EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1 | 159unique eloquence the formation of an Islamic synthesis on Greek founda-
tions, partly through creative pseudepigraphy. Unlike other Arabic transla-
tions, it does not aspire to exactitude. It transforms the target text by reread-
ing it through Muslim eyes in the case of Kindī who edited the final version,
but also Christian eyes in the case of Himsī who did the actual translation,
with its echoes of Ps.- Dionysius’s Christian Platonist vocabulary.^156 One
could hardly imagine better testimony to Arabic civilization’s successful con-
nection to an immensely complex and at times contradictory cultural evolu-
tion rooted in the late Greek world, but also in the remoter reaches of Greek
and Near Eastern Antiquity. At its heart stands Aristotle, understood no
longer as primarily a logician, but as the author of a vast encyclopedia from
which the Arabs omitted only the Politics. Through the Theolog y, they em-
braced too the mature Platonism of Plotinus and Proclus. If it could be made
to speak with one voice, and to unify—as among certain of Kindī’s pupils—
the scientific traditions of Eg ypt, Babylon, Iran, and India into a single vi-
sion, then Greek philosophy might be accepted by Muslims as a worthy in-
terlocutor, and even as a tool for expounding scripture.^157
Second only after Aristotle himself, according to tradition, was Fārābī,^158
whose account of his own intellectual genealog y we have already seen, and
who together with Kindī and Ibn Sīnā belongs to the trinity of names which
dominate early Arabic philosophy or falsafa. Fārābī, perhaps from the East
Iranian world and of Turkish origin, spent much of his adult life in Baghdad,
Syria, and Eg ypt. His travels, and the prominence of Christians among both
his teachers and his pupils, made him an ideal citizen of the cosmopolitan
Islamic Commonwealth.
Fārābī’s philosophy synthesized and systematized what had gone before,
with special regard for the Alexandrian Aristotelianism he saw as his per-
sonal heritage. His extension of the Syriac logic curriculum beyond Prior
analytics 1.7, to include not just the Posterior analytics but the entire Orga-
non, on all of which he wrote commentaries or paraphrases or both, was
highly characteristic of the role attributed to him as, after Aristotle, the “Sec-
ond Master.” Logic provided Fārābī with not just one possible expression of
the world of concepts, but a description of the structure of reality itself, free
from the constraints imposed by the particular language in which it is formu-
156 Gutas, Greek thought [5:92] 136–50, esp. 149; Adamson, Arabic Plotinus [5:152] 9–12, 165–
77; D’Ancona, in Entre Orient et Occident [5:151] 194–95.
157 For a general assessment of Aristotle’s role in Arabic philosophy from Kindī to Ibn Rushd, see
G. Endress, “L’Aristote arabe. Réception, autorité et transformation du Premier Maître,” Medioevo 23
(1997) 1–42.
158 D. Gutas and others, “Fārābī,” EIr 9.208–29; C. Martini Bonadeo and C. Ferrari, “Al- Fārābī,”
SFIM 380–448; D. C. Reisman, “Al- Fārābī and the philosophical curriculum,” in P. Adamson and R. C.
Taylor (eds), The Cambridge companion to Arabic philosophy (Cambridge 2005) 52–71; U. Rudolph, “Abū
Nasr al- Fārābī,” PIW 363–457.