Al-Fārābī's Imperfect State

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Al-Frb's Imperfect State

Al-Farabi on the Perfect State: Ab Nar al-Frb's Mabdi r Ahl al-Madna al-Fila byRichard WalzerReview by: Muhsin MahdiJournal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 110, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1990), pp. 691-726Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/602898 .

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AL-FARABI'S IMPERFECT STATE*MUHSIN MAHDI

HARVARD UNIVERSITYRichard Walzer's revised text of the Arabic philosophic classic, al-Farabli's Virtuous City,

published with an introduction, translation, and commentary, is an impressive work of recentscholarship on Islamic philosophy. After a general account of his intention and method (sec. 1)and of his understanding of the Virtuous City's subject matter and place in al-Farabli's life andwritings (sec. 2), the article examines Walzer's approach to source criticism (the imagined Greekauthor, special authority, predecessor, prototype, or source of the Virtuous City, as against thegenerally-known Greek philosophic tradition available to al-Farabli[sec. 3]), and to contextualanalysis (the assertion that in the Virtuous City al-Farabli gives full expression to his religiouscommitment as an Imamr Shl'ite sectarian [sec. 4]). Next, it presents certain cautions that mayhelp those who wish to benefit from the translation (sec. 5). Finally (sec. 6), it describes the newlyconstructed Arabic text and the assumptions underlying the stemma (6a), points to thecharacteristic features of the apparatus (6b), and explains the implications of what is knownabout the history of the text and the evidence of the manuscripts for a future edition, which, it issuggested, must abandon the notion of a single recension of the original and recover the textof al-Farabli's chapter-headings and summary of the Virtuous City absent from all existingeditions (6c).

1. INTRODUCTIONTHE PUBLICATION BY THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESSof a new edition of a significant Arabic philosophicwork would have been an occasion for rejoicing even

if it did not have the additional merit of being theculmination of the lifework of a well-known andrespected scholar, who was Reader in Greek andArabic Philosophy at the University of Oxford, andFellow of the British Academy. The occasion isworthy of special attention for other reasons as well.The name of al-FarabT,the author of the work, maynot be a household word among philosophers or evengeneral historians of philosophy today. Yet it was.hewho initiated in Islamic philosophy the movement

* This is a review article of: Al-Farabi on the Perfect State:Abii Nasr al-FdrdbT's Mabddi' Ard' Ahl al-Madina al-Fddila. A revised text with introduction, translation, andcommentary by RICHARDWALZER.Oxford: THECLARENDONPRESS, 1985. Pp. viii + 571. $69. Page and line numbers nthe body of the article refer to the pages and lines of thisbook. References to al-Fdrabl's other works, and to otherArabic works, are by short title; references to secondaryliterature,by author and publication date. A list of referencesfollows the article.

back to the works of Plato and Aristotle, pointing theway by engaging in careful study of, and commentaryon, these works, with special attention to subsequentviews and developments. For many of those whocame after him, he was the greatest philosophicauthority since Aristotle: Avicenna referred to al-Farabi as the most excellent among his predecessors;Maimonides said his writings are finer than fine flour;Averroes began his career as a faithful student of hisworks; Albert the Great made use of his works onlogic; Roger Bacon quoted him as an authority onreligion and theology; Thomas Aquinas and the LatinAverroists made much use of his work On the Intel-lect; and the Renaissance scholar Pico della Mirandolaadmired his grave and meditative style. Al-Farabl'sworks on political science, logic, and music continuedto be studied in the Islamic world until modern times.The story of his position in, and significance for, thephilosophic and scientific tradition of the past mil-lennium is just beginning to be pieced together bymodern scholarship. The work here edited was part ofal-FarabI's effort to revive Platonic political philos-ophy as the discipline with which to approach theestablishment of the revealed religions and the regimesfounded on them. He saw that the theme of therelation between philosophy and politics (the city aspolity) had to be revived and made intelligible again

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692 Journal of the American Oriental Society 110.4 (1990)in a context where the overriding question seemed tobe the relation between philosophy and religion. Whatwe today call the philosophy of religion was practicedby him as a branch of political philosophy.

The work itself, the Virtuous City, has become asort of classic of Arabic philosophic writing since itfirst appeared toward the middle of the tenth century.It was read, commented on, cited, quoted, and sum-marized by Muslim authors in the manuscript age. Itwas widely copied by scribes and scholars, who alsocompared and collated various manuscript copies andprepared a number of "editions" in which they pooledthose copies to produce copies thought to be better,more complete, or more correct. Since the late nine-teenth century, two editions (Dieterici 1895; Nadir1959; 1985) and a host of popular printings have beenpublished, along with numerous selections for the useof students. At the same time, the work was translatedinto a number of languages, including German (Die-terici 1900), French (Karam, Chlala, and Jaussen1949; 1980), and Spanish (Alonso 1961-1962). As forcomments and criticism, they have been extensive andvaried: liberals find it inimical to the open society;conservatives find it outrageously radical; Marxistsand pseudo-Marxists find it reactionary. Richard Wal-zer contributes to almost every aspect of this complextradition. In his introduction he assesses the work'simportance and character. In his edition of the Arabictext he presents new manuscript evidence, a newarrangement of the parts, a fuller text, and a fulleraccount of the manuscript tradition. He offers a firstEnglish translation for those with no access to theArabic text or to any of the earlier translations. Andin his detailed commentary he discusses the work'ssources and cultural context at length.The first impression one forms of Walzer'sextensivecommentary is that he was primarily interested intracking down the work's Greek sources and becameconvinced in the process that al-Farabi was copyingfrom a Greek text in Arabic translation, even perhapsat some point abandoning one Greek text and goingon to copy from another. Walzer had made this kindof suggestion before and extends it here in the com-mentary to other works by al-Fardbl. He is convincedthat in many of his works al-Farabl was copyingGreek "prototypes," all of which have strangely dis-appeared-or, as he prefers to put it, "have not beentraced as yet" leaving no trace, not even a substantialfragment, either in their supposed original form inGreek or in their presumed Arabic translation. Tojudge by the space allocated to this hypothesis and thenumber of times and the various forms in which it isrepeated, it readily appears to be the most important

thesis he wishes to present and his frequentlyexpresseddoubts and hesitations are merely scholarly refine-ments. This impression must be revised, however, soas to accommodate a second thesis. Though occupyinglittle space in the commentary and lacking the enor-mous number of references to the literature that theGreek-prototype(s) hypothesis seems to enjoy, it isasserted with equal emphasis and conviction, namely,that al-Farabl gives full expression in this work to hisown personal religious commitment as an ImamTShl'ite sectarian.Those who have followed Walzer's writings knowthat he worked hard and long on al-FarabTand theVirtuous City over many decades (al-Farabi's Phi-losophy of Plato, edited with Franz Rosenthal, waspublished in 1943). The plan for the present book wasconceived at least two decades before its author'sdeath in 1975. During this period, he frequentlymentioned his work on al-Farabli's Virtuous City,reported on its progress, and summarized his findings.At the same time, he contributed a number of papersand encyclopedia articles on the Greek background ofearly Islamic philosophy, the Islamic reception ofGreek philosophy, and works or fragments of workswhose Greek originals are lost but have survived inArabic translation. (Some of the essays were collectedin Walzer 1962; see Mahdi 1965; Stern, Hourani, andBrown 1972: 5-16.) Coming to the study of Islamicphilosophy after having been trained in the philo-logical and historical approaches to Greek philosophyunder WernerJaeger, he was well placed to reconstructfrom the Virtuous City one or more Greek prototypesand write a detailed account of their careerthroughoutpagan and early Christiantimes. A sympatheticreader,while admiring his learning and industry, may wonderat times whether he was not perhaps tackling thewrong Arabic philosophic work and cannot helpnoticing that his conclusions are by no means simpleor unequivocal.Walzer did not work on al-Farabl's Virtuous Cityin isolation. He consulted a number of colleagues onmanuscript readings and on al-Farabli'shistorical andreligious background, fields in which he lacked pro-fessional competence. He records their contributionsin the apparatus of the Arabic text and elsewhere inthe book. The manuscript he left behind is a collectiveeffort that includes the views of many like-mindedfriends and students, with generous referencesto theircontributions to general questions of interpretation aswell as to a number of particular points of textualcriticism. It can be surmised that Walzer encounterednumerous difficulties in his effort to edit, translate,and write "a very detailed analytical commentary"



