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Introduction. Alfarabi and the Question of the Umma (Nation)

The overarching theme of this book is Alfarabi’s understanding of the Umma, an Arabic term most frequently translated as “nation.” The subject of the nation is, in most respects, a highly familiar one. The rise of nationalism has created a modern international community composed of nation-states, in which membership through national self-determination has come to be regarded as an almost sacred right. The terms “nation” and “nationalism” occur daily on the news, and have been the subject of a vast amount of scholarly research.

Yet when we turn to the history of political thought, the significance of the nation becomes somewhat harder to discern. It does not appear to have been a primary subject of concern for most of the major political philosophers. In ancient political thought, exemplified by Aristotle, the nation appears subordinate to the city, while in modern political thought, exemplified by Hobbes, it appears subordinate to the state. This sweeping formulation nevertheless helps capture the relative obscurity of the nation throughout much of the history of political philosophy. The marginalization of the nation changed only with Rousseau, who lived at the threshold of modern nationalism. I will eventually have occasion to discuss both the interest of Rousseau in the nation and the disinterest of some of his predecessors, along with the striking exception presented by Alfarabi. But I wish to begin with a more general question: why do we need to discuss the prenationalist nation at all? It might be argued that an examination of nationalism, through which the nation became an important political entity, is sufficient.

Nationalism and the Pre-Nationalist Nation

An extensive discussion of modern nationalism and the massive body of scholarship devoted to it lies far beyond the scope of this book. However, a brief consideration of three of the most influential scholarly studies of this subject will help to frame, and justify, the ensuing discussion. All three studies trace the origin of the phenomenon to the turn of the nineteenth century. Elie Kedourie ascribes the triumph of nationalism to a new kind of political and intellectual propaganda, which he describes in rather derogatory terms (Kedourie, 20 ff.). Ernest Gellner traces the growth of nationalism to the same epoch, but attributes it to the more general social phenomena of industrialization and literacy (Gellner 1997, 25 ff.; 2006, 38 ff.). Benedict Anderson focuses heavily on print capitalism, and its ability to create a new kind of communal consciousness (Anderson, 37 ff.). These three accounts of the formation of nationalism all emphasize the transformative power of intellectual or historical forces that were completely unknown in premodern times. Yet such transformations might remake existing communities, rather than constitute entirely new ones from scratch. The founders of nationalism were undoubtedly shrewd politicians and propagandists, but did they have the power of magicians, managing to pull a strong national identity out of a completely empty hat? It seems more plausible to assert that they based their new movement on human ties and institutions that had been present for centuries without ever being fully exploited for political ends. One could pose similar questions about industrialization and print capitalism: did they give birth to entirely new communities, or simply reconfigure old ones?

The answers given by each of these three authors to these questions are intelligent, and therefore somewhat ambiguous. As much as Kedourie likes to bring out the sheer fantasy, bordering on madness, that lay behind the spread of nationalist doctrines, he quietly admits that these doctrines “annexed … universally held sentiments” such as patriotism, group loyalty, and xenophobia (Kedourie, 73–74). Kedourie acknowledges the existence of different ethnic groups prior to nationalism, while arguing that nationalism makes their relations worse: empires that granted cultural autonomy to the various ethnic groups subject to them actually provided greater political stability than the nationalist agitators who eventually dissolved these empires (115–17). Gellner, who argues for the modernity of nationalism, nonetheless admits that nations had “navels” on which nationalism was based, some of which were stronger than others (Gellner 1997, 90 ff.). Pre-unification Germany was a stronger nation than pre-independence Czechoslovakia, while pre-nationalist Estonia barely existed at all. Yet even in this extreme case the people who became Estonians had some kind of pre-national name for themselves, thus distinguishing themselves from the Russians and Swedes who also inhabited their territory (96–97). They also, I may add, spoke their own distinct language. Gellner states elsewhere that pre-nationalist peoples are “richly endowed with cultural and hence (potentially and actually) ethnic differences” (Gellner 1994, 35). Anderson notes that the power of print capitalism to create nations is a result of “the primordial fatality of particular languages and their association with particular territorial units” (Anderson, 43). In short, none of these authors go so far as to completely dissociate nationalism from certain pre-nationalist nations that rendered it possible.

