Hi, welcome back to the new thing. I'm David Barr and with me is my good friend Greg McBrayer. How are you Greg? Doing great David, good to hear from you.
Good to see you. Good to see you too. And Alex, how are you Alex? How is baby Penelope?
David Penelope is great. I'm happy to be here. I'm looking at the screen and I see three beards and one hairless and you live in DC. So I can only conclude that whatever is in the water there has emasculated you.
If you live here long enough, you become you turn into this a feet kind of creature that can be that can be bought and you know, trying to fight that. That's a slimy swamp thing. So today we have our first recurring guest, Dr. Charles Butterworth.
How are you, Charles? I'm fine. Thank you. How the rest of you are well too.
Yes. And before Greg introduces this episode, I wanted to people know that the three of us are close with you. They always ask us to inquire into your latest project. So do you have any translations or what are you working on at the moment?
People genuinely get excited. And before you answer that, I should add Charles, your episode is the most listened to or the most downloaded episode in our history. Now we have how many under our belt, Alex? More or less?
I always will answer. Yeah, 40. 40. And we've had very nice guest, Charles, and you are head and shoulders are the most popular.
My goodness. Well, it could be the subject rather than the person. And now I've forgotten your question. So what you're working on, if anything's coming down the pipeline?
I'm working on Al-Furabi. I have not yet sent off to the press the book of letters, but it is completely done. And I'm simply being a little bit too careful to make sure that everything is letter perfect because what I'm sending to the press will be the closest thing to a camera ready copy that I have ever done. What I can say in justification of the slowness is that I understand Al-Furabi much, much better today than I did even six months ago.
And what's the book of letters about just for listeners who? The book of letters is either simply a cute way of saying that it's a commentary on that other book of letters, Aristotle's metaphysics, Al-Furabi, et cetera, or it's a very sophisticated and if that's so, then it really is focused on those parts of the metaphysics where Aristotle talks about the categories, but also especially that very elusive book, Lambda, where he talks about religion and human beings. It's also a very sophisticated account of logic and the way logic leads us as we study it to think about all sorts of other questions. Above all, politics and once we begin talking about politics, religion, there seems to be a recurrent theme or a recurrent interest in Al-Furabi's teaching.
This is wonderful. People will get excited. Thank you. So Greg, kick us off to today.
Al-Furabi is also on the menu. So what are we talking about? Sure. First, I guess we should ask Charles if you'll come back to do the book of letters with us.
But tonight, we're doing Al-Furabi's short work called the Book of Religion. We're also going to briefly look at a part of the book by Al-Furabi called The Enumeration of the Sciences. We'll look briefly at the fifth chapter of that book, which is about the science of politics. And before you go on, Greg, forgive me.
This is my final interruption. Which edition are we using? We're using one edition in particular, Cornell University Press, who's the great translator? Well, it happens to be our distinguished guest tonight, Charles E.
Butterworth. So yeah, it's the political writings, selected efforts, and other texts. It's now it's volume one of the political writings because we now have a point two of the political writings with Cornell University Press. We're doing the Book of Religion, which I'll let Charles describe and give an overview.
I'll just say it's a great, I think it's a great text. It's a text that summarizes neatly and in very insightful ways, what religion is. It defines it in ways that clarifies the subjects for me in ways that I haven't seen so neatly done. It's by Al-Furabi, for listeners who don't know.
Al-Furabi was a medieval Muslim slash Arabic thinker. I'll let Charles give us a little more background on who Al-Furabi is and why we decided to do this text tonight. Al-Furabi wrote on all kinds of things. He wrote on mostly, I guess Charles can correct me here, but Greek philosophy and how one might read Greek philosophy in a new environment.
Now that we have this other alternative source of wisdom revelation. If that's too far, but Charles, tell us more about Al-Furabi and recognize it in our audience who know who Al-Furabi is and people who've never even heard the name. What's the episode? You said the last interruption was something.
I'll just forgive me. I'll just... No, that's fair. No, I want another question.
