On the Perfect State [Hardcover]

Translator: Richard Walzer Abu Nasr al-Farabi (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1871031761 | ISBN-13: 978-1871031768 | Publication Date: January 1, 1998 | Edition: Revised

Al-Farabi (d. 950 AD), known in medieval Latin texts as Alfarabius or Avennasar, was one of the most outstanding and renowned Muslim philosophers. He became known as the second teacher, the first being Aristotle. On the Perfect State reflects al-Farabi's view that philosophy had come to an end everywhere else and that it had found a new home and a new life within the world of Islam. Philosophy, in his view, gives the right views about the freedom of moral choice and of the good life altogether. The perfect human being, the philosopher, ought also to be the sovereign ruler. Philosophy alone shows the right path to the urgent reform of the caliphate. Al-Farabi envisages a perfect city state as well as a perfect community and a perfect world state. His importance for subsequent Islamic philosophers is considerable. His impact on the writings of 10th century AD authors such as the Ikhwan al-Safa, al-Masudi, Miskawayh and Abu l-Hasan Muhammad al-Amiri is undeniabl! e. Ibn Sina seems to have known his works intimately and Ibn Rushd follows him in the essentials of his thought. Maimonides, the greatest Jewish philosopher who lived in Muslim Spain and wrote in Arabic, appreciated al-Farabi highly. Al-Farabi's political ideas had a belated and lasting success from the 13th century onwards. A few of his treatises became known to the Latin Schoolmen while more were translated into medieval Hebrew.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Arabic

About the Author

Abu Nasr Muhammad b. Muhammad b. Tarkhan b. Awzalaugh (or Uzlugh) al-Farabi was born abut 870 AD in Turkestan, at Wasij in the district of Farab on the Jaxartes. He eventually settled down and spent many yars in Baghdad, the seat of the Abbasid calphs. During part of the last ten years of his life, he stayed at the court of Sayf al-Dawla, the renowned Hamdanid Amir of Aleppo. He is reported to have died in 950 AD.

Al-Farabi's life was more that of a cynical philosopher than of an aristocratic intellectual. We are told that he always wore a brown Sufi garb. In al-Farabi's day no adherence to mystical Sufi views was indicated by the use of this garment, and in his particular case it can be easily shown that he was decidedly opposed to the mystic's unworldly interpretation of life and his overemphasis on the world-to-come. In the tenth century AD the Sufi cloak had a quite different meaning. This has been aptly characterized by Professor G. Makdisi, People of this kind are often what we may call nowadays militant intellectuals. They accept no one's patronage, they are afraid of compromising their independence by becoming connected with men of wealth and power and prefer to remain self-employed and are content with living on a mere subsistence level.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 588 pages
• Publisher: Kazi Pubns Inc; Revised edition (January 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1871031761
• ISBN-13: 978-1871031768
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #380,575 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderfully Annotated Edition of an Arab Classic, September 24, 2000

By 

Tron Honto - See all my reviews

This review is from: On the Perfect State (Hardcover)

Though this book is somewhat expensive, it is definitely worth the money for those interested in understanding the political philosophy of al-Farabi. His book is truly beautiful in its philosophical grace. As a Christian whose tradition also was profoundly impacted by its contact with classical philosophy, I could not help being pulled in with great fascination peering into how Greek philsophy was adapted and understood by a philsopher of Arab-Islamic culture.

This edition is excellent. Included with the translation is the parallel Arabic text with variants and an extensive introduction and notes written by the translator, Richard Walzer. Walzer's work here is excellent making a reading of the contents of this book a study in itself.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Farabi and some modern scholars, March 30, 2007

By 

Joseph Martin "pomonomo2003" (NJ, USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: On the Perfect State (Hardcover)

This is the only English translation of 'Mabadi ara ahl al-madina al-fadila' (henceforth referred to as the Ara) of which I am aware. Richard Walzer provides a very suggestive annotated commentary that is about 170 pages long. The text itself is almost 300 pages and it appears in both Arabic and English on facing pages. Walzer "left the manuscript of the present work ready for publication" upon his death but did not live to see it through the publishing process. He made use of 10 manuscripts in preparing this critical edition. One of the main problems he faced in establishing the text for this edition was that it was "written in an ordinary naskhi, eighteen lines to the page, with no vowels and very few diacritical consonantal signs, so that quite a few words can be understood in different ways. [...] Numerous variant readings in later MSS. of the Ara are best explained in this way." Following the introduction Walzer indicates which manuscripts he found most useful in preparing this edition and why he thought they were useful.

