while it is true that a Jewish philosopher like Maimonides felt much greater intellectual affinity to a Muslim philosopher like al-Fārābī than to a Jewish mutakallim like Saʿadia Gaon, one cannot properly understand Maimonides without taking the distinctly Jewish character of his work into account. In fact, Maimonides did not write a single philosophical work strictly speaking. In a sense, all of his works are commentaries on the Law of Moses. His first important work is the Commentary on the Mishna, his last the Guide of the Perplexed, which is presented as a book of biblical interpretation. According to the introduction, Maimonides’ goal is to explain ‘the meanings of certain terms’, as well as ‘very obscure parables occurring in the books of the prophets’ in order to show perplexed Jewish intellectuals that no real conflict exists between the teachings of the prophets and the teachings of the philosophers.8 In addition to explaining the Law of Moses as a commentator, Maimonides also puts order into it as a legal scholar, most importantly in the Mishneh Torah, his fourteen-volume code of Jewish law. Similarly, one cannot coherently separate the philosopher Yaḥyā ibn ʿAdī from the Christian Yaḥyā ibn ʿAdī who spares no effort to make philosophical sense of key Christian doctrines such as the Trinity and the Incarnation. And since, as we will see, the distinctive feature of Christ for Yaḥyā is that his intellect is perfectly united with God’s, any philosophical insight contributing to intellectual perfection brings a person closer to Christ. On the other hand, some of the actually meaningful boundaries run across shared religious and intellectual affiliations—for example the theological debates between the Muʿtazilite schools of Basra and Baghdad, the debate about the validity of the Talmud between Rabbanites and Karaites (who both adopted the conceptual tools of Muʿtazilite kalām), or the debate about the nature of Christ between Melkites, Monophysites, and Nestorians. As this short sketch illustrates, adequately capturing the complicated relations between philosophical and theological commitments, intellectual context and religious identity is not at all straightforward and much scholarship remains bound by divisions that are not justified by the material.
Al-Ghazālī’s characterization of kalām as concerned primarily with apologetics fits well with how the falāsifa see kalām. According to al-Fārābī it is the science that seeks the ‘victory of the doctrines and actions prescribed by the religious Lawgiver and the refutation of all opinions contradicting them’.9 Maimonides goes even further: the mutakallimūn bend the facts to make them conform to their preconceived religious beliefs instead of grounding their beliefs on a scientific examination of the facts.10 To be sure, this portrait of kalām is at least in part skewed, in particular with respect to the first school of kalām, the Muʿtazilites. ‘The first duty prescribed to you by God’, writes ‘Abd al-Jabbar, a tenth-century Muʿtazilite theologian, is ‘rational inquiry’ (al-naẓar) because without it knowledge of God cannot be attained.11 The commitment to reason (ʿaql) is just as distinctive in Saʿadia Gaon, the most prominent Jewish intellectual in the tenth century, who uses the tools of Muʿtazilite kalām to provide a scientific foundation for the core doctrines of the Jewish tradition. And the Christian theologian Theodore Abū Qurra had already argued in the ninth century that Christianity is the true religion because it accords with reason.12
The Muʿtazilites were also known as the ‘people of justice and unity’ (ahl al-ʿadl wa-al-tawḥīd) because demonstrating God’s justice and unity was one of their chief concerns. Both doctrines were clearly not derived from the Bible or the Quran. On the contrary, the Muʿtazilites went to a great deal of trouble to align the religious texts with their philosophical concept of God by reinterpreting everything that on a literal understanding contradicted it. But why did Muslim, Jewish, and Christian theologians value reason so highly and turn issues like God’s justice and unity into objects of rational enquiry? Do the religious sources—the Bible, the Quran—not provide authoritative answers to such questions?
For one thing, they noticed that the religious sources often advocated inconsistent positions. On a question as crucial as assessing what it means to transgress a divine commandment, for example, different verses in the Quran as well as in the Bible appear to support mutually exclusive views. On the one hand God’s will is said to determine human actions, on the other hand human actions are said to arise from free will.13 Surely such a conflict can be solved exegetically. But in order to decide what to take literally and what to interpret, reason must serve as an arbiter. And once the debate started its far reaching implications for the conception of God become apparent. How can God be called ‘just’ if he rewards and punishes actions that he himself determined? And conversely, how can he be called ‘omnipotent’ if he has no power over what human beings do?