While these authors do not reject the existence of pre-nationalist nations, none provide a very compelling account of them. From the point of view of nationalism this approach is understandable: very few of these prenationalist nations had the power or cohesion needed to form independent political units of their own. Yet from a cultural point of view neglect of these early nations appears harder to justify. Most nations that have left a strong imprint on human civilization existed as recognizable entities well before the nationalist era, understood as beginning in the late eighteenth century. This statement applies not merely to the major nations of Western Europe, such as England, France, Spain, Germany, and Italy, but even less ambiguously to the great peoples of antiquity and the Orient, such as the Greeks, Israelites, Arabs, Persians, Indians, and Chinese.

It may seem natural for a scholar seeking to understand the prenationalist nation to turn to the most famous names in the history of political thought. But as I have already indicated, the leading political philosophers tend to discuss this theme rather sparingly. I contend that the most obvious exception to this generalization is Alfarabi. The Umma appears in almost all his major political works, often in a very prominent role. Alfarabi argues for the broad cultural, political, and religious significance of the Umma in an era in which nationalism did not yet have any meaning. This is not to say that Alfarabi’s interest in the Umma lacks any specific historical cause. The Umma, which appears dozens of times in the Qur’ān, had long since become the term of choice for Muslims in defining their own religious community. This religious meaning of Umma may be all too easily forgotten when reading Alfarabi, who appears to employ the term mainly in the ethnic sense. However, I will show that Alfarabi’s understanding of the Umma has an Islamic as well as an ethnic component. His treatment of the Umma sheds light both on a religious problem particular to Muslims, and on a broader issue strangely neglected by the history of political philosophy: what is the ethnic nation, and how does it influence other human institutions and activities, such as philosophy, religion, and politics? My goal in this book is to provide a comprehensive account of Alfarabi’s response to these questions.

Alfarabi: Some Introductory Remarks

Alfarabi was born somewhere in Turkestan around A.D. 870, spent many decades in Baghdad, and died around 950, probably in Damascus. Most of the details of his life are veiled in obscurity, and seem destined to remain so due to lack of reliable historical sources.¹ For the purposes of my argument I have assumed, safely I think, that he was a non-Arab who wrote entirely in Arabic, and an immigrant of remote Central Asian origins who spent most of his intellectual career in Baghdad.

Alfarabi enjoyed an extraordinary reputation in the medieval philosophical community. His three most famous successors, Avicenna, Maimonides, and Averroes, all esteemed him as their teacher. Their testimonies of admiration have frequently been cited, but there is no harm in citing them briefly again here. Avicenna recounts in his autobiography how fruitlessly he toiled over Aristotle’s Metaphysics, until a chance encounter with Alfarabi’s short commentary on the work unlocked its secrets for him (Gutas 1988, 28). Maimonides, in a letter to Ibn Tibbon, extols “the wise Abu Nasr Alfarabi” for his writings on logic, as well as his treatise “The Principles of the Beings,” otherwise known as the Political Regime; he even goes so far as to contrast Alfarabi favorably to Avicenna (Maimonides 1987, 552–54). Averroes freely incorporates paraphrases of Alfarabi’s Attainment of Happiness and Political Regime into his commentary on Plato’s Republic, implying that Alfarabi may be no less an authority on political matters than Plato (Averroes 1974, 29.31 ff., 80.17 ff.). These citations are by no means comprehensive, but they suffice to show how highly regarded Alfarabi was among medieval philosophers in fields as diverse as metaphysics, logic, and political science.

