4

Strauss, Alfarabi, and Plato’s Laws

Shortly before his death in 1973, Leo Strauss planned to put together a collection of his articles dealing with very different subjects and philosophers under the title of “Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy.”¹ In what sense Strauss could describe these writings as “Platonic” is not easy to explain. What seems to be rather clear, however, is that he could not call them Machiavellian, Nietzschean, or Xenophontean. That Strauss attached a particular importance to Plato’s thought and writings has not eluded the attention of his readers. After all, his last major writing, or rather what he, perhaps as a Platonic gesture, left to one of his closest students to publish after his death, was a commentary on Plato’s Laws.² The importance of Plato for Strauss does not mean that he published often on Plato. In fact, it was only in 1964, after more than three decades of intense study of Plato, that Strauss, a confirmed scholar well in his sixties published his first study dedicated exclusively to a Platonic dialogue.³ Between his commentary on Plato’s Republic and his last book on the Laws, Strauss published several pieces on different Platonic dialogues. But his last book on Plato’s Laws seems to occupy a special place, although this is not obvious from the immediate reactions to it: it would not be an exaggeration to say that Strauss’s The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws was either coldly received by other scholars or was simply rejected by them.⁴ These negative reactions were in a sense expected even by Joseph Cropsey, who in his foreword pointed to the unusual characteristics of the book, its repetitive appearance, reticent prose, and unattractive style.⁵ Considering the unusual character of Strauss’s last book, one is naturally led to an obvious question: why did Strauss decide to dedicate his last energies to writing a whole book of unusual character on a rather neglected dialogue of Plato? An adequate answer to this question requires a proper understanding of Strauss’s commentary on the Laws, but to begin acquiring such an understanding, one does well to follow the signpost erected by Strauss himself. This signpost, in its conspicuousness as well as its modesty, is found right at the beginning of his book: it is a quotation from Avicenna’s On the Divisions of the Rational Sciences which, in Strauss’s translation, goes as follows: “… the treatment of prophecy and the Divine law is contained in … the Laws.”⁶

This statement, as Strauss explains at the beginning of his 1971–72 course on Plato’s Laws offered at St. John’s College, has preoccupied him since “about forty years ago,” more precisely since 1929 or 1930, when he “was a student of Jewish medieval philosophy and therefore also of Islamic philosophy,” reading Avicenna’s popular epistle for the first time in the Berlin National Library.⁷ Avicenna’s statement, which establishes a connection between Plato’s Laws, Plato’s political book par excellence, on the one hand, and prophecy (nubūwwa) and the Islamic Law (sharīʻa) on the other, was bound to capture Strauss’s attention: the statement ties all the elements of the theologico-political problem together. What all of this means could only become clear if we knew how Avicenna read Plato’s Laws. If there was no extensive discussion of Plato’s Laws found in Avicenna’s extant writings, however, it would be helpful if the commentary of some other faylsūf on the Laws were available, someone who was “considered the greatest authority in philosophy, apart from Aristotle himself” by the “men of the competence of Avicenna.”⁸ It is a piece of good luck that such a commentary exists, by the hand of none other than Alfarabi himself: Summary of Plato’s Laws (hereafter Summary).⁹ Strauss’s familiarity with and interest in Alfarabi’s Summary goes back to right after his discovery of Avicenna’s statement. He worked on a German translation and emendations of Alfarabi’s manuscript with Paul Kraus in 1931–32 in Berlin.¹⁰

It is safe to assume that Strauss’s commentary on Plato’s Laws is somehow influenced by Alfarabi’s Summary. In fact, Strauss never seems to have lost interest in the Summary, because not only did he try to track the material related to his collaboration with Kraus shortly after Kraus’s death, he also retells the famous story told by Alfarabi at the beginning of the Summary as an introduction to his 1971–72 course on Plato’s Laws.¹¹ More importantly, two years after the publication in 1952 of Gabrieli’s edition of the Summary, Strauss began working on an essay which later was published in Louis Massignon’s Festschrift as “How Fārābī Read Plato’s Laws” and finally, with slight modifications, as a chapter in What Is Political Philosophy?¹² Considering his longtime interest in Alfarabi’s Summary, one should say that this essay, Strauss’s last publication specifically dedicated to the Falāsifa, is a culmination of a project which Strauss began in the 1930s. Therefore, it seems that the only beginning, which is not arbitrary, the proper point of departure for understanding Strauss’s reading of Plato’s Laws is an analysis of his essay on Alfarabi’s Summary. But before turning to this analysis, we should say a few words about the debate around Alfarabi’s own work to bring out the specific character of Strauss’s reading of the Summary.

Debate on Alfarabi’s Summary

Despite the availability of a reliable edition of Alfarabi’s Summary for about seven decades, one cannot claim that it has found its place as a major source for the study of Alfarabi’s philosophical views. Very few scholarly studies have been written on any aspect of this unique writing.¹³ This lack of interest in Alfarabi’s Summary is quite unusual, especially if we consider the unique place occupied by this writing of Alfarabi in Islamic philosophy as well as in the scholarship on Plato’s Laws in general. The only other surviving commentary on a Platonic dialogue by a Muslim philosopher is Averroes’s commentary on Plato’s Republic. The difference being that the Arabic original of Averroes’s commentary does not seem to have survived, and we have to rely exclusively on the Hebrew translation, with all the problems such a reliance entails. This, while we possess a reliable edition of Alfarabi’s original Arabic text.¹⁴ Furthermore, although there has been a rise of interest in Plato’s Laws in recent decades, and despite the fact that in the antiquity and Middle Ages some ideas presented in the Laws attracted the attention of some thinkers, overall “the Laws was not subject to much interpretative activity” in antiquity.¹⁵ Alfarabi’s Summary occupies, therefore, a unique place in the history of the reception of Plato’s Laws: its treatment of the whole nine books of the Laws has no parallel in what we know from the accounts of the commentaries written in antiquity. To resume, Alfarabi’s Summary“is the sole extant premodern commentary on the Laws.”¹⁶ This lack of interest in Alfarabi’s Summary, however, is partially justified due to the uncertainty about the nature and objective of the work itself: it is not easy to discern what Alfarabi’s Summary actually means to be. When one hears the word “summary” one imagines something like an encapsulation of a larger work. Strauss explains this problem in the central paragraph of his essay, where he describes Alfarabi’s text as “a mere report of the content of the Laws, a simple enumeration of the subjects discussed in the Laws” ( 12). But this does not correspond, he explains, to what one actually finds in Alfarabi’s Summary, because, as Strauss notes, Alfarabi’s work appears “a pedantic, pedestrian and wooden writing which abounds in trivial or insipid remarks and which reveals an amazing lack of comprehension of Plato.” Strauss’s claim is based on the observation that there are “many Platonic thoughts to which Farabi hardly alludes,” as well as “many contentions for which one seeks in vain in the text of the Laws.”

Facing this characteristic of the work, traditional scholars turned to a hypothesis which came most naturally to them: if many aspects of the Laws are missing in Alfarabi’s summary, and if there are things mentioned which cannot be found in the Laws, perhaps a reliable translation of Plato’s Laws was not available to the author. This was already the hypothesis of Francesco Gabrieli, the original editor of the Summary: he claimed that one must suppose that there must have been intermediary sources which formed Alfarabi’s understanding of Plato’s Laws, and that Alfarabi’s Summary is not actually based on either of the two known translation of Plato’s Laws available at the time, but rather on some sort of compendium of Plato’s Laws.¹⁷ S. M. Stern agreed with Gabrieli’s hypothesis in his review, and even drew the natural conclusion: if the Summary is based on some kind of intermediary, “then the attribution to Farabi can hardly be maintained, for it is difficult to see why Farabi should have made a compendium of a compendium.”¹⁸ The hypothesis did not receive universal acceptance, and Strauss, Muhsin Mahdi, Joshua Parens, and Thérèse-Anne Druart assumed that Alfarabi must have had access to Plato’s Laws.¹⁹ Even Richard Walzer, who otherwise was very much convinced that Alfarabi “learned most of the things that set him apart from his fellows” from some “putative Greek ‘source’ of some three centuries earlier,” was in this case convinced that Alfarabi must have had access to the full text of the Laws.²⁰ One scholar who persistently maintained Gabrieli and Stern’s hypothesis and went after finding Alfarabi’s source was Dimitri Gutas. First, in his rather severe review of Parens’s book, and then in a full essay, Gutas claimed that Alfarabi’s Summary is not based on Plato’s Laws, but rather on a summary of it, perhaps the lost Arabic translation of Galen’s Synopsis of Plato’s Laws.²¹ Gutas bases his claim on the comparison of three different manuscripts which both overlap and differ in various aspects: through this comparison, Gutas tries to show that two of the manuscripts are actually two independent works by two different authors, one by Alfarabi and the other probably by a certain Abū-l-Faraj Ibn-aṭ-Ṭayyib. These two authors, Gutas claims, have been both summarizing either the translation of Galen’s Synopsis or something close to it.²² Gutas also implicitly mentions and responds to Stern’s discomforting suggestion by speaking of the possibility that Alfarabi might have “doctored” his intermediary source to create a compendium of a compendium “along the explicatory and doctrinal lines customary with his” philosophy. Gutas claims that Alfarabi has “molded transmitted material to fashion his own philosophy.”²³ That such suggestions require much more substantial elaboration to resolve the issue raised by Stern is not difficult to see: in the interest of consistency, one expects Gutas to take the final step and deny the authorship of Alfarabi of such a strange compendium of compendium, something which he refrains from doing.

A more substantial claim was needed to make the hypothesis of an intermediary source more consistent. It was provided in the assessment of the debate by Steven Harvey. He evaluated Gutas’s textual arguments and concluded that they are unconvincing.²⁴ But this did not prevent Harvey from siding with Gutas’s thesis based on his own evidence. The evidence was that for him, the “Summary simply reads like a summary of a summary. Most conspicuously, there is no indication that the book [i.e., Plato’s Laws] is a discussion among three people.”²⁵ In other words, the dialogic form of the Laws seems completely unknown to Alfarabi. Harvey considers the nondialogic character of Alfarabi’s Summary to be due to “the failure of a professional summarizer.” He cannot entertain the idea that “a perceptive philosopher” like Alfarabi would have omitted such an important and decisive aspect of the Laws if he had a direct access to it.²⁶ In addressing Stern’s conclusion implicitly, Harvey avoids Gutas’s unsatisfactory solution by claiming that it “may well be that Alfarabi believed that the text upon which he commented was Plato’s.” He even goes so far as to consider the possibility that the so-called translations of the Laws on which Alfarabi might have based his Summary were actually themselves summaries or epitomes of the Laws, without Alfarabi or even the translators themselves being aware of that.²⁷ Harvey’s hypothesis is perfect for arguing that Alfarabi did not have access to Plato’s Laws, but rather to a summary of it, while avoiding saying that a serious thinker of Alfarabi’s rank wrote a summary of a summary. Contrary to Gabrieli and Gutas, however, Harvey’s doubts about Alfarabi’s access to Plato’s Laws do not persuade him to question the philosophic value of Alfarabi’s Summary: he still believes that one can learn important things from Alfarabi’s work about Plato’s Laws, and has even dedicated an essay to the subject.²⁸ What Harvey specifically cautions us about is “that we must exercise great caution before making or accepting any arguments from silence or other such arguments.”²⁹ This remark is specifically directed at Parens, and more importantly for our subject here, at Strauss: they both attribute much importance to what Alfarabi omits in the Summary as a way to discover his teaching and intention.³⁰

In the introduction to his translation of the Summary, Charles E. Butterworth discusses Harvey’s evaluation of the debate. Although he is sympathetic to Harvey’s view and finds it balanced as a whole, he still seems more inclined to the view that Alfarabi had access to the text of Plato’s Laws. Butterworth addresses the evidence raised by Harvey in support of his thesis and finds it unconvincing. The same linguistic formulas and stylistic idiosyncrasies which Harvey mentions to argue that Alfarabi is summarizing a summary, as Butterworth notes, are also present in Alfarabi’s commentaries on Aristotle, and “we do know [Alfarabi] had direct access to Aristotle’s treatises.” Moreover, Butterworth argues that in none of his writings on Plato that have come down to us does Alfarabi mention the dialogic-form of Platonic writings.³¹ Butterworth’s point about the linguistic peculiarities of Alfarabi’s Summary, I believe, effectively responds to Harvey’s linguistic evidence. His claim about the dialogic-form misses, however, Harvey’s main contention: Harvey is very much inclined towards Franz Rosenthal’s radical claim, supported by F. E. Peters and Gerhard Endress, that “[Alfarabi] never came across a true Platonic text, no matter in what language” and that perhaps none of the medieval Arabic translations of Plato were really “verbal reproductions of an unaltered Platonic wording.”³² The evidence giving rise to these doubts and sustaining Harvey’s thesis is that no medieval Arabic translation of any of Plato’s writings has survived. One should, however, bear in mind that there is some evidence, even quotations in dialogic form, in medieval sources which show awareness of the dialogic character of Plato’s works. Even skeptical scholars have been persuaded that there is too much evidence to suppose that all these passages come from summaries, especially those of Galen, since the only complete Galen synopsis which has survived, that of Timaeus, does not preserve the dialogic-form.³³ Furthermore, it is remarkable that Harvey refers to the beginning of the first treatise of the Summary, in which the dialogue between Cleinias and the Athenian Stranger is mentioned by Alfarabi, without its having any impact on Harvey’s thesis. Finally, one should be careful not to attribute too much importance to the literary reading of Platonic dialogues: this approach is a recent one in Platonic scholarship.³⁴ Although one can adduce good arguments in favor of this literary approach, one should not assume that medieval thinkers would have agreed with them and attributed the same importance to the literary character and the dialogic-form of Plato’s works, as one can observe in Averroes’s comment on him “eliminating the dialectical arguments” from his commentary on the Republic.³⁵ Moreover, it is significant that a philosopher of Aristotle’s caliber, who after all knew his Plato, also seems uninterested in the dialogic-form of Plato’s writings, and for instance, in Politics, quotes the Athenian Stranger of the Laws as well as Socrates of the Republic simply as “Plato.”³⁶