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MAHDI: Al-FdrdbT'sImperfect State 693(p. 1) on the Virtuous City. Not a few of al-Farabli'sworks of immediate relevance to the study and inter-pretation of the Virtuous City were published onlyduring the final years of Walzer's work on this book.He could not have had the time to investigate themand determine their import for his work. GerhardEndress, who deserves praise for his effort "to avoiderrors and inconsistencies in the printing,"for compil-ing the massive bibliography, and for preparing theuseful indices to the introduction and the commentary(there are none to the text or translation), says in abrief postscript that upon his death Walzer "left themanuscript of the present work ready for publication,but he did not live to give the finishing touches to hisstudy nor to see the book through the press" (p. 571).What one may surmise the author would or wouldnot have done to give the finishing touches to hisstudy or to see his book through the press (his earlierwritings prove that Walzer would- have done much)can be of little help now. One must judge this impres-sive and many-sided book on its own merits and pointout Walzer's achievement in each of the domains itcovers al-Farab'is biography and the place of thiswork in his corpus, the edition, the translation, andespecially the general interpretation of the VirtuousCity in the introduction and the commentary.By taking more than ten years to publish the bookand then doing such a poor job of producing it, thepublisher did not make this task easier. To begin withthe Arabic text, one must wonder why an importantphilosophic classic was printed in the handwriting ofan anonymous scribe, why so many simple errorswere not corrected, and why the photographic processwas not better controlled to avoid missing so manydiacritical points. One notes with astonishment thatthis is the same pioneering press that began printingin Arabic as far back as the middle of the seventeenthcentury and, as late as 1959, printed F. Rahman'ssuperb edition of the Arabic text of Avicenna's DeAnima, many times more difficult to edit and set inprint than the Arabic text of the Virtuous City. Thenthere are the numerous misprints in the English textof the introduction, translation, and commentary.Altogether, the work deserves a prize for the OxfordUniversity Press as its most poorly printed book. It ishardly to be believed that it issues from the samepress that for so long published the best and mostaccurately printed books in English, in classical lan-guages, and in modern foreign languages.Despite the manner in which the book has beenpublished, whoever is able and willing to look criticallyat the material presented in it will not fail to findinteresting information, stimulating suggestions, and

fruitful lines of inquiry. To the extent that students ofIslamic philosophy and Arabic philosophic writingsare willing to sift through this material, evaluate thesuggestions made in it, develop those that need to bedeveloped, and discard or correct the rest, Walzer'slabor will not have been in vain. The general studentof medieval philosophy, on the other hand, not ac-quainted with the history of scholarship in this particu-lar area or with the questions disputed in it, will haveno idea most of the time why Walzer says what hesays, does what he does, or carries on so frequentlyagainst unnamed persons and their views. He will notbe in a position to judge the character or validity ofthe assertions made or the points of view presented.And he will be particularly hampered by the wayWalzer qualifies and modifies his position within theintroduction, from the introduction to the commen-tary, and then within the commentary.

2. AL-FARABI AND THE VIRTUOUS CITYSince a review of Walzer'scontribution as a textualcritic requires examining a number of technical ques-tions of less interest to the general student of medievaland Islamic philosophy, it is best to leave that forlater discussion, and to begin instead with the general,composite picture drawn in the introduction of al-Farabl's biography, the place of the Virtuous Cityamong his writings, the work's intended audience andpurpose and range, its subject matter, its Greek

sources, and its Islamic context. It is an attractivepicture that ought to encourage anyone with theslightest interest in the later history of Greek phi-losophy or Islamic cultural history to begin readingthe Virtuous City with excitement so as to discoveral-Farabi, the militant intellectual (p. 4), to learnmore about the Muslim philosopher who had "a clearcommitment to one of the most animated and topicalpolitical controversies of his century" (p. 15), and toobserve the dexterity with which Walzer analyzes the"differentlayers of Greek thought" on which the bookis purportedly based and tries to "reconstruct a con-sidered view of metaphysics and other philosophicaltopics going back-in all probability to the time ofJustinian, i.e. the early sixth century" (p. 9). It is onlywhen one takes a closer look at the individual ele-ments of the composite picture that they begin to fadeand the picture itself to crumple.Editors of works by al-Farabl seem persistentlytempted to claim that the work they have edited is thelast, or among the last, of al-Farabrs writings (Dunlop1961: 15-17; Khalifat 1987: 38). The Virtuous City isone of a few works by al-Fdrdbl about which there is



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694 Journal of the American Oriental Society 110.4 (1990)some historical information. Although this informa-tion does not state the date of the works's originalcomposition, one can nevertheless infer from it thedate of its revision, the composition of its chapter-headings, and the composition of a summary of thebook in six sections. These dates fall in the last decadeof al-FarabT's ife. Walzer goes beyond this informa-tion and says that the Virtuous City is "the lastand most mature Summa Philosophiae by al-Farab"l'(p. 1). He is also "certain that it is the last of hisextant works," even though "the date of none of theother works can be definitely fixed.... Hence one hasat present to confess absolute ignorance, and contentoneself with private guesses which cannot for the timebeing be verified" (pp. 1-2). The difficulty is not that"there are no explicit or implicit cross references inthe various writings [of al-Farab-1]"p. 1), as Walzersays in this context. Cross references are rather nu-merous in some of his works, but these alone, evenwhere they do occur, do not provide reliable guides todating al-Farabli'sworks. The example of the VirtuousCity shows that some of these works were writtenover a long period, and that al-Farabl carried themwith him on his travels, looked them over and revisedthem at various times, and made significant additionsto them. Cross references could have been insertedlong after the composition of any of these works, andthe fact that a work does not refer to other worksdoes not mean that the others had not already beencomposed. Again, this is borne out by the text of theVirtuous City, which refers to none of al-Farabl'sother works, even though it is certain that most ofthem were composed before or during the relativelylong period when the Virtuous City was being com-posed and revised.The notion that the Virtuous City is al-Farabl'smost mature work needs to be supported by anaccount of what is meant by "mature," citing theworks considered less mature, and identifying thefeatures that indicate maturity or lack of it in al-FarabT'sworks. Walzer acknowledges that there are"no monographs on, nor any analysis of, the variouswritings." He makes no effort to analyze any of themhimself and confines himself to quoting some of them"only where they contribute to the explanation of"the Virtuous City (p. 1), without explaining how oneunanalyzed work can shed light on the argument ofanother. This is perhaps why he revises his judgmentregarding both questions that is, how late and howmature the Virtuous City is by saying soon there-after that the work "appears to be the latest and themost mature of [al-Farabl's works]" (p. 5). Walzer's

characterization of the work as a "Summa Philos-ophiae" also had to be modified when he realized thatal-FarabT"shows little, indeed scarcely any, interest inany special features of the various branches of phi-losophy on which he touches. Almost entirely ignoredin this work are the many different aspects of astron-omy, for instance, or general natural science or biologyor psychology or formal logic" (p. 8); indeed the"account given is as remote from being a comprehen-sive philosophical encyclopaedia. . . as it could pos-sibly be" (p. 413). Still, Walzer'svery characterizationof the Virtuous City as a "Summa Philosophiae"prevented him from attempting to see what theme oraspect of political philosophy it deals with or, to useal-Farabi's favorite expression (see, for instance, Phi-losophy of Plato, 3, 11. 1ff.), what "part" of politicalphilosophy the work means to set forth and the "rankof order" of that part in the discipline to which itbelongs.In order to decide which of al-FarabT'sworks is thelast and most mature, assuming the two characteriza-tions need to go together, one has to correlate theworks with his career as writer. Yet there are seriousdifficulties with most of the information about al-FarabT's ife. Much of it surfaces for the first timeonly three centuries after his death, and one does notknow to what extent it is genuine, when and in whatcontext it originated, who transmitted it, and whattransformation it may have undergone in the processof transmission. It must therefore be treated withcircumspection rather than embroidered. For instance,there is no basis for the supposition that al-FarabTlived in Damascus at any time prior to his departurefrom Baghdad in 330 A.H./A.D. 942. Therefore, even ifone were to credit any of the stories told about him ashaving taken place in Damascus, such as Ibn AbiUsaybi'a's fanciful tale that al-FarabT worked as agardener or as guard in a garden, one should not add"presumably before he settled down in Baghdad"(pp. 3-4, emphasis added), a presumption that flies inthe face of everything known about his family's originin Central Asia and his father's connection with theSamanids, namely, that he came to settle in Baghdadfrom the east rather than from Damascus. Anotherpiece of information about him is that he used to wearbrown SiifTgarb. To deduce from this that he was oneof those whom we nowadays call "militant intellec-tuals" is, again, to interpret his lifework in a mannernot borne out by what is known for certain abouthim. The temptation to engage in "more or less likelyguesses of this kind"(p. 4) presumes, as we shall see, afar closer relation between al-Farabi's political phi-



