The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

philosophy

In Islam, philosophy (falsafa) is reasoning about the physical and metaphysical worlds based on the Greek philosophical tradition, especially the works of Plato and Aristotle, received through the harmonizing interpretation of the Neoplatonists of late antiquity. The works most relevant to political thought were Plato’s Republic and Laws, available in summary translations, and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, translated in full. Aristotle’s Politics was not translated, though parts of it seem to have been known, perhaps from anthologies or quotations in other works.

The Greek philosophical tradition was still alive in the Near East at the time of the Arab conquests, but little is known of the forms it took, except insofar as it had come to form part of Christian theology. Zoroastrian priests and other religious leaders may have found use for it, but its main exponents in late antiquity were doctors, astronomers or astrologers, alchemists, and secretaries. It was such educated laymen, not religious scholars, who were its main bearers in Islam as well.

The systematic translation of Greek works into Arabic began in the mid-eighth century, but it was not until around 900 that philosophy achieved prominence as a discipline in its own right. Since it was pursued by laymen and claimed to be an avenue to the highest truth and salvation based entirely on human reason rather than divine revelation, it was set for a head-on collision with Islam as understood by the religious scholars. Some early philosophers, notably the physician and alchemist Abu Bakr al-Razi (d. 925), rejected all revealed religion as false and dismissed the prophets as impostors, claiming that philosophy was the road to salvation for everyone. But most philosophers chose to avoid the clash by unifying philosophy and revealed religion. According to Farabi (d. 950), prophets were philosophers of such extraordinary worth that they had achieved contact with the Active Intellect: this was the source of their divine revelations. As prophets, they reformulated the absolute truths of philosophy in a language that everyone could understand, using myths, images, and metaphors and adapting their message to the particular conditions of their audience; as philosophers, they presented the eternal, universal, and unchanging truth as it was.

Some disagreement over the details notwithstanding, this solution was adopted by all later philosophers, including Ibn Sina (Avicenna, d. 1037) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes, d. 1198). Though it was a major intellectual achievement, it was rarely persuasive to the religious scholars for the obvious reason that it made the Prophet a self-made man rather than a person chosen by God and reduced his divine revelation to a popular version of the absolute truth. It implied that the philosophers were the true heirs of the Prophet and leaders of the Muslim community, and that the theologians, jurists, and other religious scholars were to take their cue from the philosophers as mere popularizers of their syllogisms. Indeed, the ruler himself should be a philosopher in Farabi’s view. Failing that, a number of philosophers might rule together; this was Farabi’s understanding of aristocracy (literally “the rule of the best”). In his view, it would be disastrous if philosophy had no representatives at the highest level of government. Instead of striving for happiness, the community would pursue unworthy aims such as wealth, military power, or mistaken impressions of the truth, all of which he illustrated in accounts of imperfect constitutions, in the loose sense of “ways of life,” some adapted from Plato and Aristotle, others worked out by himself.

To modern readers, Farabi’s political thought comes across as strangely unreal and decontextualized. He never gives historical or contemporary examples; he rarely mentions any names other than those of philosophers; and he has nothing to say about concrete forms of political organization, distribution of power, conflict resolution, or politics as a process. His interest lies entirely in the diverse views of the ultimate good to be pursued in this life, and government to him really meant spiritual direction. The battle he was fighting was for souls, not for the throne. Since the ultimate good in life followed from the ultimate nature of reality, all his “political” books devote more space to metaphysics than to the city that should reflect it. This was in keeping with the common understanding at the time. Whether known from reason or from revelation, the metaphysical world dictated how one should live on Earth, and concrete politics were far less important than identifying the road to eternal salvation.

Farabi’s ideal community was necessarily authoritarian. A philosopher-king of the highest kind (i.e., a prophet) endowed with unique wisdom and understanding of what was best for everyone obviously had to be obeyed without question. The same was true of lesser philosophers in the absence of a supreme philosopher-ruler. Like Plato, Farabi would have liked everyone to follow the dictates of a small intellectual elite credited with superior insight and seen as indispensable for common welfare. Neither Greek nor Islamic philosophy ever extolled the virtues of democracy. The belief that the Greek philosophers were supporters of democracy is a modern lay misconception, and to Muslim philosophers, democracy was a constitution in which everyone was free to pursue whatever aim in life he wanted, resulting in a highly diverse community. This struck them as self-evidently bad, since there was only one eternal truth and all those who ignored it would perish. Uniting people in the common pursuit of a single, overarching objective was the ideal to which philosophers and religious scholars alike subscribed. The shared objective took precedence in the vision of both.

The philosophers never achieved the primacy that Farabi hoped for. They never even succeeded in gaining regular representation in educational institutions, though logic did come to form part of the madrasa (institution of higher education) curriculum, especially in the eastern lands of Islam. In the absence of professorial chairs and schools, philosophers made a living as doctors, astronomers, and, to some extent, members of the bureaucracy. Despite all that, philosophy achieved great prominence in the 10th and 11th centuries, and it continued to exercise a major influence on Islamic thought thereafter, in part thanks to the fact that from the 11th century onward, Muslim theologians were often well read in it, whether they approved of it or not. Ghazali (d. 1111), often believed to be a mortal enemy of philosophy, explained that it was foolish to oppose it completely, since it included eminently useful sciences such as logic, mathematics, and the natural sciences. He presented philosophical writings on government and ethics in a somewhat unfavorable light, but it was only the metaphysics of the philosophers that he condemned, and only on a specific number of points. He was deeply influenced by Ibn Sina, probably beyond the limit he recommended in his pastoral works. By his time, it was above all in Spain, where Ibn Rushd was active, that there was interest in “political science,” as the philosophers called their thoughts on communal life. Ibn Rushd, who wrote a commentary on Plato’s Republic, which is extant only in Hebrew and which followed Farabi’s own commentary, made an unprecedented attempt to relate philosophical constitutions to actual regimes. This played a role in the sociological theory of history developed by Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), who was proudly aware of having developed a new science. However, his theory did not live on or receive further development, though it had its admirers in the Ottoman Empire. Farabi’s political philosophy also left a deep imprint on Jewish thought, not least on that of Maimonides (d. 1204), who was born in Spain and who had a major impact on intellectual developments in Christian Europe.

Farabi’s vision also had strong appeal to Shi‘is, especially the Isma‘ilis, because they shared his conviction that there was a man endowed with supreme wisdom not just in the past in the form of the Prophet but also in the present in the form of the imam. The Isma‘ilis cast their imam (especially when he was absent) as the philosopher-king and saw themselves as sharing in his insights, identifying philosophy as esoteric knowledge inaccessible to the masses and themselves as the spiritual elite. Among those who saw themselves as such an elite were the anonymous authors of the tenth-century collection of epistles known as the Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa’ (Epistles of the sincere or true brethren). The best-known Shi‘i exposition of political philosophy is the Nasirean Ethics of the Imami (at some point Isma‘ili) philosopher and scientist Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (d. 1274), who offered advice on the management of the self, the household, and the kingdom and who had many imitators.

From the 12th century onward, philosophy increasingly merged not only with theology but also with Sufism, but its later history is largely unknown, for lack of study rather than for lack of evidence. It is probably safe to say, however, that political philosophy never had much influence on politics on the ground. It is not likely to influence politics today, either. It still has its admirers, usually for its rationalism rather than its authoritarianism, but now as then, it is political visions based on divine revelation that have mass appeal. “Political science” in the modern sense of the term is a Western import.