Al Farabi

 *7. Al-Farabi*  

*Name*: Al-Farabi  

*Full Name*: Abu Nasr Muhammad al-Farabi  

*Title*: The Second Teacher  

*Born*: 872, Farab on the Jaxartes (Syr Darya) in modern Kazakhstan or Faryab in Khorasan (modern-day Afghanistan)  

*Died*: 950, Damascus  

*Ethnicity*: Persian or Turkic  

*Era*: Islamic Golden Age  

Abu Nasr Muhammad al-Farabi (c. 870–950) was an early Islamic intellectual who was instrumental in transmitting the theories of Plato and Aristotle to the Muslim world, and had a considerable influence on later Islamic philosophers like Avicenna. He was an excellent linguist who translated Greek works on Aristotle and Plato and made considerable additions of his own. He earned the nickname _Mu’allim al-Thani_, which translates as “The Second Master” or “The Second Teacher.”

*Early Life*: Al-Farabi completed his early education in Farab and Bukhara, but later, he went to Baghdad for higher education, where he studied and worked for a long time. During this time, he acquired mastery over many languages as well as various branches of knowledge and technology. Farabi contributed considerably to science, philosophy, logic, sociology, medicine, mathematics, and music, but the major ones are for philosophy, logic, and sociology, for which he presents himself as an encyclopedist.

*Contributions and Achievements*: As a philosopher, Farabi was the first to separate philosophy from theology. It is difficult to find a philosopher in both the Muslim and Christian worlds from the Middle Ages who has not been influenced by his ideas. He believed in a Supreme Being who created the world through the exercise of balanced intelligence. He also claimed that the rational faculty is the only part of man that is immortal, and thus he set the paramount human goal as the development of that rational faculty. He paid considerably more attention to political theory than any other Islamic philosopher. 

Later in his work, al-Farabi, in Platonic fashion, included the qualities essential for a ruler: he should have a native disposition to rule by good quality of character and demonstrate the right attitude toward such rule. At the heart of al-Farabi’s political philosophy is the concept of happiness, in which people cooperate to gain satisfaction. He followed the Greek example and allocated the highest rank of happiness to his ideal sovereign, whose soul was ‘united’ with the ‘Active Intellect.’ 

Thus, Farabi served as a tremendous source of aspiration for intellectuals of the Middle Ages and contributed greatly to the knowledge of his day, paving the way for later philosophers and thinkers of the Muslim world. Farabian epistemology has both a Neoplatonic and an Aristotelian dimension. The best source for al-Farabi’s classification of knowledge is his book _Ihsa al-‘Ulum_. This work neatly reflects both al-Farabi’s esoteric and exoteric beliefs. Through all of them runs a primary Aristotelian strain on the importance of knowledge. Thus al-Farabi’s epistemology can be described as encyclopedic in range and complex in expression, using both Neoplatonic and Aristotelian voices.

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