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MAHDI: Al-FdrdbT's Imperfect State 695losophy and actual political and religious conditionsthan is consonant with his writings, including theVirtuous City.Finally, there is a certain ambiguity in what Walzerthought about the subject matter of the Virtuous Cityand al-FarabT's intention in writing it that colorsmuch of what he says in describing the book's placeamong al-Farabli'swritings in general and his politicalwritings in particular, the audience for which it waswritten, its content, its Greek sources, and its Islamiccontext. Although he makes a number of sensibleremarks about many of these subjects, it is difficult toevaluate any of them before determining what thebook is about. Walzer's view that the book is aSumma Philosophiae led him to answer this questionin the most general of terms, such as considering it"the product of an Islamic philosopher of the tenthcentury." This, in turn, prompts him to describe al-Farabl's intention in writing it as giving "a new...answer to the intellectual as well as the religious andpolitical questions of his century" and to suggest thatthe audience to whom the book was addressed, "theArabic-speaking Muslim public of his own day,"consisted of "sophisticated readers" (p. 6). When hecomes to list the main contents of the work, hediscloses that these statements mean the Virtuous Cityis neither a translation of a Greek original, nor anadaptation, nor a teaching manual. He now sees thebook's "Islamic purpose" and "its real significance"(p. 6). The work is not confined to "theoretical phi-losophy, i.e., to metaphysics and natural science," norto "man considered in isolation." Indeed, "the averagelate Greek student of philosophy .., would presum-ably have been shocked" to find that more than one-third of it is devoted to a description of the "structureof human society as it ought to be." This "interest in'political philosophy'," this "rather uncommon em-phasis on 'politics'," this "remarkable revival in theMuslim world of Plato's message of the philosopher-king" (p. 8), and this "admirable adaptation of Pla-tonic truth to the realities of the Muslim world" (p. 9)need to be understood. For a brief moment, Walzertakes "a first cursory glance at the book" and dis-covers some strange things. Its approach to the so-called theoretical sciences is neither complete norexhaustive and its emphasis is on "justice"and "hier-archic structure" in the world of nature. There is a"key passage" that demands that human action followthe principles established "outside" the human sphere(pp. 8-9).Instead of pursuing any of these puzzling questions,Walzer reformulates his earlier description of the

work as a Summa Philosophiae. It is now seen as awork in which al-Farabl appends to the account ofmetaphysics, nature, and man a "political section" or"'political' chapters" based on an explanation ofPlato's Republic, and in doing this he is said to havebeen continuing the tradition of "'political' Platon-ism," which may have been "rather obsolete" incertain branches of the Neoplatonic movement, but"not defunct" in late antiquity (pp. 4, 8, 9-10). "Moralphilosophy and political science as well, from Chap-ter 15 onward-are from now on being added totheoretical philosophy" (p. 408, emphasis added)."Politics," "political," and "political philosophy" typi-cally occur within quotation marks. Political science,unlike any other science, theoretical or practical,seems to disturb the sensibility of a modern student ofGreek and Islamic philosophy. One must wait for thecommentary to come across the phrase "this mainly'political' work" (p. 333). Perhaps political science orpolitical philosophy has become "rather obsolete"again today, and Walzer does not wish to confuse itwith real politics. Whatever the reason, he showsgreat resistance to accepting the notion that this worktreats one discipline and one discipline only, namely,what al-FarabTcalls political science and political phi-losophy; indeed, it treats only one of the subjectmatters covered by that discipline. To the innocentreader all this may appear to be clearly stated by al-FarabT n the full title of the book: "The Principles ofthe Opinions of the Citizens of the Virtuous City."But "virtue," like "city," has lost much of its shine; itno longer signifies excellence and what is best; mod-ern embarrassment or incomprehension induces aless shocking but basically misleading reformulation:hence, "The Perfect State."This observation could have raised a number ofinteresting questions regarding the precise subjectmatter of the Virtuous City. What is the differencebetween the "principles" of the opinions and theparticular opinions prescribed for the citizens of acity, especially a virtuous city? What does the lawgiverwho prescribes such opinions need to take into ac-count in formulating particular opinions for the citi-zens of his city? What does the lawgiver need toprescribe for the citizens in addition to opinionswhose principles are stated in this book, and whereare these other things to be found in al-FarabT'spolitical writings? (Consider, for instance, al-Farabi'sBook of Religion and Avicenna's Healing: Meta-physics, bk. 10.) What other topics does politicalscience or political philosophy deal with according toal-Farabi? Why is it that the opinions of the citizens



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696 Journal of the American Oriental Society 110.4 (1990)of the virtuous city need to cover views about "theo-retical" things (indeed, why is it that views abouttheoretical things appear to be more important, andare therefore treated more extensively, than opinionsabout practical things), and yet such terms as "meta-physics" and "natural science" are absent from thetext of the Virtuous City? Why are there no citationsof authorities in this work or even cross references toal-Farabi's other works? Why does it not presentphilosophic arguments for the principles of the opin-ions stated in it? What justification does al-Farabiprovide for turning a new page in the history ofIslamic philosophy and placing a rather obsolete, ifnot defunct, political philosophy in center stage?These questions are obviously not answered by saying'since man . . . cannot live in isolation and cannotfind fulfilment except as a member of society, hismain concern ought to be to strive for the perfectstate.... That ought to be the supreme aim of phi-losophical thought" (p. 9). For almost all men and allphilosophers admit the premise without admitting theconclusion. Instead of offering the reader a discussionof the issues stated in the book he is editing, translat-ing, and commenting on, and trying to develop someanswers to the questions raised by them, Walzerwanders into the treacherous fields of source criticismand contextual analysis. The primary subject matterof the book, political philosophy, is thus abandonedand the reader forced to consider side issues thatcould very well have waited until the main subjectmatter of the work had been elucidated.

3. THE GREEKTRADITIONStudents of the early period of Islamic philosophyare faced with a puzzling discontinuity between thephilosophic traditions presented by al-Kind! and al-RazT, on the one hand, and al-FarabT and whatbecame the dominant tradition after him, on theother. Difficult and controversial as the attempts toclarify the Greek background of the philosophicthought of al-KindT and al-Razl are, they seem tomeet with far greater success than the attempts tounderstand the relation between what is known aboutthe character of the Greek philosophic tradition dur-ing the fifth and sixth centuries and the character ofal-FarabT's writings four centuries later. Al-FarabTwas eager to present himself as a disciple of theancients, more particularly, as a thinker in a traditionthat went back to Roman times and had moved fromAlexandria to Antioch, Harran, Marv, and finally toBaghdad. But his statements on this subject seem

intended to establish his claim as a legitimate suc-cessor to, and authorized teacher of the writings of,Plato and Aristotle and a competent -interpreter oftheir thought in the light of later philosophic andscientific developments, rather than a follower of anyparticular fifth- or sixth-century Alexandrian philos-opher. This is especially true of his interest in politicalphilosophy and the manner in which it dominates hisown writings as distinguished from his commentaries.Nothing in this respect connects him with any knownfifth- or sixth-century Greek philosopher. One needsto go as far back as Cicero (whose works were nottranslated into Arabic) and the Middle Platonists (ofwhose writings on political philosophy not a greatdeal has survived or can be shown to have beentranslated into Arabic) almost a millennium earlier tofind a comparable interest in political philosophy.This being the case, it is relatively easy to spin outvarious hypotheses about al-Farabl's sources and back-ground. There is the rise of Islam and the newreligious and political context. There is the continuitypresented by the extraordinary translation movementinto Arabic of the classics of Greek philosophy andthe Greek commentaries on them. There is the possi-bility of the persistence of Greek and Syriac schooltraditions so that what was written down and whatwas taught orally to advanced students may not havebeen the same. However, one is still faced with theformidable contrast between the "higher mysteries"(see, for instance, Dodds 1963:xxii-xxiii; 1964: 283ff.)pursued by the Greek philosophers since the thirdcentury (in Athens as well as in Alexandria) and al-Farabl's pursuit of political philosophy or of thequestion of the relation between philosophy and thecity.Walzer's quest for the "sources" (in the plural) andthe "source" (in the singular) covers the major partof his commentary. It is not easy to determine howand when the second theme, the contextual analysis,emerged and developed alongside -the quest for thesources and the source. It is also not clear howthe two approaches complement or supplement oneanother, or why on occasion the one is suspended andthe other introduced. The contextual analysis in thecommentary is based largely on a few "terms" pre-sumed to be Islamic or used in a particularlysectariansense, a presumption, as will be shown below (sec. 4),based on rather superficial impressions. So the questfor the sources and the source-outmoded and evenamusing, given the length to which it is carriedremains the dominant approach and the one in needof closer attention, though one needs to keep remind-



