In Mabadi' ara' ahl al-madina al-fadila, al-Farabi transposes Platonic and Aristotelian political philosophy into an Islamic frame, arguing that the madina (city) is the smallest human association capable of delivering true happiness. He compares the virtuous city to a healthy body whose organs are ranked and coordinated by a single ruling faculty, so that each craft and class serves a hierarchy culminating in the philosopher-prophet ruler. Against it he sets typologies of defective cities - the ignorant, wicked, errant and 'democratic' city - each defined by the ends its inhabitants pursue. Excellence is therefore a property of the political community rather than of the individual, and the city is the instrument through which reason and revelation are made social.
It established the city, not the empire or tribe, as the primary unit of political perfection in Islamic thought, and supplied a vocabulary of hierarchy, function and civic virtue that ran through Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd and later Ottoman and Persian statecraft. Because it read the city as an organism with ranked parts, it prefigured both the ideal-city tradition and the functional-hierarchy reasoning of much later planning.
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