No, come on, listen to me. The listeners should be encouraged to tune into the other episode we did with Charles, where he did speak extensively about some of these matters. David, you need to recognize that Greg is the first ruler of this podcast with the Kingly Science. You as an inferior person have to listen to his commands.
We'll see how well he understands that science. So Charles, pardon my Tweedling and Tweedling down here for a moment. Who is Al-Furabi? Let's just begin with what are the rough dates?
875 to 950. He flourishes in Baghdad, but he doesn't come from Baghdad. He comes from somewhere, as the biographers put it, beyond the oxus, to the east of the oxus river. Now it's the stands that claim him.
And Turkmenistan is the one that would like to say that he's from there. Because he is among his names Abu Nasr, the last one is Al-Furabi. He's from someplace where he gets to be, that's an adjective from a town called Farab. And so the Persians, the Iranians claim that it's Farab in Iran, whereas the Turks claim that it's Farab in Turkey, or Turkmenistan.
Not clear. We simply don't know. But he comes by way of Marv, which is in eastern Iran, and by way of Haran to Baghdad in just sort of the end of the ninth century, just sort of the beginning of the 900s, Christian or the common era. And his native tongue is not Arabic.
His native tongue is some kind of dialect based on Persian. Most people say Dadi. And so he learns Arabic, studying it in Marv to begin with, with historian Christian monks, who are engaged in the study of Aristotle and translating Aristotle from Greek into Syriac into Arabic. This book that I'm working on right now, the book of letters, Al-Furabi compares Arabic and the way it expresses the verb to be, as well as other terms, with Greek, Persian, a language called soyidin and Syriac.
So he had what extent of language competency has in these different languages is always up for debate, but he certainly has some awareness of them. And he sees the problem of expressing the verb to be in Arabic. A simple sentence such as, isaid is tall, the verb is, does not get expressed in Arabic. Zid, al-weil.
Okay. We don't have to go into that. Well, before you go on, just a small point. But this is why, I assume this is why you're saying this is relevant to the book of letters, which is a commentary possibly on Aristotle's book on the metaphysics, where being, of course, is the central subject under investigation.
That was a small point. Okay, no, and that's important because the question about Ussia, which in Arabic is probably jauhara, and which I translate probably much to Joe Sax's chagrin as substance, but simply because thinghood doesn't work in the way Al-Furabi uses it. So Ussia and tau ti'ain, which he translates, which he uses in Arabic word that translates as essence. The discussion of those two concepts and the whole question about existence and existent ENT is the biggest discussion, the longest discussion in the whole work.
So it's a major part of the work. That's one issue, the other issue that's very, very important. The book of letters, we do know a great deal about because part two of the book of letters has circulated in a kind of semsiedot version among any number of students of philosophy for years now. And it mustn't matter who really helped us understand the importance of philosophy, had an excellent version of part two that circulated.
What's exciting about part two is the way learning and especially the learning of the logistical arts that leads to the syllogistic arts culminates in two arts, dialectic and demonstration. I think that Al-Furabi is trying to show us indirectly that even though demonstration is the highest art, it doesn't achieve all that it's cracked up to be. But that's a long complicated thing. What's most important, I think, for our discussion right now is that in this argument, once Aristotle has achieved certainty or shown us the way to certainty through demonstration, we can stop, sit down, and begin to think about politics.
And once we do that, we have to think about setting down rules. When we set down rules, religion becomes very important. And so at that point, Al-Furabi rejoins, brings up again, returns to this famous theme of the relationship between philosophy and religion, and sort of the thing that we want to talk about tonight. So is that why you chose this book for us to address?
You thought the book of religion serves as that kind of a... Indeed, yeah. And the reason I mentioned the enumeration of the sciences, chapter five, is because Al-Furabi in the following way, the enumeration of the sciences, which sets forth, according to him, a popular view of the sciences, ends with a depiction of political science as it has been known until now. There's to say the political science that was passed on from Plato and Aristotle is no longer sufficing.
And the reason that no longer suffices is because something new has come about. Opinion has now been shown to lead the way. An opinion as exemplified by religion in the arts of dialectical theology and jurisprudence. So when Al-Furabi presents that old political science in the enumeration of the sciences, which basically tried to teach people to rule by showing them how to shape their own character, and then how to shape the character of others, this character formation he sees as deficient because it emphasizes what is being done rather than what is being said.