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MAHDI: Al-Fdrdbi's Imperfect State 697ing oneself that a second approach lurks in the wings.(Between them, the two approaches produce a mostnovel view of the activity of philosophy.) By the timeWalzer attempted to summarize in his introductionthe results of his "quest for the identity" of al-Farabl's"Greek authorities," or "putative Greek 'source'," or"Greek predecessor," it must have already becomeclear to him that, while one can speculate endlesslyabout the subject, very little could be said withcertainty that was not public knowledge already, viz,that al-Farabl's authorities, sources, and predecessorsare the ones cited by al-Farabl explicitly and repeat-edly in his own works. These, however, are not thesources Walzer was seeking. He was, rather, in questof hidden Greek sources no one knows anythingabout and of works that have survived neither inGreek nor in Arabic. Walzer concluded that thisquest, in which he spent about two decades, "does notyield absolutely certain results"(p. 9).This statement does not surprise students of al-FarabTwho are aware of his account of, and com-mentaries on, the works of Plato and Aristotle as wellas the works of numerous later Greek philosophersand scientists and commentators such as Alexander ofAphrodisias, Porphyry, and Plotinus. One would havethought that the first order of business was to deter-mine which of these works was "used"in the VirtuousCity and which part or parts of the work still remainin need of a search for an authority, source, orpredecessor. (One might have found it useful as wellto ask why al-FarabTwould wish to copy the work orworks of some unknown author instead of the authorshe does acknowledge as his authorities; why he wouldwish to go to Middle Platonist or other unknown"predecessors," about whom so very little is known,when he was otherwise openly engaged in the recep-tion and transmission of a learned tradition.) For itwould seem unwise to go aimlessly hunting for sourceswithout first deciding what one does and what onedoes not have a source for. Available to al-FarabTwere Plato's Republic, Statesman, Timaeus, and Laws,as well as nearly all of Aristotle's works, with thepossible exception of the Politics. Aristotle's criti-cisms of some of the views expressed in Plato's Repub-lic were known to commentators such as Proclus,through whom they might have been known to theArabs even in the absence of the text of the Politics.The first questions to be asked, then, should havebeen how the Virtuous City is related to such worksas were not only available to al-Farabi but alsoknown to have been studied and commented on byhim (in the case of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, al-

FarabT's ommentary became notorious for the view itexpressed about survival after death), whether it agreesor disagrees with the doctrines contained in them, andthe grounds of disagreement if any. Al-FarabT s notusually reticent about his sources. If he is silent aboutthem in the Virtuous City, there must be a reason. Itcould mean that this work's purpose, intended audi-ence, and point of view do not require mentioning thesources or reference to the Greek authorities men-tioned in many of his other works. Walzer, it must beadded, does not take a hard line on the question ofthe availability of complete Arabic translations ofmany Greek works, such as Plato's Republic andLaws, which other scholars think were available onlyin summary form. It is reasonable to assume that al-FarabTdoes not mention all his Greek authorities orall the Greek works he utilized, even in the works inwhich he does mention Greek authorities, and onemight ask to what extent one needs to supplement theauthorities he does mention with authorities or sourceshe could have used but for one reason or another doesnot mention. These works are of two sorts: first,works generally admitted to have been translatedfrom Greek into Arabic that could have been avail-able to him and are available to us in their Arabictranslations, their Greek originals, or both; second,works known to have been translated from Greek intoArabic and that could therefore have been availableto al-Farabl, but have not survived either in theirArabic translations or in their Greek originals, aboutwhich one could speculate with some profit on thebasis of what one knows about their authors, surviv-ing fragments in Greek or Arabic, and so forth.Speculative as the conclusions of this quest mighthave been, one could at least have presented thefollowing argument in justifying it: having made theattempt to isolate the Greek authorities or sources ofthis work on the basis of writings al-FarabTsays hehad access to, or writings on which he is known tohave commented, there remain a number of questions,or parts of the Virtuous City, that cannot be ac-counted for; let us see, therefore, whether other Greekwritings available to al-FarabTand to us, or availableto al-FarabT and about which we know something,can account for these remaining questions or parts.But, given the sources that were available to, and usedby, al-Farabl, and are sufficient to explain most if notall of the Virtuous City, was all this effort needed tolocate sources for whose existence or even availabilityto al-FarabT here is hardly any evidence?One could have then proceeded to ask why al-FarabT hose this particularform and structurefor his



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698 Journal of the American Oriental Society 110.4 (1990)work. Why, for example, does he begin with opinionsabout God and the higher world? Why does he reversePlato's procedure in the Republic and make thediscussion of the excellent city precede rather thanfollow the discussion of justice? Other interestingpolitical questions would then emerge also. For in-stance, what about the radical communal arrange-ments in the Republic regarding women and childrenand community of property, which Aristotle hadfound particularly objectionable? Why is al-FarabTsilent about them? Is it due to his having adoptedAristotle's criticisms of Plato's position on these is-sues? But then how would his adherence to Aristotleon these issues accord with his adherence to thePlatonic view of the full equality of men and women?Starting with such questions, one could have pro-ceeded to give an account of the long tradition ofdiscussions on these issues (including, for instance,Galen's modification of the complete community ofwomen as reported in Averroes' Commentary onPlato's Republic, 56, 11.24ff.) as a backdrop againstwhich one might have been able to gain some under-standing of al-Farabl's position.None of this, however, seems to have commendeditself to Walzer in his quest to ascertain al-Farabl'sGreek source. For a reason that must have beenultimately founded on a general view of how medievalphilosophers worked and the character of what theydid and said, he distrusted the information providedby al-Farabl about his authorities and sources andwas not satisfied with the view that al-FarabTcouldhave learned what he states in the Virtuous City fromthe authorities he acknowledges having studied andfollowed. Walzer was after bigger game: "absolutelycertain results" about al-FarabT's Greek sources orsource in the form of the particular Greek book orbooks, presumably in Arabic translation, that al-Farabliwas thinking about, looking at, or copying ashe wrote the Virtuous City. Thus the aim of the partof the quest that did not lead to absolutely certainresultswas not al-FarabT'sGreek authorities or sourcesin general, nor the Greek tradition al-Farabli openlysays he studied and is transmitting, but a "specialauthority" and a particularGreek "author."Indeed, ina number of cases the antecedents of pronouns usedby Walzer can be understood as referring either to al-Farabli, the author of the Virtuous City, or to apresumed Greek author of a supposed Greek original(pp. 334, 343, 365, 366, and the antecedent of "It" inthe last line of p. 9).Walzer could identify neither work nor author. Yethis commentary is full of discourses about what the

work he had hoped to find contained (it contained, ofcourse, almost everything contained in the VirtuousCity), did not contain (it did not contain, for instance,the "Islamic" terms found in the Virtuous City), andabout who its author was and when he lived (he lived"in all probability" at "the time of Justinian, i.e. in theearly sixth century"). If Walzer did not succeed inlaying his hand on a sixth-century Greek source, thatwas because we do not possess much of the Greekliterature available to the Arabs, and "unfortunately"because "the intermediate stages -in the more thanthree hundred years between the 'source' and al-Farabi are unknown" (pp. 9-10).It is important to keep in mind that when Walzerspeaks of al-Farabi's "authority,""source," and "pre-decessor," he does not mean what those engaged inthe study of the philosophic tradition, ancient, medi-eval, or modern, generally understand by these expres-sions-that a later philosopher reads about, studies,reflects upon, learns from, modifies, develops, andhands down, his predecessor's thought, either with orwithout fully acknowledging his debt to him. Hemeans, rather, that the Virtuous City is by and large acollection of foreign (Greek) passages textually copiedfrom a sixth-century Greek work, presumed to havebeen available to al-Farabi in Arabic translation.Walzer's task as scholar was conceived primarily asone of tracing these foreign passages to their rightfulGreek author. It is this curious quest that does notseem to yield absolutely certain results. The sixth-century "source" must-have in turn been copied froman earlier source or sources that go back to the firstand second centuries, presumably because that iswhen political Platonism existed among the MiddlePlatonists. It is in this sense that al-FarabT s said tobase the Virtuous City upon different layers of Greekthought, which Walzer sees it as his task to analyze.Then, the sixth-century "source"was recopied duringthe four centuries between the time it itself was copiedand sometime toward the middle of the tenth centurywhen al-FarabTcame across the copy from which hecopied all that he copied. All the intermediary copiesbetween the first- or second-century and the sixth-century "source" and all the intermediary copies be-tween the sixth-century "source" and al-FarabT arelost as well. It is surprising, nevertheless, that Walzer'sencyclopedic knowledge of the Greek sources couldnot lead him to a single source in the sense in whichhe understood "source," a text copied or followed.Given the paucity of evidence-given the total lack ofit, in fact-one must wonder why a serious scholarwould engage in such a quest, especially since it yields



