The Virtuous City

Farabi'nin ideal şehri, filozof-peygamber tarafından yönetilir. Şehir halkı, mutluluk için bedendeki organlar gibi iş birliği yapar.

Al-Farabi imagines a city the way a physician imagines the body. Each part has a function. Each function serves the whole. At the center is a ruler who combines the philosopher's reason with the prophet's ability to speak in images the people can receive. This is not Plato's Republic copied out — Al-Farabi is writing in Baghdad, in Arabic, and he is thinking about Islam, about revelation, about how a community of believers becomes a community of thinkers. The virtuous city exists to help its citizens reach happiness, which for Al-Farabi means the full development of the intellect, the closest a human being can come to the divine. Cities that pursue wealth, power, or pleasure instead are variations of the same error: they mistake the instrument for the end. Only the city ordered toward reason is, in his view, fully alive.