By the nineteenth century, however, Alfarabi had fallen into relative obscurity, to the point where most of his writings seemed lost. This was the culmination of a long process of neglect. Alfarabi was less widely translated into Latin during the European Middle Ages than Averroes and Avicenna (Fakhry, 148–50). Many of the Latin translations of Alfarabi cited by medieval authors such as Roger Bacon and Albert the Great never seem to have been printed, a clear sign of diminishing European interest in them (Salmon, 245–61). None of the modern European philosophers, from Machiavelli to Nietzsche, seem to have had any access to Alfarabi, even in translation. Meanwhile, the leading intellectual authorities in the Islamic world also appear to have gradually lost interest in Alfarabi, failing to preserve many of his works. The important late nineteenth-century Muslim reformers, such as Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī, would have been able to read only the small selection of Alfarabi’s works that were still available. These included the Virtuous City, Political Regime, and Harmonization of the Opinions of the Two Sages, but not the Book of Religion or Book of Letters, which will play so crucial a role in this book.

Owing to the diligence of leading philologists such as Franz Rosenthal, Richard Walzer, and Muhsin Mahdi, several additional works have been unearthed in the past century, and edited in competent critical editions. Translations into major European languages have gradually followed. Muhsin Mahdi has observed that although we still have less than half the works attributed to Alfarabi in medieval catalogues, we already have enough to appreciate the power of his thought (Mahdi 2001, 51–52).² I would add that some caveats still apply: most importantly, whenever one says that “Alfarabi never treats a subject,” one must continue, implicitly if not explicitly, “in the works that have come down to us.” We should continue to look forward to the discovery of new works by Alfarabi with the greatest anticipation, but we may already proceed to interpret him on the basis of extant works.

The increased availability of new editions and translations of Alfarabi has spawned further scholarly research. Several books and articles written on Alfarabi in recent years are of very high quality, but they have hardly covered all the bases.³ The topic of this book is a case in point. There is remarkably little scholarship on Alfarabi’s treatment of the Umma, despite its intrinsic interest. While themes related to the Umma have been examined, the Umma itself has somehow slipped between the cracks. Muhsin Mahdi has treated Alfarabi’s views of politics and religion in great depth, but he has left only some preliminary reflections on the Umma (Mahdi 2001, 142–43). The same can be said of Joshua Parens, although he does discuss the subject at somewhat greater length than Mahdi (Parens 2006a, 88–90, 1995, 51–52, 166 n. 4). Miriam Galston provides a useful but inconclusive discussion, where she openly confesses that the subject “needs to be studied further” (Galston 1990, 153). All three scholars focus on the treatment in the Political Regime without examining the more thorough account of the development of the Umma in the Book of Letters. Ilai Alon, coauthor with Shukri Abed of a lexicon of Alfarabi’s philosophical vocabulary, gives a cursory definition of the term, which observes that Alfarabi never seems to speak of the Umma in the traditional Muslim fashion (Alon, 12; cf. Vajda, 250). The most comprehensive treatment of the subject exists in Arabic: Nāṣīf Naṣṣār has devoted an entire chapter to Alfarabi’s concept of the Umma in his book on the meaning of Umma in classical Islamic thought (Naṣṣār 1978, 31–53). This chapter contains many interesting insights, but it too fails to give adequate consideration to Alfarabi’s most fundamental discussion of the Umma in the Book of Letters (BL 39, 41–42, 46–47), and accepts the prevailing view that Alfarabi “does not use the term Umma in a religious sense” (40).

The study of the Book of Letters has developed rather slowly since Muhsin Mahdi published the first critical edition in 1969, but has recently picked up pace. Georges Vajda responded to that publication with an excellent summary of the second chapter, in which he observes the importance of the Umma several times, but does not really elaborate on it (Vajda, 250–51, 256–58). The section is discussed in greater detail by Jacques Langhade, who provides a very thorough summary of Alfarabi’s account of the development of language, as well as some illuminating background to it (Langhade, 190–311). Deborah Black explains Alfarabi’s inclusion of poetics and rhetoric in the Organon (Black, 63–71). Shukri Abed provides some good insight into the linguistic and philosophical teachings of the Book of Letters (Abed, 59 ff.), while Stephen Menn conducts an intelligent inquiry into its meta-physical teachings (Menn, 59–97). Emma Gannagé, Thérèse-Anne Druart, and Luis Xavier López-Farjeat have also written useful articles on its middle section (Gannagé, 229 ff.; Druart 2012, 51–56; López-Farjeat, 193–215).

