Renowned Scholars

Farabi arrived in Baghdad to pursue higher studies in 901. He studied under a Christian cleric.


Abu Nasr Al-Farabi (c.870-950) is said to be one of the world’s great philosophers and much more original than many of his Islamic successors. A philosopher, logician and musician, he was also a major political scientist.


He was known to the Arabs as the “Second Master” (after Aristotle). Al-Farabi has left us no autobiography and consequently, relatively little is known for certain about his life. His philosophical legacy, however, is large.


Al-Farabi may rightly be acclaimed as one of the greatest of Islamic philosophers of all time. Considerable myth has become attached to the man. We do know that he was born in Turkestan and later studied Arabic in Baghdad, it has been claimed that most of his books were written here. He traveled to Damascus, Egypt, Harran and Aleppo, and in the latter city, the Hamdanid ruler Sayf Al-Dawla became his patron. Even the circumstances of his death are not clear: some accounts portray him dying naturally in Damascus, while at least one holds that he was mugged and killed on the road from Damascus to Ascalon.


Al-Farabi became an expert in philosophy and logic, and also in music: one of his works is entitled Kitab Al-Musiqa Al-Kabir (The Great Book of Music). However, perhaps the book for which he is best known is that whose title is abbreviated to Al-Madina Al-Fadila (The Virtuous City), and which is often compared, misleadingly in view of its Neoplatonic orientation, to Plato’s Republic. Other major titles from Al-Farabi’s voluminous corpus included the Risala Fil-AqI (Epistle on the Intellect), Kitab Al-Huruf (The Book of Letters) and Kitab Ihsa Al-Ulum (The Book of the Enumeration of the Sciences).


Although many of his books have been lost, 117 are known, out of which 43 are on logic, 11 on metaphysics, 7 on ethics, 7 on political science, 17 on music, medicine and sociology, while 11 are commentaries. Some of his famous books include the book Fusus Al-Hikam, which remained a text book of philosophy for several centuries at various centres of learning and is still taught at some of the institutions in the East.


The best source for Al-Farabi’s classification of knowledge is his Kitab Ihsa Al-Ulum. This work illustrates neatly Al-Farabi’s beliefs both about what can be known and the sheer range of that knowledge. Here he leaves aside the division into theological and philosophical sciences which other Islamic thinkers would use, and divides his material instead into five major chapters. Through all of them runs primary Aristotelian stress on the importance of knowledge.


Chapter 1 deals with the “science of language”, chapter 2 formally covers the “science of logic”, Chapter 3 is devoted to the “mathematical sciences”, Chapter 4 surveys physics and metaphysics, and the final chapter encompasses “civil science” (some prefer the term ‘political science), jurisprudence and scholastic theology. A brief examination of these chapter headings shows that a total of eight main subjects are covered; not surprisingly, there are further sub-divisions as well. To give just one example, the third chapter on the mathematical sciences embraces the seven sub-divisions of arithmetic, geometry, optics, astronomy, music, weights and ‘mechanical artifices,’ these sub-divisions in turn have their own sub-divisions.


There is no consensus or sufficient evidence to decide the matter of Al-Farabi’s ethnic origins. The existing variations in the basic facts about Al-Farabi’s origins and pedigree indicate that they were not recorded during his lifetime or soon thereafter by anyone with concrete information, but were rather based on hearsay or probable guesses.


Some historians thus claim Farabi was born in the small village of Wasij near Farab (in what is today Turkmenistan) of Persian parents. The older Persian form Parab is given in the historical account, Hodud Al-’Alam for his birthplace. Ibn Al-Nadim, among other historians, however, states Farabi’s origins (in ed. Flugel p. 2631. 9) to lie in Faryab in Khorasan (“men Al-Faryab men ardh Kho-rasan”). Faryab is also the name of a province in today’s Afghanistan. Very little is thus known of Al-Farabi’s life for certain and whether or not he was of Turkic origin.


But what is known with certainty is that after finishing his early school years in Farab and Bukhara, Farabi arrived in Baghdad to pursue higher studies in 901. He studied under a Christian cleric who abandoned lay interests and engaged in his ecclesiastical duties, and he remained in Baghdad for well over 40 years and acquired mastery over several languages and fields of knowledge.