Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy

Muhsin S. Mahdi

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780226774664
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In this work, Muhsin Mahdi—widely regarded as the preeminent scholar of Islamic political thought—distills more than four decades of research to offer an authoritative analysis of the work of Alfarabi, the founder of Islamic political philosophy. Mahdi, who also brought to light writings of Alfarabi that had long been presumed lost or were not even known, presents this great thinker as his contemporaries would have seen him: as a philosopher who sought to lay the foundations for a new understanding of revealed religion and its relation to the tradition of political philosophy.Beginning with a survey of Islamic philosophy and a discussion of its historical background, Mahdi considers the interrelated spheres of philosophy, political thought, theology, and jurisprudence of the time. He then turns to Alfarabi's concept of "the virtuous city, " and concludes with an in-depth analysis of the trilogy, Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. This philosophical engagement with the writings of and about Alfarabi will be essential reading for anyone interested in medieval political philosophy.

PART ONE

Orientation: Philosophy, Jurisprudence, and Theology

ONE

The Political Orientation of Islamic Philosophy

First, I beg leave to speak of our Church Establishment, which is the first of our prejudices, not a prejudice destitute of reason, but involving in it profound and extensive wisdom. I speak of it first. It is first and last and midst in our minds. For, taking ground on that religious system of which we are now in possession, we continue to act on the early received and uniformly continued sense of mankind. That sense not only, like a wise architect, has built up the August fabric of states, but, like a provident proprietor, to preserve the structure from profanation and ruin, as a sacred temple, purged from all the impurities of fraud and violence and injustice and tyranny has solemnly and forever consecrated the commonwealth and all that officiate in it. This consecration is made that all who administer in the government of men, in which they stand in the person of God Himself, should have high and worthy notions of their function and destination, that their hope should be full of immortality, that they should not look to the paltry pelf of the moment nor to the temporary and transient praise of the vulgar, but to the solid, permanent existence in the permanent part of their nature, and to a permanent fame and glory in the example they have as a rich inheritance to the world.

In this statement from Reflections on the Revolution of France (446–47), Burke sums up a fundamental premise on which Western political theology and political philosophy before the sixteenth century was based and against which Western political philosophers since the sixteenth century have rebelled. (While one can certainly find ancient Epicureans and modern Western religious philosophers who do not fit this general picture, they neither seriously challenged the dominance of the above view in earlier times nor hampered the subsequent successful rebellion against it.) This chapter will examine the same issue as it arose in Islamic philosophy.

It is a common opinion that the human activity called philosophy is neither necessary nor useful, and the prevalence of this belief compels philosophy to justify itself. The justification often involves asking, first, about what is necessary and useful for man, and eventually about the nature of man himself. One way to approach the question “What is man?” is to look at man’s place in the world and speculate about the things that might distinguish men from other beings that one sees or imagines. The question comes down to this: Is man’s reason or intelligence something different from the rest of the world of nature and from those other parts of man’s being that he shares with the higher animals? Or is man’s reason simply a more complex mental mechanism than those of other animals, merely an extension of, or an improvement on, animal faculties—one that serves to satisfy the same needs, desires, and passions that animals experience, but in a more efficient and perfect fashion? This question is inseparable from the question of what constitutes politics. Both ancients and moderns understood man to be a “political animal,” an animal who differs from the others in living and acting and pursuing his goals in a political community. What man is all about and what politics is all about are questions that approach the same point from two different directions.

Islamic philosophy shared the ancient view that man is a special kind of being; that his ability to reason—his power to know himself and the whole—is the activity that marks him as different from other animals; and that reasoning is therefore the ultimate purpose of his existence. It regarded this difference between man and other living beings as a radical one—as radical as, if not more radical than, the difference between inanimate and animate beings, the soulless and the souled.