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MAHDI: Al-FdrdbT'sImperfect State 699little of anything that is new or interesting about theGreek tradition or about al-Farabl's Virtuous City-nothing, that is, that cannot be learned from studyingthe Virtuous City along with Plato's Republic andLaws, and the writings of Aristotle and those of theMiddle Platonists and Neoplatonists, to which it iscertain that al-FarabT had access. Walzer tried toapply the generally accepted rules of the source-hunting game in a thoroughgoing manner. Philoso-phers, it seems, do not engage in independent andcritical study of their authorities, and none of themappears able to think of the same simple idea in-dependently. The result is a commentary that lookslike a collection of disjointed notes and that dis-members the Virtuous City, replacing what was meantto be a living tree with a heap of shavings.Walzer's training as a classical philologist and tex-tual critic must at some point have overwhelmed hiscommon sense and driven him to imagine that thequest for al-Farab'is Greek authorities should take theform of reconstructing a lost sixth-century Greek text.He never abandoned this view despite the astonishinglengths to which he had to go to suggest even themost meager results. The results may not have beenabsolutely certain, but there is no intimation thatthere could be anything wrong with the quest itself: toattempt to reconstruct an imagined Greek text, whileclaiming to interpret an Arabic philosophic work. Noris there any recognition that there may have beensomething slightly odd, even weird, about the initialassumptions on which philology and textual criticismbase this extension of the territory that is legitimatelytheirs. So long as this approach controlled Walzer'squest, the model that guided his story of the "source"of al-FarabT's Virtuous City was the one philologyand textual criticism use to account for the manner inwhich a text travels through time. It is described byMaas:

A river comes from an inaccessible source underthe peak of a high mountain. It divides underground. . . and finally flows onward in visible form over-ground. The water from its source onwards is of ever-changing but fine and purecolours. In its subterraneancourse it flows past several places at which colouringmatters from time to time dissolve into the water; thesame thing happens every time the stream divides andevery time it comes to the surface in a spring. Everyinflux changes the colour of a certain part of thestream, and this part keeps the colour permanently;only very slight colour changes are eliminated bynatural processes. The distinction between the dyed

water and the originalremainsalwaysvisible to theeye, but only occasionallyn the sense that theeye atoncerecognizes colour as falsifiedby influxes; ftenonly in the sense that the differencebetweenthecolours of the varioussprings s discernible.On theotherhand, he falsified lements an oftenbedetectedandtheoriginal olourrestoredbychemicalmethods;at other times this method fails. The objectof theinvestigation s to test thegenuineness f the colourson theevidenceof thesprings. Maas1958: 0)

Using this model, Walzerengaged in a two-prongedinquiry into the Virtuous City. The first was thesearch for the "original" of the book as a whole, aquest which he must have finally recognized wasleading nowhere with respect to locating an authoranyone knows anything about or a book for whoseexistence there is evidence other than that presumablydrawn from al-Farabrs Virtuous City. But that needno more discourage one from assuming the existenceof the presumed author and the reality of the pre-sumed Greek work than from reconstructing thatwork's contents and discoursing on its particularfeatures. The second was to dissolve the Virtuous Cityinto smaller and smaller elements and attempt to tracethem, or as many as could be traced, to their respec-tive "sources." For the most part, the comments andnotes in the commentary follow the second line ofinquiry, but it is clear that the author's heart was seton finding the original for the whole book, or at leastfor a substantial part of it. He appears to have beenthinking that, somehow, the more individual items hecould trace to their presumed sources, the more hecould allow himself to assume that a common proto-type, authority, author, or text was being copied orfollowed by al-Farabl; thus he uses the word "author"to designate not al-Farabl but the imagined sixth-century Greek author. Having chopped the work intowords, phrases, sentences, and passages, Walzer wenton to seek their Greek sources, with a rate of successinversely proportional to the size of the item inquestion. One must wonder at the value of thesemeager results, achieved as they are at the expense ofthe progressive removal of the context and sense ofthe work as a whole. One needs to wonder alsowhether the presumed connections thus establishedmean anything at all. For it is a well-known rule inthe source-hunting game that if you pull a philosophicwork to bits "you can usually find for each bit, if notanything that can strictly be called a 'source', at anyrate some more or less closely related model orantecedent or stimulus"(Dodds 1973: 129). The atom-



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700 Journal of the American Oriental Society 110.4 (1990)izing method, even were it to lead to an occasionalassociation between al-Farabl's statement and that ofa presumed source, in no way supports the view thatal-FarabT was following or copying a source or twowhen writing the Virtuous City.

There is the further difficulty that most of theassociations made between such elements and theirpresumed sources remain problematical as well. Forinstance, there is a long list of vocabulary items in thecommentary where Walzer's English rendering of anArabic term in the Virtuous City is equated with aGreek term, and occasionally with a Latin term aswell (see the group on pp. 337ff., for example). Nowthese are for the most part terms that have manysenses in each of these languages. There is usually noindication who used the Greek or Latin term, in whatwork, or in what context, even though the particularsense of each term depends very much on the authorusing it, the work in which it is used, and theparticular context in which it is used in that work.The equal sign in these cases means nothing apartfrom the fact that a certain Arabic term happened toremind Walzer, correctly or incorrectly, of some Greekor Latin term. It is true that, in the case of mostphrases, sentences, or passages, the reader is providedwith a reference to a Greek source or sources. Yet thisis normally not of much help either. One reads theArabic and the presumed Greek source only to bebaffled at what Walzer had in mind and to wonderwhy he did not elucidate what he thought the connec-tion might have been between what al-FarabT issaying and what the presumed source says. Then thereare those cases where something said by al-FarabT"bringsto [Walzer's]mind"or "recalls"something elsesaid by some Greek author, or he describes the"Greek tradition which he [al-FarabT]seems to con-tinue" (see, for instance, pp. 338, 339, 420). In most ofthese cases one learns very little about the substanceeither of al-Farabrs statement or of its presumedGreek source.But the main difficulty is that once a work like theVirtuous City has been cut up into smaller andsmaller elements, elements as small as single words, ittakes little to see loose parallelisms between what al-FarabTsays and what many earlier philosophers andwriters of philosophic works may have said, especiallyif one makes allowances for the passage of manycenturies, translation from one language to another(sometimes through the intermediary of yet a thirdlanguage), and different religious and cultural con-texts. What is so surprising, or even interesting, aboutsuch parallelisms between what al-FdrdbTsays and

what his acknowledged authorities, or those authorsin the tradition within which he was working andthinking, said? And where does one stop when look-ing for sources and prototypes? Is there an "original"source of a philosophic work similar to the originalsource of a river-assuming, that is, that one knowsthe "original" source of a river? Finally, what exactlyis one supposed to learn from so many brief referencesto presumed sources? That one should understandwhat al-Farabli is saying against the background ofwhat was said by the Greek source? And what doesthis mean? Perhaps it means something to the classi-cist interested in lost Greek authors and works, inwhich case one may wish him good hunting. But itdoes very little to make sense of al-Farabl's VirtuousCity, its structure, its intention, its relation to al-FarabT's ther political writings, or its place within hiswritings in general. It succeeds only in turning thereader's attention away from the work before him tothe analysis of several layers of Greek thought whoserelevance to the task at hand is rarely evident. In whatis called a "commentary"-the most substantial partof Walzer's book-there is in fact little commentaryon the substance of what al-Farab! says, and hardlyany serious interest in understanding what he issaying. The reader's attention is constantly drawn toquestions of Greek sources and historical context,questions that would have been of some interest hadthey led to anything more substantial than an unlikelygenesis.

For instance, in contrast to numerous Neoplatonicwriters of late antiquity, al-FarabT presents in theVirtuous City and in a parallel work, the PoliticalRegime, a simplified structure of the higher world.Walzer comments on this aspect of the work: "Itcannot be decided, in my view, whether the simplifiedstructure of the higher world which we find in this andin other similar works of al-FarabT s due to him or toa Greek predecessor" (p. 12). The ground for suspend-ing judgment is the failure to locate a Greek predeces-sor. But in the absence of an "original" predecessor,one must be consistent and suspend judgment about"the simplified structure" as having been due to thepresumed Greek predecessor, and his Greek predeces-sor, and so on. One may ask what is wrong aboutsuspending judgment in this or any other case inwhich a definite "original" has not been located. Isthis not more "scientific"than deciding that it was dueeither to al-FarabTor to his presumed Greek prede-cessor? Yet to pose the question this way is to remainwithin the charmed circle of the source-hunters, in astate of uncertainty whether this simplified structureis



