SCOTT :
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Al-Farabi
An
Iranian stamp bearing an illustration of Al-Farabi's imagined
face
Illustration
from Kitāb
al-mūsīqā al-kabīr. Drawing of a musical instrument,
called shahrud]
Al-Farabi
(Arabic:
ابونصر
محمد بن
محمد
فارابی /
Abū Naṣr Muḥammad ibn
Muḥammad Fārābī; for other
recorded variants of his name see below) known in the
West as
Alpharabius (c. 872 in Fārāb
– between 14 December, 950 and 12
January, 951 in Damascus), was a
renowned scientist and philosopher
of the Islamic Golden
Age. He was also a cosmologist,
logician,
and musician.
Through his
commentaries and treatises, Al-Farabi became well known among
medieval Muslim intellectuals as "The Second Teacher", that is, the
successor to Aristotle, "The First
Teacher".
Biography
The existing
variations in the basic accounts of 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
based on hearsay or guesses (as is the case with other
contemporaries of al-Farabi).The sources
for his life are scant which makes the reconstruction of his
biography beyond a mere outline nearly impossible.
The earliest and more reliable sources,
i.e., those composed before the 6th/12th century, that are extant
today are so few as to indicate that no one among
Fārābī’s successors and their followers, or
even unrelated scholars, undertook to write his full biography, a
neglect that has to be taken into consideration in assessing his
immediate impact. The sources
prior to the 6th/12th century consist of: (1) an autobiographical
passage by Farabi, preserved by Ibn Abī
Uṣaibiʿa. In this
passage, Farabi traces the transmission of the instruction of logic
and philosophy from antiquity to his days. (2) Reports
by Al-Masudi, Ibn al-Nadim
and Ibn Hawqal
as well as by Said Al-Andalusi
(d. 1070), who devoted a biography to
him.
When
major Arabic biographers
decided to write comprehensive entries on Farabi in the
6th-7th/12th-13th centuries, there was very little specific
information on hand; this allowed for their acceptance of invented
stories about his life which range from benign extrapolation on the
basis of some known details to tendentious reconstructions and
legends. Most modern biographies of the
philosopher present various combinations of elements drawn at will
from this concocted material. The sources
from the 6th/12th century and later consist essentially of three
biographical entries, all other extant reports on Farabi being
either dependent on them or even later fabrications:
1) the Syrian tradition represented
by Ibn Abī
Uṣaibiʿa. 2) The
Wafayāt al-aʿyān wa-anbāʾ abnāʾ
az-zamān (“Deaths of Eminent Men and History of the Sons
of the Epoch”; trans. by Baron de Slane, Ibn
Khallikan’s Biographical Dictionary, 1842–74) compiled
by Ibn Khallikān. 3) the
scanty and legendary Eastern tradition, represented by
Ẓahīr-al-Dīn
Bayhaqī.
From
incidental accounts it is known that he spent significant time in
Baghdad with Christian scholars including the cleric Yuhanna ibn
Haylan, Yahya ibn Adi, and Abu Ishaq Ibrahim al-Baghdadi. He later
spent time in Damascus, Syria and Egypt before returning to
Damascus where he died in 950-1
Name
His name was Abū Naṣr
Muḥammad b. Muḥammad Farabi, as all sources, and
especially the earliest and most reliable, Al-Masudi,
agree. In some manuscripts of
Fārābī’s works, which must reflect the reading
of their ultimate archetypes from his time, his full name appears
as Abū Naṣr Muḥammad b. Muḥammad
al-Ṭarḵānī, i.e., the element
Ṭarḵān
appears in a nisba (family
surname or attributive title). Moreover, if
the name of Farabi’s grandfather was not known among his
contemporaries and immediately succeeding generations, it is all
the more surprising to see in the later sources the appearance of
yet another name from his pedigree, Awzalaḡ.
This appears as the name of the
grandfather in Ibn Abī
Uṣaibiʿa and of the
great-grandfather in Ibn
Khallikān. Ibn Abī
Uṣaibiʿa is the first
source to list this name which, as Ibn Khallikān explicitly
specifies later, is so to be pronounced as
Awzalaḡ. In modern
Turkish scholarship and some other sources, the pronunciation is
given as Uzluḡ rather than Awzalaḡ, without any
explanation
Birthplace
His birthplace is given in the classical
sources as either Fāryāb
in Greater Khorasan
(modern day Afghanistan)
or Fārāb
on the Jaxartes (Syr Darya) in
modern Kazakhstan. The
older Persian Pārāb (in
Ḥudūd
al-ʿĀlam) or
Fāryāb (also Pāryāb), is a common Persian
toponym meaning “lands irrigated by diversion of river
water”. By the 13th
century, Fārāb on the Jaxartes was known
as Otrār.