Turning from God’s justice to God’s unity, a second context must be mentioned: the theological debates between intellectuals of different religious communities. Consider a debate between a Christian and a Muslim on the question of whether Christ is God and incarnated in a human body. The Gospel of John affirms it, the Quran denies it, but if the debate’s participants do not recognize the authority of each other’s religious texts, the appeal to reason as arbiter is again a way out of the impasse.14 The same holds for the doctrine of the Trinity, another signature Christian doctrine that the Quran rejects. The historian al-Ḥumaydī (d. 1095) describes just such a debate:
At the…meeting there were present not only people of various [Islamic] sects but also unbelievers, Magians, materialists, atheists, Jews and Christians, in short unbelievers [i.e. non-Muslims] of all kinds. Each group had its own leader, whose task it was to defend its views…One of the unbelievers rose and said to the assembly: we are meeting here for a debate [munāthara]; its conditions are known to all. You, Muslims, are not allowed to argue from your books and prophetic traditions since we deny both. Everybody, therefore, has to limit himself to rational arguments [ḥujaj al-ʿaql]. The whole assembly applauded these words.15
The principle at work is clear: the participants in the debate cannot rely on their religious texts because none of them is recognized as authoritative by everyone. The sense of a multitude of conflicting opinions conveyed by al-Ḥumaydi is corroborated elsewhere. The Christian theologian Theodore Abū Qurra, for example, sketches a thought-experiment in his Treatise on the Existence of the Creator and the True Religion: a person raised in solitude without religion encounters proponents of the many competing religions in the Middle East. Since they all claim to represent the true religion, Theodore argues that we must ‘lay the scriptures [kutub] to one side and ask the intellect [ʿaql]’.16 For his part Saʿadia Gaon, after establishing that God created the world out of nothing, proceeds to refuting the views that disagree with what he determined to be the Jewish position. These are no less than twelve cosmological theories ranging from Plato and Aristotle to the Upanishads and the Manichaeans.17 It is thus clear how theological debates within a religious community, as well as with representatives of other religious communities, were able to motivate the embrace of reason and the subordination of revelation to reason when the two were in conflict. This does not mean that the qualms of the falāsifa are entirely misplaced, even in the case of rationalist theologians. Thus Theodore, for example, spends much effort on rationally proving the Incarnation, but neither discusses God’s existence nor numerical unity—two points that were not controversial in his intellectual context. Reason, then, does not seem to have the foundational role that the falāsifa claim it should have. It is used to resolve disputes, but not to systematically ground the religious project as a whole.
From the eighth to the tenth century a large part of Greek philosophy and science was translated into Arabic. This was a highly impressive achievement: one civilization appropriated the system of knowledge of another and turned it into the basis of a vibrant and creative intellectual culture of its own. It was, moreover, not the project of some isolated intellectuals, but a large-scale enterprise carried out under the patronage of the political, social, and economic elite of the Abbasid caliphate (the second Sunni dynasty ruling the Muslim empire; it seized power from the Umayyads in 750). After the Greeks, the next significant period in the history of philosophy and science thus unfolded in the context of Islamic civilization. Its main intellectual centres were Baghdad, the residence of the Abbasid caliphs, and al-Andalus (Muslim Spain), the last stronghold of the Umayyads.18 Christian translators played an important role in this process, translating either directly from the Greek or through the intermediary of Syriac translations. The motives behind the translation movement were complex: a science like medicine, for example, was of interest because of its practical usefulness. The Topics, the first Aristotelian work to be translated, offered the dialectical tools required for debating with intellectuals of other religious communities. Competition with Byzantium about which empire had achieved greater scientific sophistication also played a role. Among the justifications offered for the reception of the Greek texts was the claim that the Greeks themselves had derived their insights from ancient Persian wisdom and that the translation movement thus only restored this wisdom to its place of origin (note the similarity to the attempt of Averroes and Maimonides to trace their philosophical views back to Abraham).
Among the competing responses to the encounter with Greek philosophy, that proposed by al-Fārābī ultimately prevailed. Although, chronologically speaking, al-Fārābī is not the first Arabic philosopher, he shaped the identity of classical Arabic philosophy from the ninth century onwards.19 To understand the place of philosophy in the medieval Islamic world, we must thus begin with an examination of al-Fārābī. In the Book of Letters al-Fārābī offers an account of the development of human knowledge of which the last two stages are associated with Plato and Aristotle. While at ‘the time of Plato’ knowledge reached the degree of certainty that can be achieved through dialectics, in Aristotle’s time
scientific speculation [al-naẓar al-ʿilmī] is completed and all its methods are distinguished, theoretical philosophy and universal practical philosophy are perfected, and no object in them remains to be investigated. [Philosophy] becomes an art that is only learned and taught.20
True philosophy, al-Fārābī claims, ‘was handed down to us by the Greeks from Plato and Aristotle alone’.21 Later Muslim, Jewish, and Christian falāsifa shared al-Fārābī’s high regard for Plato and especially Aristotle. Averroes, for example, writes in his Long Commentary on the De anima that Aristotle ‘was a model in nature and the instantiation that nature found for showing the highest human perfection’.22 The great majority of Averroes’ works are commentaries on Aristotle. They come in different formats and serve different purposes. Sometimes they take on the form of a systematic treatise on a philosophical topic, for example philosophical psychology or celestial physics. But all of them reflect what is undoubtedly Averroes’ central intellectual concern: understanding Aristotle. Averroes thus bears eloquent witness to the falāsifa’s conviction that Aristotle was the best gateway to the truth.
This does not mean that true philosophy flourished only in Greece. Elsewhere al-Fārābī traces the origin of philosophy back to Mesopotamia where Abraham was born. From there it was transmitted to ‘the people of Egypt’, then ‘to the Greeks where it remained until it was transmitted to the Syrians and then to the Arabs’.23 Since al-Fārābī wrote most of his works in Baghdad, this suggests once more that he is merely returning philosophy to where it originally came from. Al-Fārābī’s claim to inherit and continue Greek philosophy is made most clearly in On the Appearance of Philosophy where he describes the transmission of philosophy through a long chain of intermediaries from Aristotle to himself. While Christian authorities prohibited teaching parts of the philosophical curriculum because they perceived them as a threat to Christian doctrine, he is the first to restore philosophy to its full scope after the arrival of Islam.24 As a historical document this text is of little interest, but it allows us to see how al-Fārābī situates himself in relation to ancient philosophy and how he conceives his own role in philosophy’s transmission to the Muslim world. Al-Fārābī’s portrait of his role in the transmission of philosophy was adopted by later falāsifa who take him to be the foremost philosophical authority after Aristotle.25 Unlike seventeenth-century philosophers like Descartes who were keen to establish a ‘new’ philosophy after the Copernican revolution had blown the Aristotelian picture of the world into pieces, the falāsifa thus wanted to continue the true philosophy which they equated with the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. While they did not pretend to originality, this does not imply that they were not original in many respects—in the way they interpreted and systematized their Greek sources, made them useful to their distinctive concerns, engaged in debates with kalām and other intellectual rivals, and so forth.
Since al-Fārābī did not encounter Greek philosophy as a living tradition, his first task was to bring the Greek texts that had been translated into Arabic back to life by explaining the importance of philosophy, introducing its methods and subjects, and commenting on its canonical works. Ensuring the continuity of philosophy is crucial, because, according to al-Fārābī, philosophy is the key to the best life. His second task is to clarify the relationship between philosophy and religion. Al-Fārābī rejects a number of views that had been proposed on this matter. On one end of the conceptual spectrum is a group of mutakallimūn that al-Fārābī describes in the Enumeration of the Sciences: because human reason is ‘too weak’ (yaḍʿuf) to guide us, they argue, we must rely on the supernatural revelation received by the prophets.26 On the opposite side of the spectrum Muslim freethinkers like Abū Bakr al-Rāzī deny the need for prophetic guidance altogether, since God has bestowed reason on all human beings. The plurality of prophetic religions, moreover, and their claim to exclusive validity only give rise to religious strife in Rāzī’s view.27 The first Arabic philosopher, al-Kindī (d. c.870), occupies a middle ground. He modified philosophy to suit Islam in an unacceptable manner, according to al-Fārābī, which is why he omits al-Kindī in his account of the ‘appearance of philosophy’ in Islam.28 Similarly Christian authorities prohibited teaching parts of the philosophical curriculum as we saw. Thus several questions arise: should prophetic guidance replace reason or, conversely, reason prophetic guidance? Must the teachings of reason at least be modified or partially prohibited to fit into a religious framework?29
Reviving the project of ancient philosophy requires, first of all, clarifying what this project is.30 According to al-Fārābī’s general outline in the Attainment of Happiness, its central concern is an enquiry into the constituents of human perfection or ‘happiness’ (saʿāda, translating Aristotle’s eudaimonia), and into how to attain and disseminate it. In the Philosophy of Plato and the Philosophy of Aristotle, al-Fārābī explains how this project informs the writings of Plato and Aristotle. Of course the question arises whether Plato and Aristotle pursue the same project in the first place. Although Aristotle is superior to Plato, al-Fārābī stresses that the ‘purpose’ (gharaḍ) of their philosophy is the same.31 To corroborate this he writes a treatise harmonizing their views on issues of apparent disagreement.32 Then al-Fārābī establishes the order of the philosophical curriculum, most prominently in the Enumeration of the Sciences. A number of introductory works exhort to or prepare for the study of philosophy.33 After all these preliminary steps, the strictly philosophical work can begin: explaining Aristotle. Since Aristotle agrees with Plato and at the same time is superior to him, no explanation of Plato is needed. The Greek philosophers left not only an outline of philosophy, but also of ‘the methods [ṭuruq] to it and of the methods to re-establish it when it becomes confused or extinct’.34 By ‘the methods’ al-Fārābī certainly means Aristotle’s logic. Since his goal is to ensure the continuity of philosophy, providing the ‘toolkit’ for establishing and transmitting it is obviously a central concern to him. He thus commented on all parts of the Organon in the version inherited from the late ancient Alexandrian tradition—from Porphyry’s Eisagôgê to the Rhetoric and the Poetics.35 Much of al-Fārābī’s authority for philosophers like Averroes and Maimonides rests, in fact, on his contribution to logic.36 But he also commented on the philosophical sciences properly speaking, both theoretical (mathematics, physics, and metaphysics) and practical (ethics and politics).