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MAHDI: Al-FdrdbT'sImperfect State 701nothing more than a foreign passage from a presumedGreek predecessor which al-Farablihappened to comeacross, or something that was of his own making. Wecongratulate ourselves for a scientific attitude thatenables us to suspend judgment rather than rush intopremature decision. In the unlikely event, however,that the simplified structure was due to al-Farabl, thiswill never be known. For how or when can one everbe "absolutely certain" that one has exhausted all-possible Greek predecessors when the works of somany of them have been irretrievably lost? In themeantime we fail to ask the necessary questions acommentator is under some obligation to ask. Whydid al-FarabT present a simplified structure of thehigher world in this book and in the parallel work, thePolitical Regime? Was it perhaps because he thoughtthe citizens of his virtuous city needed a view of thehigher world more in harmony with the conclusionsof astronomical theories such as those of Ptolemy? inharmony with the prevailing religion? or in harmonywith their view of the political structure under whichthey are to live? Such questions remain in suspense-indeed, unanswered-as long as the primary interestin al-FarabT'swork is whether a certain idea was dueto him or to some Greek predecessor. The source-hunter's argument here, as everywhere else it is em-ployed, seems to absolve the commentator of havingto wonder about the one thing the author and hisreaders did care about: the subject matter of the book.A second useful example is al-Farabl's discussion ofthe world state. In this case Walzer is sure that it wasdue to the Greek predecessor; for, according to Wal-zer, this notion assumes the Roman Empire. But whyshould this be the case? Why could the universalclaims of Christianity and Islam and their empires notserve as the historical background, if a historicalbackground is deemed necessary for the notion of aworld state? It is evident that Walzer was not askinghimself in this case whether one needs at all to go asfar back as the Roman Empire to explain the presenceof the notion of the world state in al-Farabl. Thequestion uppermost in his mind seems rather to havebeen: how far back could the "source" of this notionbe traced? Assuming that no one can think of theworld state without there having existed a world state,assuming that the Roman Empire was a world state ofthe type al-Farabi is thinking of, and assuming thatal-FarabT could not independently have thought ofthe world state even after the success of the universalclaims of Christianity and Islam and the existence ofan empire that covered a wider area than the RomanEmpire and was much closer to al-FarabT's own

time-Walzer can do no better than direct the reader'sattention to some hypothetical predecessor who issupposed to have lived a millennium before al-FarabT.This in turn is enough to absolve him of the responsi-bility to reflect on what al-Farabl himself is sayingand why. Strangely enough, it absolves him of theresponsibility of even asking whether al-Farabi's no-tion of the world state has anything to do with theRoman Empire, or with the Christian and Islamicempires for that matter, and where the differences lie.A third example must suffice. Al-FarabTdoes notidentify the divine mind called the Active Intellectwith God and thus does not follow the traditionemanating from Alexander of Aphrodisias, the greatcommentator on Aristotle. Walzerengages in a compli-cated quest for the "source"of this view:

I suppose the tradition which al-Farabl will havechosento accept-or the newstandwhichhe himselfmay have taken-is comparableo the attitude o beobserved n Ps. Alexander's ommentaryon booksE-N of Aristotle'sMetaphysics,whereAlexander'sideas are linked, indeedequated,with neo-Platonicconcepts.Al-Farabimayhavefolloweda similar ateGreektraditionwhichhappensnot to be preservedelsewhere.Al-Farabihimselfpointsout, in his essayDe intellectu, hathis conceptionof the DivineMindoccursin book Lambdaof Aristotle'sMetaphysics.He does not mention by name any of the Greekauthoritieshe followed,either in the Ard' [the Vir-tuous City] or in the K al-Siyasa [the PoliticalRegime]. (pp. 343-44)

Then he tries to get closer to the Greek "predecessor"through Marinus:Marinusof Sichem, hebiographer f Proclus,whomhe succeededas head of the PlatonicAcademyafterA.D. 485, is creditedwitha descriptionof the ActiveIntellectwhich is somewhatakinto al-Farabl'sdoc-trine.... I make bold to say that a Greek expressionfor an inferiordegreeof divinity, ike Marinus'dai-monion or angelikon, does not fit too badly al-Farabl's enth ntellect.. althoughMarinuswill mostlikely not have held exactly the same view as al-FarabT'sredecessor.p. 404)

Because the Greek "predecessor" n question is said topresuppose "some view such as that put forward,perhaps for the first time, by Marinus," he is con-strued to have lived in the sixth century. "There canthus, in my view, be no doubt that the proximate



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702 Journal of the American Oriental Society 110.4 (1990)common source of Chapters 10-15 [of the VirtuousCity] is to be found in a Greek work of the sixthcentury" (p. 405; see also p. 440). All this in order toexplain why al-Fdrabl does not identify the divinemind called the Active Intellect with God. NowMarinus may or may not have been the father ofsome such view about the divine mind, called theActive Intellect, and he may or may not have been the"source" of al-FardbT'snot identifying it with God.Yet the transition from the possible "source" of thisparticular notion to the global, presumed predecessorand his work that presumably served as a model foral-FarabT can in no way be supported by what isknown about Marinus or his doctrines.Source-hunting is not the innocent game it appearsto be. It tends to turn the commentator away from hisprimary task of analyzing and explaining the work'sstructure, method, problems, and point of view. Ex-cessive concern with source-hunting, especially whenit is so uncertain as to require many levels of hypo-thetical construction, is liable to distract the commen-tator's attention from even the salient characteristicsof the work on which he is supposed to be comment-ing. One of the striking opinions presented in theVirtuous City, for example, is that there are "firstintelligibles" of morality and the practical arts andthat these are first principles common to all (pp. 202-4). This view, which underlies such natural law doc-trines as are found in Aquinas, receives little attentionin the commentary, and the comment that is made("good and bad are useful common notions in prac-tical, moral philosophy" [p. 407]) has nothing to dowith the significance of what is being said by al-FarabT.Then, the "first intelligibles"of the theoreticalsciences, which do receive some attention, occasion astatement that causes one to wonder: "Undemon-strable starting points of theoretical sciences," we aretold, "are all the subjects discussed in the precedingchapters 1-12 of al-Farabl's book: Heaven and FirstCause are specially mentioned here"(p. 407, emphasisadded). That al-Farabl does not demonstrate any ofthe views presented in the Virtuous City is easy to see,and this applies to chapters 1-12. But the subjectsdiscussed in these chapters are not the "startingpointsof theoretical sciences." They are the subjects of thetheoretical sciences, which cannot be said to be simplyundemonstrable. This confusion is not removed bythe subsequent remarks that "al-Farabi restricts him-self to informing the reader of the results of philo-sophical discussions without providing any reasoneddemonstration" (p. 457), or that "there are certainresults of philosophical research of which all the

citizens of the perfect state must be aware" (p. 472).As he rewrites the work he is commenting on, Walzertends to render al-Farabl's statements less precise. If,for instance, al-Farb-i says that, with respect to thepowers of sense perception, representation, and rea-son, the human male and female "do not differ"(Walzer'sown translation of p. 196, 1. 5 at p. 197, 1.6),the commentary paraphrases "there is no noticeabledifference" and goes on to wonder whether this sug-gests the inference "that al-Farabl shared Plato's viewthat women too could be philosophers and rulers"(pp. 400-401; see also below, sec. 5).Walzer must have convinced himself not only thatsource-hunting was a worthier occupation than reflec-tion on the Virtuous City itself, but that it was alsonot really worth seeking help from al-Fardbl's otherwritings for the purpose of comparison, clarification,or placing the Virtuous City within the broadercontext of the author's concern with political phi-losophy. During the two decades in which Walzerwasworking on the Virtuous City, a number of al-Farabl's political works became available for the firsttime in published form (he made little use, in the com-mentary, of al-FarabT'sworks in manuscript form).These are listed in the bibliography appended to theVirtuous City, and one has the impression that Walzerhad some recourse to them for the commentary. Mostof the references to them are brief, consisting largelyof page numbers, without any indication how theydiffer from one another in treating the same subjectmatter. In particular, Walzer seemed not to haverealized that the Virtuous City cannot be interpretedwithout first understanding al-Farabl's account ofpolitical science as a whole, its parts and the relation-ship among them, which of his works on politicalphilosophy treat what part or parts, and the differentpoints of view from which a certain part is presentedin parallel works such as the Virtuous City and thePolitical Regime. Thus, having noted that in theAttainment of Happiness al-Farabl refers explicitly toPlato's Republic and Timaeus while he "does notmention by name any of the Greek authorities hefollowed" either in the Virtuous City or in the PoliticalRegime, Walzer concludes that "to produce the Greekevidence in detail would not have been relevant to thepurpose of these works" (p. 344), but ignores thatsuch a judgment presupposes a clear and coherentaccount of the "purpose" of each of the works-anaccount nowhere to be found in the commentary. It isalso impossible to say anything intelligent about theintended audience of the Virtuous City without firstfinding out whether and how al-FarabT's writings