The best evidence for the access of Alfarabi to the text of Plato’s Laws is, as usual, the oldest one already proposed by Kraus. In a letter to Strauss, Kraus writes: “And the Nomoi paraphrase of Fārābī does not seem to me to be simply a re-edition of the galenic one. It is too unconventional for that. And besides, Fārābī himself says that he had the original under his eyes when paraphrasing it, which does not exclude the possibility that he also used the paraphrase of Galen, which was translated at his time.”³⁷ Harvey’s hypothesis, according to which Alfarabi might have relied on a summary of the Laws without even being aware of it, is certainly possible. But it is possible like many other incredible things. I find the idea that a competent philosopher like Alfarabi and translators like Hunayn ibn Ishāq and Yahya Ibn ʿAdī could not distinguish between a genuine work of Plato and its paraphrase right around the time and place where Greek translations were still being made hard to believe. Attaching so much worth to such an incredible hypothesis rather than more reasonable alternatives would eventually lead to further problems: this can be clearly seen in the case of a remarkable point, mentioned by Harvey too, about the preservation of the dialogic form and the interlocutors of the Laws in a few passages quoted by Al-Bīrūnī, born only two decades after Alfarabi’s death. Facing such interesting evidence, mentioned by Harvey himself no less, instead of deducing the most natural conclusion, which would be the possibility of medieval Arabic readers having access to Plato’s Laws, Harvey presses ahead by a supplementary hypothesis: “Could al-Bīrūnī’s source have been an abridgement in dialogue form?”³⁸ But when an improbable hypothesis encounters difficulties which can only be dealt with by adding more supplementary hypotheses, it is time to question one’s basic premises. Furthermore, although Harvey finds his denial of Alfarabi’s access to Plato’s Laws compatible with the view that one can learn something valuable from Alfarabi about Plato’s Laws, one can reasonably doubt this. The careful reading of Alfarabi’s Summary like the one found in Strauss’s essay owes much of its legitimacy to the view that Alfarabi was a very competent student of Plato, and this presupposes reliable access to the text of the Laws.

These critical points do not obviously mean that all the evidence speaks in favor of Alfarabi’s access to a reliable version of Plato’s Laws. Considering the loss of many Arabic medieval writings, perhaps forever, the question of Alfarabi’s access to Plato’s Laws might never receive a definite answer. The philosophical value of Strauss’s commentary also, as I shall try to show in my presentation, is not entirely dependent on the truth of his supposition that Alfarabi had access to Plato’s dialogue. Regardless of what one can learn from Strauss’s essay about Alfarabi, one can see that there are many interesting philosophical ideas present and developed in Strauss’s interpretation of Alfarabi’s Summary worthy of serious consideration independent of their purely historical aspect. It was necessary to address the doubts raised about this question before turning to Strauss’s essay, however, because the existing scholarly consensus might give one the impression that in view of the existing evidence, the Falāsifa’s lack of access to Plato’s works is beyond question, and that to argue otherwise with Strauss is a sign of some unreasonable attachment to a mythological image of Falāsifa, or a romantic view of their philosophical status and activities. If the previous observations succeed in awakening a prejudice in favor of Strauss’s supposition and, even more, in arousing suspicion against the powerful opposing prejudice, they have accomplished their goal.

Alfarabi’s Art of Writing: The Pious Ascetic

Strauss describes Alfarabi’s Summary as consisting of a preface and nine chapters, or rather nine “speeches” ( 1). Elsewhere he mentions that calling a writing “a speech” or in Arabic “a maqâla, hints at the essentially oral character of its teaching.”³⁹ While Alfarabi justifies his summarizing only the first nine books of the Laws by saying that he has seen only these nine books, Strauss questions Alfarabi’s claim, which opens the possibility of Alfarabi declining to summarize the tenth book of the Laws, “Plato’s theological statement par excellence” ( 1). Is it an “accident” that the correct number of the books of the Laws is the middle of ten and fourteen, which Alfarabi mentions as the number of the books related by others? Is it also an accident that the correct number is the number of the central paragraph of Strauss’s own essay?⁴⁰

Alfarabi’s Summary, Strauss notes, has an un-Platonic preface, in which Alfarabi explains to the reader “how to read Plato’s Laws.” Strauss summarizes Alfarabi’s initial claim as follows: “The men of judgment have observed men’s natural inclination to make unwarranted generalizations.” They have discovered that if they always act in a certain manner, the exceptional cases in which they deviate from their customary behavior will escape the notice of the common people because “the deviation will be thought to be a repetition” ( 2).⁴¹ The term “repetition” reminds us of one of Strauss’s techniques of esoteric writing; namely, paying attention to the deviations in repeated items of a writing, deviations which escape the notice of the common reader, but are of particular help to the careful reader to discover the esoteric teaching of the text.⁴² One can say that the action of the men of judgment, as for instance in the case of Alfarabi, is reflected in the way they write a commentary: how they repeat, omit, and deviate from their sources. The un-Platonic preface of the Summary is followed by the story of an abstemious pious ascetic who, Strauss remarks, “in spite of” or, “because of,” his virtues, has drawn the anger of the ruler of the city and is trying to escape ( 3). His escape is made possible by wearing the garment of vagabonds, the guise of which, Strauss notes, it is not clear how he obtained. Did he possess them already, or has he obtained them through questionable means? The pious ascetic’s probity seems to be in question, perhaps his other virtues are too. One can doubt he could have become so artistically proficient to imitate a drunkard and to play an instrument if he were strictly abstemious.⁴³

One of the wise men mentioned in Alfarabi’s general remark has turned out to be a pious ascetic: he “happens to be a pious ascetic” ( 5). One is tempted to say that to be a pious ascetic is not his necessary quality, but is something determined by his specific situation.⁴⁴ The most important characteristic of the pious ascetic is that he has established his reputation as “a man of the strictest morality and religion.” Based on this reputation, no one expects him to lie, even in order to save his life. The public, which has “very severe notions of decency” ( 4) would not expect him to go against his reputation as a man of “probity,” the man who never lies; the public does not see such moral rules as what “can safely be disregarded in extreme cases.”⁴⁵ Appropriately, the pious ascetic’s lying “in deed” is not considered truly a lie by the public. One might say that the pious ascetic is an ascetic in a specific sense. His asceticism is that of “a jockey, who in order to win a race must live very restrainedly.”⁴⁶ He has no reservation against lying or, in Alfarabi’s words, “to play a flute or to dance” or do other “extremely repugnant and base” things if they are “obligatory” and save him from “persecution,” because for him “what counts is thinking and investigating and not morality.”⁴⁷

That the question of morality is one of Strauss’s main preoccupations in this essay is later confirmed in 18, which deals with the issue of morality in its relationship with philosophy. Strauss draws our attention first to a passage in which Alfarabi compares the legislator to a beekeeper, and the citizens with bees in the beehive. Strauss raises an issue regarding the Latin translator’s understanding of this passage. The translator believes that the relationship between the beekeeper and the bees is akin to the relationship between the legislator and those citizens who are described by Alfarabi as “the wicked and the lazy,” to the exclusion of others. Strauss does not believe that the translator’s interpretation is as obvious as one might believe. To clarify his point, Strauss enumerates three pairs of terms (“the bees and the beekeepers,” “the free and the slaves,” “the way of the legislator and the right road”) while specifically excluding a fourth pair consisting of “the wicked and the lazy” (Latin: “mali et otiosi homines”; Arabic: “al-ashrār wal-bat.t.ālīn”). Next, Strauss puts four questions forward to clarify Alfarabi’s purpose in this passage. The first question points toward the universal character of the work of the legislator, who, like a beekeeper, can only concern himself with the universal and not with the individual.⁴⁸ The second question points toward the tyrannical character of the legislative art, which, like the art of beekeeper, treats the citizens as slaves who must obey commands through force rather than persuasion. The third question clarifies the simile of legislator and beekeeper. The fourth question asks whether “there is a point of view” from which “the free” can be seen as “wicked.” Strauss does not explain what that point of view might be. Perhaps one might be able to shed more light on this question if one concentrates rather on the relation between “the free” and “the lazy.” Strauss invites us rather to turn to two passages in Alfarabi’s Summary which makes clearer the issue that he has in mind:

Truly the impudent is the one who deliberates only according to himself and his happiness, and that is why he is hated by the gods, and, being hated by the gods, he does not benefit from the help of the gods; and whoever does not benefit from their help leaves no beautiful and pleasant trace. He then set out to describe him (that is to say, the best prince and legislator) and he recalled what he had to take care of; and he said that he had to focus first on the care of the body, then on the soul, then on external things, degree after degree; and he brought examples of this and he spoke of it abundantly when it was particularly useful.

This quotation, which happens to appear right in the middle of Alfarabi’s Summary, gives two descriptions which seem difficult to synthesize.⁴⁹ The first description depicts an insolent self-centered individual who is hated by the gods while the second description concerns a man who cares about the perfection of his body and soul. Gabrieli has tried to attribute each of these two descriptions to two different individuals. Strauss’s claim consists of not only pointing toward the identity of Gabrieli’s two individuals but also of suppressing Gabrieli’s additions in his translation by italicizing them, additions which imply the existence of providence. The individual described in this passage, according to Strauss, is a “man” who is not concerned “with things other than his own felicity.” In the previous version of his essay, Strauss spoke more emphatically of the man who is not concerned “with anything except his own felicity.” This man who is indifferent toward the gods and is focused on the cultivation of his body and soul seems to be the same man who can be described as “lazy.”⁵⁰ What remains to be seen is how this same individual can also be described as “wicked.” This seems to be explained in Strauss’s immediate discussion of another passage of the Summary, in which Alfarabi explains the relativity of the just and the noble things (“all these things are noble and shameful in reference to something else, and not in that they would themselves be noble or shameful”) in contradistinction to the objective character of the useful things characteristic of the arts. This claim has a theologico-political character too, to which Strauss implicitly refers: the noble things (see καλά in the paragraph heading of 18), belong to “the realm of opinion”; the noble things are connected with “courage, war, city” as well as “kindred things.” ⁵¹ These are next described as “the high and holy” regarding which men have “fanatical disagreement.”⁵² One is tempted to say that the man described in these passages has a kinship with the pious ascetic, who also has a questionable relationship with morality.⁵³

The story of the pious ascetic, according to Alfarabi, clarifies one of the secrets of the writings of Plato, who was famous for writing by recourse to symbols, riddles, obscurity, and difficulty or, in Strauss’s words, by means of “allusive, ambiguous, misleading and obscure speech” ( 5; see also 18). Just like the pious ascetic, Plato sometimes deviated from his usual style and spoke frankly, which went unnoticed by the public. Although Alfarabi tells the story of the pious ascetic to clarify Plato’s style of writing, Strauss notes, it seems that the parable is not entirely to the purpose: First, it is true that like the pious acetic, Plato is a “man of judgment” who took account of what is “useful,” but contrary to the pious ascetic, Plato did this less in view of what is useful to himself and his own safety than in view of “what is useful for the sciences or their existence in the cities and nations.” Second, “Plato was not a pious ascetic” ( 7). Not only the idiosyncrasies of the pious ascetic’s character do not correspond to our image of Plato, also while the pious ascetic lies on occasion and in deed, Plato seems to be insincere as a matter of course and in speech. One can therefore legitimately wonder who the pious ascetic is. Regardless, what the pious ascetic and Plato have in common is that they are both “men of judgment” and that they speak the dangerous truth by surrounding it with untruth or innocent truth. It is in this manner, Strauss notes, that “Plato has written about laws.”

According to Strauss, Alfarabi’s purpose in his Summary is to extract and explain “the thoughts to which Plato has alluded in his Laws” or those which Plato “intended to explain” in his work ( 8). There seems to be a difference between alluding to a thought and intending to explain a thought, but Strauss claims that they are in fact the same: one alludes to a thought when one intends to explain it – the intention is “consummated” only by the reader who can interpret the allusions. Plato did not want to explain the truth to all men indiscriminately, so he chose to employ allusions. Alfarabi followed Plato’s example in his own summary, which has a “two-fold” character: it is written for those who desire to know the Laws and can bear “the toil of study and meditation” on the one hand, and those who cannot bear that hardship on the other. Strauss notes, however, that Alfarabi’s Summary is not of much use to the second group, whose desire to know the Laws through Alfarabi’s Summary even turns into aversion because that desire cannot be satisfied: they cannot consummate the intention of the writer who transmits his thought through allusions. Strauss, however, continues to speak of the “two-fold meaning” of Alfarabi’s work, as if the Summary is not exclusively addressed to that specific group of elite readers and has something for the more ordinary reader too. This point is clarified by comparing Alfarabi’s style of writing enigmatically to “men on horseback” ( 8).