To understand how al-Fārābī conceives the relationship between philosophy and religion we must look at his political philosophy which was mainly shaped by Plato. Scholars have long wondered why Aristotle’s Politics was not translated into Arabic and why al-Fārābī—and the falāsifa in general—turned to Plato rather than Aristotle for their political philosophy despite considering Aristotle superior to Plato.37 But recall that Aristotle’s superiority, according to al-Fārābī, stems from the fact that his scientific method is superior to Plato’s. Whereas in Plato’s time knowledge was still pursued by means of dialectics, in Aristotle’s time ‘scientific speculation’ was ‘completed’—that is, reached the stage of ‘burhān’ (demonstration), the method set forth in the Posterior Analytics. Aristotle himself, however, stresses that ‘political philosophy’ is not an exact science. Its premises and conclusions are only ‘generally’ (epi to polu) and not necessarily true.38 For the falāsifa this means that political philosophy by its nature cannot generate more than dialectical propositions.39 Hence even on al-Fārābī’s conception of Greek intellectual history Plato would seem to be as good as Aristotle with regard to political philosophy. Arguably, Plato had given more thought to political issues than Aristotle. And the way he proposes to conceive the relationship between philosophy and political power in a virtuous polis and the role of philosophy in the pedagogical-political guidance of the citizens to virtue provided a much better conceptual framework for interpreting Islam and Judaism as philosophical religions than Aristotle’s Politics. It is also not true that Aristotle plays no role in al-Fārābī’s political thought. First and foremost the Organon, but also the De anima and the Nicomachean Ethics, provide crucial concepts that are integrated into the overall Platonic framework.
How, then, did Plato’s political philosophy prove useful to al-Fārābī for determining the relationship between philosophy and religion? Throughout Plato’s dialogues, the goal of his philosophical-political project remains the same: to make the citizens better by leading them to virtue.40 In the Socratic dialogues the key to virtue is knowledge, which the Socrates of the Apology thinks is to some extent accessible to all citizens.41 Knowing what is good for Socrates is a necessary and sufficient condition for doing what is good.42 Political success thus consists in directing the citizens through philosophical enquiry to knowledge.43 But from the middle dialogues onwards Plato no longer considered knowledge as sufficient for the task. When he came to see the human soul as having both rational and irrational parts, and most souls as dominated by one of the latter, the problem of non-philosophers—that is, of those who cannot be led to virtue through philosophy—became a central concern for him.44 My understanding of Plato’s solution is this: although philosophy remains a necessary condition for becoming perfectly virtuous, all human beings can be led to a lower level of virtue through a pedagogical-political programme designed by philosophers for non-philosophers. This explains the elaborate discussion that Plato devotes to non-philosophical devices—most strikingly in the Laws. The programme’s main components are religious stories, laws, persuasive speeches, and religious practices. The crucial point for my purpose is that Plato abandons the Socratic attempt, portrayed in the Apology, to lead all citizens to virtue through philosophical enquiry. In the Republic, Plato, in fact, explicitly criticizes the use of the Socratic debate for testing the beliefs of non-philosophers, since it will cause them to lose the traditional beliefs in which they were brought up and they lack the ability to ‘discover the true ones’. After having been ‘law-abiding’, therefore, they ‘become lawless’.45
Al-Fārābī adopts Plato’s fundamental premise that human beings are unequal by nature and divided into a minority of philosophers and a majority of non-philosophers.46 In Falsafat Aflāṭūn, moreover, he clearly distinguishes between the Socratic method and the method advocated in Plato’s later dialogues. ‘Socrates’, he claims, was only able ‘to conduct a scientific investigation of justice and the virtues…but did not possess the ability to form the character of the youth and the multitude [al-aḥdāth wa-al-jumhūr].’ The ‘philosopher, the king and the lawgiver’, by contrast, must be able to do both: to instruct ‘the elect [al-khawāṣṣ]’ by means of ‘the Socratic method’ and to form the character of ‘the youth and the multitude’ by means of a pedagogical-political programme.47 From al-Fārābī’s Jawāmi‛ kitāb al-nawāmīs li-Aflāṭūn [Epitome of Plato’s Laws], we know that at a minimum, he was familiar with the main traits of the pedagogical-political programme that Plato had worked out in the Laws.