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MAHDI: Al-FdrdbT'sImperfect State 703differ in subject matter, style, and complexity; whateach assumes as preparation on the part of the reader;and what particular aspect or stage of a discipline it ismeant to deal with. Not having made an effort to dealadequately with this question, Walzer, when in themood to wonder about the intended audience of theVirtuous City (for some reason he never speaks aboutthe intended audience of the work of al-Farabi's"Greek predecessor" or "author'), can form only thehaziest notion and say the most innocuous, albeitsometimes contradictory, things about it. The book is"writtenby a philosopher qua philosopher"; al-FarabTis "by no means talking down to the unsophisticatedcommon man"; the book "is not intended specificallyfor professional students of philosophy in the techni-cal sense of the word";al-Farabli"composed a numberof books with a comparatively wide appeal to thegeneral public of his time" (p. 5). "The sophisticatedreaders to whom the book is addressed are able tounderstand philosophy without practicing it them-selves and are willing to accept as true the results ofphilosophical discussion without questioning funda-mentals and without being acquainted with the waysand proofs which lead to them. They are meant to beat least familiar with basic philosophical concepts. Wehave to assume-I think rightly-that such a readingpublic existed in al-Farabi's days" (p. 6). Al-Farabi's"book can be understood by every reader of Arabic"(p. 7). "The term belongs to the basic vocabularywhich al-FdrabTdoes not care to explain in this book"(p. 341). "In my view al-FarabTwants the reader toconnect these various chapters. A more explicit refer-ence would certainly have made it easier to understandhis intentions immediately. But al-Farabi's ability as awriter of books, has its shortcomings-in this book aselsewhere-even assuming that he addresses a verysophisticated audience"(p. 417).One of the reasons for not making better use of al-Farabi's other political writings to gain some perspec-tive on the Virtuous City is again Walzer's convictionthat these other works, like the Virtuous City, followpresumed Greek predecessorsor models or prototypes.The work On One and Unity, for example, "de-pends ... more immediately, on some late Greek man-ual on unity and plurality," even though it is "al-most completely free from any neo-Platonic features"(p. 339). This is never proved in the case of any par-ticular work. With the passage of time, a work thathad been subjected to the rules of the source-huntinggame with questionable results is later assumed tohave been shown with certainty to have been copiedfrom a Greek model. Slowly, what appears to be a

solid case is developed for the notion that each one ofal-FarabT's writings was copied from a presumedGreek predecessor, author, or prototype, when in factnot a single one of his major writings (as distinctperhaps from some of his lecture notes or the papersfound in his Nachlass) has really been shown to havebeen thus copied. Nevertheless, the general hypothesisis used in support of the notion that the mainquestion to be asked in the case of each of al-FarabT'swritings is how to trace the Greek predecessor orprototype that was being copied or followed. If al-FarabT'sdifferent writings are in any way different,whether in subject matter, style, or doctrine, that mustbe because he was following different Greek predeces-sors or models. This, in turn, absolves the commenta-tor of the responsibility to attempt an overall accountof these writings, to explain whether or how theydiffer, or what the intention is in each case. Nor doesone ask these questions about their respective sources.That, it seems, is not part of the rules of the source-hunting game, especially since one has little to go onregarding the identity of these sources and theirauthors.It must be added in all fairness to Walzer that hedid not invent the rules of the source-hunting game,but was only following a long and respected traditionin classical scholarship. That tradition had alreadybadly harmed major figures of antiquity, such asCicero, whose fate was described by Richard Harderin a moving and graphic picture:

Der PhilosophCicero war noch zu Beginn des 19.Jahrhunderts ine europAischeGrdsse;er galt alsKennerderPhilosophie,alsgrosserSchriftstellerndals grosser Romer. Dann fiel er in die Hande derQuellenforscher,nd zurUckblieb nur ein Schlacht-feld, zerstortwieje ein OrterbittertenKampfes.Undzudem warder Kampsieglos:denn wo sind hierdieSiege,wo gibt es eineerharteteFeststellung,wo eineallgemeinzugestandeneZuweisung, elbst wenn wirder ciceronischenQuellenforschunguf ihr eigenesFeldfolgen? Harder1960:328)There are many places in the commentary where,on a particular point, one learns something usefulfrom Walzer's account of the Greek tradition and itsdevelopment from Plato or Aristotle through MiddlePlatonism and Neoplatonism down to the sixth cen-tury (see, for instance, pp. 343ff., 362ff., 472). In hiscommentary on chapter 10 (pp. 384ff.), for example,he considers the question of the order of rank of thesoul's faculties, how some authors in the tradition



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704 Journal of the American Oriental Society 110.4 (1990)make use of it while others do not. Yet one soonbegins to wonder whether one is reading a commen-tary on the entire Greek philosophic tradition or onal-Farabi's Virtuous City, and if the latter, why therelevance of what is being said about the Greektradition to al-Farabli's Virtuous City is not beingexplained, and why the information about the Greektradition and its development is not confined tomatters that throw light on the work the commentaryis meant to elucidate. These questions must be raisedwith particular urgency since the approach Walzerchose to follow not only fails to lead to certain results,but also fails to provide him at any significant point inthe commentary with a firm ground on which tostand. It all seems to reduce to the following (seepp. 404-5, 420): if al-Farabi says X, and X or some-thing like X or something that X recalls or that Xbrings to mind was said in the fifth or sixth century bysome obscure or unknown Greek predecessor, then al-Farabi could not have learned it from Plato orAristotle or anyone else earlier than the presumedGreek predecessor; nor could he have thought of itindependently by reflecting on what the authorities ofthat Greek predecessor had said or written, eventhough their works were available to him and he isknown to have studied them. If, on the other hand, Xis thought to have been a modification of what theGreek predecessor had presumably written, then themodification occurred subsequent to the Greek pre-decessor and before al-Farabl; it could not have beendue to someone who preceded the Greek predecessoror to al-FarabThimself.In all such instances, it is assumed that al-Farabiwas following the practice of a scribe, a copyist whocopies what is before him, while occasionally insertingterms and comments reflecting his personal, political,or religious condition, precisely the kind of thingscribes are apt to do. The task of the philologist-historian is to follow the course of the written copy ofa text through the centuries and show when andwhere the original may have been altered. There isnothing inherently wrong with this procedure whentracing the fate of a real text. Here, however, theoriginal text itself is an assumption. Reviewers (Jolivet1987; Lerner 1987) may wonder what could promptsomeone to engage in a search for a "Greek prede-cessor" when another, more sensible explanation isclose at hand. Yet there is nothing surprising aboutthis approach, once the simile of the copy of a texttraveling like a subterranean river takes possession ofthe researcher'smind. If a later copy presents featuresof an earlier copy, it is assumed that the later copy

was copied from a copy of the earlier one that musthave been available to the copier of the later copy.Walzer's "Greek predecessor" refers not so much to ahuman being as to a written copy of which a latercopy must have been available to al-Farabl. For thisreason Walzer can say that the copy of the Greekpredecessor-the original copied by al-FarablT-has"not yet" been traced. (The Elysian fields are popu-lated by faceless scribes.) This assumption allows thephilologist-historian to move freely across fifteen hun-dred years of a philosophic tradition and deduce fromtraces he finds in a tenth-century book the presence ofinfluences from the entire spectrum of that tradition.All that is needed, in order to assume the existence ofthe work of the Greek predecessor, is that every bit ofwhat al-Farabi says in this book be connected withsomething in the earlier philosophic tradition-if notthe late Athenian, then the late Alexandrian; if noteither, then the Middle Platonic; if not the MiddlePlatonic, then the Stoic or the Epicurean; and soforth. Therefore, that the work al-FarabTwas follow-ing (or rather the particular text or texts he wascopying) does not exist, or that the text he was copy-ing happens to be unknown in Greek or Arabic, doesnot really matter: its traces are present in al-Farabi'sbook. That none of this corresponds to what is other-wise known about al-FarabT as author and thinker,and his access to works known to have been availableto and used by him, seems to raise no doubts in themind of someone under the spell of the model inquestion.One notices with bewilderment the frequency withwhich Walzer was obliged to qualify the references tothe presumed Greek predecessor, author, or proto-type, and to derivations from other Greek authorities:something "appears"to be the case (p. 414); a certainPeripatetic view "may have reached" al-FarabT'spre-sumed Greek predecessor "through an otherwise un-known work by Alexander of Aphrodisias" (p. 419);and it is "more likely to look for al-Farabi's Greekpredecessor among the members of the sixth-centuryschool of Alexandria than to connect him with themore mystically-minded Platonic Academy of Proclusand his successors" (p. 420). Or, "al-Farabi may havefollowed a similar late Greek tradition which happensnot to be preserved elsewhere"(p. 344). Or, again, "al-Fdrabb'sGreek predecessor had thus an appreciationof" (p. 421) what al-FdrabThas an appreciation of inthe Virtuous City. And, finally, "al-Farabi and hispredecessor do not attribute such extraordinary quali-ties to the philosopher" (p. 421); that is, they seem tohave had identical thoughts. It is almost charming to



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MAHDI: Al-FdrdbT'sImperfect State 705see the source-hunting game played with such dedica-tion and pushed to extreme limits. Its failure, whichmust in all honesty be admitted even by Walzer'sadmirers, is a telling lesson to imitators who lack hisencyclopedic knowledge or devotion to this approach.Walzer'scommentary is the best proof that somethingis missing in the Greek tradition that came down toal-Farabl, namely, an overall concern with politicalphilosophy, the central and dominant theme of theVirtuous City. Al-FarabTneeded to go back to thewritings of Plato and Aristotle in order to develop hispolitical philosophy. Walzer'smain difficulty in under-standing the Virtuous City is that he did not followal-FarabT's ead.