Origin
There is a difference of opinion on the
ethnic background of Farabi. According
to Dimitri
Gutas, "[...] ultimately pointless as the quest
for Farabi’s ethnic origins might be, the fact remains that
we do not have sufficient evidence to decide the matter
[...] The Cambridge companion to Arabic
philosophy also states that "[...] these biographical facts are
paltry in the extreme but we must resist the urge to embellish them
with fanciful stories, as the medieval biographers did, or engage
in idle speculation about al-Farabi’s ethnicity or religious
affiliation on the basis of contrived interpretations of his works,
as many modern scholars have done [...]"
According to the Oxford Encyclopaedia of
African Thought "[...] because the origins of al-Farabi
were not recorded during his lifetime or soon after his death in
950 C.E. by anyone with concrete information, accounts of his
pedigree and place of birth have been based on
hearsay
Iranian
origin theory
Medieval Arab historian Ibn Abī
Uṣaibiʿa (died in
1269)—al-Farabi´s oldest biographer—mentions in his
ʿOyūn that al-Farabi´s father was of
Persian descent. Al-Shahrazūrī
who lived around 1288 A.D. and has
written an early biography also state that Farabi hailed from a
Persian family. Additionally, Farabi has in a number of
his works references and glosses in Persian and Sogdian (and
even Greek but not
Turkish).Sogdian has also
been suggested as his native language and the
language of the inhabitants of Fārāb.
Muhammad Javad Mashkoor argues for an
Iranian-speaking Central Asian origin. A Persian
origin has been discussed by other sources as
well.
Turkish
origin theory
The oldest known reference to a
possible Turkish origin is
given by the medieval historian Ibn Khallikān (died in 1282),
who in his work Wafayāt (completed in 669/1271) states that
Farabi was born in the small village of Wasij near
Fārāb (in what is today Otrar, Kazakhstan) of Turkish
parents. Based on this account, some modern scholars state his
origin to be Turkish. Others, such
as Dimitri
Gutas, criticize this, saying that Ibn
Khallikān´s account is aimed at the earlier historical
accounts by Ibn Abī
Uṣaibiʿa, and serves
the sole purpose to prove a Turkic origin for al-Farabi, for
instance by inventing the additional nisba (surname) "al-Turk" (arab. "the Turk")—a nisba Farabi
never had.However, Abu
al-Fedā´, who copied
Ibn Ḵhallekān, corrected this and changed
al-Torkī to the descriptive statement
"wa-kāna rajolan torkīyan", meaning "he was a Turkish
man." In this regard, Oxford professor
C.E.
Bosworth notes that "great figures [such] as
al-Farabi, al-Biruni,
and ibn Sina have been
attached by over enthusiastic Turkish scholars to their
race
Life and
Education
Al-Farabi spent almost his entire life
in Baghdad. In the
auto-biographical passage about the appearance of philosophy
preserved by Ibn Abī
Uṣaibiʿa, Farabi has
stated that he had studied logic,medicine and sociology with
Yūḥannā b. Ḥaylān up to and including
Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, i.e., according to the order
of the books studied in the curriculum, Fārābī said
that he studied Porphyry’s Eisagoge and Aristotle’s
Categories, De Interpretatione, Prior and Posterior Analytics. His
teacher, Yūḥannā b. Ḥaylān, was
a Christian cleric who
abandoned lay interests and engaged in his ecclesiastical duties,
as Fārābī reports. His studies of Aristotelian logic
with Yūḥannā in all probability took place in
Baghdad, where Al-Masudi tells us
Yūḥannā died during the caliphate of al-Moqtader
(295-320/908-32). He was in
Baghdad at least until the end of September 942 as we learn from
notes in some manuscripts of his Mabādeʾ
ārāʾ ahl al-madīna al-fāżela, he had
started to compose the book in Baghdad at that time and then left
and went to Syria. He finished
the book in Damascus the following year (331), i.e., by September
943). He also lived and taught for some time
in Aleppo. Later on
Farabi visited Egypt; and
complete six sections summarizing the book Mabādeʾ in
Egypt in 337/July 948-June 949. He returned
from Egypt to Syria. Al-Masudi writing
barely five years after the fact (955-6, the date of the
composition of the Tanbīh), says that he died in
Damascus in Rajab 339
(between 14 December 950 and 12 January 951).
In Syria, he was
supported and glorified by Saif ad-Daula, the
Hamdanid ruler
of Syria.
Contributions
Farabi made contributions to the fields
of logic, mathematics,
music, philosophy, psychology,
and education.
