Documents

The Virtuous City

Also Known As Al-Madina al-Fadila

Citation Formats

General Reference

Political Atlas. "The Virtuous City." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://political.interactiveatlas.org/documents/the-virtuous-city.

APA Style

Political Atlas. (n.d.). The Virtuous City. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://political.interactiveatlas.org/documents/the-virtuous-city

BibTeX

@misc{politicalatlas-the-virtuous-city,
  author = {Political Atlas},
  title = {The Virtuous City},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://political.interactiveatlas.org/documents/the-virtuous-city},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Al-Farabi's Mabadi' Ara' Ahl al-Madina al-Fadila, written late in his life after he left Baghdad for Syria. It sets out an ideal state led by a philosopher-ruler whose intellectual and moral perfection qualifies him to guide the community toward genuine happiness, by analogy with the way a healthy body's parts are ordered under the heart, synthesising Platonic political philosophy with Islamic thought.

Facts

Key Provision

Attributed to the tenth-century philosopher Al-Farabi, the work sets out a model of the ideal political community that fuses Plato's philosopher-king with Islamic prophecy and Neoplatonic cosmology: the virtuous city is ruled by a philosopher-prophet whose intellect has achieved conjunction with the Active Intellect, uniquely equipping him to apprehend truth directly and to govern the city toward its citizens' true happiness, understood as the fullest possible perfection of the intellect. Al-Farabi contrasts this virtuous city against several failed forms, among them the ignorant city, which does not know true happiness at all, and the wicked city, which knows it but pursues other ends instead, and the work became a foundational text for later political philosophy in the Islamic tradition. 1

Disputed

Year

942 1

Written late in Al-Farabi's life after he left Baghdad for Syria around 942 CE; the exact year of composition is not precisely fixed by the sources.

Cross-Tradition Connections