The purpose of this book is to examine the medieval Muslim philosopher Alfarabi’s (ad 870–950) conception of the Umma, which he understood as the particular ethnic as well as the broader religious (Islamic) community. The central argument of the book is that contra contemporary claims that the Muslim community is a homogenous entity that should be ruled by a single political authority, one of the earliest and most notable Islamic philosophers thought otherwise. Through a careful and lively examination of Alfarabi’s various writings, Alexander Orwin shows that the philosopher acknowledged and affirmed the continued existence of specific national communities (what Orwin refers to as ethnic or civilizational Ummas) under the aegis of the broader Islamic Umma.

While Alfarabi advocates virtuous rule based on philosophy and true religion, Orwin illustrates that he recognizes that neither the universality of the Islamic message nor of philosophy could quell the diversity of languages, customs, literatures, and arts of the communities comprising the multinational Islamic Umma. Ultimately and most importantly, Orwin shows that Alfarabi can be compellingly read as suggesting that Islamic rule ought to accommodate and adapt itself to the particularities of the ethnic Ummas comprising its broader political community. He reads into the nuances of Alfarabi’s works to offer a few directives to this end, including the use of visual arts and poetry to “establish effective and unique ways of instilling the opinions of the religion in every ethnic Umma” (p. 129), and the continuous exercise of prudence on a case-by-case, or umma-by-umma, basis.

The significance of this project is twofold. First, it enriches the extant literature on Alfarabi’s political thought, and through him, the study of medieval Islamic political thought more generally. It does this by offering the first sustained examination of Alfarabi’s understanding of the ethnic and religious Ummas and his theorization of their origin, development, and relationship to philosophy, as well as to one another. Notably, Orwin’s approach is distinct for the way its shifts the focus from Alfarabi as a “transmitter of Greek thought,” which was characteristic of earlier treatments of this philosopher (the author cites signature examples of this trend, such as Franz Rosenthal and Richard Walzer’s Philosophy of Plato, 1943, and Leo Strauss, “Farabi’s Plato,” in Louis Ginzberg: Jubilee Volume, 1945, pp. 357–393) to Alfarabi as a philosopher who “wrote primarily for Muslims and minorities living under Islamic rule” (p. 11). Orwin substantiates this claim by showing how Alfarabi develops the notion of the ethnic community beyond Plato and Aristotle’s understandings of this concept (pp. 45–65). In addition to putting Alfarabi in conversation with his avowed Greek teachers, Orwin puts him in conversation with various successors, such as Rousseau and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Islamic reformists Jamal Ad-din Al-Afghani and Mohammad Iqbal (pp. 187–99). In doing so, this book also contributes to the budding field of comparative political theory.

Whereas the first significance could be described as academic, the second has palpable political investments: The author hopes to provide a theorization of difference and its accommodation from within the ambit of Islamic thought, and consequently, a potential antidote for purist understandings of the Islamic Umma propagated by Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the like. Indeed, almost every chapter of Redefining the Muslim Community ends with an attempt to show how Alfarabi’s teachings about the infeasibility of establishing a worldwide Islamic Umma, and the necessity of accommodating the various subcommunities within the broader Umma, could still apply to a region ridden with various kinds of conflict today.

Orwin’s suggestions about the applicability of Alfarabi’s notions to today’s Middle East, though insightful, sometimes risk collapsing the distinction between precolonial modes of Islamic governance and their modern nation-state counterpart, and therefore, of extending Alfarabi’s judgments about prudence and accommodation beyond their limits. Although the book’s introduction expresses the author’s acquaintance with the literature on modern nationalism as an epistemologically and historically distinct form of governance (pp. 2–3), its finale characterizes all forms of government in the Middle East since Alfarabi’s time as problematic and resistant to reform, be they “under the thumb of a long series of sultans and shahs . . . and Ottoman Turks” or “European imperialists who . . . were hardly departing from precedent when they divided up the conquered peoples according to no particular ethnic rule” (pp. 202–3). Apart from overlooking crucial differences between precolonial and colonial modes of rule (see, for example, Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 1988), the broader argument about the continued relevance of Alfarabi’s thought to a persistently despotic and conflict-ridden Middle East risks imputing an inherent, timeless resistance to positive change to that region.

Relatedly and more importantly, by the end of the book the transformative thrust of Alfarabi’s philosophical project becomes considerably blunted. In his tellingly titled The Attainment of Happiness, Alfarabi defines political science as “consist[ing] of knowing the things by which citizens of cities attain happiness through political association in the measure that innate disposition equips each of them for it” (cited in Joshua Parens and Joseph Macfarland, Political Philosophy in Islam, 2011, p. 58). In the Political Regime, Alfarabi writes that he sees his mission as describing “the way by which it is possible for a human being to come to this happiness” (Political Philosophy in Islam, p. 40). In his own book Orwin pays careful attention to Alfarabi’s conception of the structure of the virtuous city and Umma, the means through which it could be founded and sustained, and the roles of its various constituent parts. Yet, the anticlimactic finding of each of these examinations is that such a city or Umma exists only in speech or, as with the Republic of Plato, “in heaven” (p. 149). This is on account of “the absence of any effort to grapple with the obstacles posed by the Umma to the virtuous community,” such as linguistic diversity and the relationship between the successful Islamic ruler and the preexisting communities (pp. 148–49). However, it is not immediately clear why Alfarabi’s failure to provide details about the mechanics of making his ideal possible should altogether disqualify that ideal, if only as a heuristic toward which extant political communities should strive.

To be sure, by the conclusion of the book, Alfarabi emerges as a figure who would likely accommodate extant political arrangements (e.g., nation-states) on account of their prevalence (p. 203), and whose main advice to every Umma is to pursue “political prudence, artistic creativity, and philosophical inquiry . . . in the manner most suited to its characters and traditions” (p. 205). While a valuable insight, this conclusion does not seem to match the tone or aspiration we see in Alfarabi’s writings, or indeed in some of Orwin’s own close expositions of them. In that connection, one of the remarkable absences in this work is Alfarabi’s own voice, which we encounter in a sustained passage form only once in the book (pp. 176–77). Besides this passage, Orwin’s extremely attentive examination of Alfarabi is primarily based on paraphrase. While Alfarabi’s prose tends to be dry, the inclusion of more of it in the body of the text would have given the reader a sense of the style and texture of his works, and provided a more persuasive illustration of the author’s interpretations.

Overall, Redefining the Muslim Community is a very well researched textual interpretation of Alfarabi. It deftly weaves together his various writings to offer a remarkably cogent account of the increasingly salient, if often misunderstood, concept of the Umma.