Walzer argues that Farabi is something of a Shia who clearly preferred the Imamiyya to the Ismaili's. I do not have enough knowledge of the times Farabi wrote to have a judgement one way or the other about this. However, I did find Walzer's continual assurance in his commentary that Farabi must have had a Greek predecessor every time he is original really quite annoying. For instance, on page 424, Walzer, while speaking of the difference between Farabi's way of handling political Platonism and his neo-Platonic and Aristotelian predecessors, muses about who his 'Greek predecessor' must have been: "One obviously wonders who the author of this unusual synthesis of Aristotle and Plato may have been or, if this question cannot be answered, whether at least his place in the history of later Greek philosophy can somehow be circumscribed." In other words, even if a putative predecessor is never found we must assume he did exist! I will, btw, concede that if there is a predecessor Walzer is surely correct to say that it would be among the Middle Platonists, and not the Neoplaonists, that we would find him.

But why are we even looking for him? Walzer says, "the best evidence of a continuous appreciation of Plato's political thought in later Antiquity is provided by its impact on Arabic philosophical literature." Isn't this a bit like arguing that the best proof early moderns had something like refrigeration is that late moderns have it? I think the reason that Islam (and also Judaism in the Medieval period) had philosophers that made a great deal of Plato's Political Philosophy is that the Prophet Mohammed was above all a bringer of Law (as was Moses) but Jesus in the Gospels brings no Law (except to love others as you love yourself) at all. The fact of the Prophet/Legislator in Islam and Judaism thus dovetails rather nicely with Plato's political discussions in his Republic and Laws. This provided the opportunity for Farabi to speak of the Prophet as if he were Plato's Philosopher-King. Thus we should find that the originality of Farabi's Platonic Politics is explained by the fact that he was immersed in a revealed Religion that also contained a detailed revealed Law. This 'political interpretation' of the Platonic texts first becomes possible in Islam.

In Walzer's defense I want to add that it was not very long ago that it was thought that Islamic philosophers (falasifa) weren't really philosophers but merely transmitters of original Greek thought and texts. Thus it was typical that whenever one of the falasifa said something that wasn't in precise agreement with some Greek predecessor it was assumed that the Islamic philosopher had made a mistake. In other words, according to the accepted scholarship, originality was always taken to be an error. Charitably one could say that perhaps Walzer bent over backwards to show that Farabi was a genuine philosopher by insisting he belongs in the line of Middle Platonism. And I do not doubt for a moment that this was indeed part of his motivation. After all, Walzer does say that, "none of the 'political' works of al-Farabi - such as the Ara - which were well known and popular all over the Muslim world, from Spain to India, was ever translated into medieval Latin, although this important section of the Greek legacy had been seen in a new and very original light by al-Farabi." So we see that Walzer is somewhat aware of Farabi's originality. Now, further down this page (32) Walzer remarks that the reason these texts weren't translated into Latin by the Christians was that "Platonic 'political' thought as applied to Islamic situations of the tenth century A.D. was useless for them, and thus they did not embark on latinizing any such texts." Well, all I would add (as stated earlier) is that if we can explain the absence of Farabi's political Platonism in the West by the situation of Christianity then why can't we go ahead and explain the appearance of an original political Platonism in Farabi by the situation of Islam?