These scholarly contributions all contain some helpful suggestions, but never anything resembling a detailed analysis of the term Umma, or an exploration of its broader role within Alfarabi’s philosophy. In short, there is an evident lacuna in scholarship that the present work aims to address. Before addressing it, however, I need to say a few words about reading Alfarabi in general, and briefly discuss his use of Greek and Hellenistic sources in light of the new political and intellectual challenges posed by the rise of Islam.

How Should One Read Alfarabi?

This question is fundamental for approaching most major philosophers, and Alfarabi is no exception. While I do not expect to resolve this question here, I do hope to justify my own interpretative procedure. The works of Alfarabi that have come down to us contain no direct cross-references or comments on Alfarabi’s own manner of writing. They do include, however, several comments on the manner of writing employed by Plato and Aristotle, which should provide at least some indications about Alfarabi’s own (Galston 1990, 35 ff.). Yet these references do not provide a single, unified account of how a philosopher should write. Although Plato and Aristotle both wrote obscurely in order to conceal their teaching, each did so in his own particular manner: in the Harmonization of the Opinions of the Divine Sages, Alfarabi suggests that Plato proclaimed his use of riddles more openly than Aristotle (HS 131–32, #12–13, Ar. 84–85).⁴ In keeping with his own suggestion, Alfarabi’s clearest exposition of the use of riddles comes in his Summary of Plato’s “Laws” (SL 130–31, Intro. 2, Ar. 125), while there is no comparable passage in any of his summaries of Aristotle. If Alfarabi’s two most revered philosophic predecessors each employed his own distinctive manner of writing, it is plausible to infer that Alfarabi may have developed his own as well.

Some scholars of Alfarabi, such as E. I. J. Rosenthal, decry much of his writing for being “diffuse, repetitive, and lacking in clarity and precision” (E. I. J. Rosenthal, 158). Yet such criticisms tend to ignore what Alfarabi says about the riddling ways of his philosophic predecessors, and the possibility that he followed in their footsteps. I hope to cast doubt on such charges by carefully and profitably analyzing Alfarabi word by word, showing that many of his apparent repetitions and imprecisions in fact have a deliberate meaning. In so doing I build on two noteworthy attempts by Leo Strauss and Miriam Galston to elucidate Alfarabi’s obscure writing style.

Leo Strauss, in a seminal 1945 article titled “Farabi’s Plato,” presents a very detailed interpretation of one of Alfarabi’s most important texts, which had just recently become available to scholars. The interpretative techniques developed by Strauss, which pay careful attention to contradictions (Strauss 1945, 369), repetitions (382), and the density of important terms such as “city” (madīna, 379 n. 53) and “human” (insān, 392 n. 99), all while weaving these minute details into a compelling interpretation of the whole, make this article a cornerstone of scholarship on Alfarabi. The same can be said of Strauss’s equally brilliant article on Alfarabi’s Summary of Plato’s “Laws”, written about a decade later, which among other things profitably explores the relationship between Alfarabi’s two most explicitly Platonic writings (Strauss 1959, 138–39, 152–54). Yet Strauss sheds less light on the question of the relationship between Alfarabi’s two presentations of Plato and his various other works. Strauss makes the astonishing claim that Alfarabi’s truest and most candid teaching, insofar as it can be expressed in writing, is found in the Philosophy of Plato, and never in other works (Strauss 1945, 375). We must not forget that in 1945 the vast majority of Alfarabi’s works were still unavailable, a fact that was hardly unknown to Strauss (357–60). It might therefore be best to interpret Strauss’s bold proclamation as applying to themes discussed so brilliantly in his article, such as the afterlife and the relationship between philosophy and politics, whose fullest expression indeed occurs in the Philosophy of Plato. But how could it apply to the sundry themes that are barely touched upon in the twenty-odd pages of this short treatise? It may be Alfarabi’s most revealing work, but it is certainly not his most comprehensive.