When does he draft enumeration first, Charles? Who knows? I think when Al-Furabi reads Aristotle, he reads Aristotle in terms of what Aristotle did in each book. So how, from Aristotle's perspective, one book leads to another.
I would read Al-Furabi in the same way. I think that's a good lesson for us. In that sense, then, yes, the enumeration of the sciences in his mind precedes the book of religion and many other writings. And especially his own political writings, the political regime, the principles of the opinions of the virtuous city and so on.
So if that can be taken as a characterization of what Al-Furabi is doing in the enumeration, in a minute you open the book of religion, you see that you're in an entirely new universe. Religion, and the word that he uses there is the Arabic word is middle, which could be religious community, just as well as religion, is depicted very much the way a political science is depicted, the line just off the top of my head. And religion is the opinions and the rules that are set down by the first ruler, and what the first ruler wants to do with these things, either to attain happiness for the people of the community, along with his own happiness, or to attain happiness for them, without regard to his own happiness, or to obtain his own happiness without regard to them. And off we go.
Go ahead. Can I stress what you said? This sounds like a political scientist. I think this sounds like a very specific political scientist, Aristotle.
I mean, his definition of religion, this almost strikes me as coming almost verbatim out of how Aristotle might define the city and the politics. I'll just read, since you summarized it, I'll read it sort of verbatim, your translation. I mean, this is unique in a text, I think, that a philosopher like Alfred Robbie begins by just telling you from the start what the thing is that he's investigating. He says this is Alfred.
Religion is opinions and actions. One, determined and restricted with stipulations and described for a community. Two, by their first ruler, three, who seeks to obtain through their practicing it a specific purpose for with respect to them or by means of them. And that sounds like four parts, which don't quite map up, but almost quite map up to aerosols, four main parts of the polis or something like this as well.
The material cause, what did it, the first rulers, the efficient cause, material is what's for, what form it takes and wants its tealos or purpose or goal. So it does strike me as a very Aristotelian account of what religion is. That's interesting. Yes.
In that respect, Aristotle is front and center. He's not front and center if you were to think of anything like the politics because to the best of our knowledge, Alfred Robbie knew nothing about Aristotle's politics. But that could also be very platonic also, that definition. And when you go on in the book of religion and he, and Alfred Robbie talks about the opinions and the actions, then this does begin to sound very much like what Socrates tries to do in the Republic when he reforms, when he does a new theology in the Republic.
Yeah. It struck me at a number of points as I just finished the seminar, we read the Republic all semester and I was reading this. I felt like especially when you got the political science sections, how felt like he was building the city in a way when the religion sounds like the theological education, but also the way he starts describing how cities come together or communities come together and how each has a purpose in the whole and then they try to form into an organic hole in a way and it struck me as very much. And even up to where he says that in all the defective regimes are concerned with this worldly things, whereas the perfect regime is concerned not just with worldly things, but presumably the things in the life you're after.
And it struck me that this is almost, I might teach this the next time I do the Republic. It's almost like a little in a nutshell, 20 pages of rich political insights that Plato, you read it afterwards, you realize how much Robbie can stick in this short work. We have other readers have tweeted questions, Charles, into us about the parallels between Frobbing and Book of Religion and Machiavelli. So, Sure.
Can that be made more precise? No. No matter. We can drop.
We can cut it if you want, but I think question something along the lines of what is the main differences between how Machiavelli and Al-Frawbi treat religion? I think there are huge differences between how we treat religion. I mean, Al-Frawbi never tries to undermine religion ostensibly. What he's trying to do, if anything, is to reform religion or to put religion on a better footing.
And over and over the simple, the surface of the argument is that religion is philosophy in popular speech and popular images. Once we understand the way things are, then we can communicate those things to the people. It's what comes next that fascinates me, that then you need to have law giving. And this would, for somebody who follows a revealed law, either a Torah or a Shari'a, this makes a great deal of sense because the idea is to obey that revealed law.
