Death of Al-Farabi, The Second Teacher

# Al-Farabi: The Second Teacher of Islamic Philosophy

The Life and Death of Abu Nasr al-Farabi

Abu Nasr Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Farabi passed from this world in Damascus in 339 AH / 950 CE, at an age estimated to be approximately eighty years. He had been born in the region of Farab — in the territory corresponding to modern-day Kazakhstan and Central Asia — in approximately 259 AH / 872 CE. His death in Damascus came while he was under the patronage of Sayf al-Dawla al-Hamdani, the cultured ruler of Aleppo, who had gathered around him the greatest literary and intellectual figures of the age. Ibn Khallikan records that al-Farabi spent his final years in the Hamdanid court before dying in Damascus, leaving behind a body of work that would permanently alter the course of Islamic intellectual history and, through Latin translations, the intellectual history of medieval Europe.

Al-Farabi occupies a position unlike any other thinker in the Islamic tradition. He was given the honorific "al-Mu'allim al-Thani" — The Second Teacher — because he was considered the greatest interpreter and transmitter of Aristotle (the First Teacher) to the Arabic-speaking world. This was not an idle title. Before al-Farabi's efforts, the works of Aristotle that had entered the Islamic world through the Bayt al-Hikmah translation movement were accessible but not fully systematized or made intelligible for the Islamic intellectual context. Al-Farabi did for Arabic readers what no one else had done: he produced commentaries, paraphrases, and introductions that made the full range of Aristotelian philosophy — logic, natural science, metaphysics, politics, and ethics — accessible and comprehensible.

His Education and Intellectual Formation

Al-Farabi's education began in Central Asia and continued in Baghdad, the intellectual capital of the Islamic world. He studied logic under the Nestorian Christian scholars Yuhanna ibn Haylan and Abu Bishr Matta ibn Yunus — masters of the Greek logical tradition who had preserved and transmitted the Aristotelian heritage through the Christian Syriac-speaking intellectual community. This lineage of transmission is itself remarkable: Greek philosophy traveled from Athens to Alexandria to Syriac-speaking Eastern Christians to Baghdad to al-Farabi — a chain of intellectual inheritance spanning a thousand years and multiple civilizations.

In Baghdad, al-Farabi immersed himself in the full range of learning available in that extraordinary city. He mastered not only philosophy and logic but also music, mathematics, and the Arabic literary and linguistic sciences. He reportedly learned more than seventy languages, though this claim may be an expression of admiration rather than a literal count.

The Philosophical Project: Harmonizing Plato, Aristotle, and Islam

Al-Farabi's central intellectual project was ambitious beyond any easy summary: he sought to create a grand synthesis of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy and to demonstrate their fundamental harmony with each other and with revealed religion. His treatise "On the Agreement of Plato and Aristotle" addresses the apparent contradictions between the two Greek masters, arguing that these contradictions are superficial and that at a deeper level the two great philosophers agree on essentials.

This harmonizing project had profound implications for how Islam would engage with Greek philosophy. By presenting philosophy as a coherent, harmonious system and by arguing that this system is compatible with prophetic revelation, al-Farabi opened a path for Muslim intellectuals to engage deeply with the Greek heritage without necessarily seeing it as a threat to religious commitment.

The Virtuous City and Islamic Political Philosophy

Among al-Farabi's most celebrated works is "Ara Ahl al-Madina al-Fadila" — The Opinions of the Inhabitants of the Virtuous City. This text is his Islamic reworking of Plato's Republic, but it is far more than a mere adaptation. Al-Farabi transforms Plato's philosopher-king into a figure who is simultaneously philosopher, prophet, and imam — the perfect ruler of the perfect city.

In al-Farabi's political philosophy, the ideal city is one governed by an individual who has achieved the highest philosophical knowledge and who has also received prophetic revelation from the Active Intellect (al-Aql al-Fa'al). This faculty of the Active Intellect is one of al-Farabi's most significant philosophical concepts. Drawing on Aristotle but significantly developing the idea, al-Farabi posited a hierarchy of intellects emanating from the First Cause (God), with the Active Intellect being the lowest of the cosmic intellects and the one that interfaces with the human world, illuminating human minds and being the source of prophetic inspiration.

This identification of the Active Intellect with the source of prophecy — and his understanding of prophethood as the highest form of philosophical illumination received by a soul of exceptional receptive capacity — represents a significant philosophical interpretation of Islamic prophethood. The Prophet ﷺ, in this framework, is understood as the ideal philosopher-prophet whose soul was perfectly receptive to the illumination of the Active Intellect.

Logic and the Sciences

Al-Farabi's contributions to logic were transformative. He composed commentaries and paraphrases of virtually the entire Aristotelian logical corpus — the Organon — making these texts accessible for the first time to Arabic readers in a comprehensive and pedagogically useful form. His "Ihsa al-Ulum" (Enumeration of the Sciences) provided an organized classification of all the sciences known to the Islamic world, arranging them into a coherent hierarchy and explaining how they relate to one another.

This taxonomic work had enormous practical importance: it helped scholars understand what they were learning and how different disciplines fit together. Al-Farabi distinguished between the theoretical sciences (mathematics, natural science, metaphysics), the practical sciences (ethics, politics), and the productive sciences, drawing on Aristotle's distinctions but adapting them for the Islamic educational context.

