Politics and Excellence: The Political Philosophy of Alfarabi.

• Author: Frank, Daniel H.

Galston has made a solid contribution to Farabian studies in this book. She commences with a chapter on Alfarabi's method of writing, and proceeds on the basis of conclusions reached in the initial chapter to discuss his views concerning "the nature of happiness and perfection ... ; the qualifications of rulers of excellence, in particular the contribution of both theoretical and practical wisdom to the formation of practical judgments; and the kind or kinds of political orders that make possible a political community of excellence" (p. 54). A final chapter discusses the extent to which political science is an autonomous science, not needing a metaphysical foundation upon which to reside.

Galston is extremely well read in the scholarly controversies that have arisen over the last fifty years regarding the way to read and understand Alfarabi. Leo Strauss and others have pointed to a tradition of "multilevel" writing, to which Alfarabi (and other medieval Islamic and Jewish thinkers) were attracted. According to Strauss, this tradition of writing on two different levels, exoteric and esoteric, was primarily political in intent, but political in a special sense. Reflecting upon the death of Socrates at the hands of the unenlightened masses, Plato, according to Strauss, noted the necessity that philosophy (and philosophers) hide their true views from the masses, lest their fate be like the great martyr. For Strauss, then, the exoteric/esoteric distinction was developed by philosophers primarily to avoid political persecution, to save their skin. But such a self-interested program does not seem very Socratic in spirit; after all, Socrates was not afraid to die. Perhaps, then, a new impetus for multilevel writing can be found, one which is more truly Socratic. Such a one is to be found I think in Galston's presentation of Alfarabi's method as primarily pedagogical in intent rather than as self-preservative. We must suppose that Alfarabi was most concerned to enlighten, in different ways, all the members of the community, both those philosophically inclined and those not so. In this sense, Alfarabi stands revealed as a great teacher, sensitive to the varying abilities of his audience, and with a political agenda rather different than that of a solitary, lonely figure intent upon survival. To me, it is obvious which is the more Socratic in spirit, and it is to Galston's credit to have altered the terms of the debate concerning the proper way in which to read Alfarabi.

With this methodology in place, Galston proceeds to distinguish between different types of multilevel writing, religious and philosophic. Both are operative throughout the Farabian corpus, indeed within single works. "Using persuasive arguments, religious multilevel writing tries to present the reader with an apparent demonstration; in contrast, through carefully juxtaposed persuasive arguments, philosophic multilevel writing seeks to guide readers to their own discovery of the appropriate proofs, In short, the ultimate goal of philosophic multilevel writing is to provide those who wish to know with the passion, the tools, and the awareness necessary to engage in the arduous search for truth" (p. 48). Whereas religious multilevel writing deals with appearances (rhetorical proofs, etc.), philosophic multilevel writing presents "opposing arguments of roughly equal persuasive power" (p. 10), offered with a view to stimulating the philosophically inclined to move beyond the mashhurat (the endoxa) to the foundations of the science. It is in this sense that we are to understand how and why, according to Alfarabi, religion is an imitation of philosophy. This, perhaps Alfarabi's most famous (and infamous) view, is ngle consonant, e.g., daq, laf, fak, etc. There are synonyms in AAT, e.g., babur and sayyara `car', maktab and hafis `office', ash and sakan 'to live', jaw and taqs `weather', mutarjim and turjuman `translator', etc. Students would like to know the differences, if any, between, e.g., babur and sayyara, on the one hand, and which is more commonly used, on the other.

Inaccuracies are, e.g.: lyaman sh shamali, not lyaman sh shamaliyya, for `North Yemen', al id alkabir, not Lid alkabir, for Greater Bairam' (not the Greater Bairam), alt d azzaghir, not id azzaghir, for `Lesser Bairam' (not the Lesser Bairam). If "Muslim countries" (p. I 1 8) means Arab countries whose constitutions state that Islam is their religion, then most of those countries follow the Gregorian, not the Higra calendar. Yemenis buy qat by the bunch, not by the branch (p. 119). id al ummal (p. 119) probably is better translated as May Day, which is celebrated...