This is a philosophic view. However, the philosopher does not live among, confront, argue with, or justify his position to inanimate beings or other animals, but to other men; and other men are, like him, already members or citizens of a political community. Yet they are, by and large, immune to philosophy and the way of life it entails. Instead they stand by their common conviction that the fundamental opinions accepted by and pursued in the political community are normative and are not to be questioned; to question them may inf act be considered a form of treason that justifies banishment or death. This presents the philosopher with the following dilemma. If—and he is convinced that it is so—man’s reason for existence and his distinction from other animals is his exercise of intelligence and his ability to know, if such knowledge is predicated on questioning convictions and opinions and investigating everything, and if a political community denies the need for such an investigation and makes it impossible, then that political community has already decided in favor of the view that the proper aim of political life and of man himself is to gain greater efficiency in attaining ends that are not specifically human but are more elaborate versions of ends pursued by certain other animals—pleasure, wealth, honor, and so forth. It is at this point that the classic conflict between philosophy and the political community begins.

Philosophy and the Divine Law

If there is a single attitude that has characterized the entire Muslim community throughout the centuries, it is gratitude for revelation and the divine law; commitment to the exemplary deeds and sayings of the Prophet, the vehicle of that revelation; adherence to the way of life of the Prophet and his companions as the correct way, which the community must preserve and imitate and to which it must return; and the conviction that deviation from the way of these pious ancestors is wrong and constitutes a rebellion that leads to strange byways, to forsaking God’s command, to estrangement, and to exile to a world of infidelity, from which the Muslim community must return and again find its home. No amount of interpretation, legal devices, reliance on the consensus of the community and its common interest, or justification based on necessity and the change of times can undermine the fundamental belief that genuine progress requires a return. There is no rainbow on the horizon, no golden age at the end of man’s time whether resulting from the perfection of human sciences and arts or from man’s controlling or conquering nature. Progress consists in resisting estrangement and false paths and in returning to one’s origins by completing the circle—in their end is their beginning. The Muslim community is therefore never satisfied with its present. It looks to the future, but only insofar as it is called upon to bring about the revolution that will suppress its own rebellion and, beyond all this, as it must think of the final end and of the final accounting. Beyond the return to the right way of pious ancestors is the final return of all men to their Maker, to the other world, the world beyond this world. A state of forgetfulness or indifference to the final end can only be seen as the ultimate rebellion and infidelity and as exile by a community that began with an overwhelming sense of the imminence of that end.

The demands of Islamic philosophy and the demands of the Islamic divine law as commonly understood did not agree in every respect. For the modern Western student of Islam the agreements loom large. For Muslim philosophers and theologians the disagreements demanded attention and in some cases an adequate resolution.

To begin with, man is the central concern of both philosophy and divine law: philosophy is a human activity, and the divine law is addressed to man and not to animals, stars, or angels. In addition, both call on man to reach for something higher than himself, to become divine, to relate himself to what is above and beyond himself. Man is confronted with a demand, a duty, to open himself to the whole or the highest principle of the whole. Further, neither philosophy nor the divine law is meant to be at man’s service; rather, man is meant to be at the service of both. They are not meant to meet his needs or improve his condition as they existed before he became aware of philosophy or of the divine law, for those needs and that condition are seen by philosophy and the divine law as miserable and unworthy of his capacities as a human being. Man’s humanity is now constituted or reconstituted by a higher calling. Philosophy calls upon man to know the visible universe and its principles through his highest faculty, his reason or intelligence; the divine law calls upon him to obey faithfully the commands of God. In both cases, however, he is primarily performing a duty rather than demanding his rights. The highest rights are not the rights of man but the rights of the universe and its highest principle, the right of God to be known and obeyed. Therefore, both the city constructed by the philosophers and the city established by the divine law demand a comprehensive view of the universe and its highest principle and require man to understand his place in that comprehensive order of things.