His logical works were foundational for all subsequent Islamic philosophy. Ibn Sina (Avicenna) famously stated that he read Aristotle's Metaphysics forty times without understanding it, until he read al-Farabi's short commentary, after which it became clear. This testimony alone indicates the magnitude of al-Farabi's contribution.

Music and the Sciences of Sound

Al-Farabi's intellectual range extended beyond philosophy and logic to music theory. His "Kitab al-Musiqa al-Kabir" (The Great Book of Music) is the most comprehensive Arabic treatise on music theory ever written and remains an indispensable source for the study of medieval Islamic music. The work covers the physics of sound, the nature of musical intervals, the modes and rhythmic patterns of Arabic music, and the construction and playing of musical instruments.

Al-Farabi was himself reportedly a skilled musician, and accounts describe him playing the lute before Sayf al-Dawla's court with such mastery that he could move his audience to laughter, tears, and sleep at will. Whether these stories are literally true or represent the admiring exaggeration of later biographers, they reflect the historical memory of a man whose musical understanding was considered exceptional even in a culture that prized musical excellence.

His Character and Asceticism

Despite being welcomed at the court of Sayf al-Dawla and enjoying the patronage of one of the most generous rulers of his age, al-Farabi is reported to have lived simply and without attachment to worldly goods. Ibn Khallikan records that he wore woolen clothing associated with ascetic practice and that he had no interest in accumulating wealth or living extravagantly. He reportedly subsisted on modest provisions and devoted his time entirely to study and writing.

This character, whether fully accurate in its details or not, was remembered as appropriate for the greatest philosopher of the age. The philosopher who reflected on the nature of the virtuous city lived, in his own way, as if attempting to embody its values in his personal conduct.

The Ahl us-Sunnah Assessment

The Ahl us-Sunnah relationship with al-Farabi's legacy is nuanced and requires careful discernment. His contributions to logic, the natural sciences, music theory, and the transmission of the Greek intellectual heritage are of enormous value. Islamic scholarship has benefited from his logical analyses, and the madrasas used logic texts derived from his tradition for centuries.

However, al-Farabi's philosophical theology — specifically his doctrine of emanation, his interpretation of prophethood as philosophical illumination rather than direct divine revelation, his understanding of the afterlife in philosophical rather than literal terms, and his identification of the Active Intellect with the angelic intermediary of revelation — departs from the clear affirmations of Ahl us-Sunnah theology. The physical reality of resurrection, the direct and non-philosophical nature of divine revelation to the Prophet ﷺ, and the doctrine of divine knowledge and power as affirmed in the Quran and authenticated Sunnah are not adequately preserved in al-Farabi's philosophical framework.

Imam al-Ghazali, writing a century and a half after al-Farabi's death, addressed precisely these issues in his "Tahafut al-Falasifa" (The Incoherence of the Philosophers). While al-Ghazali's target was primarily Ibn Sina, who built heavily on al-Farabi's foundations, the critique extends to al-Farabi's positions as well. Al-Ghazali identified three positions shared by the philosophers (al-Farabi, Ibn Sina) that he declared to be unbelief (kufr): the claim that the world is eternal without beginning, the denial of God's knowledge of particular events, and the denial of bodily resurrection. These are not positions that Ahl us-Sunnah scholars accept.

The proper approach to al-Farabi's legacy is therefore one of discriminating engagement: his logical and scientific contributions are part of the heritage of human knowledge, and Islamic scholarship has incorporated and benefited from them; his philosophical theology requires critical evaluation in light of revealed knowledge.

His Influence on Subsequent Islamic Thought

Al-Farabi's influence on Islamic intellectual history was immense. Ibn Sina built directly on his foundations, developing al-Farabi's emanationist metaphysics and philosophy of mind into a more systematic and more detailed framework. Ibn Rushd (Averroes) in the West continued the Aristotelian philosophical tradition al-Farabi had established. Even thinkers who opposed the philosophical tradition — like al-Ghazali — engaged with the philosophical positions al-Farabi had defined. In a real sense, the entire history of Islamic philosophy runs through al-Farabi.

Beyond the Islamic world, al-Farabi's influence reached medieval Europe through Latin translations. His works on logic, the sciences, and political philosophy were translated in Toledo and other centers of translation in al-Andalus, entering the European intellectual tradition alongside Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd.

The memory of al-Farabi in the Islamic tradition is that of a man of immense learning, personal simplicity, and intellectual courage who took on the greatest challenge of his era: making sense of the Greek philosophical heritage for a civilization formed by Quranic revelation. His success in that project, with all its achievements and its limitations, placed him permanently among the most significant figures in the history of human thought.

Sources:

• Ibn Khallikan, Wafayat al-A'yan wa Anba Abna al-Zaman (Deaths of Eminent Men)
• Al-Ghazali, Tahafut al-Falasifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers)
• Al-Farabi, Ara Ahl al-Madina al-Fadila (Opinions of the Inhabitants of the Virtuous City)
• Al-Farabi, Ihsa al-Ulum (Enumeration of the Sciences)
• Al-Farabi, Kitab al-Musiqa al-Kabir (The Great Book of Music)
• Majid Fakhry, Al-Farabi: Founder of Islamic Neoplatonism (Oxford: Oneworld, 2002)
• Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Oliver Leaman (eds.), History of Islamic Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1996)
• Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (London: Routledge, 1998)
• Oliver Leaman, An Introduction to Medieval Islamic Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)