You have to understand it, of course, and that's the art of jurisprudence. But what Al-Frawbi is trying to do is to show the importance of getting that law, the stipulations that go into that law straight. Just a couple of other things about the book of religion. He cast the gates.
Let me back. Let me restate that. At the end of the enumeration of the sciences, when he portrays the art of dialectical theology, Calam, the portrait that he gives is a very dark portrait. It becomes clear that for Al-Frawbi, those who engage in Calam are not interested in truth, but they're interested in winning the day.
He depicts Calam as being the art of defending religion. I suppose from a Christian perspective, we call this dogmatics. And the way Al-Frawbi explains what they're doing, he gives examples of practically any kind of argument being accepted, as long as it wins the day. When he depicts religion, and especially virtuous religion, in the book of religion, he says nothing at all about dialectical theology.
It just drops out silently, drops out. He does speak at length about jurisprudence. There's a role for the person who would interpret the lawgiver and try to show sometimes the lawgiver didn't legislate everything that needs to be legislated. You need to have that drawn out.
There's a role for that kind of person. That's worth looking at. It's especially worth looking at sections five and six of the book of religion, because this is where he tries to show that even though religion is subordinate to philosophy, it is so because philosophy presents the full picture of what religion presents by way of images. He then presents two kinds of political science.
One is the political science, very much like the one that he depicted in the enumeration of the sciences, and shows its insufficiency today, especially its insufficiency with respect to religion. And then he depicts political science, which is a part of philosophy. This political science is fully adequate. And at the end, it's this political science that provides the paradigm for the way we should – for the regime that we should aspire to have.
And so it's one that is informed by religious concerns, if not by religion simply. I can briefly – I just want to briefly for listeners to be familiar with what's going on here. So in the book of religion, the idea is there's a lawgiver. And then if there's a perfect succession of lawgivers, you're in good shape.
But at some point, if there's lawgivers, if there's not a perfect succession, if we don't have a prophet, if we don't have a first ruler, then we rely on the rule of lawyers, jurists, like you were saying. And this has a certain plausibility to it, I suppose, right? The first ruler sets down laws. Once he's gone, the next best thing we can do is have people who are expert in the laws using analogical reasoning from the law to situations that the law doesn't meet.
So for example, if the law prohibits imbibs imbiving alcohol, but doesn't say anything specifically about marijuana, our lawyers could infer, well, the reason the prophet said don't drink booze was because we don't want you to get into this delirious state. Marijuana put you in delirious state, so therefore let's forgive it that. So it's a second best let's rule on what would the first ruler have sat down and had he applied it to these circumstances. But yeah, yeah.
But you want to direct us to section five of the book of religion about the relationship between philosophy and religion, I think? Well, yes. And I mean, I did, I captured what I really interested in capturing that religion is subordinate to philosophy and the reason that it's subordinate to philosophy is because the teachings, the practical and the theoretical teachings of religion are fully grasped by philosophy. Can I press you on this?
So this is something, sorry, Alex, jump in if you want, but this is something that sort of intrigues me. And I remember I first studied this with you in grad school and then I said on your undergraduate class, which actually helped me more than the grad class for what because you were speaking more than other grad students like me. But this sort of this implies a kind of priority of philosophy to religion. It's well, it doesn't apply to explicitly states, but it implies a temporal priority as well.
And he makes this explicit in his other work, the A Team of Happiness, section 55, he says philosophy is prior to religion in time. So in other words, if it is the case that religion is giving images of what is discovered by philosophy, that implies that while whoever's making those images must have had the thing, he's drawing the images from first. And so I found this highly implausible, just looking at the history of the world, it seems like we had most places have religion before they had philosophy. But what really helped me to think this through maybe in conversation with Alex actually was in thinking about Homer.
And so Homer was clearly a poet. Religion is a little bit anachronistic of a term to use, but Homer was sort of setting down the religion for the Greeks. And he's giving sort of here's areas that got a war. What's going on there?
