Document Type : Research Paper
Author
Assistant Professor in Social Sciences Department, Institute of Humanities and Cultural Studies, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
Al-Farabi is the earliest and the most important political philosopher in the Islamic world and the founder of the idea of Excellent City; meanwhile, he rarely mentions anything on household management in his political writings. In his few references about gender, women, and household, we face incoherence statements which are swing between misogyny and belief of equality between men and women. He also uses some gendered concepts in his metaphysical thoughts about material and form but still does not mention the inferiority of women in creation. Some scholars try to reconstruct his Idea about household management according to the structure of his "excellent city" and self, but others interpreted his silence as a sign of his fear of different kinds of authorities. In this article, I indicate that his fragments and contradicts statements about the household are the proofs that show the household management is a problematic issue to him.
Keywords
Main Subjects
- Al-Farabi (1985) Selected Aphorisms, F. M. Najjar (ed.), Tehran: Maktabah al-Zahra. (In Arabic)
- Al-Farabi (1995) Principles of the Opinions of the Inhabitants of the Perfect City (Mabādiʾ ārāʾ ahl al-madīnat al-fāḍilah), Ali Bu Mulhim(ed.), Beirut: Dar wa Maktabah al-Hilal. (In Arabic)
- Al-Farabi (1996) Political Regime (Kitāb al-siyāsa al-madaniyya), Ali Bu Mulhim(ed.), Beirut: Dar wa Maktabah al-Hilal. (In Arabic)
- Al-Farabi (2016) Summary of Plato’s Law , ed. and trans. Ahmed Furadi Ahwazi, Tehran: Negah-e-Mouaser.
- Aristotle (2002) Politics, trans. Hamid Enayat, 4th Tehran: Cultural Science. (in Persian)
- Bakhshi, Mansoura; Sadeghi Hassanabadi; Majid; Emami Jomeh, Seyyed Mehdi (1397) "The women role in the social system and family from the perspective of Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina and Tusi", Hekmat Sinavi, 59: 5-25. (In Persian)
- Davari, Reza (1975) Al-Farabi, Founder of Islamic Philosophy, Tehran: Imperial Society of Iranian Philosophy. (In Persian)
- Galston, Miriam (1990) Politics and Excellence: The Political Philosophy of Alfarabi, Princeton, Princeton University Press. (In Persian)
- Kermani, Touba; Soghara Salehi (2017) "Farabi methodology in household management and its impact on lifestyle", Strategic Studies of Women, 76: 109-135. (In Persian)
- Mahdi, Muhsin (2001) Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
- McCumber, John (2012) On philosophy: notes from a crisis, Stanford University Press.
- Plato (2001) The Complete Period of Plato's Works, Trans. Muhammad Hassan Lotfi and Hassan Kaviani, 3rd Tehran: Kharazmi. (in Persian)
- Swain, Simon (2013) Economy, Family, and Society from Rome to Islam: A Critical Edition, english translation, and study of Bryson's management of the estate, Cambridge University Press.
)
Send comment about this article