Al-Farabi completes ‘The Virtuous City’

Little is certain about al-Farabi's life. His name points to Central Asia — to Farab on the Syr Darya according to Ibn Hawqal, to Faryab in Khorasan according to Ibn al-Nadim — and the later stories about him are largely legend. He spent most of his career in Baghdad: by his own account he studied logic there with the Christian cleric Yuhanna ibn Haylan, and he worked in the Aristotelian school revived there by Abu Bishr Matta and other Christian scholars. Some of the few firm dates come from notes in the manuscripts of this book: he began it in Baghdad, where he was still living until September 942 (the end of AH 330), took it to Syria and finished it in Damascus the following year (AH 331, by September 943).

The work is a philosophical summa set out as a sequence of ‘opinions’ that the members of a perfect community should hold. It begins with the First Cause, from which the heavenly intellects and spheres emanate, descends to matter, the human soul and its faculties, prophecy and dreams, and ends with human society. People can attain happiness only in community; the virtuous city is like a healthy body, governed by a first ruler who unites philosophy with prophetic imagination, and it is contrasted with ignorant cities, which pursue wealth, pleasure or power instead of true happiness, with wicked cities, which know the right opinions but act against them, and with erring cities, which hold false ones. The model drew on Plato's Republic and on Neoplatonism, but al-Farabi named no historical ruler as its embodiment.

In Syria al-Farabi lived in Damascus and for a time taught in Aleppo; his stay there was somehow connected with the Hamdanid Sayf al-Dawla, though how is not known; in Egypt in 948–949 he summarised the book in six sections, and he died in Damascus in December 950 or January 951. Through Avicenna, Averroes and Maimonides his synthesis of Aristotle, Plato and Neoplatonism shaped medieval philosophy in Arabic, Hebrew and Latin.