Al-Farabi: Founder of Islamic Neoplatonism

Majid Fakhry

IIS 241 Book Review

Prepared by Al-Ahmadgaid B. Asaad
July 5, 2023

‫ِيم‬ ِ ٰ َ ‫ب ِس ْ ِم ٱلل َّٰه ِ ٱلرَّحْم‬

ِ ‫ن ٱلرَّح‬

Summary
The book aims to present the works and contribution of al-Farabi to the discipline
of Philosophy. According to Fakhry, al-Farabi was the first Muslim philosopher
whose works were based on a systematic methodology to studying Philosophy.
Fakhry further mentioned that, not only in the sphere of logic, but also in
cosmology and metaphysics, al-Farabi stands out as a leading figure. Neither
al-Kindi nor al-Razi had contributed substantially to the systematization of
cosmology and metaphysics.

The book’s content is arranged into chapters of topics that al-Farabi has
contributed. Among his main contributions, logic was accordingly pivotal. Among
the chapters, Fakhry included the following topics: Classification of the Sciences,
Al-Farabi as logician, Theory of Knowledge, Emanation versus Creation, Ethical
Theory, and Political Theory.

Critique
Fakhry’s approach to presenting al-Farabi contribution is done by explaining it in
Fakhry’s own words as to how he understood al-Farabi. While this is the typical
approach, I would have preferred it presented mostly in verbatim of al-Farabi’s
word in English translation. This would at least give you a sense of al-Farabi's
reasoning or thinking on certain topics, a taste of the style of al-Farabi’s writing.
As mentioned by Fakhry, al-Farabi’s works were based on a systematic methodology
to studying Philosophy. When studying a subject in a systematic way, one has to
start with the fundamentals, defining the basic building blocks of the subject which
can be used as the basis for creating other complex ideas. As for Philosophy, it is
the fundamental nature of knowledge of truth, reality, and existence. As such, in
discussing Philosophy, it is better to start with its fundamentals if one was to
approach this from a systematic way.

One such fundamental topic is the definition of “being”, according to Fakhry, in the
Book of Letters, al-Farabi discusses the terms that are common in philosophy and
logic in particular. These terms include ‘that’, ‘being’, ‘concept’, etc. Of these terms,
‘being’ is the most fundamental since it is common among the terms in philosophy.
Honestly, when I took my philosophy class in college, it was hard for me to
understand why we need to waste our time understanding the word “being”. I felt
that it is not important in today’s advancement, but now I understand.

I think when it comes to discussing reality, existence, knowledge, at times people

tend to be subjective and biased as to what truth is. Most of the time they are
emotionally attached to certain belief and once invited to dialogue or debate,
people are sometimes having a hard time accepting what truth is. Sometimes they
argue defensively. Unlike certain subjects like Mathematics, Statistics, and other
Sciences, subjectivity is not really prevalent, most of the time finding truth in these
science can be easily achieved without much friction from other opposition,
because it is approached from an objective process, and so people who oppose your
idea will easily accept it so long as proven objectively.

However, when it comes to existence, religion, and related topics, finding truth
through dialogue can at times be subjective, especially when experience is brought
into the table. For example, how can you find the truth if all believers of all religions
say that they experience some unexplained feeling and sometimes events that can
be considered a miracle or impossible (that actually happened). More specifically, if
someone said I converted to Christianity because I saw Jesus (A.S.) in my dream,
and another said I saw Prophet Muhammad (S.A.W.) in my dream and so I converted
to Islam. How can you tell which of the two is the truth? Indeed, such an argument
being brought forward to the table in dialogue is subjective, because how can you
validate it? How can you test it?
What is left for such a situation where both claim truth on the basis of their dream
is to check other materials that define their religion. In this case, their holy book,
and to answer the question, can we compare the Bible and the Qur’an and infer
which is the truth? While this can be done most of the time by simply validating the
claims of the Christians about their Bible and claims of the Muslims about their
Qur’an. Questions like, is it the holy word of God? What defines the holy word of
God? Using these guide questions, we can easily answer which is the truth between
these books. Such an approach, while can be validated, will also take time. This is
because any reader needs to check manually the verses again to do fact checking
on the claims of the findings on the question, is the Bible or the Qur’an the holy
word of God? Indeed, this can be done objectively using numbers to score the Bible
and the Qur’an based on the claims of it as the holy book. This won’t be discussed
extensively here as it is out of scope.

In order to bring people to come to terms and accept your opinion as the truth on
topics that often are perceived as subjective, the main methodology to use is
Philosophy. Philosophy helps researchers with the tools that are adhered as the
correct equipment to use for finding the truth by the scholars. Hence, in order to
discuss topics in belief, existence of god, arguments about it are built using the
fundamental concepts like ‘being’. This is why al-Farabi bothered to make an effort
in establishing its definition as it will help al-Farabi build sound arguments using
these terms.