Al-Farabi

Al-Farabi — Abu Nasr Muhammad, born around 872 in Turkestan or Transoxania, working in Baghdad and dying in Damascus about 950 — earned the title Islam gave him: al-Mu'allim al-Thani, the Second Teacher, second only to Aristotle. What Aristotle was to logic, Farabi was to the project of making Greek philosophy speak Arabic — and speak to a scriptural civilization.

His logical commentaries organized the entire Aristotelian Organon for the Islamic world and fixed the technical vocabulary later thinkers — Ibn Sina above all, who said he grasped Aristotle's Metaphysics only through Farabi's little treatise on its aims — would inherit. He wrote on music (the Kitab al-Musiqa al-Kabir, the great medieval treatise on the subject), mathematics, alchemy skeptically, and the classification of the sciences.

His masterpiece is political theology: The Principles of the Opinions of the Inhabitants of the Virtuous City (al-Madina al-Fadila). The cosmos emanates from the One through descending intellects — Neoplatonism in Quranic dress — and the ideal city mirrors that order. Its founder must be both philosopher and prophet: a mind conjoined with the Active Intellect whose imagination clothes intelligible truth in symbols the multitude can follow. Religion, in Farabi's bold formulation, is the imitation of philosophy — the same truths, delivered as images and law for those who cannot follow demonstrations. Prophecy is thereby neither fraud nor magic but the highest political art.

He lived, tradition says, simply — a garden, a Sufi's robe, four dirhams a day from Sayf al-Dawla's court in Aleppo. His quiet radicalism — that philosophy judges and grounds religion's claims — echoed for centuries: through Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd, into Maimonides, and by Hebrew and Latin translation into early modern political thought.