I suspect is that Homer actually had some serious or philosophical reflections. There was this one passage where he mentions nature and passing. And from his grasp of reality in some way, he then presented that grasp in poetic form to other people. And so it does make sense to mean a way that philosophy precedes religion in time, in the case of say a Homer or something like this.
But that's a really sophisticated reading of, I mean, the common sense they're saying is Homer comes to poor Plato, so religion comes before philosophy. So this novel reversal of what comes first I find quite fascinating. You want to speak more? I mean, can I stress how in plausible it sounds that these sort of primitive peoples out in the wilderness by themselves, the first thing they do is scare a philosophy.
And then they turn to religion or doesn't it seem that the most plausible thing is that they would come up with stories about the gods and then somebody eventually would say, well, that story doesn't sound quite right. And they would try to reflect on those opinions. Sorry, Alex, it's the feedback on that. One could maybe make the claim that philosophy is prior to virtuous religion in time, right?
That if you're going to establish a good religion, but it's not. That's not what said, it's prior to religion. So you would want to say, well, there could be sort of simple superstition and sort of weird cultish worship that's unreflective in its basis or in its founding. But we say that even unvirtuous religion is that philosophy is prior to that in time.
What if the original religion or the first religion is a kind of is not virtuous religion or base or is he distinguishing religion from superstition? So I'm like, I'm getting a little messy here, but maybe that's another way to think about this. Yeah. He speaks at length about this in the book of letters, in part two of the book of letters.
The idea is that sometimes philosophy is prior in time to religion and sometimes it's the other way around. And it just depends on what happens. Now, I would like to just jump up and get the attainment to look at that passage because I didn't remember him being so explicit in the attainment. That's problematic if he does say it so explicitly in the attainment.
But the nuanced version and indeed he goes back and he goes back and he stays on the subject length in the book of letters. There is false philosophy and there's something that is deceptive or purposely deceptive philosophy. And these do come before true philosophy and sometimes they come before religion. But religion which is humanly set down, he thinks comes after philosophy.
In the attainment of happiness, the passage I now have in front of me. It's the very end of section 55. It's a very long section. We have to go through that to make sense of it.
But the key thing is that finally philosophy is prior to religion in time. This comes as a conclusion to a long series of reasons why philosophy is prior to religion in having a grasp of what is, while religion only has an image of what is. And the only thing that I can say is however, in the book of letters, there's a time when religion is prior in time. There's a moment when religion is prior in time.
And there's a moment when philosophy is prior in time. It just depends on what happens. And if you think about it, I mean that's really what you were saying earlier, Greg, depending on where people are. The people looking around themselves and asking about the trees and asking about the birds and the bees would be able to come up with some idea of religion before they get to philosophy.
Can I point out just before he reaches that conclusion? He's talking about all the things that religion imitates. He says, philosophy gives an account of the ultimate principles. Religion sets forth their images by means of similitudes.
And as he's working through all of these, he says, and it attempts to bring the similitudes of all these things that he's just gone through as close as possible to their essences. So he seems to be saying that prior to the construction of these similitudes is some discernment of the essences by the person making religion. So in the sort of religion that he's describing, it would seem to have to be the case of philosophy is prior to religion in time. Yeah.
And I'll just say, again, the plausibility of the strikes, you know, in the Christian tradition, at least, I mean, Jesus famously spoke in parables, which how is that not image making and these kinds of things? And it's, I think you see similar things in Hebrew Bible, and I think you see similar things in just whatever religion, right? I mean, speaking in images, I think too often when people hear speaking in images, they think well speaking therefore, and sort of something that's not the truth as opposed to thinking of something that's a simillitude of the truth, something that is the truth but in different form, not quite two truths, like air verities has been popularized to have said, but there's an account of reality, and then there's a likely account of reality, something like this. There's a footnote that Matt has through the passage that we're reading from, and he refers us to the book of religion, and what he refers us to is what we now have in the translated version at least as sections 23 and 24.
So, no, I'm sorry, even earlier than that, sections 18 and 19. So this notion of philosophy being prior is emphasized in the book of religion, and also in other works, the political regime, but there is the possibility of things happening the other way around. And I would probably resist the Christianity argument because I'm the following grounds. What Jesus comes to do is not to make a new religion, but to help us see a better path to the old one.
