Al-Farabi was one of the few Muslims in this group, and he made his
mark by transmuting its cultural capital into Islamic terms. An independently
wealthy individual living quietly without court patronage, he dedicated himself
to gathering everything he could from the cosmopolitan network, seeking out
the leading teachers and traveling as far as Byzantium. Al-Farabi represents
the culmination of idea importing into Islam. He surveyed all the available
Greek works and enumerated all the natural sciences, the main concern of the
Baghdad translators, systematizing everything into a Neoplatonic hierarchy of
emanations. Al-Farabi was most original in adapting Plato’s Republic to Is-
lamic conditions: the Prophet, as head of Islam, is the true philosopher-king;
just as the universe emanates from the absolute One, the successive ranks of
political hierarchy emanate from the political head. Al-Farabi implies that after
the Prophet, the headship is delegated to a being of secondary grade, whose
qualities and powers are lessened. The vagueness of al-Farabi’s formulation is
perhaps a deliberate appeal to cover all factions; the “second head” could be
equally the caliph, the Àulama, or even the ShiÀite Imam. Al-Farabi’s hallmark
is political caution and the avoidance of theological disputes. His Neoplaton-
ism is a religion of reason, combining the naturalism of the sciences with the
most abstract and general form of Islam that he could safely espouse.
Why would this religion of reason now rise to dominance in the network
of philosophers? External political forces helped move the network in this
direction. Islam, originally a religion of the Arabs, was pressuring its subject
peoples to convert. Zoroastrians had already been persecuted and largely
eliminated in the 800s. In 932–934, the caliph launched a persecution of
Sabians, and the last of them in the scientific network (notably 105 and 127
in the key to Figure 8.2) converted to Islam. Christians came under increasing
pressure, although we find them in the network of Yahia ibn ÀAdi’s successors
down into the next century. The Muslim intellectuals who inhabited these
circles had no reason to defend Christianity or any other religion; their struc-
tural location motivated them to take a studied neutrality. The freethinker Ibn
al-Rawandi took the most dangerous stance, claiming the autonomy of science,
superior to religion. Al-Farabi’s contemporary Rhazes even more explicitly
rejected the clashing religious sects; he held that prophecy is superfluous to the
light of reason, and indeed the cause of violence among religious rivals (Fakhry,
1983: 105). Rhazes, one of the first Muslims among the elite medical doctors,
drew widely on the cosmopolitan communities intersecting at Baghdad, from
India as well as Greece. Rhazes postulated a system of co-eternal principles,
including atoms moving continually in the void, souls undergoing a cycle of
rebirths, and a creator-God who sets in motion these preexistent materials.
Rhazes’s eclectic synthesis was condemned on all sides; in his grandpupils’
generation it would be picked up by another heretical group, the secret Breth-
ren of Purity.
410 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths