130 - State of Mind: al-Fārābī on Religion and Politics

I think he would probably say that the ruler knows he is right since he has certainty (this is something that will be covered in the interview with Deborah Black), and that no one else is in a position to judge. That's why they have to be convinced/persuaded using rhetoric: because they can't assess truth claims on a demonstrative basis. In fact he doesn't really take up the question but this is, I think, what he would need to say given his theory. By the way I don't think that the imagination or prophecy need to be non-propositional; he is primarily thinking of the prophet as a user of rhetorical discourse. The point is not about propositionality, it is about whether he offers demonstration or just persuasion.

By contrast the question is discussed by others in the Islamic world e.g. the theologians themselves; they talk about the possibility that miracles are the proof by which prophets are acknowledged. That is accepted by some Ash'arites but Ghazali discusses it more critically in his autobiographical "Deliverer from Error" on which more in due course!

Peter

Thanks very much! That point is one I think about a lot as I write the scripts, I mean, how often to introduce terminology and issues that are used in current philosophy. I am actually doing it pretty frequently though that may not always be obvious if you aren't steeped in contemporary philosophy. My aim is to try to make it clear how this stuff might be relevant to the contemporary debates without burdening the narrative with too much explanation about what is going on now; also there is the constant risk of anachronism. But I'd be interested to know whether people out there want to hear more (or less) in the way of allusions to contemporary philosophy.

By the way the interview with Deborah Black, which is the episode after this one, makes it pretty clear that the topic we're discussing relates to contemporary epistemology (for instance she alludes to reliabilism and the KK principle).

Peter

Well I have a lot of respect for both of them but also some points of disagreement. Walzer is often criticized (this may be what Mahdi said too, I'm not sure) for assuming that Arabic philosophical texts are mostly useful for recovering lost Greek works; he has a tendency to reduce everything interesting in Arabic to some Greek source, even hypothetical lost sources. With Mahdi things are a bit more complicated but I think it would be fair to say he is in the Straussian tradition of reading Farabi, and you know what I think about Straussianism if you have listened to episode 161 on Maimonides. (And actually I find this approach less fruitful and textually supported for Farabi than for Maimonides.) I should hasten to reiterate though that both of them were wonderful scholars and did a lot to promote the subject, for instance with valuable editions and translations.

This is a controversial issue in part because there is no agreement about what, exactly, Farabi was able to read. But probably a paraphrase version of Plato's "Republic" (also of the "Laws"), which may or may not have told him much about the critique of poetry. In any case when it comes to the use of various types of discourse in the political sphere he seems more interested in the rhetoric-dialectic-demonstration contrast which is of course Aristotelian, not Platonic.

One place to look though for more of his ideas would be his Great Book of Music, soon being translated into English I believe. In that he talks about the relationship between music and poetry, much as Plato does in the Republic, but it is a pretty standard association (I mean, poetry was often set to music in Arabic culture too) so one shouldn't leap to any conclusions. Cf. my recent rule 1 in the blog posts on methodology...

Yes, it's odd that he still thinks of cities rather than larger political blocks - this is often seen as a holdover from his sources, since Aristotle and Plato think about cities. So you could argue this is a failure on al-Farabi's part to see that his sources no longer address the situation "on the ground" so to speak. But in his defense, actually by this period the Abbasid empire has greatly weakened its grip on local authorities, so it may actually make sense for him to think of rulers as the leaders of city-sized polities, like for instance Aleppo or whatever.

Yes, actually that is a pretty frequent suggestion in the literature; maybe not that he was a fullblown closet Shiite but that he had 'Alid sympathies, like many Sunnis at that period did. For what it's worth I am not so impressed by that thought: I think the prophet-philosopher he describes is clearly modeled on Muhammad, not the Imams, and in his Book of Religion he even describes the subsequent rule that follows a prophet in terms of using law and qualified but non-inspired leaders to carry on his work, which to me sounds like sunni legal schools plus the rightly guided caliphs. So, thoroughly sunni as far as I can see, but as I say other scholars do follow the line you suggest.

Might it be the one by Lameer mentioned in the bibliography above?