4. IMAMI SHICISMThe Ard' [the VirtuousCity] is then to be con-sideredas the productof an Islamicphilosopherofthe tenthcentury,as a book in its own rightwhichal-Farabiwrotefor a specialpurposeof his own andaddressed o the Arabic-readingMuslimpublicof hisown day. It is neither a translation of a Greekoriginal-I mean one of the many original Greekphilosophicalwritingsof late Antiquitywhich weretranslatednto Arabic n the ninthor tenthcenturiesandsubsequentlyost in the laterstagesof ByzantineGreekcivilization-nor an adaptation.... It is not ateachingmanual;nor is it concernedwith impartingantiquariannformationorits ownsake.(p. 6)

It is appropriate to begin the account of Walzer'scontextual analysis with this quotation in order toindicate the manner in which he superimposes acultural and historical interpretation on his quest forthe Greek sources or source of the Virtuous City. Thesubstance of this second-order analysis, however, isthinner and less wide-ranging than the first. It lacksthe support of al-Farabl's own emphasis on his debtto the Greek tradition and cannot benefit from Wal-zer's extensive acquaintance with that tradition or hisdexterity in connecting what he finds in the VirtuousCity with both well-known and obscure Greek sources.One has the impression that the ground has becomeslippery. There is no investigation of al-FarabT'sIs-lamic philosophic sources-al-Farabl does not seemto have a Muslim "predecessor"or to follow earlierMuslim authors or prototypes. And one misses ahistorian's critical sense and ability to control andevaluate medieval and modern historical accounts.The absence of substantial details about al-FarabT'slife has given rise to the fabrication of numerous

anecdotes and fables, a process that started in medi-eval times and has been continued by modern scholars.One of the few events of his life which can be reliedon, because the information about it survives in themargins of manuscripts of the Virtuous City (thesource from which the medieval biographers drew thisinformation), is that, in 330 A.H./A.D. 942, at the ageof seventy, al-Fardbl left Baghdad for Syria andEgypt, where he spent the last decade of his life. Inthe article on al-Farabl in the Encyclopaedia of Islam(1913-1936a, 2:53b), Carra de Vaux described theevent as follows: "He then went to Halab to the courtof the Hamdanid Saif al-Dawla, under whose protec-tion he lived the life of a Siffi. He died . . . in Damas-cus, whither he had accompanied his king on acampaign." I am embarrassed to add that hardly anitem in this account bears historical examination. ToWalzer fell the lot of revising the article in the newedition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam (1960-, 2:778b).Now we read: "For reasons unknown he accepted in330/942 an invitation of the ShTCTHamddnid rulerSayf al-Dawla [q.v.] and lived in his entourage,mainly in Aleppo, together with other men of letters,until his death." Where Walzer got the additionalinformation that there was an invitation by Sayf al-Dawla and that al-Farabi accepted such an invitation,I do not know. Given the widespread notion that theEncyclopaedia of Islam does not disseminate unreli-able historical information, it is not surprising to findW. Montgomery Watt inserting this additional infor-mation in the new edition of his manual IslamicPhilosophy and Theology (1985: 69): "In 942 heaccepted an invitation to the court of the Hamdanidprince Sayf ad-Dawla in Aleppo, and spent the re-mainder of his life there."By the time the work on the Virtuous City wascompleted, the invitation's potential for contextualanalysis was in full bloom. How could one imaginethat al-FarabTwould "give up his principles" for thepresumed "salary" of four silver dirhams a day, wellabove subsistence level, "but not enough to cut arespectable figure as a member of the middle or upperclasses"? What possible reason could he have had foraccepting an invitation that carried such a smallstipend? "There is only one explanation: being himselfa partisan of the Sh-cite Imamiyya ... he did nothesitate to become an independent member of thiscircle and gladly accepted the ImamTiHamdanidprince's invitation" (p. 5). From this point onward, al-FarabT's onnection to ImamT Ithnacashari, Twelver)Sh-icism is formulated in the strongest terms: al-FarabTwas "taking the side of the Imamiyya"; this



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706 Journal of the American Oriental Society 110.4 (1990)"meant a clear commitment"; to appreciate this fullyis "to have the key to al-FarabT as a Muslim writer"(p. 15). Then, on the basis of this conviction, Walzerproceeds to imagine where al-FarabTstood in relationto different Muslim communities and political move-ments: he "definitely favoured the answer of the AlidShc'a''; he "unmistakably dissociated himself" fromthe Isma'Tlis; he "disagreed with the 'Abbasid cali-phate in Baghdad and felt like an exile and an alienwhile living in the 'City of Peace'"; the attitude of theHamdanids "appealed to him"; the sympathies of theBuwayhids "were most probably to his liking"; and soon. Beyond this, Walzer promises to show that "themost fundamental ideas of the author of the Ard'[Virtuous City] agree fully and precisely with theImamT interpretation of Islam" and that al-Farablgives "a most adequate and fitting description of thesebasic ImamT ideas" (p. 17). Following suggestionsmade by Henri Laoust and Dominique Sourdel, Wal-zer thought that he had indeed found the key to theVirtuous City, or at least to the Islamic purpose of theVirtuous City: "once one is aware of this ImamT enet,the opening paragraphs of Chapter 16 appear in anew and rather unexpected light: they read like aphilosophical commentary on this tenet of Imamieschatology" and "there can be no doubt" that al-FarabT"has this ImamTdoctrine in mind"(pp. 17-18).Since Walzer provides no evidence for what heasserts, other than references to his own earlier arti-cles, which do not substantiate the claims made here,and to the works of Laoust and Sourdel, one is led toexpect that these historians (and W. MontgomeryWatt, a student of Islamic theology who had com-mented on this question) will clarify some of thestrong statements he makes. Yet their writings on thisissue are disappointing as -professional historians,they avoid flowery language and strong, unsupportedclaims. With respect to al-FarabT'svisit to Sayf al-Dawla, for instance, Sourdel confines himself to, "quifit un sejour ahAlep aha cour des &mirshamdanides[in the plural] et mourut atDamas en 950"(1979: 116).And on the many questions that have to do with theconnection between al-FarabT and Sh-cism, Sourdelspeaks rather vaguely of certain "analogies" and con-cludes with a curious suggestion:

Mais il n'est pas inutile de noter les analogies quiexistaient entre les conceptions qu'elle [la philosophicd'al-Farabi] mettait en oeuvre et celles des chiites. Cesanalogies ne sauraient etonner lorsqu'on songe qu'unetelle philosophie prit naissance a la cour des Ham-danides qui professaient eux-memes la doctrine dite

imamite: es theories farabiennes, out en se situantsur un plan intellectuel, subissaient es effets despreoccupations olitico-religieusesn faveur dans lemilieuoii elles-memesurent&laborees.1979:117)Thus it would seem that al-FarabT's theories wereelaborated at the Hamdanid court in Aleppo, whichwould mean that al-FarabT'sphilosophy was born justbefore his death. Laoust is more careful and says ofal-Farabl merely that it is through interpreting Plato'sRepublic and Laws "a travers une theologie d'inspira-tion mu'tazilite et imamite qu'il a construit sa proprepolitique" (1970: 68), which can mean anything. Atone point Walzer quotes Laoust approvingly to theeffect that "les qualites exigees du chef de la citeparfaite sont, ah eu de choses pres, celles-la meme quele chiisme a demandees ah es imams et, en particulier,au premier d'entre eux, at 'imam 'AlT,compagnon etsuccesseur legitime du Prophete" (p. 445, n. 686; seeLaoust 1965: 420). The phrase "a peu de choses pres"leaves the door open as to how close the two positionsare and suggests that the differences are not decisiveenough to make the agreement between the two setsof qualifications of no value. W. Montgomery Watt'sviews regarding the connection between al-Farabl andImamTShT'ismare even more guarded, for he restrictshis comments to "the second head," that is, thesecond-best rulers (see below), those successors of thefounder of the city who lack some of the latter'squalifications. Thus one reads in the first edition ofIslamic Philosophy and Theology: "What is saidabout the 'second head' could be interpreted in such away as to make him more or less identical with theImamite imam; and this would mean that al-FarabT'sphilosophy could be regarded as providing a basis forImamite Shi'ism. This would make him acceptable inShT'ite Aleppo" (1962: 55). A similar view is found inthe new extended edition: "the 'second head' mightjust conceivably be an imam as conceived by theImamites"(1985: 70).One must conclude that, while scholars like Carrade Vaux, Sourdel, Laoust, and Wattmay have "pointedout" and "indicated"to Walzer(as he says referringtoLaoust [pp. 15, 502]) the way to the connectionbetween al-FarabT and ShT'ism, none of them ex-pressed the strong views he expresses on the topic.These views are his own. The only basis for them isthe evidence he found in the Virtuous City af

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Al-Fārābī's Imperfect State