AL-FĀRĀBĪ

Al-Fārābī (d. 339/950) was a scholar in the history of the Islamic philosophy whose thoughts give guidance to solving the problems of certain fields even in the twentieth century. For example, by describing the system of sciences he guided the librarians of the twentieth century to create an Arabic library cataloguing system. This observable fact may motivate the researcher of violence and conversion to examine what his opinion was about the role of political violence and the method of conversion. Obviously as a political philosopher he had to explain the practice of Islam differently from what a legal expert, a theologian or a poet would write, but as a thoughtful Muslim he was not able to ignore the real circumstances he was living in. Reading his writings in the area of politics we often find trends of thoughts that deal with these questions.

In his book The Views of the Inhabitants of the Perfect State, when he talks about the inhabitants of the faulty and imperfect state, he introduces their views this way: ‘The faulty and imperfect state comes into existence when their religion is based on the wrong views of the elders.’ This sentence indicates that the views expressed in the following passages do not represent al-Fārābī's opinion, but is his account of opinions that he does not believe to be true. The fact that the doctrines he ascribes to the virtuous city in the previous chapters of the book are in the spirit of the Platonic and Aristotelian tradition of the Neo-Platonic philosophy warns the reader that the ‘wrong views of the elders’ are the claims of another Greek philosophical school. The essence of these views is summarised briefly by the following sentences: