مقام تخيل درفلسفه سياسي اسلامي - ايراني : مورد فارابي

The Status of Imagination in Islamic-Iranian Political Philosophy: Farabiʹs Case

This paper seeks to explore the status of imagination in Islamic political philosophy, referring to the most prominent political philosopher in the Muslim World, Abu Nasr Farabi. Most historians of philosophy have developed history of political philosophy from the perspective of reason and related discussions, ignoring the place of imagination in political philosophy. The roots of such neglect can be traced in the thoughts of founding philosophers in Ancient Greece. In the Greek philosophy, imagination was relegated a low status in the hierarchy of human powers, and such conception was transferred to the Islamic philosophy through Aristotleʹs translated works. Muslim philosophers, however, resorted to imagination for explaining revelation and other spiritual phenomena from the beginning, since they had found out that such phenomena could not be properly explained with a rationalist approach. As the founder of philosophy in the Islamic period, Farabi attempted, especially in his Thoughts of the Dwellers of Utopia, to link imagination with his political philosophy discussions by developing it. This endeavor resulted in opening a path for the entry of imagination to political philosophy. Farabiʹs project was important because it focused on those aspects of political life that the Greeks failed to notice, as a number of new research attests to the importance of Farabiʹs emphasis on the status of imagination in politics.