So we have to really talk about the religion that was there, Judaism, and these are the really two big contenders, Judaism and Islam. It's very easy to make an argument without being seen to be irreligious that philosophy comes before religion in time, if you're talking about Islam. But Charles, don't the censors pick up on El Farabi's, the whiff of impropriety and some of his... I don't know if any of his books ever being censored.
So I'm confused that. Am I confusing Farabi with... A very weak. A very weak.
So Farabi, really? Okay. Okay. I mean, but there's a better censor for El Farabi.
I'm probably was just neglected. Yeah. Well, Charles, it doesn't even have a file sort of imply that in the beginning to Hibern Yachson, which is not all that I hope will do, a certain kind of what, imprudence on the part of El Farabi? Well, yeah.
Yeah. And what's his status today, Charles, as a thinker, and he's coming very much into the vogue and over and over, I receive emails from people, or I hear about people who are writing on El Farabi and trying to study El Farabi. A lot of this is, if we could ever have an intelligent sociology of thought, of knowledge, it has to do with where you are when. And a Veroese, even to file all of the end of the sea and philosophers had a very good press, because it was the Macribians who were writing about them.
And they had the manuscripts there in the Magna, either in Morocco, Algeria, or Tunisia, and brought them out, or some of them in Spain. For some reason, El Farabi's writings just didn't get reproduced that much. And the ones that we have access to now, for the most part are written in a script that shows a Persian, Persian influence by the way they're written. And they were kept, they were to be found mainly in Iranian libraries, or in Turkish libraries where the holdings had been picked up from Iranian book merchants.
And they're also very, very late. 16th, 17th century. So can I ask a question a little bit to the book of religion? So religion is an imitation of philosophy, but earlier, and this is a question I had with the various, so I'll be interested to see how it plays out in Verobi.
But you started off when talking about the book of letters that there's kind of two ways to understand philosophy. One is on the model of demonstration, the other on the model of dialectic demonstration. You've grasped the essence of principles, and then you can derive from that which particular laws or creeds would be necessary for people to follow. But if it's, as you suggested earlier, philosophy doesn't attain that level of certainty as dialectical, right?
How does that fit into this account? I'm thinking in particular about just what we read from the attainment of happiness, but also when he's describing here how rulers will legislate for particular circumstances, and then they don't anticipate new things that are happening either within this sort of category like Greg's example, or there's a whole new situation that arises. And it seems like there the legislation is imperfect, both in its grasp with the principles and in its ability to comprehend particulars. And studying that aside, when he's talking about religion as an imitation of philosophy, which model of philosophy are we really talking about?
And how does that ambiguity in philosophy is demonstrative versus philosophy is dialectical, actually fit in? It's very problematic because what we have been brought up to believe is that demonstration is the highest form of reasoning that leads us to the best kind of understanding. But there is one small problem. Has any of us seen a demonstration?
And the answer I think is no. But maybe in mathematics we can come up with something. And okay, so that's one thing. That's very important.
That's true that there are no demonstrations. Or if you'd rather have me say that we're still aspiring to grasp demonstrations, then what we're left with is understanding better the premises by which we reason. And that's pretty much what dialectic is all about. The best kind of premises, the best kinds of premises used in dialectic are those that the majority of the wise hold.
And if we can get those, that would be very, very good. Alfa Rabi leaves, I think, leaves that door wide open. He does insist that philosophy comes to an end with Aristotle at the highest level. So does the Veroese.
But we know that's not accurate. And in his writings, the philosophy of Aristotle, which is the third part of this trilogy of which the attainment of happiness is the first part, there he acknowledges that Aristotle's metaphysics is not complete. We don't have what Aristotle tried to do. I think it's fair to say that if you read the metaphysics with great care, you see that it's a work of problems rather than a work of solutions or of answers.
You learn to live with unresolved questions. You understand them better as you work them through with Aristotle. But you haven't received answers to the most important questions. That's one thing.
