A detailed analysis of Strauss’s first substantial commentary on a writing of Alfarabi, titled “Fârâbî’s Plato,” is provided in Chapter 3. This rather obscure, yet fundamental writing of Strauss contains some of his most important ideas about Alfarabi, his relationship with Plato’s philosophy and religion, Alfarabi’s view on esotericism, and what he later calls zetetic philosophy.

A detailed examination of Strauss’s interpretation of Alfarabi’s summary of Plato’s Laws is the subject of Chapter 4. Strauss’s complex article on Alfarabi’s summary, which complements his earlier “Fârâbî’s Plato,” has received minimal attention. The original manuscript of Strauss’s article, found among the Leo Strauss Papers, can substantially improve our understanding of this text and provide the opportunity for a more detailed commentary: The paragraphs of this manuscript are numbered, and contain headings which are absent in the published version of the article. My interpretation of this article will take these aspects of the original manuscript, as well as Strauss’s other writings and correspondence on Alfarabi and his course transcripts, into account.

Discourse about justice assesses what each person’s share in the accomplishments of humanity should be. This is a sufficiently abstract characterization to accommodate differences in usage of terms such as justice, justitia, dikaiosunê, etc. Yet it is characteristically human that we construct and maintain things together. Plato’s world is limited to city-states, but Plato gives us the idea of each doing/having their own as a core idea for determining each person’s share in common accomplishments. “To each their own” reason also plays a role in the work of al-Fārābi. But the range of interpretations of that idea becomes visible through the Nazi appropriation of the slogan. Another point of orientation is Aristotle’s distinction between distributive and corrective justice. From Cicero, finally, we get the thought that reflection on each person’s share might involve reflection on concentric circles of involvement.

In contrast to the dearth of discussions about visual images in the first centuries of Islam, discussions of music abounded, often incorporating discourses inherited from Greek antiquity. Chapter 2 considers how juridical discussions of music reflected antique traditions of inward mimesis. Inheriting aspect of Eastern Roman music theory, discussions generally distinguished between theory and performance, affectivity and entertainment. Inheriting the Pythagorean–Platonic tradition, theorists emphasized the capacity of music to engage with the harmonies between the universe and the body that enabled its therapeutic and curative capacities. Music and instruments could be characterized through an iconography of sound. Music needed to be treated with caution due to its association with forbidden practices such as drinking and licentiousness. Yet it was also recognized as facilitating transcendence by opening the heart to the workings of the divine. Both aspects became central to literary gatherings devoted to the ritualized recitation of poetry with music, wine, food, and real or imaginary gardens. The centrality of music in the Islamic intellectual corpus undermines the oculocentrism of art history, offering instead a field of multimedial perceptual culture.