The emphasis on man’s duty is also the overarching principle of political and social life as seen by both the philosophers and the divine law. Political and social life are constituted by the duty to act in a virtuous way. To perform virtuous activity does not mean to pursue one’s desires and passions and pleasures but to meet the demands of goodness as established by human intelligence or by the divine law. Virtuous activity is not at the service of pleasure; it is a by-product of activity according to virtue. Therefore, both the city constructed by the philosophers and the city established by the divine law are cities devoted to virtue—they are virtuous cities. Virtue is at their center; it is the principle of their regimes and of their organization, in contrast to the tyrannical city, whose end is not the common good of the ruler and the ruled but the private good only of the ruler. The virtuous city is ruled by the wise; the tyrannical city is ruled by the ignorant who pursue their lower passions, desires, and pleasures.

The chief virtue in both the city constructed by the philosophers and the city established by the divine law is justice; and justice means obedience to the law, which in both cases is a comprehensive law, covering what we now call civil and penal law, public and private law, moral and religious law, or the law relating to both deeds and beliefs. Muslim philosophers and Muslim theologians have argued at length for the superiority of such comprehensive laws over laws that restrict themselves to deeds alone or to such deeds as are considered socially or politically relevant. These arguments will not be reviewed here. Instead, we will look into how a comprehensive law tends to tempt certain members of the Muslim community into trying to transcend the common legal demands of virtue and justice and even to impose on them the duty to go beyond these demands, how the additional activity tends to be an asocial or private activity, and how the philosopher in his view of what this activity ought to be tends to part ways with certain other followers of the divine law.

To understand how this parting of the ways develops, it is necessary to begin with the common legal demands of the divine law regarding belief, worship, and the conduct of social transactions. The divine law comes equipped with certain underpinnings meant to ensure obedience by encouraging the formation of certain states of character, mind, and feeling commonly placed under the headings of piety and humility, fear and hope—the fear of God and of divine punishment and retribution, and the hope for future rewards and divine mercy. In contrast to the common legal demands of the divine law, piety and humility admit degrees of more or less. Similarly, while the divine law demands that man inquire into the universe and come to know its highest principles, especially the highest principle, God Himself, this, too, obviously admits of degrees. And while in both cases the minimal demands may be incumbent on all, the maximal possible demands can be imposed only on the chosen few.

Now it so happens that the states of character, mind, and feeling best suited to carry out these two kinds of demands are quite different from, if not antithetical to, each other; to meet the two kinds of demands more than minimally requires additional virtues that are different in kind, and therefore two different kinds of training or education. A life lived in constant fear and trembling is not conducive to acquiring knowledge, to inquiry and understanding and contemplation. These require rather that man be serene, take pleasure in looking about him and in wondering at what he sees, and be fearless in facing whatever presents itself to him in his inquiry, in considering various views, in admitting the truth of what he discovers to be demonstrably true, and in confessing his ignorance or doubt when he does not find certainty.

Neither inquiry nor piety, it is true, require knowledge of the highest principles or the so-called essence of God, nor do they presuppose wisdom about the whole. The unknown can either be feared or it can be inquired into—both are equally possible attitudes to take, and either can just as well go hand in hand with initial ignorance. But men do not usually confine themselves to confessing their ignorance; they argue with each other and seek a ground to stand on that is firmer than ignorance, one that can support certain positive views about the universe, its structure, and its highest principles.

Islamic Jurisprudence and Theology

Let us begin at a time when the juridical study of the divine law, theology, mysticism, and philosophy had reached a degree of maturity and follow the path that a concerned Muslim would have taken to learn these disciplines and to try to cut his own trail through them. Toward the end of the twelfth century, al-Ghazālī surveyed these various paths to knowledge in his famous Al-Munqidh min al-Ḍalāl (Deliverer from Error), but since he was seeking the ultimate ground of knowledge, he did not concern himself with the juridical study of the divine law, in which he was already an expert practitioner. His reason was rather simple: according to him, this study deals primarily with practical and worldly matters. Starting from the explicit statements in the Quran and the sayings and deeds of the Prophet-Lawgiver and of his immediate followers, and using such logical procedures as analogy, this discipline attempts to arrive at correct determinations of cases for which there are no explicit precedents. The jurist’s perspective is confined within the horizon established by the Lawgiver and the divine law. As a jurist, he does not inquire into the divine law in the sense of asking questions about its grounds: Why a divine law at all? Why this divine law rather than another? Why a regime based on this divine law rather than another? Why this way of organizing a human community rather than another?