The metaphor of man on horseback, with its multiple facets, appears in several writings of Strauss, with different connotations. As Strauss intimates elsewhere, the metaphor finds its original source in Xenophon and is also reflected in Machiavelli, and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. In Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, a certain Chrysantas, a companion of Cyrus, speaks of his desire to be a centaur, a half-man, half-horse creature who synthesizes human prudence and brachial dexterity with the speed and the strength of a horse. Centaurs can attack with strength and take flight with speed. But in view of the limitations of the centaur as an indivisible whole who cannot enjoy the human nor equine-specific goods to the full, Chrysantas opts rather for becoming a knight, a man on horseback. A rider is independent of his ride because they both are capable of existing independent of each other. The rider can benefit from human and equine goods at the same time, enjoying the eyesight and hearing of a man as well as those of a horse.⁵⁴ The superiority of the man on horseback to the centaur seems to be the core of this metaphor in Strauss’s eyes. But how this should be understood is a complex issue and can at least take two or three different forms. To begin with, there is the fact that the man on horseback is a divisible whole; the rider can dismount the horse when necessary. The flexibility of the man on horseback consists of being able to mount and dismount the horse at will, and to react to different needs adequately. Commenting on the passage in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, Strauss interprets the man on horseback as reflecting a unity consisting of reason and sub-reason, rational and sub-rational.⁵⁵ It does not seem that the relation between these two elements is simply one of the rational part ruling over the irrational, the relation of which one can describe as a simplistic form of Platonism. Two parts, rather, seem to play different complementary roles, and contribute to the perfection of the whole synthesis. In other words, there seems to be a form of cooperation between the rider and the horse in which both parts have a specific function. In theologico-political terms, this is reflected in Machiavelli’s teaching that Chiron is a model of perfect synthesis of law and force. Machiavelli recommends using both man and beast in our actions, which Strauss understands as Chiron replacing God. More clearly elsewhere, Strauss claims that in the Machiavellian perspective “imitatio Chironis replaces imitatio Christi,” half-beast half-man replaces half-god half-man.⁵⁶ That this dichotomy and its political lesson apply also to Alfarabi is shown by the fact that Strauss, in his earlier writings, has spoken of Alfarabi replacing the “divine-human” dichotomy with the “human-beast” dichotomy, and has named Alfarabi as the founder of a tradition followed by Machiavelli which proposes a “secular alliance between philosophers and princes friendly to philosophy,” an alliance between the high and the low.⁵⁷

Furthermore, if one understands the rational rider as depicting the wise, and the irrational horse as the many, the metaphor can be seen as the illustration of a cooperation between the philosopher and the many: this republican form of the alliance is depicted in Machiavelli’s story of Carmignuola, the Italian general who dismounts his cavalry to defeat the enemy, with the cavalry representing the aristocracy and the infantry standing for the people.⁵⁸ More abstractly, the message is to defeat the supernatural forces by founding the political order on “the low but solid ground” of this-worldly goods.⁵⁹ Another form of the relation between the rider and the horse is reflected in the twofoldness of the speech of the perfect man, the twofoldness which depicts the “unity of knowledge and communication of knowledge.”⁶⁰ In a sense, the perfect man or philosopher is a mixture of these two elements as they are present in his twofold speech. The twofoldness corresponds to two different audiences, the elite and the many. The elite is the interlocutor of the human side of the philosopher’s speech, while the many is the addressee of the equine part. To be able to synthesize the human and the equine part is in a way the essence of the so-called Socratic turn and its accompanying art of esoteric writing. It is a testimony to the richness of this metaphor that here the horse can also be interpreted as reflecting the unruliness of reason, while the man represents moderation. The man on horseback depicts then the rule of moderation over wisdom, the lesson being that wisdom cannot “be divorced from moderation,” which Strauss considered to be the essence of the Socratic turn, separating the Socratic school from the Pre-Socratic philosophers.⁶¹ Through an allusion to “the horse-drawn Parmenides,” Strauss describes these pre-Socratic predecessors as those who follow the “logica equina” and cannot lie, even nobly.⁶² The thought is born out of the poem which begins with Parmenides depicting himself as being drawn by mares toward the sun, and speaks of the impossibility of saying what is not, that is, of lying. Parmenides and his companions are drawn by their unruly equine reason toward the truth. But the deeper truth is that wisdom divorced from moderation cannot “bring to light” something which “cannot be illumined by the sun.”⁶³ That which the sun cannot bring to light can be seen only in the darkness of the cave, “the world of common sense.”⁶⁴ The Parmenidean perspective, which can be depicted by the image of a centaur and not man on horseback, is also present in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, where a race of centaurs called Houyhnhnms, living in a dystopian island, are incapable of lying and are alien to all human refinements: they cannot tolerate a human being in their midst.⁶⁵

Alfarabi’s Summary and the Problem of Islam

If Alfarabi’s Summary is as allusive and enigmatic as Plato’s Laws, one might reasonably ask what the justification of Alfarabi’s esoteric commentary on a Platonic esoteric writing might be. The justification, Strauss notes, is found in the fact that Plato’s allusions “which were intelligible to some of Plato’s contemporaries are not equally intelligible to men of the same type among Fārābī’s contemporaries” ( 9). Strauss does not explain what has brought about this change, but rather moves to another question: how to discover Alfarabi’s allusions. One way to discover them is to find what remains “unsaid” in the Summary, what is “the most important subject” which is not mentioned.⁶⁶ Strauss here has recourse to his other writing on Alfarabi, which he has commented on several years before. In that work, as it was explained in Chapter 3 above, Strauss claims, Alfarabi implies that “the necessary and sufficient condition of happiness, or man’s ultimate perfection, is philosophy” ( 9). Now, Strauss claims that the Summary is silent about philosophy and that the words “philosophy,” “philosopher,” and their derivatives are absent in it. This claim is partially true, because in fact the word falsafa and its derivatives do not appear in the Summary, although more common Arabic words for designating philosopher (ḥakīm) and philosophy (ḥikma) do appear. It is rather more significant that the words philosophy and philosopher appear nineteen times in Strauss’s own essay, the central one being in a sentence in this paragraph, which repeats, with a minor modification, what was said a few lines above: “The Philosophy of Plato teaches that philosophy is the necessary and sufficient condition of happiness.” In the previous statement, happiness was equated with “man’s ultimate perfection.” The equivalence of happiness and perfection, however, was a major question in Strauss’s earlier essay, where it was argued that by distinguishing between these two, Alfarabi implies that philosophy, which is the perfection of man, only by the addition of the royal art can lead to happiness. The statement on the insufficiency of philosophy for providing man with ultimate happiness, however, Strauss noted there, is later on corrected by Alfarabi through equating the philosopher with the king: Alfarabi’s last word is that “[p]hilosophy is the necessary and sufficient condition of happiness.”⁶⁷ As Strauss explains in his 1945 commentary, the roundabout way in which Alfarabi goes to make his final position known to the careful reader is due to the fact that such a position would clash with the claim of Islam, which argues for the insufficiency of all human endeavors for providing man with happiness in absence of the divine guidance provided by divine revelation. This last claim, Strauss notes, is underlined and prominently present in the Summary, which speaks rather frequently of not only the divine but also of the life after death, the subject to whose absence Strauss draws our attention in his earlier essay.⁶⁸ It is therefore particularly suitable to describe the relation between Alfarabi’s Philosophy of Plato and his Summary as that “between two entirely different worlds.”

The relationship between Alfarabi’s Philosophy of Plato and his Summary is further clarified by saying that the former contains a discussion of “Plato’s philosophy” while the latter contains “his art of kalām” ( 10). That for Strauss the Summary is a work of kalām is due to the fact that Alfarabi seems to distinguish between the concern of the legislator and that of Plato: while the legislator is concerned with the laws proper as well as the roots of the law, Alfarabi’s Plato is concerned mainly, if not exclusively, with “the roots” (us.ūl), so much so that he claims the whole first eight books of the Laws deal with that question (D 150). Dealing with the roots, in Strauss’s perspective, is the proper work of those who practice kalām, namely the mutakallimūn or the so-called dialectical theologians. Strauss notes that the words derived from the root klm appear twenty-six times in the Summary. It happens that the English equivalent of such words are used seventeen times in Strauss’s own essay.⁶⁹ Now it is rather surprising to call the Summary a work of kalām because Alfarabi is famous for being very critical of the whole enterprise of the dialectical theologians. Strauss points to this problem by drawing our attention to a part of Alfarabi’s understanding of dialectical theology, which consists of “the art of defending the laws or religions” ( 10). Strauss’s description of Alfarabi’s view of dialectical theology, however, remains incomplete if one does not add that according to Alfarabi, dialectical theologians employed all sorts of pseudo-arguments, which fall short of true philosophical arguments for defending their own particular religion while debating the adherents of other religions. What would be the justification then, for applying the term kalām to Alfarabi’s understanding of Plato’s Laws? One understands Strauss’s claim better if one considers that Strauss brings up the question of the afterlife for justifying the attribution of the term kalām to Alfarabi’s Summary: it is only in the ninth chapter of the Summary, Strauss notes, that Alfarabi does “refer to punishment in the other life.” In the previous version of his essay, Strauss actually used the term “allude” rather than “refer,” which is a more exact description of the passage he has in mind: Alfarabi does not actually speak of “punishment in the other life,” not even of “the other life,” but rather of “a future punishment” (al-ʻuqūba al-ājila : D 151). This slight revision of the essay, as well as Strauss’s unliteral translation, remind one of the previous paragraph, in which Strauss spoke of Alfarabi’s frequent usage of the terms such as “the other life” in his Summary ( 9). To begin with, as it was mentioned, Alfarabi does not actually use this term in the Summary. Furthermore, Strauss’s term “the other life,” just like Alfarabi’s “future punishment” are quite ambiguous: “the other life” does not necessarily mean the life after death, although it is ambiguous enough to remind some readers of that idea too. Strauss’s ambiguous terminology seems to point to Alfarabi’s ambiguous terminology. Two other passages in Alfarabi’s writings, in which the distinction between this life and the other life is mentioned, and to which Strauss refers elsewhere, are also capable of being understood in a nonorthodox manner.⁷⁰ The distinction might refer to “this life” as the life dedicated to the goods appreciated by the vulgar such as wealth, honor, and pleasure, and the “other life,” which is the life dedicated to higher goods such as virtue or knowledge. In other words, one can also speak of living “the other life” in “this life,” to live the life of virtue and knowledge among the vulgar who lives “this life.”⁷¹

It seems that for Strauss, the Summary is a work of a specific kind of kalām: this unique form of kalām, whose existence Strauss principally deduced from Alfarabi and Maimonides’s critique of the common form of kalām, is elsewhere described as the “enlightened kalām.”⁷² Strauss employs this term for describing Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed, and explains that Alfarabi’s critique of kalām is of “decisive importance” for understanding the genus to which Maimonides’s book belongs. In fact, Maimonides’s specific kind of kalām as it is found in the Guide takes Alfarabi’s specific critique of the mutakallimūn into account while formulating a new art of kalām. What this new kalām precisely entails is not explained here, and even in Strauss’s other writings it remains quite obscure. But a few things seem clear: First, the enlightened kalām remains a defense of the Law, with the difference that, unlike the vulgar kalām, it is not formulated in opposition to philosophy.⁷³ Second, the enlightened kalām occupies a place between the vulgar kalām and philosophy proper. What distinguished it from the kalām of the dialectical theologians is that it is not anti-philosophic, while what distinguishes it from philosophy proper is its religious elements. “Plato’s philosophy” as it is presented in Alfarabi’s Philosophy of Plato corresponds rather clearly with Strauss’s understanding of philosophy as a “radically atheistic” enterprise, while the enlightened kalām of the Summary“speaks rather frequently” of religious themes and the divine.⁷⁴ Not that the Summary is entirely free of heretical ideas: for instance, Strauss points to the fact that Alfarabi implicitly speaks of God as the final and not as the efficient cause of the world; the idea which Strauss attributes to the “Averroists” in general and other atheist philosophers like Machiavelli in particular.⁷⁵ Third, this specific form of kalām, although friendly to philosophy, is quite distinct from philosophy, and one can say that it is not philosophical, or more precisely, demonstrative. One should suppose that the enlightened kalām employs inferior and less exact forms of argumentation, perhaps rhetoric, dialectic, or even a synthesis of them.⁷⁶ An indication for the lower status of the Summary in Strauss’s view is also the fact that the Summary is described as “more ‘personal’” than Alfarabi’s Philosophy of Plato ( 11). What is personal is infinitely less significant than what is truly individual, that is, “the necessarily anonymous truth.”⁷⁷ Fourth, the arguments presented by the enlightened kalām are of exoteric character.⁷⁸ The practitioner of the enlightened kalām is more concerned with formulating the rational basis, the rational justification of the Law or “the reason of the Law,” by concentrating on the end of the Law, rather than with a discussion of its divine origin (cf. 21). This is precisely what Strauss describes as the method followed by the Athenian Stranger of the Laws in his evaluation of the Dorian laws. Strauss implies this move from the origin of the Law to the end of the Law by inviting the reader to compare the end and the beginning of the opening statement of the Summary, which summarizes the beginning of the first book of the Laws (footnote 6: “cf. also 5, 4–5 with 5, 2–4”): Zeus is there imperceptibly transformed from the maker of the Law and the one who sets down the Law, to Zeus who is the final cause of the Law.⁷⁹

In paragraph 12, Strauss describes the characteristics of the Summary as something between a simple report and a mere enumeration – the title of this paragraph in the manuscript reads: “General characteristics of the Summary: from simple report to mere iḥṣā [enumeration?].” He notes that Alfarabi’s “chief concern” in his work is to unveil the “purposes” of Plato in discussing some subjects, the purposes (aghrāḍ) which Plato did not expound himself. In the next paragraph, Strauss underlines Alfarabi’s allusion to Plato’s discussion of “a law which was famous in his time” without identifying which law is meant or even where precisely the subject is brought up in Alfarabi’s Summary ( 13). He moves rather swiftly to another theme instead, one which is discussed twice in Alfarabi’s Summary, that of “tyranny.” In order to have some notion of what Strauss is doing here, let us begin by noting the “law” to which Alfarabi is referring. That law is mentioned by the Athenian Stranger of the Laws in the context of his criticism of the divine laws of the Dorians. When the gentle discussion of an old Athenian with two old Dorian interlocutors risks turning into a bitter conflict born out of criticism of the divine laws of the Dorians, the Athenian Stranger reminds his companions of the existence of an old law, what Strauss calls the “law of laws,” supposedly laid down by Minos, the divine lawgiver. This law forbids the criticism of the laws in front of the youth and commands everyone to say with one voice that the laws are given by the gods and that they are good in every respect. The same law of laws, however, permits the old men to evaluate and criticize the laws when no young person is present.⁸⁰ In the case of Alfarabi, the protection against the prying eyes of the young seems to be provided by esoteric writing; in this context, by only implying what one should understand by tyranny. Strauss points to the esoteric meaning of the discussion of tyranny by speaking of it in the thirteenth paragraph of his essay, the number which in Strauss’s thought is intimately linked with the question of divine tyranny.⁸¹ In his discussion, Strauss draws our attention to two statements of Alfarabi on the necessity and justification of tyranny. Although Strauss intimates that there are some difficulties in understanding these two statements, the real significance of his discussion is only revealed by looking up the passages mentioned in the seventh footnote attached to this paragraph. The footnote has two sets of references, each referring to three passages. The first set of references are to passages in which Alfarabi mentions, respectively, the issue of the plurality of traditional laws which must be eliminated by the legislator, the necessity of imposing one set of laws on all citizens regardless of their different natural dispositions, and the corruption of the laws of a city through its conquest by foreign kings and the imposition of some divine law on the citizens.⁸² The second set of references turn out to be an implicit critique of tyranny: they speak, respectively, of the superiority of the path of freedom, which creates a spirit of cheerfulness and voluntary obedience among the subjects, censure the legislators who are “envious,” mention the corruption and destruction engendered by slavish and coerced obedience, and praise the city founded on affection and intellect. This critique is, however, mitigated partly by the fact that tyranny is a way to convince the good men to accept the laws laid down by those who assimilate themselves to what is divine; this is precisely the synthesis of two different statements of Plato related by Alfarabi; in the first statement Plato has “intimated” the advantage of the festivals which make pleasures divine, while in the second statement he “mentions” that the festivals of gods serve the purpose of reinforcing the attachment of the public to the laws.

The rather tiring repetition of “then” (thumma), characteristic of Alfarabi’s exposition of Plato’s Laws, provides an opportunity for Strauss to draw our attention to a rather surprising observation: “that it is sometimes impossible to say where the alleged report of what Plato did ends and Fārābi’s independent exposition … begins” ( 14). The decisive step in Strauss’s gradual unveiling of his understanding of Alfarabi’s Summary is taken when he refers to the enigmatic character of the seventh chapter of the Summary. That chapter is supposed to resume the content of the seventh book of the Laws. In reality, however, we cannot even speak of an incomplete, inexact, or even a misleading summary: of the content of Alfarabi’s chapter “one barely finds a single trace in the alleged source” ( 15). This does not mean that the seventh chapter is completely incomprehensible. In fact, Strauss quotes a surprising statement of the editor of the Summary– who is above all forms of suspicious interpretation – to the effect that in writing one of the passages of the chapter, “which is not at all found in the Greek text of Plato, it seems that Farabi had before his eyes the judgment of Muhammad himself on the law of earlier prophets.”⁸³ Strauss mentions that the editor also found it reasonable to entertain the idea that Alfarabi must have been aware of the fundamental difference between the Islamic Laws and Plato’s laws. In this way, Strauss builds a bridge between the editor’s claim and the possibility of an esoteric art of writing practiced in Alfarabi’s Summary, and proposes a hypothesis: perhaps the discrepancies between Alfarabi’s account and Plato’s text is due to Alfarabi’s awareness regarding “the fundamental difference between Islam and Plato’s philosophic politics.” In other words, and more radically, Strauss suggests that Alfarabi “may have rewritten the Laws” to respond to the requirements of his Islamic context and the changes brought about by the revealed religions. What is conveyed through Alfarabi’s Summary is not Plato’s teaching: Strauss goes so far as to say that Alfarabi has ascribed his “revised” version of Plato’s teaching to “the dead Plato.” What remains of Plato in Alfarabi’s account is rather “Plato’s purpose.” In order to protect himself and his science, Alfarabi has refrained from openly agreeing with the teaching of “his Plato” and has blurred the distinction between “his mere report and his independent exposition.”

Strauss depicts the seriousness of Alfarabi’s encounter with Plato’s Laws, the seriousness which is rarely, if ever, a concern for a mere historian, by reminding us of a major point, a point which must have been a concern of “[e]very serious reader of the Laws,” including “[e]very Muslim reader in the Middles Ages”: “The Laws contains a teaching which claims to be true, i.e., valid for all times” ( 16). Facing this issue, Strauss notes, those Muslim readers had three options: (1) they could have rejected Plato’s philosophy on the basis of and because of its incompatibility with their Muslim faith; (2) they could have begun evaluating their Muslim beliefs by the standard of Platonic philosophy; (3) they could have claimed that Islam is in perfect harmony with Platonic philosophy, nay, it is the realization of the Platonic ideas in deed and can be understood in purely rational terms. Here it is important to remind oneself of the fact that what is the main issue is the relationship between Alfarabi’s own thoughts as a man living under the shadow of Muslim revelation and Plato’s philosophy. Strauss does not spell out his own view of the debate. One is tempted, however, to conclude that the central statement reflects Strauss’s position, while the first position can be attributed to those Muslim readers of the Greek writings like al-Ghazālī, who found the wisdom of the Greeks incompatible with their Muslim beliefs and rejected that wisdom and its representatives among their contemporaries. That the central position is what Strauss attributed to Alfarabi is also confirmed by the title of this paragraph in the manuscript which depicts a movement from the Laws to Islam: “Plato’s Laws→ Is Islam true?” Two supplementary points are here of particular importance: First, Strauss clearly supposes that in Alfarabi’s perspective, a perfect harmony between Plato’s philosophy and Islam is not possible. Second, it is interesting that the third possibility mentioned by Strauss seems rather a good summary of the position often ascribed by scholars to the Falāsifa, the view which has solid textual basis in the writings of the Falāsifa themselves. Would it mean that Strauss took that view simply to be the exoteric teaching of the Falāsifa? We will come back to this point on pp. 196–99.

Specific Character of the Summary

Strauss’s essay on Alfarabi’s Summary is in a sense a rejoinder to his earlier writing on Alfarabi’s Philosophy of Plato. It is therefore not surprising that there are continuities as well as revisions in these two presentations of Alfarabi’s thought. Perhaps one of the most remarkable revisions in Strauss’s understanding of Alfarabi’s thought concerns a passage in Philosophy of Plato which presents the content of Plato’s Laws. In his earlier essay, Strauss began by drawing our attention to the fact that in his Philosophy of Plato, contrary to his Attainment of Happiness, in which he speaks in his own name, Alfarabi does not assert “the identity of legislator and philosopher,” or that the legislator of the perfect city is a prophet-philosopher. In the absence of such a clear statement, Strauss warned us not to presume that the esoteric teaching of Alfarabi is that the ruler of the virtuous city is a prophet. This remark paved the way for Strauss’s comment on Alfarabi’s description of Plato’s Laws: Strauss observed that in his description, Alfarabi “conceives of the Laws, not, as Plato himself had done, as a correction of the Republic, but as a supplement to the Republic: whereas according to Plato the Republic and the Laws deal with essentially different political orders” Alfarabi gives us the impression that “the Republic deals with the best political order and the Laws deal with the best laws belonging to the very same best political order.”⁸⁴ This reading of Alfarabi’s description of Plato’s Laws was used by Strauss as further evidence for his thesis, according to which Alfarabi does not claim that the existence of the virtuous city is dependent on the revelation of a divine law, or even more fundamentally, that the foundation of the perfect political community is the requirement of perfect happiness, the happiness which is only brought about by philosophy. Strauss’s new consciousness in his study on Alfarabi’s Summary regarding what he called the “problematic character of law” leads to a new understanding of Alfarabi’s enigmatic description of Plato’s Laws. While what attracted Strauss’s attention to this description in his earlier writing was the fact that, according to Alfarabi, the legislator of the virtuous city is not a prophet, and its laws are not divinely legislated, in his new study he was more surprised by “the silence of that passage about the obvious and guiding theme of the Laws, namely, the laws” ( 22). To clarify this pregnant silence, Strauss draws our attention to another passage in Philosophy of Plato which also refers to Plato’s Laws. In that second passage, Alfarabi claims that the science and art of Socrates is presented in the Laws. Strauss adds another observation from his earlier study, according to which Alfarabi distinguished between “the way of Socrates” and “the way of Plato.” From the absence of Socrates in Plato’s Laws as we know it, and Alfarabi’s silence about the laws in his description of the Laws, Strauss concludes that Alfarabi’s intention is to imply the idea that “if per impossibile the Laws were Socratic, they would not deal with laws.”⁸⁵ What Strauss is pointing toward is his understanding of the so-called Socratic turn and its relation with the question of esotericism. To summarize, Strauss claimed that the change in character of philosophy from pre-Socratic to Socratic is of utmost importance for understanding the essential characteristics of the Socratic school and the political character of its teaching. This Socratic turn, as it was reflected in the writings of Socrates’s detractors like Aristophanes, as well as his followers like Xenophon and Plato, is depicted as one from deep interest in natural philosophy to political things, to the noble and the just. This political turn is concomitant with discovery of “the doubtful character of the freedom to say everything” characteristic of the pre-Socratic Socrates and his “arrogance and impatience with stupidity” as is depicted in Aristophanes’s Clouds. In Strauss’s perspective, one of the pillars of Aristophanes’s friendly criticism of Socrates consists of ridiculing “Socrates, not for trying to keep his teaching secret from the uninitiated, but for his ineptitude in this respect.” Socrates after his turn is, on the contrary, “the unrivaled master in judging human beings and in handling them”; “he is of infinite patience with stupidity” and for this reason he is superior in wisdom to the pre-Socratic Socrates.⁸⁶ In his essays on Philosophy of Plato and the Summary also, Strauss points towards this change in rhetorical strategy consequent to the Socratic turn by referring to Alfarabi’s distinction between “the way of Socrates” and “the way of Plato.”⁸⁷ While Socrates is “intransigent” and advertises an “open break” with the many, Plato synthesizes the Socratic rhetoric which is only appropriate for dealing with “the elite” and Thrasymachus’s art of speaking suitable for dealing with “the vulgar.” Platonic rhetoric and the art of writing which Alfarabi follows demand “judicious conformity with the accepted opinions.” While in the perspective of “the way of Socrates” the unphilosophical character of the laws makes them unworthy of a philosopher’s concern, “the way of Plato” permits “appreciation or legitimation” of the laws as an instrument for dealing with the vulgar, because the Summary establishes a connection “between the vulgar and laws” ( 22).⁸⁸

Right at the end of Socrates and Aristophanes, whose importance in Strauss’s oeuvre is attested by him calling it his “real work,” Strauss describes Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyyā al-Rāzī’s short treatise entitled The Book of the Philosophic Life as the “clearest and most thoughtful exposition” of the Socratic turn.⁸⁹ While al-Rāzī seems to attribute the Socratic Turn, “the profound differences between the Aristophanean Socrates and the Platonic-Xenophontic Socrates” to a change in the character of the historical Socrates, Strauss entertains the idea that perhaps the Socratic Socrates, which has gone through a political turn, is a construction of his followers as a reaction to the Aristophanean critique of the historical Socrates. That this is a preoccupation of Strauss in his essay on the Summary is reflected in the last paragraph. The last paragraph points toward the “‘unhistorical’ character of the Philosophy of Plato and the Summary” (see the paragraph heading in the manuscript). The guiding theme is here an understanding of what “Plato’s philosophy” is – the term which is used twice in Strauss’s essay ( 10, 23). In both occasions, “Plato’s philosophy” points toward the esoteric aspect of Alfarabi’s thought as distinguished from its exoteric façade, the exoteric aspect which was previously described by the term kalām. The distinction between the way of Socrates and the way of Plato is a way toward understanding the precise meaning of Plato’s philosophy as it is presented in Alfarabi’s two “historiographical” works. Strauss’s main concerns seem to be to overcome a very commonsensical misconception: contrary to what one might reasonably expect, Plato’s philosophy is not properly speaking Plato’s philosophy. In fact, one might perhaps do better by dropping the proper name because, according to Strauss, Alfarabi does not mean “to say that all insights which he ascribed to Plato were peculiar to Plato” ( 23). Even this formulation, “insights,” prove to be misleading because right away Strauss explains that the “only originality” which Alfarabi attributes to Plato and Plato alone is a remark on the dialogue Menexenus. “Plato” is, therefore, here a type of place-holder for some specific kind of individual who is dissatisfied with the state of knowledge at a particular time, and who, like Alfarabi’s Plato, “did not find the science which he desired among the sciences and arts which are known to the vulgar” of his time. That desired “science” which Strauss is referring to is not any science, but “the science of the essence of each of all beings,” the science which is provided by philosophy. “Plato” is therefore any individual who is dissatisfied with the sciences of his time and begins walking in the footsteps of similar individuals in search of “the science of the essence of each of all beings.” The curious description of Plato’s Laws is just another piece of evidence which points to the unhistorical character of Alfarabi’s “historiographical” writings, an example of Alfarabi inventing Platonic speeches.⁹⁰

Alfarabi and the Divine Laws

While Strauss argued for the importance of observing what Alfarabi refrains from mentioning in his summary of Plato’s Laws ( 2), he believed that Alfarabi’s secretiveness in his Summary is also found in his practice of avoiding speaking of some subjects in some places while mentioning them in other places. In the longest paragraph of his essay, Strauss follows this point particularly regarding Alfarabi’s treatment of the divine. Strauss draws our attention to the fact that Alfarabi reserves his mentioning of theological themes to the beginning and the end of his Summary, while “there is silence in a central section” ( 19). Not that the Summary is relatively free of theological reflections: it contains more on those subjects than Philosophy of Plato – an exception, Strauss notes, is the sixth chapter which “is the closest approximation, within the Summary to the Philosophy of Plato,” because in that chapter theological subjects are absent. Furthermore, Alfarabi’s secretiveness is also observable in the manner in which he goes out of his way to speak exclusively of “gods” rather than “God,” even going so far as deviating from Plato’s text. One remarkable example of such a deviation is found in two passages in which, when Plato speaks of God and chance, in his report Alfarabi speaks only of chance. In one instance to which Strauss alludes, when Plato’s Laws speaks of praying “both to the god and to good luck,” Alfarabi speaks of availing oneself of “drawing by lots, chance, and what resembles them,” implying some kind of identity between the divine and chance.⁹¹ Moreover, Alfarabi’s usage of the adjective “divine” in the Summary is of an unusual character; Strauss claims that a careful inquiry shows that “divine” in the Summary is “a certain quality of human pursuits, namely, their excellence.” This is the same conclusion which Strauss reached while studying this point in his earlier study on Philosophy of Plato.⁹² Finally, Strauss draws our attention to a peculiar deviation from the text of Plato’s Laws in the central chapter of the Summary: the Athenian Stranger of the Laws puts the soul below the gods from the point of view of honor. The issue is much more ambiguous in Alfarabi’s report, which describes soul as “superior in nobility or dignity to the divine,” but also as “inferior to the divine” ( 19). What Strauss seems to imply by highlighting this point is the thought which he alludes to in one of his published writings and explains in more detail in an unpublished lecture.⁹³ The point concerns the seventh book of Aristotle’s Politics, where six essential functions of the city are enumerated in a descending order. The fifth item turns out to be the “concern with the divine,” but Aristotle calls that element “fifth and first” instead.⁹⁴ Strauss interprets that statement as Aristotle meaning that no “city is possible without religion, without established religion, a state religion obligatory on all citizens.”⁹⁵ The concern with the divine is therefore the first among the essential functions of the city, it is even “more necessary even than food,” which occupies the first place in the enumeration. Strauss adds, however, that “in another respect it is not the first, therefore he says fifth or first.” In other words, the concern with the divine, from a political perspective, occupies the first rank; as it is political, however, it does not have the same dignity even as something as low as food, and should be ranked as the fifth.⁹⁶

In the seventeenth paragraph, which numerologically points to nature, Strauss addresses the possibility of Muslim philosophers believing in the perfect harmony between Islamic Law and Platonic philosophy, the possibility which was previously only mentioned without being developed further ( 16).⁹⁷ He begins by reminding us of Alfarabi’s awareness of the conflict between “the Greek laws” and Islamic Law. Strauss gives two examples to establish this point: singing and another “institution” are accepted by one code and rejected by another. He then notes that Alfarabi has explained in which conditions this variety in what concerns the second “institution” is unobjectionable. The “institution” which Strauss has in mind is wine-drinking, and in the passage which Strauss has in mind Alfarabi actually discusses the benefits of wine rather than providing a justification for its prohibition. These two practices, both of which provided recourse for the ascetic as an escape, pave the way for a discussion of the quest for the rational justification of Islamic Laws, which seemed to be rejected by Strauss because of its “apologetic” character. It turns out, however, that even this third approach to the relationship between Islam and Plato is as unorthodox as the second possibility. This point is discussed by Alfarabi in two statements. In the first, the self-sufficiency of political virtues is put forward as something common to both Greek and Islamic Laws. The point should, however, be understood as a depiction of the natural limitations common to all human political associations – Greek, Islamic, or otherwise. It is as natural as fire, which burns equally in Athens as in Baghdad, that the highest end of a good political association always falls short of what is needed for the highest perfection of the individual.⁹⁸ The second common element turns out to be more complex: it refers to the corruption and restoration of the laws in cataclysms such as universal deluges. Such a perspective on the cyclical movement of things, which Strauss describes as “Plato’s natural explanation” of the origin of the laws, be they human or divine, manifests its problematic character for Islamic revelation by being related to the heretical view, according to which world is eternal rather than created: Strauss refers to this problem, rather ambiguously, by mentioning it at the end of a peculiar enumeration consisting of very unequal objections to this interpretation as well as by inventing a quotation which cannot be found in Alfarabi’s Summary.⁹⁹ The question of “eternity or creation” sheds more light on the meaning of Strauss’s allusion to “what Plato had said about the natural beginning” of every code, the issue alluded to also by a reference to Alfarabi’s Summary ( 17: “cf. 18, 4”). In the latter passage, Alfarabi speaks of the dual sources of the change of divine laws, one due to the natural corruption of the mores and the other through the imposition of a new divine law by a conquering king. Differently stated, the change of divine laws has two natural sources, one being the cyclical changes which lead to sudden or gradual changes, and the other, the human agency which brings about the establishment of “divine” laws which are actually of “human origin.” The connection between the issue of the eternity of the world and the divine or human origin of the laws is established through the fact that the doctrine of the eternity of the world presupposes necessity, which leaves no place for divine omnipotence or for divine intervention in the affairs of the world through the exercise of providence in the form of legislation, appointment of prophet-legislators, or even the performance of miracles.¹⁰⁰ Furthermore, it is doubtful that a god who is obedient to a blind necessity can be “assumed to be capable of such motions as fear, anger or hate, and grief,” not to say love, the passions which, at least in some cases, are prerequisites of the idea of providence and legislation.¹⁰¹ Moreover, the doctrine of the eternity of the world and its concomitant idea of cyclical cataclysms, as in the case of Alfarabi, lead to the idea of recurrent corruption of codes and gradual introduction of new ones. This is while a revealed religion proclaims “only one divine law,” and demands the complete obedience of man to that law because of its finality, perfection, and its uniqueness to the end of times. The plurality of divine laws born out of cyclical cataclysms is incompatible with the demand for absolute obedience.¹⁰² Finally, the doctrine of the eternity of the world weakens the demand for “full obedience to the law” characteristic of divine legislation, because for such a demand to be sustained, “the law must be the source of all blessings” and therefore “the god must be omnipotent.”¹⁰³

One must be wary of Strauss’s statement about the “only originality” that, in Philosophy of Plato, Alfarabi attributes to his Plato. Strauss writes that according to Alfarabi’s report, Plato’s investigation in the Menexenus“led to the result that the philosophers, as distinguished from the legislators, cannot expect to be deified by the citizens” ( 23). This peculiar – one might say audacious – statement of Strauss, which is just mentioned in passing, “by the by,” and without any explanation, needs to be understood. Right after this statement, Strauss changes the subject by one of his idiosyncratic expressions which appear in some of his writings as a kind of “pointer” or “warning sign” for a thought which requires special attention: “However this may be.”¹⁰⁴ A look at Alfarabi’s text shows that the original source does not speak of “legislators” nor of “deifying” but only of “the princes” or “the rulers” (mulūk) and “the virtuous” (afad.il) on the one hand, and of “making great” (ʻaz.ama; Mahdi’s translation: to glorify) and “praising” or “glorifying” (majada; Mahdi’s translation: to exalt), on the other. One is therefore reasonably led to the question of why Strauss makes these changes and what might be the main purpose behind his movement of thought, or the basis of this statement. I believe this statement points to one of Strauss’s most ambiguous ideas implied only, to my knowledge, in three other writings: the possibility of a philosopher becoming the founder of a civil religion disguised as a revealed religion. In two instances, Strauss denies this possibility: When discussing the classical philosophers’ understanding of the relationship between politics and religion, Strauss states that none “of these philosophers believed that he could found a religion. Religion is a work of the founders or legislators.” Strauss does not exclude the possibility of philosophers trying to “affect or modify religion” which they find existing already in their respective communities; but he categorically states that religion is “not meant to be the work of philosophers.”¹⁰⁵ Elsewhere, he goes even further and denies the possibility of any religion being the work of philosophers who as such, Strauss claims, could have understood its basis and principles. In view of the stark opposition between religion and philosophy, Strauss finds it incomprehensible that philosophers might engage in founding a religious code and questions the rationale behind a philosopher’s effort in founding “what only an entirely different human type bent on the anti-philosophic possibility could discover or invent.”¹⁰⁶ This rationale, however, is implied in another writing of Strauss where he discusses the affinity between books such as the famous Nabatean Agriculture and Plato’s Laws. Although at first Strauss seems careful to make a distinction between the books dealing with superstitious practices and beliefs which he describes as “superstitious nomoi” and the works by philosophers properly speaking which he calls “philosophic nomoi,” the distinction gradually seems to disappear: Strauss ends up claiming that it is a possibility that “the authors of some of the superstitious codes, were themselves philosophers.” Why these philosophers would engage in such an enterprise is also implied in Strauss’s statement which mentions “addressing the multitude.”¹⁰⁷ In other words, although Strauss mentions that the esoteric intention of these works might have been to serve “the purpose of undermining the belief in Divine legislation proper,” they seem to have a mainly or supplementary political purpose also, which is fulfilled by conveying an exoteric teaching to the multitude: these religions act as a supplement to purely political laws “in order to strengthen the people’s willingness to obey the purely political laws.”¹⁰⁸ But one should not lose sight of the fact that even here, Strauss seems to be persuaded that the enterprise of founding such a civil religion is not the work of philosophers but rather of legislators and rulers, while philosophers again seem to be open to working within the confines of the existing religion of their communities.¹⁰⁹ This is also confirmed by the character of Plato’s Laws and Alfarabi’s writings in general, and his Summary in particular, which seem to deal with variations on the existing religions of their communities. Be that as it may, one must refrain from categorically denying Strauss’s interest in this possibility, especially since one encounters the following rather audacious statement in Strauss’s essay: “the divine laws are the work of a human legislator” ( 19).¹¹⁰

An Unfinished Task

In the end, one should bear in mind the tentative character of Strauss’s interpretation of Alfarabi’s Summary as it is presented in his essay. The provisional character of Strauss’s interpretation in addressing all the difficulties of Alfarabi’s Summary is reflected in the statement in which he warns us of overstating our capacity to claim that “we are in a position to explain these difficulties.” What he particularly finds defective is our knowledge of “the religious situation in Fārābī’s age” ( 20).¹¹¹ This does not mean that Strauss does not believe that he has acquired “a certain understanding of the manner in which such writings need to be read”; his essay reflects that understanding. Strauss gives us “a specimen” of his understanding of the way in which Alfarabi’s Summary should be read by concentrating on the first chapter and depicting “the problem of νόμος” (see the title of 21 in the manuscript). He brings together different elements of his reading of the Summary through the idea that the move from Zeus as the efficient cause of the laws to Zeus as the final cause is concomitant with the move from the divinity of the laws toward their agreement with the precepts of reason ( 21). This movement has a consequence which one can anticipate: from such an evaluation, one can distinguish between a true legislator and an imposter. As the laws of Zeus did not live up to the standard of reason, one must conclude that Zeus was not a true legislator, although Alfarabi does not say so in so many words. The true legislator intends to guide men toward God, the desire for “the other life,” and the highest virtue, which is “above” moral virtues. That highest virtue turns out to be “human virtue,” which includes “science.” “Human virtue” can be acquired without practicing it according to the prescriptions of the laws; “one can acquire human virtue without obeying the law.” The end of the laws is to produce “divine virtue” or to make men “religious.” The divine virtue is not necessary for seeking the countenance of God or for desiring “the other life.” One must conclude that divine virtue, whose production is the end of the laws, is of a lower status than human virtues, which can be acquired without obeying the law: divine virtue seems to be of more “political” character. Law has for its objective leading “the people” (see 21: “cf. 16, 14‒15”). This should not distract us from the thought that not all divine laws are good. In fact “some older laws” of “the vanquished” contained precepts regarding music and singing which were of “consummate soundness,” and they rendered great service, although they were replaced by the laws of “the victors.” Here Strauss draws the obvious conclusion: such a view certainly “casts some doubt on the divinity of Zeus and Apollo.” The divinity of the lawgiver is further put in doubt by Alfarabi’s requirement that the lawgiver himself should obey his own laws, because in the same way that “gods do not pray,” they cannot obey their own laws. In fact, by this statement, Strauss refers us to the difficulties of imagining a perfect being who rules human beings “by telling people what they should do, or by issuing commands.”¹¹² But doubts regarding the divinity of the divine laws should not lead to forgetting the utility of such laws, because in contrast to “the reasonable individuals” who possess “human virtue in the comprehensive sense of the term,” others need the guidance that can only be provided by the laws. The divinity of laws is necessary for those people who are described as “the ignorant and children.”¹¹³

¹Leo Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

²According to a famous ancient story (Diogenes Laertius Vitae III.37, Olympiodorus, Prolegomena VI.24) when Plato died, the Laws was still on wax tablets and was published posthumously by Philip of Opus, one of Plato’s students, or as Strauss describes him, “a kind of [literary] executor.” In his two courses on Plato’s Laws, Strauss mentions this story three times and suggests that Plato might have explicitly decided to write Laws late in his life because he might have thought that a “certain subject can be properly treated only if you are old, and therefore [Plato thought] I will not write it or begin to write it until I am old.” Strauss, 1971–72 Course on Plato’s Laws, 396 (Session 18); Strauss, 1959 Course on Plato’s Laws, 66 (Session 3, January 13, 1959), 397 (Session 14, March 3, 1959). Compare this with the account given by Joseph Cropsey, Strauss’s literary executor, of the publication of Strauss’s last book in Strauss, The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws, vii–viii.

