The Virtuous City

Al-Farabi's Opinions of the People of the Virtuous City (Ārāʾ ahl al-madīna al-fāḍila), begun in Baghdad and finished in Damascus in 942–43: the Islamic world's answer to Plato's Republic. It climbs down from the First, through the intellects and the heavens, to matter, the human soul and the Active Intellect, prophecy and dreams, and then builds the virtuous city and its first ruler, set against the ignorant, immoral, changed and erring cities. A new translation from Friedrich Dieterici's German (Der Musterstaat, Leiden 1900), checked paragraph by paragraph against the Arabic of the Cairo edition (1906), which stands beside it; where Dieterici departs from the Arabic, the Arabic is followed. Words in square brackets are the translator's. References are to the pages of Dieterici's Arabic edition (Leiden 1895). Not yet reviewed by a scholar. Texts from Source Library's transcriptions (CC BY-SA 4.0).

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. This is a book composed by Abu Nasr al-Farabi on the principles of the opinions of the people of the virtuous city.

The First Existent is the First Cause of the existence of all the other existents. He is free of every kind of deficiency, while everything other than Him cannot be free of having some kind of deficiency in it, either one or more than one. But the First is free of all its kinds.

His existence, then, is the most excellent existence and the most prior existence; there can be no existence more excellent or more prior than His. In excellence of existence He is of the highest kind, and in perfection of existence He is of the loftiest rank. For this reason non-existence cannot in any way be mixed with His existence and substance.

Non-existence and the opposite occur only in what lies beneath the sphere of the Moon; and non-existence is the not-being of that whose nature is to exist.

Nor can He have existence in potentiality, in any manner at all, nor is there any possibility, in any way whatever, that He should not exist. For this reason He is eternal, everlasting in existence by His substance and His essence, without needing, in order to be eternal, anything else that would sustain His permanence; rather He is sufficient by His substance for His permanence and for the perpetuity of His existence.

Nor can there be any existence at all like His existence; nor, at the rank of His existence, is there any existence that could be His or be supplied to Him.