Miriam Galston has made a more recent attempt to describe Alfarabi’s manner of writing, and in particular the relationship between his works. Galston suggests that something about the subject can be learned from Alfarabi’s logical works, with a special emphasis on his treatment of dialectic (Galston 1990, 39–43, 48). Galston cites a number of memorable passages about the role of dialectic in fostering philosophical inquiry. By exposing the initiate to a wide variety of different and often contradictory arguments, dialectic prepares him for the pursuit of demonstrative philosophy (40–41). Galston concludes that “both rhetorical and dialectical modes are present in Alfarabi’s treatises, and that the former are subordinated to the latter” (54).

Galston’s conclusion is valuable in encouraging the study and comparison of Alfarabi’s numerous works, each of which is distinct in its own way. But it may be somewhat overstated. For one thing, Galston herself calls it only an “assumption,” and acknowledges that Alfarabi employed rhetorical as well as dialectical modes of writing (Galston 1990, 54). It should be added that Alfarabi may have employed demonstrative, poetic, or even sophistic modes as well. In the Enumeration of the Sciences, all five methods are presented as perfectly respectable uses of the logical art under certain circumstances (ES 103–13). That same work contains an introduction that indicates, if not the manner in which it is written, at least its intended audience (51–53). That audience, which includes both genuine men of science and crude impostors (Mahdi 2001, 66–67), is diverse enough to encourage the view that the work must be written in various ways for various readers.

What Galston does show is that if Alfarabi’s works can all be construed as an introduction to philosophy, then they must proceed dialectically, since dialectical training is indeed the best way to approach philosophy. Yet Alfarabi never proclaims that all his works serve only that function: as we just saw in the introduction to the Enumeration of the Sciences, he regards his varied readership as comprising more than just potential philosophers. In the absence of any indication from Alfarabi that all his works are written dialectically, we cannot corroborate Galston’s assumption. However, Galston’s idea of determining Alfarabi’s manner of writing by means of his logical works should not be discarded. On the contrary, further research in that direction is required. The challenge of integrating Alfarabi’s logical and political works, which together constitute the lion’s share of the writings that have come down to us, may ultimately prove as daunting as the challenge of integrating all the works of Aristotle into a single whole. As worthy as this project may be, it far exceeds anything that I can undertake here. In the absence of such an effort, how can we even begin to interpret Alfarabi’s works?

The lack of any comprehensive account of how to read Alfarabi does not make it impossible to approach my particular topic. Alfarabi’s writings are divided into a large number of treatises, and his treatment of any given theme varies from work to work. These variations might have something to do with the peculiar context and purpose of each work. Indeed, the unique aim and character of any major treatise of Alfarabi could become the subject of a valuable scholarly monograph. Yet in the undeveloped state of scholarship on Alfarabi, such works are generally not at our disposal: apart from Joshua Parens’s thorough interpretation of Alfarabi’s Summary of Plato’s “Laws” (Parens 1995) and Strauss’s lengthy article on the Philosophy of Plato (Strauss 1945), I cannot name a single one. In the absence of such works and the assistance they might afford, the project of interpreting every single treatise comprehensively within the confines of a single volume appears extraordinarily ambitious.