The other thing is, whenever Alfa Rabi talks about these matters, there's a progression. When do we become interested in politics? We become interested in politics when our reasoning allows us to solve a number of practical or theoretical issues having to do with natural science and issues having to do with making our way in the world. And then we begin to think about how can we live better in the world with one another?
And that's when he turns to politics. He does this over and over in his different writings. We've got this much done. Now let's turn to that.
And it's sort of, are you talking about Plato and the Republic? Are you thinking about the laws? What is the paradigm or what is the example that you're addressing? To me, it makes sense in that respect.
Yes, he thinks or he claims that Aristotle superseeds Plato. But when he writes, he writes in a platonic manner or in a sacratic manner, not in an ericitillion manner. He raises more questions and purposely acknowledges that he's speaking enigmatically rather than resolving things once and for all. Platonic theme, to bring us back to the text, there's one other thing that we talked about as we prepared for the show tonight.
Alfa Rabi discusses the relationship between the philosopher, legislator, and prophet. This seems to me to pick up on a platonic theme from the Republic, as you mentioned just a few months ago, where Plato unites the philosopher and king and the same person. Alfa Rabi goes one further, the philosopher, legislator, and prophet are the same person. What can you tell us about Alfa Rabi's account of the relationship between these three figures?
They're the same. Thanks for listening, folks. We'll see you next time. I mean, he has one more, the e-map.
And then in case you were still not there, he has yet another one, the mallex. I would translate it as king. For some reason, Matthew translated that as prince. I don't know why, but in other words, the ruler.
That person, under the best understood, is the same. That person has the same qualities. Now philosophers and kings haven't always shown themselves to have those qualities. I don't know.
I'm not going to put myself into trouble by talking about prophets, especially since we're in the month of Ramadan. Fair enough. Maybe David, you want to turn to mail back? I'm pretty sure you couldn't talk too candidly about prophets even outside the month of Ramadan.
I think that Charles answered most of the questions that I see in our mailbag. I won from Thomas Cleveland, which is fun. He quotes for Albi, the most virtuous person forced to dwell in ignorant cities due to the non-existence of the virtuous city need to migrate to the virtuous city if it happens to come into being at a certain moment. Thomas asks, what should he do if it doesn't actually come into being?
He says he's asking for a friend. This is clearly a person. He's asking for himself, and he's asking for himself. I think that's in the political regime, but I'm not certain.
I think Albi gives you an example of what to do by his own life. You look around, if you can find something, go for it. He made one mistake, apparently. He thought that Seifaldallah in Damascus was better than I forget the ruler now in Baghdad, so he went there.
But then he realized that that was not as good as it looked from the outside. So you keep trying to make the best out of that situation. Albi never served a political role in life. I suppose that's one other thing you do.
You keep out of the limelight. That question is actually from the end of section 14A. 14A of the book of religion. Yeah.
Can I ask a question? This is just a weird termological thing. At the end of section 11, Robby says, example of what is presumed to be happiness, but is not such are affluence, pleasures, honor, and being glorified. Or anything else sought and acquired in this life that the multitude calls goods.
It just struck me maybe this is too much Plato and Aristotle, but honor and being glorified are usually associated not with the multitude, but with a few who want to be excellent. So what is this? Is this just a grammatical thing, right? That you say all of these and anything else, but it sounds like he's saying that the multitude seek honor and being glorified.
That's right. If you just clarify that. But you're reading from where on that? End of section 11.
While you're looking, I'll just mention that to Tom's question about what the person ought to do in the political regime, he raises the same thing and implies that they ought to live as strangers among the non-fertuous. They ought to find the other virtuous people and if they can, but if they're separated from different regimes, they should just live as strangers. I think that the limelight, like Charles was saying. Isn't that the section 11 there, that passage that you're reading, it's part of a longer sentence.
And these are things that one looks for in trying to get to happiness, but isn't happiness. And I don't know why that has to be. Oh, I see. Anything else that the multitude calls goods.
So yeah, yeah. I would like to be honored and receive all the prizes of being honored, but I recognize that that's probably going to be short lived. You don't have to be part of the ruling class to think that it would be nice to have that. In fact, maybe that's the problem.