³Strauss, The City and Man, chapter II.

⁴See Allan D. Nelson, “Review of The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws by Leo Strauss,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 9, no. 3 (1976): 515–16; Thomas M. Robinson, “Review of The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws by Leo Strauss,” The Classical World 70, no. 6 (1977): 405; Trevor J. Saunders, “Review of The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws by Leo Strauss,” Political Theory 4, no. 2 (1976): 239–42; M. Schofield, “Review of The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws by Leo Strauss,” The Classical Review 28, no. 1 (1978): 170. For more positive and recent evaluations see David Bolotin, “Review of The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws by Leo Strauss,” The American Political Science Review 70, no. 2 (1977): 668–70; Harry Neumann, “Review of The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws by Leo Strauss,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 17 (1979): 81–82; Mark J. Lutz, “The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws,” in Brill’s Companion to Leo Strauss’ Writings on Classical Political Thought, ed. Timothy W. Burns (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015), 424–40; Clemens Kauffmann, “‘Men on Horseback.’ Leo Strauss über ‘The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws,’” in Platons Nomoi: Die politische Herrschaft von Vernunft und Gesetz, eds. Francesco Knoll and Francisco L. Lisi, vol. 100, Staatsverständnisse (Baden-Baden: Nomos-Verlag, 2017), 212–46.

⁵Strauss, The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws, vii.

⁶Strauss, The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws, 1.

⁷Strauss, 1971–72 Course on Plato’s Laws, 1 (Session 1); Strauss, “A Giving of Accounts,” 463; Meier, “How Strauss Became Strauss,” 17–18. See the discussion of the controversies around Avicenna’s statement in the Introduction to this volume. See also James W. Morris, “The Philosopher-Prophet in Avicenna’s Philosophy,” in The Political Aspects of Islamic Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Muhsin S. Mahdi, ed. Charles E. Butterworth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 169n15 and n16.

⁸Strauss, “Fârâbî’s Plato,” 355, 377.

⁹The Arabic text along with a Latin translation was first published by Francesco Gabrieli. Thérèse-Anne Druart prepared an improved edition on the basis of new manuscripts and emendations suggested by Muhsin Mahdi. This edition is now available in an excellent English translation by Charles E. Butterworth: Alfarabi, Compendium Legum Platonis; Mahdi, “The Editio Princeps of Fârâbî’s Compendium Legum Platonis”; Alfarabi, “Le Sommaire du Livre des ‘Lois’ de Platon,” ed. Thérèse-Anne Druart, Bulletin d’études orientales 50 (1998): 109–55.; Alfarabi, “Summary of Plato’s Laws,” in The Political Writings: Volume II Political Regime and Summary of Plato’s Laws, trans. Charles E. Butterworth (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2015), 97–175. For discussions about the title of the treatise see Mahdi, “The Editio Princeps of Fârâbî’s Compendium Legum Platonis,” 1n2; Alfarabi, “Le Sommaire du Livre des ‘Lois’ de Platon,” 110–11. Unless otherwise indicated, all references to the Summary are to Druart’s edition in the following form: D page number. These page numbers are also indicated in Butterworth’s translation, which I use for translations.

¹⁰See Strauss, “On Abravanel’s Philosophical Tendency and Political Teaching,” 1937, 96n4; also Strauss’s letter to Charles Kuentz on May 1, 1946 in Kraemer, “The Death of an Orientalist: Paul Kraus from Prague to Cairo,” 209; Mahdi, “The Editio Princeps of Fârâbî’s Compendium Legum Platonis,” 1n1, 15; Alfarabi, “Le Sommaire du Livre des ‘Lois’ de Platon,” 119.

¹¹Kraemer, “The Death of an Orientalist: Paul Kraus from Prague to Cairo,” 209; Strauss, 1971–72 Course on Plato’s Laws, 1 (Session 1).

¹²Leo Strauss, “How Fārābī Read Plato’s Laws,” in Mélanges Louis Massignon, vol. III (Damascus: Institut français de Damas, 1957), 319–44; Strauss, “How Fārābī Read Plato’s Laws,” 134–55. In this chapter, references to this essay are to the paragraph numbers ( paragraph number). The dates indicated on the manuscript of the essay are August 20, 1954–September 8, 1954. See the notebook in Leo Strauss Papers, box 22, folder 1, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. All references to the manuscript of the essay, including the paragraph headings and emendations, are found in this notebook. Apart from addition of some commas, slight modified punctuations, very few grammatical revisions, replacement of a few words, some revised quotations, and slight reformulation of some sentences, the revisions which I believe do not change anything of substance in the revised edition, there are several changes in the 1959 edition which are worthy of note: (1) In the new edition the footnotes are numbered sequentially. (2) In 10 “allude to punishment in the other life” is replaced by “refer to punishment in the other life.” (3) In 13 “the laws are superior to wisdom of every kind” is now in quotation marks and reads “superior to all wisdoms.” (4) In 17 “eternity or creation” which was originally in single quotation marks are put in double quotation marks. (5) In 19 twice “sharīʻa” is replaced by “revealed law.” (6) In 21 “subject to the laws of Zeus” is replaced by “to whom the laws of Zeus were given.” (7) In 21 “Both Zeus and Apollo used in their two laws or in the ordinances of their two sharīʻa’s” is replaced by “Both Zeus and Apollo used in their codes or in the ordinances of their revealed laws.”

¹³Apart from Strauss’s own essay, there is one other study by Joshua Parens which treats the Summary as a source of philosophical ideas; but even that study is written by a scholar influenced by Strauss and his students. One can also mention the introduction by Charles E. Butterworth to his translation and another essay by Steven Harvey: Parens, Metaphysics as Rhetoric; Alfarabi, The Political Writings: Volume II Political Regime and Summary of Plato’s Laws, trans. Charles E. Butterworth (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2015), 97–129; Steven Harvey, “Can a Tenth-Century Islamic Aristotelian Help Us Understand Plato’s Laws?,” in Plato’s Laws: From Theory to Practice, eds. Samuel Scolnicov and Luc Brisson (Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, 2003), 325–30.

¹⁴Mahdi, “The Editio Princeps of Fârâbî’s Compendium Legum Platonis,” 1–2; Parens, Metaphysics as Rhetoric, xix.

¹⁵Christopher Bobonich, ed., Plato’s Laws: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1; Francesco Knoll and Francisco L. Lisi, eds., Platons Nomoi: Die politische Herrschaft von Vernunft und Gesetz, vol. 100, Staatsverständnisse (Baden-Baden: Nomos-Verlag, 2017), 9–20; Harold Tarrant, Plato’s First Interpreters (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 205.

¹⁶Parens, Metaphysics as Rhetoric, xxi.

¹⁷Alfarabi, Compendium Legum Platonis, ix–xii. In his Kitāb al-Fihrist, Ibn al-Nadīm, the Arab bibliographer (d. 995/998), mentions two translations of the Laws, one by the famous Hunayn ibn Ishāq, and the other by a student of Alfarabi, Yahya Ibn ʿAdī. See Ibn al-Nadīm, The Fihrist: A Tenth Century AD Survey of Islamic Culture, 2:592.

¹⁸S. M. Stern, “Review of R. Klibansky (Ed.), F. Gabrieli (Ed. and Tr.), Plato Arabus, Volumen III. Alfarabius: Compendium Legum Platonis. London: Warburg Institute, 1952, 21s.,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 17, no. 2 (1955): 398.

¹⁹Mahdi, “The Editio Princeps of Fârâbî’s Compendium Legum Platonis,” 5–6; Parens, Metaphysics as Rhetoric, xxx; Alfarabi, “Le Sommaire du Livre des ‘Lois’ de Platon,” 112–13. Already in 1936, Paul Kraus rejected the hypothesis of an intermediary source. See Kraus’s letter to Leo Strauss on May 28, 1936 quoted in Mahdi, “The Editio Princeps of Fârâbî’s Compendium Legum Platonis,” 6n23. Reportedly, Druart has changed her initial view. See Steven Harvey, “Did Alfarabi Read Plato’s Laws?,” Medioevo: Rivista di storia della filosofia medievale 28 (2003): 61n34.

²⁰Alfarabi, On the Perfect State, 10, 356, 363, 365; Richard Walzer, Greek into Arabic: Essays on Islamic Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 238.

²¹Gutas, “Fārābī’s Knowledge of Plato’s ‘Laws’”; Gutas, “Galen’s Synopsis of Plato’s Laws and Fārābī’s Talḥīṣ.”

²²Gutas, “Galen’s Synopsis of Plato’s Laws and Fārābī’s Talẖīṣ,” 117–18.

²³Gutas, “Galen’s Synopsis of Plato’s Laws and Fārābī’s Talẖīṣ,” 118–19.

²⁴Harvey, “Did Alfarabi Read Plato’s Laws?,” 54–61.

²⁵Harvey, “Did Alfarabi Read Plato’s Laws?,” 64. See also Harvey, “Can a Tenth-Century Islamic Aristotelian Help Us Understand Plato’s Laws?,” 323; Harvey, “Leo Strauss’ Early Interest in the Islamic Falāsifa,” 227n28.

²⁶Harvey, “Did Alfarabi Read Plato’s Laws?,” 65.

²⁷Harvey, “Did Alfarabi Read Plato’s Laws?,” 62–63.

²⁸Harvey, “Can a Tenth-Century Islamic Aristotelian Help Us Understand Plato’s Laws?”

²⁹Harvey, “Did Alfarabi Read Plato’s Laws?,” 65; Harvey, “Can a Tenth-Century Islamic Aristotelian Help Us Understand Plato’s Laws?”

³⁰See Parens, Metaphysics as Rhetoric, xxiv–xxviii.

³¹Alfarabi, The Political Writings: Volume II, Political Regime and Summary of Plato’s Laws, 106–7.

³²Harvey, “Did Alfarabi Read Plato’s Laws?,” 63 and 63n41; Harvey, “Can a Tenth-Century Islamic Aristotelian Help Us Understand Plato’s Laws?,” 322; Rosenthal, “On the Knowledge of Plato’s Philosophy in the Islamic World,” 411; Francis Edward Peters, Aristotle and the Arabs: The Aristotelian Tradition in Islam (New York: New York University Press, 1968), 169. This is still the common consensus: See Rüdiger Arnzen, “Plato, Arabic,” in Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy, ed. Henrik Lagerlund (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 1012–16; Rüdiger Arnzen, “Plato’s Timaeus in the Arabic Tradition. Legend – Testimonies – Fragments,” in Il Timeo: Esegesi Greche, Arabe, Latine. Greco, Arabo, Latino, eds. Francesco Celia and Angela Ulacco (Pisa: Pisa University Press, 2012), 181–85.

³³A good summary is found in Reisman, “Plato’s Republic in Arabic: A Newly Discovered Passage,” esp. 269–71. See also Arthur J. Arberry, “Some Plato in an Arabic Epitome,” Islamic Quarterly 2 (1955): 86–99; Dimitri Gutas, “Plato’s Symposion in the Arabic Tradition,” Oriens 31, no. 1 (1988): esp. 40.

³⁴On this change of attitude and bibliography see Gerald A. Press, “The State of the Question in the Study of Plato,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 34, no. 4 (December 1996): 509, 511–12; Gerald A. Press, “The State of the Question in the Study of Plato: Twenty Year Update,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 56, no. 1 (March 2018): 10.

³⁵Averroes, On Plato’s “Republic,” 3 (Rosenthal 21); Alfarabi, The Political Writings: Volume II Political Regime and Summary of Plato’s Laws, 106.

³⁶Aristotle, Politics 1261a5‒11, 1265a12, 1266b4, 1271b1, 1274b9. For an exemplary list of such instances in the Aristotelian corpus see Erik Ostenfeld, “Who Speaks for Plato? Everyone!,” in Who Speaks for Plato? Studies in Platonic Anonymity, ed. Gerald A. Press (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 216n24. See also Socrates the Younger in Metaphysics 1036b25. The same view is found in Diogenes Laertius (Vitae III.52) who names Socrates, Timaeus, the Athenian Stranger, and the Elean Stranger as Plato’s mouthpieces.

³⁷“Und die Nomoi-Paraphrase des Fārābī scheint mir nicht einfach eine Reedition der galenischen zu sein. Dazu ist sie zu eigenwillig. Und außerdem sagt ja Fārābī selbst, dass er bei der Paraphrase das Original unter den Augen hatte, was nicht ausschließt, dass er sich auch der Paraphrase des Galen bedient hat, die zu seiner Zeit übersetzt vorlag.” (Paul Kraus’s letter to Leo Strauss on May 28, 1936). My translation. Original quoted in Mahdi, “The Editio Princeps of Fârâbî’s Compendium Legum Platonis,” 6n23. The same argument is used by Strauss to argue for the access of Averroes to Plato’s Republic (SNA 1. 3). Apart from the end of the Summary (D 152), Strauss implicitly refers to two other passages to show that Alfarabi expects the reader to have the Laws“at his elbow” ( 12): “anyone who looks into the original work on which this book is based” (D 133); “anyone who reads those chapters” (D 141). These two passages are mentioned in the footnote 6 of Strauss’s essay.

³⁸Harvey, “Did Alfarabi Read Plato’s Laws?,” 65n42. For the importance of Al-Bīrūnī’s references to Plato’s Laws see Geoffrey J. Moseley, “Arabic Support for an Emendation of Plato, Laws 666b,” The Classical Quarterly 69, no. 1 (2019): 440–42.

³⁹This remark appears in Strauss’s essay on the “literary character” of Maimonides’s Guide, in which Strauss is explaining the right manner of approaching Maimonides’s book. Relying on the linguistic root of the word maqāla which is the same as the root of the verb qāla meaning “to say” or “to speak,” Strauss claims that Maimonides avoids intentionally using terms such as “treatise” (risāla) or “book” (kitāb) for describing his work to imply an important point: Guide is a writing which tries to imitate, as much as possible, an oral conversation between a philosopher and his heterogenous audience, consisting of individuals with different capacities and concerns; it is in a sense a “Platonic dialogue” in nondialogic form. In such a conversation, the distinction between the esoteric message of the philosopher and his exoteric teaching is possible by paying attention to the intricacies of the text through esoteric techniques of reading while taking into account the multiplicity of the audience and the limitations imposed on the author by his specific historical situation. See Strauss, “Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed,” 47; Strauss, “On a New Interpretation of Plato’s Political Philosophy,” 349–50; Strauss, The City and Man, 58–60; Strauss, “How to Study Medieval Philosophy,” 336; Strauss, The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws, 2, 62; Brague, “Athens, Jerusalem, Mecca,” 243–44; Kenneth Hart Green, Leo Strauss and the Rediscovery of Maimonides (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 147–48.

⁴⁰On the importance of the center as an esoteric technique of writing see Strauss, “Fârâbî’s Plato,” 368–69; Strauss, The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws, 39; Strauss, Xenophon’s Socrates, 8, 58. Strauss seems to have been right about the intentional silence of Alfarabi regarding the tenth book of the Laws: Brague, The Law of God, 118.

⁴¹What Strauss translates as “men of judgment” is al-ḥukamā. Although it has the same root (ḥkm) as ḥukm, which is often translated by “judgment” – i.e., the decision-making activity of the judges as well as rulers – al-ḥukamā in the writings of Islamic philosophers is commonly translated as “the wise,” which is the common way of saying “the philosophers.” “Men of judgment” and “man of judgment” appear four times each in Strauss’s essay (3× in 2, 1× in 7 and 3× in 4, 1× in 6, respectively); al-ḥukamā and al-ḥakīm appear four times in the Summary (2× in D 124, 1× in D 141, 1× in D 152). See Muhsin Mahdi, “Religious Belief and Scientific Belief,” The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 11 (1994): 247; Dimitri Gutas, “Classical Arabic Wisdom Literature. Nature and Scope,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 101, no. 1 (1981): 53; Amélie Marie Goichon, “Ḥikma,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, ed. Th. Bianquis et al., 2nd ed., vol. 3 (Leiden: Brill, 1986), 377–78. In the republished version of his essay, Strauss has revised the previous version to add an eighth “the men of judgment” (cf. 2 in the original with the republished version). The word “wise” is never used in Strauss’s essay and he goes to some length to not use it (see footnote 2). “Wisdom” is only mentioned twice by Strauss: once in an unliteral translation of a passage of the Summary– 13: “superior to all wisdoms” [D 125]. Literally: “superior to all wise sayings.” The same word (ḥikma) appears only once in Alfarabi’s Summary (D 134).

⁴²Strauss, Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse, 125–26; Strauss, “Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed,” 63, 74; Strauss, “Fârâbî’s Plato,” 372.

⁴³Mahdi, “The Editio Princeps of Fârâbî’s Compendium Legum Platonis,” 15n57.

⁴⁴Strauss, “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 115.

⁴⁵Strauss, “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 130, 139, 141. Cf. Strauss, Socrates and Aristophanes, 198. with Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, XXV.2 in fine quoted in Strauss, 1966 Spring Course on Montesquieu, 96 (Session 5, April 11, 1966). See also Strauss, “Fârâbî’s Plato,” 385–86; Strauss, “Reason and Revelation (1948),” 177.

⁴⁶Strauss, “A Giving of Accounts,” 465. For the origin of the idea see Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality III.8.

⁴⁷For “repugnant” things see D 131.

⁴⁸This seems to be also the purpose of footnote 13, which consists of references to seven passages: the central one implies the esoteric art of writing, which addresses each group according to their particular capacities, sometimes acting like a physician who administers medication by mixing it with appetizing food. Cf. Strauss, “Notes on Lucretius,” 83–84.

⁴⁹See Strauss’s remark that the Summary“consists of 41 pages” (footnote 1). See also Strauss’s allusion to the central passages of Alfarabi’s Philosophy of Plato in Strauss, “Fârâbî’s Plato,” 367n27, 371n35. In “Fârâbî’s Plato,” the term “human being” is explained by a reference to Aristotle, who explains that the philosopher’s virtuous actions are due to his relation with others in his capacity as a mere human being, in contradistinction to his divine philosophic character.

⁵⁰The connection which Strauss has in mind seems to come from the Latin word “otiosus,” which he translates as “the lazy.” The term can be understood as a description of those who benefit from otium, a Latin translation of the Greek schole, “leisure” characteristic of philosophic contemplation. See Friedrich Solmsen, “Leisure and Play in Aristotle’s Ideal State,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 107 (1964): 193–220; Jean-Marie André, L’otium dans la vie morale et intellectuelle romaine des origines à l’époque augustéenne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966), 149–50.

⁵¹Like some of Strauss’s other writings, such as Thoughts on Machiavelli, the manuscript of Strauss’s essay has a heading for each paragraph, the headings which are not reproduced in the published version. The transcription is available here in as Appendix D. My transcription of the headings was significantly improved by Heinrich Meier and Svetozar Minkov to whom I am grateful. Meier has previously transcribed the headings of Thoughts on Machiavelli to which, when suitable, I refer in this chapter. See Meier, Political Philosophy and the Challenge of Revealed Religion, 187–97.

⁵²See Isaiah 57:15.

⁵³In this regard, it might also be helpful to some readers to mention the epigraph of Strauss’s “Persecution and the Art of Writing” from W. E. H. Lecky. See Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 1952, 22; Montgomery, “Leo Strauss and the Alethiometer,” 289.

⁵⁴Xenophon, Cyropaedia IV.3

⁵⁵Strauss, 1963 Winter Course on Xenophon, 299 (Session 12).

⁵⁶In a letter to Seth Benardete, Strauss writes: “Will you be so kind as to reread the passage on Chirone in Principe ch. 18 – I have the impression that the half-man half-beast with its two natures who taught the ancient princes, has been replaced, nei tempi moderni, by uno mezzo Dio e mezzo uomo with his two natures who teaches modern princes, i.e., Chiron replaces again Christ. Hence imitatio Chironis replaces imitatio Christi. Question: are not the ‘reasonable horses’ of Gulliver IV really centaurs, and hence the lesson of Gulliver in this respect [is] identical with, and derived from, Machiavelli? Can you, with the library at your disposal, reconsider Gulliver IV with a view to this question: do these horses have any traits reminiscent of the Centaurs (I have in mind some rather subtle suggestions)?” I am grateful to Svetozar Minkov who drew my attention to this letter and transcribed it for me. See also Meier, Political Philosophy and the Challenge of Revealed Religion, 82–83, 190 (the heading for II.21).

⁵⁷Strauss, “Fârâbî’s Plato,” 391–92; Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 1952, 15; Meier, Political Philosophy and the Challenge of Revealed Religion, 44–45.

⁵⁸Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, 171 (II.18); Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 159; Mansfield, Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders, 246–47.

⁵⁹Strauss, Natural Right and History, 196, 247.

⁶⁰Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 290.

⁶¹Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 1952, xvi; Strauss, Natural Right and History, 123.

⁶²Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 1952, 23.

⁶³Parmenides, Diels-Kranz 28.B1.1‒30, 28.B2.7‒8; Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 290.

⁶⁴Strauss, Natural Right and History, 79, 123; Svetozar Minkov, Leo Strauss on Science: Thoughts on the Relation between Natural Science and Political Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016), 57. See also Strauss, “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 32; Strauss, “On Classical Political Philosophy,” 1959, 92; Meier, Political Philosophy and the Challenge of Revealed Religion, 44–45.

⁶⁵Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Claude Rawson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 223 (IV.4); Allan Bloom, “An Outline of Gulliver’s Travels,” in Ancients and Moderns: Essays on the Tradition of Political Philosophy in Honor of Leo Strauss, ed. Joseph Cropsey (New York: Basic Books, 1964), 255–56.

⁶⁶On the importance of omission as an esoteric technique of writing see Strauss, “Fârâbî’s Plato,” 372; Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 31; Strauss, “Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed,” 76; Strauss, Xenophon’s Socrates, 126.

⁶⁷Strauss, “Fârâbî’s Plato,” 381.

⁶⁸Strauss, “Fârâbî’s Plato,” 371, 375–77. In this essay of his too Strauss avoids the words “future life” or “afterlife” and speaks only of “other life” while in the paragraph heading of 9 he speaks of “future life.” For a discussion of this point see pp. 184–185 below.

⁶⁹Here it is worth quoting a letter written to Muhsin Mahdi by Strauss on September 27, 1954, shortly after the date indicated in the notebook as when he finished working on his essay: “I was perhaps slightly unpolite [sic] to your wife because I was so anxious to devour your notes. I went over them, and wish to thank you very, very much for the trouble you have taken, although I console myself with the thought that it was nāfiʻ [useful] for you to check on what I said. You are a hakīm [a wise man or philosopher] in what you say about the character of your notes – but precisely as ruthless reminders of the literal meaning they are immensely helpful to me, even if, or precisely if, I do not follow all of them. Some of your suggestions I gratefully adopted. I hope you allow me to acknowledge my debt to you in print – except if you think that an article by me on the Father of Defence (what a wonderful stroke of τύχη [chance]) is not a good place to be mentioned in for a fād.il [virtuous]. I am really grateful to you for having helped me overcome my hesitation to write the article; I enjoyed myself very much in studying Farabi’s nawāmīs [Laws] and in writing about them. There is one point which I saw no reason to emphasize, which is of special importance to me – viz. the fact that ‘26’ is important for Farabi. You know perhaps that it is a key number in Machiavelli.” The transcription is done by Svetozar Minkov. Strauss refers to the assistance of Mahdi in the first footnote of his essay. The meaning of the playful allusion to “Father of Defence” is not clear to me. Perhaps it is a play on Alfarabi’s name (Abū Naṣr) which means “Father of Victory” in Arabic. Another possibility is an Arabic metonymy describing city as Abū Mansūr: See John Richardson, A Dictionary, English, Persian and Arabic: Vol. 2 (London: Blumen and Co., 1810), 281; Leonard Chappelow, Notes, Critical, Illustrative and Practical on the Book of Job. Vol. 2 (Cambridge: J. Bentham, 1752), 54. For number twenty-six in Machiavelli and number seventeen, see Chapter 2 of this volume.

⁷⁰Strauss, “Fârâbî’s Plato,” 371n34.

⁷¹Strauss, “Fârâbî’s Plato,” 371–72, 374–75, 379; Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy, 83–84. See also the explanation of what afterlife means in Alfarabi, “On the Intellect,” in Classical Arabic Philosophy: An Anthology of Sources, trans. John McGinnis and David Reisman (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2007), 76 (Bouyges 31); Alfarabi, “Selected Aphorisms,” in The Political Writings: “Selected Aphorisms” and Other Texts, trans. Charles E. Butterworth (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), 25–26 (Najjar 45–46), 52–53 (Najjar 86–87). See also Alfarabi, “The Attainment of Happiness,” in Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, trans. Muhsin Mahdi (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 13 in princ. (Hyderabad 2), 133n1.

⁷²Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 1952, 40–41, 40n9; Alfarabi, “Enumeration of the Sciences,” 80–84 (Uthman Amin 111–13); Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 175–74 (I.71). For a substantial discussion of the “enlightened kalām” see also Parens, Leo Strauss and the Recovery of Medieval Political Philosophy, 83–95. See also Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 3, 767 (Letter to Gershom Scholem on February 26, 1973).

⁷³Strauss, “How to Begin to Study the Guide of the Perplexed,” 169–70.

⁷⁴Strauss, “Reason and Revelation (1948),” 146.

⁷⁵Cf. the reference in the central paragraph ( 12) to Alfarabi’s statement on Zeus as the final cause in D 125 with Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 175; Strauss, “How to Begin to Study the Guide of the Perplexed,” 178; Meier, Political Philosophy and the Challenge of Revealed Religion, 66n80. See also 21.

