Q. & A. 711 to 1707 with solved Papers css 1971 to date

Al-Farabi (870-950)
Islamic philosophy can be said to have come into existence under the Abbasids, in the ninth century A.D. Yet within less than a hundred years it had already produced a thinker of truly international stature, namely al-Farabi (870- 950), a contemporary of Ashari. His works consists of books on logic, ethics, politics, mathematics, chemistry and music. He was celebratedly work on politics, entitled ”the Ideal city”. Yet three hundred years of political development separated the Muslim philosopher from his Western successor, and a great deal of philosophical material accumulated in the intervening centuries. Farabi, commonly called ”The Second Teacher”, that is, the veiy next one to Aristotle, the ’first’ teacher, was the son of a Persian general of Turkish descent. In his many sided education, mathematics played a decisive part. But in later life he wrote also on medicine, physics, psychology, theology and logic. An outstanding polyglot, he was reputed to be master of seventy languages.
It would be hard to decide in which of his various fields, Farabi made his most distinguished contribution, whether in metaphysics, psychology or logic. His book ’Political Regime’ was recommended by Maimonides, the greatest Jewish philosopher, in the following words. ’I recommended you to read no works on logic other than those of the philosopher Abu Nasr al-Farabi”. Yet Maimonides was acquainted not only with the relevant books by Aristotle but also with those by most of the other Greek, Muslim and Christian philosophers before the twelfth century. In logic, Farabi is best known for his doctrines of proof, norms and definitions and his law of contradiction. More clearly than anyone before him he explained how universal truths can be deduced only after individual truths have been ascertained and how abstract or conceptual knowledge must be preceded by ’precepts’, that is, knowledge gained through sensory experience.
Hardly less distinguished were his theories on what constitutes ’true being’, and what ate ’essence’ and ’form’. The orthodox Muslim conception of God’s will as the force responsible for the creation of the universe he replaced by the more philosophical concept of the ’divine knowledge of the necessary’. Regarding knowledge as even more important than morality, he claimed that the basis of all rational knowledge must be mathematics rooted in astronomy. Such knowledge he viewed as the highest good attainable by man. Like most Muslim philosophers, Farabi dealt extensively

political and Cultural History of Islam
with the subject of prophethood and prophecy, and while many of his political ideas undoubtedly derive from Plato, he replaces the Platonic philosopher-king by the ruler who must also be a caliph. There is hardly a single Muslim philosopher of later ages who is not indebted to Farabi. Many of the ideas and theories developed by his remote successors have their germinal being in his doctrines.