Of course, the majority of the faithful and many of their leaders may think, perhaps properly, that the attempt to go beyond ascertaining what the divine law demands and faithfully obeying those demands is either a waste of time or a form of rebellion. This equation of the just with the legal is the hallmark of good citizenship, but it does not satisfy those members of the religious community who believe that the divine law calls upon them to search for the secrets of God’s creation. And they need to learn the secrets of the divine law itself, especially when the community becomes splintered in its opinions regarding such questions as God’s attributes, the character of the revelation, and man’s responsibilities, or when it is faced with outsiders who deny the truth of the divine law and argue for the superiority of other divine or human laws.

Theology is the discipline of defending the divine law—of establishing the truth of a particular revelation, the genuineness of the mission of the Lawgiver, and the correctness of the beliefs and deeds his law demands. To do this, however, theology needs to go beyond the explicit statements of the divine law to develop a rational, relatively coherent view of what the ultimate source of the divine law, God, is and what kind of demands he is likely to make or not to make, what prophecy is and how to distinguish genuine prophets from false prophets, and what man is and what demands he can legitimately meet. Otherwise it will not be possible to argue for the validity of a particular divine law, the justice of its demands, or the virtue or goodness of those who faithfully fulfill these demands. All this presupposes that these matters are knowable to man, not merely on the basis of the divine law but independently of it. It also assumes that the way to this knowledge is a particular type of theological discourse or inquiry.

But are these matters knowable independently of the divine law? This seems to be the question that divided Muslim theologians into so-called rationalists and traditionalists. It was a difficult question to deal with, primarily because the intention of Islamic theology was to defend the divine law, while it could not perform that function without going beyond the divine law and elaborating what it meant, what its intentions were, and what made it possible—that is, without first obtaining a more comprehensive view of the structure of the universe and its guiding principles, of God’s essence and attributes, and of the structure of the human self and will. The different schools of Islamic theology explored the various possible comprehensive views, but, if we are to believe al-Ghazālī, their point of departure, which remained the divine law, and their primary intention, which remained the defense of that law, prevented them from pushing such inquiries as far as they needed to go if they were to satisfy his thirst for knowing the truth of things or overcome his uncertainty in the face of so many conflicting positions. Moreover, Islamic theology, already held suspect by many students of the Islamic law who felt that it was impious to conduct inquiries of this sort into the divine law to begin with, now had to face philosophers and mystics who asserted that they had found better and more fruitful ways to conduct these inquiries.

Like the juridical study of the law, Islamic theology was initially very much concerned with politics. In fact, the question of the leadership of the Islamic community was one of the primary questions, if not the primary question, that led to the rise of Islamic theology. By al-Ghazālī’s time, however, politics in the wider sense had receded into the background in both the juridical study of the law and theology. The legal qualifications of rulers continued to be discussed, but the rulers themselves had long since ceased to act as worthy successors of the Prophet. They had become secular kings who had to meet certain minimal legal requirements and whose legal function was now limited to appointing the judges who administered the divine law; they no longer engaged in elaborating, interpreting, or even applying the divine law. These functions were now assumed by the jurists and the theologians, who had succeeded in establishing themselves as the custodians of the divine law and separating the legislative and juridical from the administrative sphere. The divine law was to be protected and preserved by the jurists and the theologians, and the Muslim community became coextensive with the operation of this law rather than with the rule of any particular dynasty. But this also meant that the sphere of the divine law tended to become limited to personal law and the law of transactions, leaving the rulers and thei...