I don't know how much. Well, we'll just keep this very, very vague. Think of some of our present day rulers who seem to have chosen the wrong thing in seeking political power. On Tom's point, I was just when we were talking about the public, I just looked at the philosophy of Plato and it struck me how well that fits with that section 14a.
He says, this is in section 31 of the philosophy of Plato. From says, when he investigated it looked around him, it became evident to him that it is complete injustice and extreme evil. These grave evils and they are extremely grave would not select an advantage as long as the cities continue as they were. Another city ought to be founded, which is different from those cities.
So it's interesting. It might be if you put this passage with the 14a that, well, if it doesn't exist, you have to find it, get it started. Yeah, I have a question. Oh, sorry.
No Charles, did you need to? He doesn't. He doesn't try to found a city. What he would prefer to do is to reform what is rather than to found a new city.
Why? One answer one can give is he is living in a nice part of civilization. We're talking about the golden age of Arabic slash Islamic civilization in Baghdad, the great extolled Baghdad. And if you don't like Baghdad, there's Damascus.
And then just a few days away, there's Cairo. So there are lots of exotic cities that one could turn to and a lot of different kingdoms is not the right word, but between places ruled by one person, that flourish. So there are any number of choices for good places to live and places to seek a decent life without being a ruler or in the ruling class, being in the court, so to speak. It's a good time to be studying what's most important.
So I have one quick question from our friend Mike Schmidt, who's a student at Boston College, and then I have the final one. Greg, though, I didn't mean to. Do you have your hand raised? Okay.
Mike asks, in Butterworth's translation, the treatise is divided into 27 sections, the 14th and central of which is further divided into five subsections. Is this division for Abhis, Makhthis or Butterworth's? The division is Makhthis. There is reason for a lot of the paragraph.
Well, everything is driven by trying to figure out what the argument is. There's no attempt made to look for numerology in this. When one works with an Arabic manuscript, sometimes a scribe will highlight something, either by a thicker pen stroke or by a different color ink or by putting something in the margin. Our priori, we don't know whether that is the scribe or it's the scribe having copied the original.
That was in the original that scribes copying from, and he is simply reproducing it. So we've just got to make sense of that. Yeah. So I don't think there's any numerology secrets here.
No, I, yeah. And my question is, how is something I would like to put in a plug. A book has just been accepted by Cambridge University Press called Leo Strauss and Islamic Political Thought, which goes into all sorts of questions like this. And when that book comes out, I think that we've learned a lot about how.
So the author. Who's the author? The author is Rasul Namazi. Who is an Iranian working on Strauss for a number of years.
So my question, I think Greg is going to take us out. Charles, how much of Farabi is left untranslated? I want a sense of his corpus. Well, there's a beautiful book called The Great Book of Music, which is a thousand pages, which has not been translated in into entirety.
A lot of it has been translated into French. I don't know of anybody who's going to take that on. One major reason is because it requires a great sense of music. He was a master musician.
There is a woman in Toronto who's apparently working on the music aspects of it. But I don't know if she's going to do the whole thing or not. You all can correct me. I can't think of anything else.
The virtuous city does need to be retranslated, and there's a project of foot to do that. I was reading with a group of people, Al Farabi's, Treat Us on the Intellect, last summer and fall, and realized that the extant translations leave a lot to be desired. I've redone that and have to look at it again, put it into shape. I think that it's a very small treatise.
It might be a nice article for a journal or something like that would be suitable. We can think of journals. Well, I just wanted to thank you, Charles, for your time tonight. I just want to thank you for having translated this book and brought it into my life.
I've taught it half a dozen times to students when I'm lucky enough to be able to teach Arabic or Islamic philosophy and the book of religion has helped me to clarify my own thinking about religion. In general, the medieval Islamic thinkers have been key to my understanding of these matters generally. A lot of that's thanks to you personally and also you introducing me to some of these fantastic works. So thanks for coming back and being our guest a second time.
We sure would love to have you a third time. It's a pleasure to see each of you and to be with you. Yeah. Thank you.
Well, thanks again. We'll see you next time.