⁷⁶Leo Strauss, “Introduction to Maimonides’ The Guide of the Perplexed,” in Leo Strauss on Maimonides: The Complete Writings, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 428, 428n17; Strauss, “How to Begin to Study the Guide of the Perplexed,” 179–83; Parens, Leo Strauss and the Recovery of Medieval Political Philosophy, 24. That Alfarabi is practicing the art of kalām and its questionable methods is also implied by the fact that Alfarabi contradicts himself by attributing a thought first to Plato and then to himself, and this in the same context in which he speaks of mutakallimūn contradicting themselves ( 14).

⁷⁷Strauss, “Fârâbî’s Plato,” 377.

⁷⁸Strauss, “Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed,” 57n64.

⁷⁹Elsewhere Strauss claims that for Maimonides, the study of the origin of the Law has the potential to lead to “Epicureanism.” What Maimonides rather recommends is to discover the “reason of the law” which is accessible to human reason: Strauss, “Some Remarks on the Political Science of Maimonides and Farabi,” 299 (GS II:145); Strauss, 1971–72 Course on Plato’s Laws, 5 (Session 1); Pelluchon, Leo Strauss and the Crisis of Rationalism, 223. One other point worthy of consideration is that there might be a connection between this concern with the end of the Law and the genealogy of the Revelation which Strauss formulated in one of his unpublished writings, the genealogy which has, as one of its objectives, the refutation of the claims of Revelation. See Strauss, “Reason and Revelation (1948),” 165–67; Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, xiii–xvi; Heinrich Meier, “On the Genealogy of Faith in Revelation,” in Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 29–44. See also Strauss’s claim elsewhere that some of the rational nomoi composed by the philosophers “served the purpose of undermining the belief in Divine legislation proper.” In the footnote attached to this passage, Strauss refers to the opening of Plato’s Laws and the question of the divine origin of the Dorian laws: Strauss, “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 125, 125n96. The “rational nomoi” seem to be what Strauss means by “the Greek law” in this essay ( 17).

⁸⁰Plato, Laws 634d‒e; Strauss, The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws, 10–11.

⁸¹Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 49; Strauss, “Niccolò Machiavelli,” 31.

⁸²The central passage mentioned in the first set of references, which seem out of place, draws our attention to a strange remark of Alfarabi which Strauss had mentioned previously, in the central paragraph: “a Platonic expression” which Alfarabi had not used in summarizing the passage concerned ( 12). This Platonic expression happens to be “children.”

⁸³Strauss does not quote Gabrieli’s complete footnote. Next comes the following: “The Arab prophet accused Jews and Christians of changing the genuine law which they have received from their prophets, and [accused them] of denying the congruence [of that law] with Islamic revelation.” The footnote is attached to the following passage from the Summary: “When necessity prompts a legislator to change a statute of previous laws, let him repudiate instead the alteration made by the inhabitants of those cities in what was brought forth by their legislators and the distortion of the traditional laws and usages” (D 146, Gabrieli 35.22‒36.2). For the question of “falsification” (taḥrīf) in Islam see Qur’ān 2:75, 4:46, 5:13 and Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, “Taḥrīf,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, ed. Th. Bianquis et al., 2nd ed., vol. 10 (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 111.

⁸⁴Strauss, “Fârâbî’s Plato,” 379–80, 380n55.

⁸⁵On this question one might also consult Aristotle’s curious remark at the end of Nicomachean Ethics, where he claims that his predecessors have ignored the subject of legislation in their political science. Aristotle’s claim seems rather perplexing, as one cannot suppose that he has forgotten Plato’s Laws. Could this have something to do with the fact that Aristotle seems to identify the Athenian Stranger with Socrates? Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1181a12–19, Politics 1265a12, Strauss, “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 33; Strauss, The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws, 2; Carnes Lord, “Introduction,” in Aristotle’s Politics, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), xxxi; Ronna Burger, Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates: On the Nicomachean Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 211n43.

⁸⁶Strauss, Socrates and Aristophanes, 313–14.

⁸⁷Strauss, “Fârâbî’s Plato,” 383.

⁸⁸See also Strauss, The City and Man, 78; Strauss and Voegelin, Faith and Political Philosophy, 63 (Letter to Eric Voegelin on December 17, 1949).

⁸⁹Strauss, On Tyranny, 309 (Letter to Alexandre Kojève on May 29, 1962). Strauss mentions, if I am not mistaken, al-Rāzī twice in his published writings: Strauss, “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 117n65; Strauss, Socrates and Aristophanes, 314. The place and the manner in which Strauss mentions al-Rāzī in the latter book shows also the importance of Islamic political thought for Strauss: his “real work” ends where al-Rāzī’s begins. Strauss’s knowledge of al-Rāzi owes much to Paul Kraus’s groundbreaking work on this figure, to whose edition Strauss refers: Paul Kraus, “Raziana I,” Orientalia 4 (1935): 300–34. For an excellent English translation of al-Rāzi’s treatise see Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyyā Al-Rāzī, “The Book of the Philosophical Life,” trans. Charles E. Butterworth, Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 20 (1993): 227–36.

⁹⁰Strauss, “Fârâbî’s Plato,” 354–65, 376. The last line of Strauss’s essay directly refers to his earlier “Fârâbî’s Plato.” In the manuscript, Strauss has copied the invented quotation quoted in his 1945 essay before changing it with pencil to what appeared in the published version.

⁹¹Cf. Strauss, “Niccolò Machiavelli,” 311 (“God is fortuna”); Meier, Political Philosophy and the Challenge of Revealed Religion, 75. If there is a similarity between Alfarabi and Machiavelli, it would mean that according to Strauss, perhaps Alfarabi does not follow the classic teleological Aristotelian view which is often ascribed to his Averroist followers.

⁹²Strauss, “Fârâbî’s Plato,” 391.

⁹³Leo Strauss, “The Liberalism of Classical Political Philosophy,” in Liberalism Ancient and Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 27. In this essay Strauss speaks laconically of “the precarious status of religion” in Aristotle’s scheme. See also a comparable statement in Strauss, The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws, 63.

⁹⁴Aristotle, Politics 1328b11‒12.

⁹⁵Strauss also refers to Aristotle’s statement on natural right, where “he indicates that sacrificing to the gods, and hence of course also praying, belongs to natural right. It is by nature just that the citizens pray and sacrifice.” Aristotle actually only mentions sacrificing; praying is Strauss’s addition. I owe this observation to an unpublished lecture by Nathan Tarcov, which he made available to me. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1134b23‒25.

⁹⁶Strauss, “Religion and the Commonweal,” 95–96.

⁹⁷For the significance of number seventeen see the discussion in Chapter 2 of this volume.

⁹⁸Strauss, On Tyranny, 101, 202–3; Strauss, Natural Right and History, 121, 150n24, 151; Strauss, On Plato’s Symposium, 86; Strauss, The City and Man, 27; Strauss, Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse, 161; Strauss, “The Liberalism of Classical Political Philosophy,” 57; Leo Strauss, “Introduction,” in History of Political Philosophy, eds. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 3–4; Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy, 23–25.

⁹⁹In the original version of the essay as well as the manuscript, “eternity or creation” was put in single quotation marks, while in the final edition they were replaced by double quotation marks. The doctrine of the eternity of the world is elsewhere described by Strauss as a “pernicious fruit” of the “wisdom of the Greeks,” or “the crucial question” which distinguishes “philosophers” from “the adherents of revelation.” See Strauss, “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 109n39, 124; Strauss, “Progress or Return?,” 252. The connection between necessity and philosophy, which is one of the major aspects of Strauss’s thought, is also alluded to by the fact that the term necessity and the terms of the same family appear nine times in Strauss’s essay. The central example is found in the statement which also contains the central example of the terms “philosophy” and “philosopher” being mentioned ( 9). The connection between necessity and philosophy can be explained as follows: “Creation from nothing is the necessary presupposition of talk of omnipotence. But talk of omnipotence means in just as many words that everything is possible and nothing is necessary. And if nothing is necessary, philosophy is impossible.” Meier, On the Happiness of the Philosophic Life, 250–51.

¹⁰⁰This connection between the doctrine of the eternity of the world and denial of the divine origin of laws is pointed to in the case of Machiavelli too. See Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 32, 205, 334n72 as well as Meier, Political Philosophy and the Challenge of Revealed Religion, 189 (“His allusion to eternity – creation and to human origin of Christianity”). In his earlier study, Strauss says that Alfarabi “substitutes politics for religion.” This seems to mean that according to Strauss’s Alfarabi, the only providence one can rely on is human providence in the shape of politics in contradistinction to divine providence. Strauss, “Fârâbî’s Plato,” 378; Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 1952, 15; Parens, “Escaping the Scholastic Paradigm,” 215. The doctrine of the eternity of the world rejects in the same breath the possibility of miracles as well as divine legislation. If god, like any other being, is bound by necessity which he cannot disobey, god cannot perform miracles which by definition are the violation of the necessary laws of nature. See Strauss, “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 124; Strauss, “Notes on Philosophy and Revelation,” 169; Strauss, “On the Interpretation of Genesis,” 360; Strauss, “Reason and Revelation (1948),” 145, 158; Strauss, “An Untitled Lecture On Platoʼs Euthyphron,” 17; Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 25.

¹⁰¹Strauss, The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws, 150. The quoted passage appears in Strauss’s discussion of the tenth book of Plato’s Laws. This would help us understand Strauss’s statement to the effect that some of the peculiarities of Alfarabi’s Summary make it possible to “see without great difficulty how Fārābī would have interpreted the tenth book of the Laws had he been in a position to do so” ( 10). See also very difficult passages which imply the access of Maimonides to the Laws X as a possibility in Strauss, “Some Remarks on the Political Science of Maimonides and Farabi,” 310–12 (GS II:153–56).

¹⁰²Strauss, “Reason and Revelation (1948),” 166 (point 5); Meier, “On the Genealogy of Faith in Revelation,” 36–37, 40. Cf. “the difficulty: how only one perfect sharia (given the eternity of the universe)?” in SNA 1.20.

¹⁰³Strauss, “Reason and Revelation (1948),” 166 (point 6).

¹⁰⁴This expression appears only once in Strauss’s essay. I owe my familiarity with the importance of this expression in Strauss’s writings to Heinrich Meier. See also a comparable expression in John Locke’s usage of “by the by”: Pierre Manent, Le Regard politique: Entretiens avec Benedicte Delorme-Montini (Paris: Flammarion, 2010), 60.

¹⁰⁵Strauss, “Religion and the Commonweal,” 100.

¹⁰⁶Strauss, “Reason and Revelation (1948),” 167.

¹⁰⁷Strauss, “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 124. The footnote attached to this paragraph (89) is also of particular interest. Strauss refers to three passages: the first two passages from Halevi’s Kuzari claim that philosophers found it necessary to employ images for addressing the multitude, and also refer to the idea that philosophers believed that prophets were themselves only wise men who achieved their knowledge through purely human means – this is the central passage. The third passage is from Andrea Alpago’s comments on his Latin translation of Avicenna’s treatise on resurrection, the so-called Aḍḥawiyya. Alpago claims that the doctrine of metempsychosis attributed to Plato and Pythagoras should be understood metaphorically and that these philosophers actually only believed in the immortality of the soul. Alpago then claims that the metaphorical character of these philosophers’ doctrine is comparable to the metaphorical nature of the divine law’s statements on bodily resurrection, the doctrine which is suitable to the education of the multitude.

¹⁰⁸Strauss, “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,”125, 122.

¹⁰⁹Strauss, “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,”115, 122.

¹¹⁰One should bear in mind that this possibility is mentioned in the twenty-third paragraph of the essay. This number might point toward “the insufficiency of the given revelation” and an invitation to go beyond it. On the significance of twenty-three for Strauss see Behnegar, “Reading ‘What Is Political Philosophy?,’” 41n9.

¹¹¹See also the remark in Paul E. Walker, “The Political Implications of Al-Razi’s Philosophy,” in The Political Aspects of Islamic Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Muhsin S. Mahdi, ed. Charles E. Butterworth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 70.

¹¹²This seems to be the core of Strauss’s understanding of Alfarabi’s rejection of the idea of a divine law: A perfect being “loves more the people who do what he does than those people who merely do what he tells them to do.” A perfectly pious man who imitates the gods would neither pray nor would he obey mere commands. See Strauss, “An Untitled Lecture on Platoʼs Euthyphron,” 14.

¹¹³For “the ignorant and children” see the first reference in footnote 18. 21 has twenty-one passages referred to in the body of the paragraph. The central passage refers to the divinity of the musical laws of Egypt. On the utility of the consecration of the laws see Strauss, The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws, 25. In this regard one should mention a passage, missing in our manuscripts but which seems to have been a part of Alfarabi’s Summary: “Alfarabi wrote in the Book of Laws that ‘those who possess the perfect divine Law through which people attain eternal happiness in this world and in the world to come do not by nature need philosophy, but there must be among them a few individuals who know it in order to strengthen the divine Law through it and save it from the infidels who arise to do battle with it.’” Quoted in Harvey, “Did Alfarabi Read Plato’s Laws?,” 66. A comparable passage from Maimonides is the subject of Strauss’s next essay in What Is Political Philosophy? See Strauss, “Maimonides’ Statement on Political Science.” One must also add that the one who only obeys the laws and nothing beyond the laws should not be considered the highest type of man, “virtuous and praiseworthy” in the highest sense.