We saw that, in the Ḥurūf, al-Fārābī describes the process by which the theoretical and practical sciences reach perfection. This is followed by an outline of the two methods used for disseminating the results of this process to the political community. They correspond precisely to the two methods that we just saw: the ‘instruction’ of philosophers ‘proceeds by demonstrative methods’, whereas the instruction of non-philosophers, ‘which is public, proceeds by dialectical, rhetorical or poetical methods’. This second kind of instruction in turn constitutes ‘religion’ (milla) which al-Fārābī takes to be an ‘imitation of philosophy’ (muḥākīyya li-l-falsafa).48 Religion thus conceived fulfils precisely the role of Plato’s pedagogical-political programme: ‘through religion, the multitude is taught, educated and given all that is needed to attain happiness.’49 Its purpose is to convey ‘theoretical and practical matters that have been inferred in philosophy, in such a way as to enable the multitude to understand them by persuasion or imaginative representation or both’.50 Religion thus serves as the ‘tool’ of philosophy which makes philosophical contents accessible to non-philosophers.51 God’s description as a king in the religious texts, for example, is seen as a pedagogically useful metaphorical imitation of the philosophical doctrine of God occupying the first rank in the hierarchy of existents. The notion of the king conveys an approximate idea of God’s rank to non-philosophers who cannot understand the ontological order, but who do understand the political order.52
For al-Fārābī, Plato’s philosopher-king who has the task of guiding both philosophers and non-philosophers to the perfection and happiness possible to them, is replaced by the prophet.53 The virtuous political community is, therefore, at the same time a virtuous religious community. The difference between the philosopher and the prophet is explained in terms of Aristotle’s psychology: the prophet has not only perfected his intellect like the philosopher, but he also has a perfect imagination. And one of the imagination’s functions, according to al-Fārābī, is precisely ‘to imitate’ things.54 In other words: the prophet is not only a philosopher, but a poet and orator as well which allows him to guide both the philosophers and the non-philosophers in his community. It should be clear by now how the late ancient version of the Organon is integrated into this Platonic framework: the prophet instructs philosophers by presenting them with propositions about things as they truly are and then leads them to assent by providing a demonstration. To non-philosophers, on the other hand, he presents propositions that for the most part poetically imitate reality and then leads them to assent through rhetorical or dialectical arguments.55 Thus religious texts for al-Fārābī consist mainly of metaphors, parables, and rhetorical and dialectical arguments.
One implication of conceiving religion as an ‘imitation’ of philosophy is that much of its content will be false if understood literally. God, for example, according to the philosopher, is not truly a king as he is poetically represented in the religious texts. But the representation is true if it is understood as a metaphor for God’s ontological rank. A religious text is thus true when considered in terms of its allegorical content—that is, when the imitated doctrine is made visible behind the imitation. But if true religion coincides with true philosophy on the allegorical level, then the difference between the two—which seemed to be implied in the notion of ‘imitation’—disappears. Only taken literally, religion is an imitation of philosophy. Taken allegorically religion and philosophy are the same.
Al-Fārābī can now address the concerns about reason and prophetic guidance of both the mutakallimūn and Abū Bakr al-Rāzī. Although reason is not too weak to guide us, this does not mean that the literal content of the prophetic teachings is redundant since God did not bestow reason equally on all human beings. As a consequence, reason on its own is not sufficient to lead humankind to perfection. And al-Fārābī can also respond to al-Kindī and Christian censors that there is no need to modify philosophy or prohibit parts of the philosophical curriculum, since a virtuous religion, correctly understood, is in complete agreement with philosophy.
Al-Fārābī uses traditional religious vocabulary to signal how religious doctrines can be philosophically reinterpreted. Thus ‘divine revelation’, for example, can be reinterpreted in terms of the human intellect’s transition from potentiality to actuality.56 Note, however, that al-Fārābī never explicitly identifies Islam with the philosophical religion resulting from this reinterpretation. He stresses, moreover, the possibility of multiple virtuous religions which share a true core embedded in different cultural materials. In the Epitome of the Laws, al-Fārābī traces this pluralism back to Plato: Plato mentions the nomoi of both Crete and Sparta ‘in order to explain that there are many nomoi [nawāmīs] and that their multiplicity does not invalidate them [kathrathuhā lā tubṭiluhā]’.57 This pluralism is also reflected in al-Fārābī’s definition of religion:
Religion consists of opinions and actions, determined and limited by conditions [muqadarra muqayyada bi-sharāʾiṭ], which are prescribed to the community by their first ruler who strives to attain a particular goal.58
The ‘opinions and actions’ constituting a religion are ‘determined and limited’ by the natural and cultural ‘conditions’ under which the religion was established. Hence a virtuous religion allows for multiple instantiations each of which is valid in its particular context. Their true core is
reproduced by imitation for each nation and for the people of each city through those parables which are best known to them. But what is best known often varies among nations, either most of it or part of it. Hence these things are expressed for each nation in parables other than those used for another nation. Therefore it is possible that virtuous nations and virtuous cities exist whose religions [milal] differ, although they all have as their goal one and the same happiness.59
Al-Fārābī thus combines universalism with respect to the true content and goal of a virtuous religion with contextual pluralism concerning the laws, stories, exhortations, and practices of worship that ‘imitate’ the true content and serve as means for attaining the goal. This allows him to give an answer to Rāzī’s charge that multiple prophetic religions give rise to religious strife. On al-Fārābī’s view their claim to truth clearly must not entail a claim to exclusivity. Al-Fārābī thus provides a model for philosophically reinterpreting the religious traditions existing side by side in the Islamic world.