Alchemy
Al-Farabi wrote: The Necessity of the Art of the
Elixir
Logic
Though he
was mainly an Aristotelian logician, he included a number of
non-Aristotelian elements in his works. He discussed the topics
of future
contingents,
the number and relation
of the categories, the relation between logic and grammar, and
non-Aristotelian forms of inference.He is also
credited for categorizing logic into two separate groups, the first
being "idea" and the second being "proof".
Al-Farabi
also considered the theories of conditional syllogisms
and analogical
inference, which were part of the
Stoic tradition of
logic rather than the Aristotelian. Another
addition Al-Farabi made to the Aristotelian tradition was his
introduction of the concept of poetic syllogism in a
commentary on Aristotle´s Poetics
Al Farabi,
Aristotle, Maimonides
In the handing down of Aristotle’s
thought to the Christian west in the middle ages, Farabi played an
essential part as appears in the translation of
Farabi’s Commentary and Short Treatise on
Aristotle’s de Interpretatione that F.W. Zimmermann published in 1981.
Great is the influence of the Persian master on
Maimonides, the most
important Jewish thinker of the middle ages. Maimonides wrote in
Arabic a Treatise
on logic, the
celebrated Maqala
fi sina at al-mantiq. In a wonderfully concise way, the work
treats of the essentials of Aristotelian logic in the light of
comments made by the Arab philosophers: Avicenna and above
all Al Farabi. To use Maimonides’ words, if
Aristotle is the First
Master the second one is undoubtedly Farabi. Rémi Brague
in his book devoted to the Treatise
stresses the fact that Farabi is the only thinker mentioned
therein.
Music
Farabi wrote a book on
music titled Kitab al-Musiqa
(The Book of Music). According
to Seyyed Hossein Nasr
and Mehdi Aminrazavi:
the book of Kitab al-Musiqa is in
reality a study of the theory of Persian music of his day although
in the West it has been introduced as a book on Arab
music. He
presents philosophical principles about music, its cosmic qualities
and its influences. Al-Farabi´s treatise Meanings of the Intellect
dealt with
music
therapy, where he discussed the
therapeutic
effects of music on the
soul.
Philosophy
As a
philosopher, Al-Farabi was a founder of his own school
of early Islamic
philosophy known as
"Farabism" or "Alfarabism", though it was later overshadowed
by Avicennism.
Al-Farabi´s school of philosophy "breaks with the philosophy
of Plato and Aristotle [... and
...] moves from metaphysics
to methodology,
a move that anticipates modernity", and "at
the level of philosophy, Alfarabi unites theory and practice [...
and] in the sphere of the political he liberates
practice from theory". His Neoplatonic
theology is also more than just
metaphysics as rhetoric. In his attempt to think through the nature
of a First
Cause, Alfarabi discovers the limits of
human knowledge".
Al-Farabi
had great influence on science and philosophy for several
centuries, and was widely regarded to be second
only to Aristotle in knowledge (alluded to by his title of "the
Second Teacher") in his time. His work, aimed at synthesis of
philosophy and Sufism, paved the
way for the work of Ibn Sina (Avicenna).
Al-Farabi
also wrote a commentary on Aristotle´s work, and
one of his most notable works is Al-Madina al-Fadila
where he theorized an
ideal state as in
Plato´s The
Republic. Al-Farabi
represented religion as a symbolic rendering of truth, and,
like Plato, saw it as
the duty of the philosopher to provide guidance to the state.
Al-Farabi incorporated the Platonic view,
drawing a parallel from within the Islamic context, in that he
regarded the ideal state to be ruled by the prophet-imam, instead of
the philosopher-king envisaged by Plato. Al-Farabi argued that the
ideal state was the city-state of Medina when it was
governed by the prophet Muhammad as
its head of
state, as he was in direct communion
with Allah whose law
was revealed to him.
Physics
Al-Farabi thought about the nature of
the existence of void. He may have
carried out the first experiments
concerning the existence
of vacuum, in which
he investigated handheld plungers in water.
He concluded that air´s volume can
expand to fill available space, and he suggested that the concept
of perfect vacuum was incoherent.
Psychology
In psychology,
al-Farabi´s Social Psychology
and Model City were the first treatises to deal
with social
psychology. He stated
that "an isolated individual could not achieve all the perfections
by himself, without the aid of other individuals." He wrote that it
is the "innate disposition of every man to join another human being
or other men in the labor he ought to perform." He concluded that
in order to "achieve what he can of that perfection, every man
needs to stay in the neighborhood of others and associate with
them."
His
On the Cause of
Dreams, which
appeared as chapter 24 of his Book of Opinions of the people of the
Ideal City, was
a treatise on dreams, in which
he distinguished between dream interpretation
and the nature and causes of
dreams.
from
wikipedia