Three other recently published books on Alfarabi, by Galston (1990), Colmo (2005), and Parens himself (Parens 2006a), have taken a more thematic approach, exploring specific themes throughout Alfarabi’s writings. I follow up on that approach, offering a thematic interpretation of the Umma as it appears across many works. I strive to read each account with the care recommended by Strauss, assessing its depth and completeness while keeping in mind the general argument of the book to which it belongs. I will show that some accounts treat the Umma more thoroughly and satisfactorily than others. Most notably, the discussion in the Book of Letters, which focuses on language, is more revealing about the character of the Umma than the discussion in the Political Regime, which focuses on climate and nutrition. But no one account in any work is complete, so that each needs to be supplemented by others. The Book of Letters gives the fullest account of the Umma. However, with regard to the role of the stories of the Umma in the development of philosophy, it needs to be supplemented by the Philosophy of Aristotle; with regard to the precise relationship between philosophical language and the governance of the Ummas, by the Attainment of Happiness; with regard to the relationship between the Umma and religion, by the Book of Religion; and with regard to the nutrition of the Umma and its relationship to politics, by the Political Regime, Virtuous City, and Selected Aphorisms. By proceeding thus from work to work, weaving together the various strands of Alfarabi’s thought on the Umma into a single whole, I hope to provide a comprehensive account of the Umma’s significance for Alfarabi.

Having described the advantages of this approach, let me point out its most obvious limitation: while I cannot interpret the discussion of the Umma in each work without also considering that work’s general purpose, I am never able to fully elucidate that purpose. At most, I provide some observations that should facilitate the future study of each work. Finally, in dealing with an author of Alfarabi’s profundity and obscurity, some passages will inevitably remain quite dark. Peculiarities that I have not been able to explain have been left to the reader to puzzle over. Is it not encouraging that there may always be new things to say about, and learn from, Alfarabi?

One other feature of Alfarabi’s writing style that merits our attention is its apparent abstraction. The lack of references to specific people, countries, and events may indeed appear daunting. It should become less so if we are able through our own initiative to apply Alfarabi’s general arguments to particular things, from both Alfarabi’s epoch and our own. Indeed, many of Alfarabi’s terms would have evoked strong particular associations among his early readers. To state only the most obvious examples, “religion” would have meant, at least to most of his readers, Islam, while “prophecy” would have immediately recalled Muhammad, as well as the whole gamut of prophets who came before him. In order to grasp many of these allusions, I have tried to familiarize myself with Alfarabi’s historical milieu. Finally, Alfarabi does occasionally introduce particular references of his own. I have always paid special attention to these references, as the most solid indicators of Alfarabi’s concrete meaning. In approaching Alfarabi in this way, I hope to show that he is much more attuned to worldly affairs than many people think.

Alfarabi as a Philosopher Among Muslims

The past century of Alfarabi scholarship has often focused on his role as a transmitter of Greek thought. This applies not only to the work of such scholars as Franz Rosenthal, Richard Walzer, and Samuel Stern, but also to the philosophic interpreter Leo Strauss, whose two most mature works on Alfarabi examine his treatment of Plato (Strauss 1945; 1959, 134–54). These extremely fruitful efforts have laid the groundwork for further research on Alfarabi. I do not wish to deny or even downplay the link between Alfarabi and the ancients, which I will discuss at some length in Chapter 1 and return to throughout the book. However, I do hope to make the case for a more Muslim-oriented approach to Alfarabi, as especially suited to both Alfarabi’s concerns and our own.

While Alfarabi learned from the Greeks, he wrote primarily for Muslims and minorities living under Islamic rule.⁵ An excessive emphasis on Alfarabi’s Greek and Hellenistic sources risks losing sight of this simple and banal fact. It might have been easy enough to gloss over Alfarabi’s contribution to the understanding of Islam while the religion seemed dormant, and its adherents were still reeling under the yoke of various kinds of colonial rule. Yet with the resurgence of Islam as a religious and political force in the world, and the sharpening of the debate, among both Muslims and non-Muslims, over the interpretation of its doctrines, Alfarabi’s stature as the first great philosophic interpreter of Islam cannot be overemphasized.⁶