In a sense later falāsifa like Yaḥyā ibn ʿAdī, Averroes, and Maimonides do just that: they apply al-Fārābī’s model to the interpretation of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism as philosophical religions. Al-Fārābī’s universalism is expressed well in a passage of Yaḥyā’s Treatise on the Reformation of Morals:
One who loves perfection must also make it a habit to love people generally…and to be gentle and compassionate with them. Men are a single tribe [qabīl], related to one another; humanity [insāniyya] unites them. The adornment of the divine power is in all of them and in each one of them, and it is the rational soul. By means of this soul, man becomes man. It is the nobler of the two parts of man, which are the soul and the body. So man in his true being is the rational soul, and it is a single substance in all men. All men in their true being are a single thing, but they are many in persons. Since their souls are one, and love is only in the soul, all of them must then…love one another.60
In the entire treatise, Yaḥyā makes no explicit reference to Christianity. This does not mean that traditional religion can be neglected. But when he discusses the way of life of those who ‘give people an interest in eternal life’—for example ‘scholars’ (ahl al-ʿilm) and ‘monks’ (al-ruhbān)—he says, ecumenically as it were, that among the things ‘to be considered good for them’ is ‘attendance at churches and mosques and so forth’.61 As we will see below, however, the passage just cited is not only compatible with Yaḥyā’s Christian commitments, but can be read as the philosophical reinterpretation of a key Christian doctrine: the duty of loving one’s neighbour.
A different example of the kind of universalism advocated by the falāsifa is the view that one should accept a true claim without regard to the religion of the person who makes it. In the words of al-Kindī:
We ought not to be ashamed of appreciating the truth and of acquiring it wherever it comes from, even if it comes from races distant and nations different from us. For the seeker of truth nothing takes precedence over the truth, and there is no disparagement of the truth, nor belittling either of him who speaks it or of him who conveys it. No one is demeaned by the truth, rather all are ennobled by it.62
This attitude was, of course, crucial to justify the reception of pagan Greek philosophy in which al-Kindī and his intellectual circle were engaged. But it was also extended to philosophers of sibling religious communities as in the case of Maimonides who, like al-Kindī, instructs his readers ‘to listen to the truth from whoever says it’.63 In the instructions he left to a student about which philosophical works are worth studying, he does not recommend a single Jewish author. After the Greeks, in particular Aristotle and his commentators, the philosophers he praises are all Muslims: al-Fārābī who ‘excelled in wisdom’, for example, or Ibn Bājja whose ‘treatises are all good for the person who understands’.64 If someone proposes a definition of an animal species, explains the meaning of justice, or works out a proof for God’s existence, what matters is not whether he is Greek, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, or anything else, but whether what he says is true.
Note, however, that the falāsifa’s universalism does not by itself commit them to recognizing multiple virtuous religions. After all, someone who belongs to a false religion may also hit on the truth occasionally. Even when they are willing to admit religious pluralism, they usually deny that different religions are equally virtuous. Averroes, for example, writes that a virtuous character can only be attained through
the knowledge and exaltation of God by the forms of worship prescribed by the laws to [the members of the community] in each religion [fī milla milla], like sacrifices, prayers, supplications and similar utterances by which praise is rendered to God, exalted be he, the angels, and the prophets.65
While he thus allows that the practices and beliefs of different religions promote human perfection, he also argues that the practices and beliefs of Islam do so best. A ‘wise man’ (ḥakīm) must:
choose the best religion of his time, even if they all are true for him, and believe that the better one will be abrogated [yunsakh] through one that is even better. For this reason the wise men who were teaching the people in Alexandria converted to Islam when the religion of Islam reached them, and the wise men who were in the Roman Empire converted to Christianity when the religion of Jesus, peace be upon him, reached them. And nobody doubts that among the Israelites were many wise men, as is clear from the books…attributed to Solomon.66
A little further Averroes claims that ‘in our religion’ practices like prayer and beliefs like the doctrine of the hereafter fulfil the purpose of a virtuous religion ‘more perfectly’ (atamm) than comparable practices and beliefs in other religions.67 I thus take Averroes to be claiming that Islam is superior to Judaism and Christianity. Averroes does not say why Islam is superior in his view. Two explanations are possible. On the first, the degree of wisdom that a religion embodies depends on the moral and intellectual state of the community that the founder of the religion addresses. On the second, it depends on the degree of wisdom of the founder himself. Maimonides offers a good example of the first explanation. During their long sojourn in Egypt, he argues, the Israelites became habituated to the corrupt practices and beliefs of their pagan masters. Since human nature resists radical change, Moses could only reform, but not completely erase these practices and beliefs. Thus Moses retains the practice of sacrifices, but redirects it from idols to God. He also continues to speak of God as if he had human form. In these, as well as in many other cases, Moses, according to Maimonides, had to make concessions to the idol worship with which the Israelites had been brought up.68 Averroes could thus argue that Islam is superior to Judaism and Christianity, because it was established under more favourable religious-cultural circumstances. The second explanation can be illustrated through Yaḥyā’s account of God’s incarnation in Christ. Yaḥyā refers to Aristotle’s claim that in the act of knowledge, the subject and object of knowledge become one. Thus the human intellect unites with the form of the thing that it apprehends. Since God is incorporeal and hence pure form, knowing God entails that the human being ‘becomes united [muttaḥad] with his Creator mighty and magnificent through the intermediary of the intellect [ʿaql]’.69 But if this is all that the Incarnation means, why should such a union be attributed to Christ alone and not to the prophets and the righteous who achieved knowledge of God as well? Yaḥyā’s response to this objection is that nobody else ‘reached Christ’s degree’ (balagha mablaghuhū) who alone attained ‘perfect union’ (ittiḥād tāmm) with God.70 The difference between Christ and the prophets, therefore, is one of degree with respect to intellectual perfection.
