“It is wrong for the virtuous man to remain in the corrupt polities, and he must emigrate to the ideal cities, if such exist in fact in his time. If they do not exist, then the virtuous man is a stranger in the present world and wretched In life, and to die is preferable for him than to live.”
This passage from Al-Farabi’s Aphorisms of the Statesman is interesting to look at, especially centuries after it has been written.
All around the world we still see people that speak up for their believes facing prosecution and having to flee to more open societies. Al-Farabi in his political philosophy made a plea for establishing societies were forward thinkers were welcomed with open arms and celebrated. He skectched the kind off society we would need for this.
Al-Farabi like some ancient philosophers believed that people should strive for happiness or sa’ada. People would reach this when they would seek the truth and lead a life of virtuous contemplation after which they would find sa’ada. A political regime should allow and facilitate that people were able to live these virtuous lives so they might one day obtain sa’ada. The head of such a political regime must be a person who is the source of all power and knowledge, sort of a philosopher-prophet. For Al-Farbai many states lose sight of sa’ada and persue other things such as wealth or survivial, they have lost sight of sa’ada. We ourselves might wonder in what kind off state we live now.
The western world is mostly capitalistic, so we could assume we live in vile states, which persue wealth. But our society pursues many more things that keep us from reaching sa’ada. We seek pleasure, not just debauchery but things like watching Netflix for 8 hours straight provides people with some feeling of pleasure (otherwise why do we do it?), so maybe we live in the base state? Or do we live in a despotic state, were we seek to have power over other people? We may not live in a state of necessities anymore, but if we were to live in this state we would not yet be corrupted to pursue wealth or power. We live in a democratic state, were we seek to be free, to do as we wish. Our society holds promise for Al-Farabi we one day might become a virtuous state. The democratic state is distinct by her diversity, because people here can pursue their freedom which attracts a lot of different people. Which means that there might even be some virtuous citizens living amongst us, who might succeed in persuading the others to go and seek sa’ada.
We see in this that Al-Farabi is way more positive about democracy than Plato or Aristotle ever were. This brings us to interesting ideas. A common argument by ignorant people to explain turbulence in the Middle East are things like: ‘maybe democracy and Islam just do not go well together’ etc. But what Al-Farabi shows is a combination of Islam with political ideas that one can only find in Europe centuries later. People would do well by themselves if they would not look at only European ideas of democracy found in Voltaire and Montesquieu, but see it can take many shapes and forms, from places all around the world.
An Introduction to Medieval Philosophy 