The futility of much Hellenistic source-hunting is already apparent in Franz Rosenthal and Richard Walzer’s pioneering edition of the Philosophy of Plato. Rosenthal and Walzer assume a Hellenistic source for almost everything in this work and attempt to uncover it, but often reach the riveting conclusion that “nothing can be determined” (Rosenthal and Walzer 1943, xii–xvi). Residues of this preoccupation can still be found in Walzer’s landmark 1985 edition of the Virtuous City, where he attempts to track Hellenistic sources for every doctrine in the work, without any “certain results” (VC, trans. Walzer, 9). Muhsin Mahdi’s review of this edition includes a thorough critique of Walzer’s “source-hunting” (Mahdi 1990, 696–705). With regard to our topic, the Umma, Walzer readily admits that “our evidence of the Hellenistic theory of language is very scanty” (VC, trans. Walzer, 431), but nonetheless concludes that Alfarabi’s manifest political interest in the Umma can be traced to Hellenistic sources, “pieced together by scraps of miscellaneous information” (487). Walzer assembles an impressive array of sources, but most of them are fragmentary. Furthermore, they demonstrate little, as long as Alfarabi’s access to them, and interest in their contents, remain unproven. As Mahdi points out, Alfarabi seems much more concerned with acknowledging his debt to Plato and Aristotle, whom he mentions regularly, than to later Hellenistic authors whom he seldom mentions at all (Mahdi 1990, 696, 703–5). The meager results of Walzer’s quest for sources might rather point to the conclusion that Alfarabi was an original thinker in his own right, who did far more than merely transmit the ideas of the earlier authors to whom he happened to have access.

Walzer is hardly oblivious to historical change, admitting that “the political structure of the territories which make up the Islamic world has basically changed” since Hellenistic times (VC, trans. Walzer, 433). He also observes that Alfarabi “assumed his readers to be familiar with the religious, political, and local situation” (13). But he does not appear to draw the obvious conclusion from these premises: the meaning and significance of the Umma changed drastically with the coming of Islam, and this change is reflected in the thought of Alfarabi. The new empire, despite being just as multiethnic as its Hellenistic predecessors, was grounded in a religion that called itself an Umma and sought to spread its faith to all humankind. The term Umma thus came to acquire a double meaning: the old, ethnic Ummas of blood and language coexisted with the new, Islamic Umma of religion and faith. This dual meaning of Umma had no precedent in pre-Islamic times, and therefore could not have appeared in any Hellenistic source.⁷ It fell to Alfarabi, the great heir to the Greek tradition within Islam, to grapple with the new historical situation on his own. Alfarabi succeeded in applying what he learned from the Greeks to a world that was in so many respects alien to them. In Chapters 4 and 5, I analyze Alfarabi’s view of the new Umma in considerable detail.

I cannot conclude this introduction without raising an important objection: if Alfarabi’s teachings are in fact intended for Muslims, why have they found relatively few Muslim readers? Alfarabi’s influence in the Islamic world has for centuries been eclipsed by any number of later philosophers and theologians. He does not hold a central place in the curriculum of most Islamic countries today, as indicated by the paucity of studies in Arabic cited in the bibliography. And yet many Muslims seem to think that there is nothing more to study: a prominent Egyptian academic once told me that Alfarabi was ma‘rūf, that is to say, already well understood. Such an attitude is sure to discourage any deeper exploration of Alfarabi.

A full answer to this question would require a far more thorough examination of Islamic intellectual history than I can possibly provide. I will therefore limit myself to repeating a useful suggestion made by Joshua Parens. The audacity of Alfarabi’s praise of philosophy, along with his disregard of the particularities of Islamic doctrine and law, might have won him many admirers among the medieval philosophers, but few within the broader Islamic community (Parens 2006b, 45–46). As a non-Muslim, I am in no position to justify Alfarabi before the court of Islamic law. But I will argue, on many different occasions, that his subtle, sober teachings about the Umma could foster greater intellectual freedom, religious tolerance, and political stability, among both Muslims and non-Muslims. I am therefore inclined to agree with the claim of Muhsin Mahdi, that Alfarabi always had the best interests of his community at heart (Mahdi 2001, 62). Alfarabi may still represent, to most Muslims, the road not taken, but to a religious community whose recent history has been plagued by tyranny and tumult, precisely the road not taken may begin to warrant a second look.