Yaḥyā’s philosophical Christology also allows us to discern the implicit Christian character of the universal humanism that he espouses in The Reformation of Morals. As we saw, all human beings partake in Divine Reason through their rational souls, which in turn is the defining feature of their humanity. In this sense ‘men are a single tribe’. The more they perfect their rational souls, the more they unite with Divine Reason and hence with each other—that is, with the rational aspect of their selves. Since Christ is perfectly united with Divine Reason and thus identical with it, union with Divine Reason is at the same time union with Christ. In the end, then, Yaḥyā’s commitment to universal rationalism is not distinct from his commitment to Christianity. And since Divine Reason unites all rational souls, the love of Divine Reason is at the same time the love of all human beings insofar as they are rational. It is thus as much a love of oneself as it is a love of others, which provides Yaḥyā with a philosophical interpretation of the Christian duty to love one’s neighbour.
These examples should suffice to show that the relationship between the philosophical universalism of the falāsifa and their religious particularism is complicated. While they may all have agreed that Abraham was an outstanding philosopher, they usually also insisted on the superiority of their own Abrahamic religion.
When Christian philosophers in medieval Europe began to study Graeco-Arabic philosophy and science in Latin translation, they did not interpret Christianity as a philosophical religion. The fact that Christian philosophers in antiquity—for example Clement and Origen of Alexandria—did propose such an interpretation, as did Yaḥya ibn ʿAdī, among others, in the Muslim world, implies that nothing in the nature of Christianity precludes it.71 Yet while the relationship between philosophy and Christianity in the later Middle Ages took on different forms, the two always remained identifiable as two distinct traditions. Thomas Aquinas, for example, argues that central Christian doctrines such as the Trinity and Christ’s Incarnation are beyond the reach of reason. Latin Averroists even allow for philosophy and Christian theology to contradict each other on core doctrines. This is the opposite of the position advocated by the falāsifa. For Yaḥya, for example, both the Trinity and the Incarnation can be explained within the framework of Aristotelian philosophy. They do not transcend reason’s grasp, let alone contradict it. Thus Yaḥyā sees no tension between his philosophical and Christian commitments. The fact that in the medieval university philosophy and theology were taught in different faculties bears witness to their separation on the institutional level as well. The tensions between philosophy and Christianity culminated in the 1277 condemnation of 219 philosophical and theological theses by Bishop Tempier in Paris which further entrenched the division between Christianity and many of the teachings of the Graeco-Arabic philosophical corpus that had been translated into Latin. One could point to the fact that the Platonic framework underlying the interpretation of religious traditions as philosophical religions in the Muslim world did not play a significant role in the medieval Latin context. This, however, does not answer the question, but only moves it up one level: since Christian appropriations of this Platonic framework were available in patristic literature—for example in the works of Clement and Origen—it remains to be explained why it was not adopted for integrating Christianity with Graeco-Arabic philosophy in the Middle Ages. At any rate, medieval Latin Europe did not have a place for the philosopher Abraham who held the religious and philosophical identity of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian falāsifa together.
1 See Averroes, Long Commentary on the Metaphysics, p. 1634 [Bouyges] and Decisive Treatise, p. 2 [Hourani]; Maimonides, Book of Knowledge, Laws Concerning Idolatry 1.3 and Guide of the Perplexed 3.29, p. 376 [Munk-Yoel]; p. 514 [Pines].
2 Deliverance, 69–70 [Saliba-Ayyad]; 21 [Watt].
3 Ibid. 67–8 [Saliba-Ayyad]; 20 [Watt].
6 See Virtuous City, ch. 15.11.
7 See Guide 3.51.
8 Guide 1, introduction, p. 2 [Munk-Yoel]; 5–6 [Pines].
9 Enumeration of the Sciences, 107–8 [Amin]; 27 [Najjar].
10 See Guide 1.71.
11 The Book of the Five Principles, 79.
12 See his Treatise on the Existence of the Creator and the True Religion, 200–58 [Dick]; 1–25 [Lamoreaux].
13 See Wolfson 1976: 601–2 and the biblical passages discussed in Saʿadya, Beliefs and Opinions 4.3 and 4.6.
14 See, for example, the Dispute between a Saracen and a Christian attributed to the eighth-century theologian John of Damascus in Sahas 1972.
16 Treatise on the Existence of the Creator, 218 [Dick]; 9 [Lamoreaux]; cf. 255 [Dick]; 23 [Lamoreaux].
17 See Beliefs and Opinions 1.3.
18 For a good account of the translation movement, see Gutas 1998.
19 See Gutas 1998: 95–104 on the rise of the ‘ideology of rationalism’ in the ninth century.
20 Book of Letters, sections 142–3.
21 Attainment of Happiness, 196 [Yasin]; 49 [Mahdi].
22 p. 433 [Crawford].
23 Attainment, 181 [Yasin]; 43 [Mahdi].
24 On the anti-Byzantine stance reflected in the assessment of the Christians, see Gutas 1998: ch. 4.2. The issue seems to hinge on the teaching of the Posterior Analytics containing Aristotle’s theory of the scientific syllogism. For al-Fārābī this is, of course, crucial given his concept of philosophy as a demonstrative science.
25 Avicenna, for example, al-Fārābī’s most important successor in the Muslim East, relates in his autobiography how he studied Aristotle’s Metaphysics many times, but only succeeded in understanding it when he read it with al-Fārābī’s commentary (Sīra, 32–4 [Arabic]; 33–5 [English]). For the Muslim West, see Maimonides’ praise of al-Fārābī in his letter to Samuel ibn Tibbon: ‘All that al-Fārābī wrote […] is entirely without fault…for he excelled in wisdom [haya muflag be-hokhmah]’ (Letters, 553). For the appreciation of al-Fārābī’s works on logic by Averroes and his students, see Ibn Tumlūs, Introduction to the Art of Logic, 14–15.
26 Enumeration, 108 [Amin]; 28 [Najjar].
27 On Rāzī, see Stroumsa 1999: ch. 3.
28 On al-Kindī, see Adamson 2006; on al-Kindī and al-Fārābī, see in particular 14–18.
29 Al-Fārābī’s twofold task reflects challenges specific to introducing philosophy into the Muslim world. While historians of Islamic philosophy broadly agree that al-Fārābī’s intellectual outlook was shaped by the late Alexandrian tradition of Neoplatonic commentators on Aristotle, the continuity between the philosophical curriculum in late ancient Alexandria and early medieval Baghdad accounts only partly for al-Fārābī’s project.
30 I do not claim that the following account corresponds to the chronological order in which al-Fārābī wrote his works, or that it reflects a preconceived plan which he systematically executed. What I propose is an interpretation of how several parts of al-Fārābī’s corpus fit together.
31 Attainment, 196 [Yasin]; 50 [Mahdi].
32 See his The Harmonization of the Opinions of the Two Sages, Plato the Divine and Aristotle.
33 See, for example, Exhortation to the Path of Happiness. For a comprehensive study of this genre’s place in al-Fārābī’s work, see Jaffray 2000.
34 Attainment, 196 [Yasin]; 50 [Mahdi].
35 On the inclusion of the Rhetoric and Poetics into the Organon and its philosophical implications, see Black 1990.
36 For Averroes, see Ibn Tumlūs, Introduction, 14–15. For Maimonides, see Letters, 553.
37 See, for example, Pines 1975.
38 Nicomachean Ethics 1.3, 1094b21–2.
39 Al-Fārābī’s commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics is not extant, but see the distinction between ‘necessary’ (hekhraḥi) and ‘general’ (me’odi) in the preserved Hebrew version of Averroes’ Middle Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, 60–1.
40 For a number of characteristic passages, see Apology 25a–c; Protagoras 318c–d, 319e–320b; Gorgias 464b–465a, 515b–521d; Republic 420b–421c; Statesman 296e–297b; Laws 630a–631d, 650b.
41 See, for example, Apology 29d ff.; 30e; 33b.
42 See, for example, Charmides 174b–c; Laches 199d–e; Protagoras 351b ff.
43 Hence Plato praises Socrates as the only Athenian to practise ‘the true craft of politics’ (Gorgias 521d).
44 See, for example, Republic 581b–c.
45 See the entire passage 538c–539a.
46 For the former, see The Political Regime, 89–91 [Najjar]; 44 [Najjar]. For the latter, see Attainment, 177–8 [Yasin]; 41 [Mahdi].
47 The Philosophy of Plato, 21–2 [Rosenthal–Walzer]; 66–7 [Mahdi].
48 Attainment, 185 [Yasin]; 44 [Mahdi]. Al-Fārābī’s most elaborate discussion of religion is the Book of Religion.
49 Letters, section 144.
52 See, for example, Attainment, 185 [Yasin]; 45 [Mahdi], quoted by Averroes in his Commentary on Plato’s Republic, 30. Cf. Guide 1.8–9.
53 See in particular ch. 15 of the Virtuous City. See also Walzer 1957.
54 See Virtuous City 14.2.
55 See, for example, Attainment, 184 [Yasin]; 44 [Mahdi]. Cf. Black 1990.
56 See Virtuous City 15.10.
57 Epitome 1.2.
58 Religion 1.
59 Virtuous City 17.2.
60 Reformation 5.14.
62 On First Philosophy, 103 [Abū Rīda]; 58 [Ivry].
63 Eight Chapters, Preface.
64 Letters, 553.
65 Incoherence of the Incoherence 2.4, 581 [Bouyges]; 359 [Van den Bergh].
66 Ibid. 583 [Bouyges]; 360–1 [Van den Bergh].
67 Ibid. 584 [Bouyges]; 361 [Van den Bergh].
68 See Guide 3.32.
69 On the Necessity of the Incarnation, 83.
71 On Clement’s and Origen’s philosophical interpretation of Christianity, see Fraenkel 2012: ch. 2.