نادیا مفتونی

Does it sound plausible to obtain a strategy for global peace in Farabi’s political philosophy? Put another way, could we procure a common language leading to peace among all cultures and religions, according to Farabi? Farabi’s utopia (al-madīnat al-fāḍila), literally meaning ‘the excellent state’, consists of five levels. On the first level stands the philosopher (fīlsūf) or the prophet (nabī). The second level includes poets (shuʿarā), music composers (mulaḥḥinūn), writers (kuttāb) and the likes. Farabi strongly believes in the power of imagination (khīyāl) and that most people are under the influence of their imaginative faculty (al-quwwat al-mutakhayyila). This faculty has an important outcome which influences his view on religion (milla), prophet, and their relation with the public (jumhūr): imagination, in his view, is the most powerful tool of influencing the public. Regarding this principle, it could be concluded that there is a shared function between the poet and the prophet. Farabian theory of peace may well be identified, based on the shared function between the poet and the prophet. In other words, for Farabi rational truth and rational happiness is fixed and one, having only one denotation, while its connotations, that is, sensory images and imagery forms are more than one—possibly many more. That being the case, various and sundry cultures and religions might well have different ways to pursue the same knowledge, truth, and contentment.

Fārābī discusses art in two levels: art as it is, and art as it should be or the utopian art. Considering art as it is includes desirable and undesirable arts. But the utopian art or art as the working of the utopian artist consists only of desirable ones. When describing the desirable art, Fārābī focuses on bringing goodness and happiness into imagination and moderating the feelings. Undesirable and wicked arts are just on the opposite side of desirable ones. They seek to corrupt thoughts and tend to immoderate sensual qualities and moods. In Fārābī's view, people understand the intelligible truths and meanings through imagination. Furthermore, the arousal of people’s feelings and emotions often originates from the imagination and the imaginary forms. The ultimate goal of the utopia is that the public achieve the intelligible happiness. Given that the public, based on their nature or habit, are not able to perceive the intelligible truths, the intelligible happiness should be transferred to their imagination. The utopian artist is able to embody the intelligible happiness using sensory and imaginary forms and he/she brings the intelligible happiness close to people's minds through their imagination.

Developing the empirical method based on observation and experiment, Alhazen is considered the greatest Muslim physicist and the most significant figure in the history of optics between antiquity and the seventeenth century. Inventing a camera obscura, Alhazen rebuilt our conception of eyesight. His theory of vision was enormously prominent and much of our understanding of optics and light is based upon his groundbreaking discoveries. He began his criticism of emission by describing what happens when people are exposed to bright lights. No matter what the light source, the effect of bright lights was always the same. What this indicates to Alhazen is that light entering into the eye from an external source had some serious function in eyesight. Respecting observation, experiment and empirical method, Suhrawardi, the father of Illumination School, argues all theories of vision and rejects them just by mere reasoning. Suhrawardi validates his own Illuminationist method by scientists’ empirical method. So, I will argue, he is not to deny empirical aspect of Alhazen’s theory of vision. In an allegory, I will use the camera, representing the whole process of a human vision, while I use “beyond camera” for the embodiment that allows for the unfolding of a human soul’s position in the process of vision. What Alhazen is speaking of, we might call the process within the camera; while what Suhrawardi is speaking of, we could name the process behind the camera.

Ibn Ṭufayl and Kierkegaard share existentialist elements around nature. Ibn Ṭufayl believes in nature as the best teacher of philosophy and philosophical reasoning. For Kierkegaard, being human means being dependent on and embedded in nature. This makes Kierkegaard a highly relevant interlocutor for contemporary Eco philosophy and ecocriticism. Ibn Ṭufayl’s opinion on the subject is discernible in his novel called Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān. Pursuing the truth of life, Ḥayy, the main personage of Ibn Ṭufayl’s novel, finds his way through four travels of mind. Nature is the context of his travels, so determined to protect nature, Ḥayy takes considerable care of fauna and flora as he steps into the highest levels in his ascent. In the first travel, Ḥayy begins from nature from which is created and in which is raised by a roe mother. In the second travel, he figures out all of natural affairs insofar as becoming a leading scientist. In the third travel resulted in the former travel, Ḥayy becomes successful in philosophical analysis. In the fourth travel, Ḥayy goes forward with philosophical analysis and reaches mystical level. The mystical experiences go on so that through all natural beings and events Ḥayy conveys to God. In this last pace, Ḥayy returns to nature and becomes a nature protectionist. At the end of story, Ḥayy faces a religious stranger showed up from another island. Ḥayy finds his beliefs thoroughly in accordance with his own opinions.

According to Thomas Hobbes, public should and they normally accept what they find in place just because the alternative is destabilization and chaos. In this paper, I will argue that in Farabi’s theory the government actually would put its pace forward. As Farabi saw it, the state not only is the source of some benefits but also should be and is the source of human beings’ virtue and happiness. For Farabi, the first governor of the state resembles the heart in a body, or a physician in a city. Farabi’s utopia literally meaning ‘the excellent state’, consists of five levels. On the first level stands the philosopher or the prophet. The second level includes poets, music composers, writers and the likes of them. Farabi strongly believes in the power of imagination and that most people are under the influence of their imaginative faculty. This notion has an important outcome which influences his view on religion, prophet, and their relation with the public: images, in his view, are the most powerful means of influencing the public.

(Genesis 11:6): "And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do".Imagination for Bible as a gift permits us to see beyond the here and now and visualize a future shaped by faith. However, one might ask basically what the nature or conception of imagination is. I’ll focus on the vantage points of Farabi and Hegel as two avatars of the traditions of Christian thinkers and Muslim philosophers. Imagination, Farabi believes, may well be defined by its three most notable activities of preserving the sensible forms, combining and separating the sensible forms to make new images, and representing sensible beings as well as the intelligible affairs and beings by sensible forms of two former kinds of images, that is, preserved forms in imagination and the forms created by imagination via combining and separating the sensible forms. Imagination keeps forms of a horse, a stone, a wing, a smell, etc. Imagination also makes a horse with two wings, or a stone that is crying, or a wall that is singing. Imagination gets the image of the horse from nature, and the image of the wings from nature too, and then produces a new form by joining them. Imagination represents, for example, the vice of damaging environment by drawing a row of crying trees in a painting. Three stages of imagination according to Hegel include the first stage as reproductive imagination, the second stage as the productive and associative imagination, and third stage as the sign-making fantasy. Three stages mentioned by Hegel very well correspond three activities pointed out in Farabi’s theory of imagination.