So, why does Walzer insist upon looking for a supposed 'Greek predecessor'? The problem is that all scholars worry about, can worry about, is the source of a given philosophical position and the accuracy of its transmission; but all that genuine philosophers can worry about is the appropriateness of a philosophical position in given circumstances. If the works of Plato were only discovered yesterday a scholar would have no trouble 'showing' that all the elements (positions) in Plato had come from Pythagoras, Parmenides, Heraclitus and Socrates. This would be exactly how one would expect a scholar to 'reason'! But Plato, by putting each of these elements together in the proper measure, as the circumstances of Athens and Greece required, creates Western Philosophy. So too Farabi, by weaving together prior elements into a properly measured whole, virtually creates Islamic philosophy. The Falasifa that follow him continually refer back to Farabi (known as the 'Second Philosopher' or 'Second Master', i.e., second after Aristotle, throughout much of the medieval period) in their works. Indeed, one can say (through Farabi's distant heirs, the 'Latin Averroists') that Farabi's decisive turn to (and distinctive interpretation of) Platonic political philosophy has even influenced Western philosophy itself.

As far as the text goes I can say that of the translations of Farabi that I have seen the Ara goes further in what might be called a neo-Platonic direction than any of the others. In fact, if one wanted to keep Farabi in the neo-Platonic canon this would certainly be the translated text one would choose to argue the point. As such, it is a very good antidote to those that see Farabi as only, I do not say merely, a political Platonic esotericist. He really does have metaphysical interests too! Now, the question how the political and the metaphysical hang together is a vexed one and it certainly can't be clarified in a few sentences and I won't even try here. I will just note that for Farabi the metaphysical is best approached through philosophy; everything else is a step down from philosophy. This is a recurring motif among the falasifa, as Ghazali well knew. Averroes will later make the same point, in somewhat altered circumstances, in his tremendous 'Decisive Treatise'.

Lastly, I want to mention how unconcerned Farabi seems, compared even to Averroes, about how the orthodox view him. Look at what Farabi says about prophecy in chapter 14, 'Representation and Divination'. He speaks of prophecy in a manner that separates it from the rational faculty and places prophecy in the realm of the representative faculty. Thus Farabi seems to indicate that the Koran itself is beneath philosophy and its ability to reason. Walzer correctly says that Farabi, "accepted the inherited fabric of beliefs but gave it -and theological speculation with it- an inferior place in his philosophical interpretation of the universe and man. He can, in this respect, be compared with Plato himself..." Thus one wonders if this acceptance of "the inherited fabric of beliefs" is to be understood as acceptance of the beliefs themselves or 'acceptance' of the utility of said beliefs. If Plato 'accepted' paganism and Farabi 'accepted' monotheism due to their utility at the time one finds oneself wondering about modern philosophers and their 'acceptance' of modernity. But that is another story...

I haven't even touched on the complex argument that Farabi here weaves. Suffice to say that a discussion of the subtle argument requires far more words than an Amazon review is allowed. But there are several questions that kept occurring to me as I worked my way through the text. Most importantly, how does Farabi keep the various (middle) Platonic, neo-Platonic, and Aristotelian elements from contradicting each other? That is, how does Farabi 'harmonize' (a term of art in philosophic circles in the later Roman Empire) these various elements? Next, does Farabi intend the final 'political' chapters (15 - 19, but also 13 and 14) to overpower our reading of the text as a whole as they do for so many of us today? Finally, one wonders about the extent of Farabi's influence, not only among the falasifa or within Islam but also his influence on Maimonides, Jewish philosophy, and the Latin West too. I give 5 stars for Farabi but only 4 stars for Walzers commentary and his inane insistence that there is a 'Greek predecessor' to virtually every position Farabi takes. ...It really does wear one down. But, that said, I did find many gems of information in his commentary; it would be foolish to simply ignore it.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Merging of Politics, Psychology, and Metaphysics, November 21, 2003

By 

A. Khalil "Khalil" (Toronto) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: On the Perfect State (Hardcover)

Farabi here lays out the foundations of his political philosophy. On the basis of the title, the work appears to be simply a political text. It is in fact a comprehensive summation of Farabi's worldview of which political philosophy is only a part. Walzer's edition contains useful commentary, but he minimizes Farabi's own creative genius, reading into too many of his ideas Greek antecedents.