From incidental accounts it is known that he spent significant time in Baghdad with Christian scholars including the cleric Yuhanna ibn Haylan, Yahya ibn Adi, and Abu Ishaq Ibrahim al-Baghdadi. He later spent time in Damascus, Syria and Egypt before returning to Damascus where he died in 950-1.
Name:
His name was Abu Nasr Muhammad b. Muhammad Farabi, as all sources and especially the earliest and most reliable, Al-Masudi, agree. In modern Turkish scholarship and some other sources, the pronunciation is given as Uzlu
Birthplace:
Abu Nasr Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Tarkhan ibn Uzalagh al-Farabi, better known in the Latin West as Alpharabius, was born in Wasij, a small village located close to Farab in the province of Transoxiana in Turkistan. Of Turkish origin, his father initially served as an army captain, and later he became a prominent member of the Persian military service.
Blessed with an unrivalled linguistic ability, al-Farabi continued to develop this ability throughout his life and probably knew more languages and dialects than any other Muslim thinker of his generation. Arabic and Persian aside, he mastered Turkish, Greek, Syriac and Hebrew, not to mention many other local languages and dialects. He went on to receive advanced training in linguistics and Islamic sciences. He became so proficient in Fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) that he was appointed Qadi (judge) while he was still in his twenties.
Origin:
There exists a difference of opinion on the ethnic background of Farabi. According to the Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought “[…] because the origins of al-Farabi were not recorded during his lifetime or soon after his death in 950 C.E. by anyone with concrete information, accounts of his pedigree and place of birth have been based on hearsay…
Iranian origin theory:
Medieval Arab historian Ibn Abī U
Turkish origin theory:
The oldest known reference to a possible Turkish origin is given by the medieval historian Ibn Khallikan (died in 1282), who in his work Wafayāt (completed in 669/1271) states that Farabi was born in the small village of Wasij near Farab (in what is today Otrar, Kazakhstan) of Turkish parents. Oxford professor C.E. Bosworth notes that “great figures [such] as al-Farabi, al-Biruni, and ibn Sina have been attached by over enthusiastic Turkish scholars to their race”.
Life and Education:
Al-Farabi spent almost his entire life in Baghdad, capital of Abbasids that ruled the Islamic world. In the auto-biographical passage about the appearance of philosophy preserved by Ibn Abī U
Contributions:
Farabi made contributions to the fields of logic, mathematics, music, philosophy, psychology, and education.
Alchemy:
Al-Farabi wrote: The Necessity of the Art of the Elixir.
Logic:
Though he was mainly an Aristotelian logician, he included a number of non-Aristotelian elements in his works. He is also credited for categorizing logic into two separate groups, the first being “idea” and the second being “proof.
Music:
Farabi wrote a book on music titled Kitab al-Musiqa (The Book of Music). He presents philosophical principles about music, its cosmic qualities and its influences. Al-Farabi’s treatise Meanings of the Intellect dealt with music therapy, where he discussed the therapeutic effects of music on the soul.
Philosophy:
As a philosopher, Al-Farabi was a founder of his own school of early Islamic philosophy known as “Farabism” or “Alfarabism”, though it was later overshadowed by Avicennism. Al-Farabi’s school of philosophy “breaks with the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle [… and …] moves from metaphysics to methodology, a move that anticipates modernity”. In his attempt to think through the nature of a First Cause, Al-farabi discovers the limits of human knowledge”.
Al-Farabi had great influence on science and philosophy for several centuries, and was widely regarded to be second only to Aristotle in knowledge (alluded to by his title of “the Second Teacher” in his time. His work, aimed at synthesis of philosophy and Sufism, paved the way for the work of Ibn Sina (Avicenna).
Al-Farabi also wrote a commentary on Aristotle’s work, and one of his most notable works is Al-Madina al-Fadila where he theorized an ideal state as in Plato’s The Republic. Al-Farabi departed from the Platonic view in that he regarded the ideal state to be ruled by the prophet-imam, instead of the philosopher-king envisaged by Plato. Al-Farabi argued that the ideal state was the city-state of Medina when it was governed by the prophet Muhammad as its head of state, as he was in direct communion with Allah whose law was revealed to him.
Physics:
Al-Farabi thought about the nature of the existence of void. He may have carried out the first experiments concerning the existence of vacuum, in which he investigated handheld plungers in water. He concluded that air’s volume can expand to fill available space, and he suggested that the concept of perfect vacuum was incoherent.
Psychology:
In psychology, al-Farabi’s Social Psychology and Model City were the first treatises to deal with social psychology. He stated that “an isolated individual could not achieve all the perfections by himself, without the aid of other individuals.” He wrote that it is the “innate disposition of every man to join another human being or other men in the labor he ought to perform.” He concluded that in order to “achieve what he can of that perfection, every man needs to stay in the neighborhood of others and associate with them.”
His On the Cause of Dreams, which appeared as chapter 24 of his Book of Opinions of the people of the Ideal City, was a treatise on dreams, in which he distinguished