Alfarabi. The Political Writings. Translated by Charles Butterworth. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001.  

From the publisher:

This volume presents four of Alfarabi’s most important texts, making his political thought available to classicists, medievalists, and scholars of religion and Byzantine and Middle Eastern studies. In a clear prose translation by Charles E. Butterworth, these treatises provide a valuable introduction to the teachings of Alfarabi and to the development of Islamic political philosophy. All of these texts are based on new Arabic editions. Two of the texts—Book of Religion and Harmonization of the Two Opinions of the Two Sages: Plato the Divine and Aristotle—appear in English for the first time. The translations of the other two works—Selected Aphorisms and chapter five of the Enumeration of the Sciences—differ markedly from those previously known to English-language readers.Butterworth situates each essay in its historical, literary, and philosophical context. His notes help the reader follow Alfarabi’s text and identify persons, places, and events. English-Arabic and Arabic-English glossaries of terms further assist the reader.

Excerpt:

1. Political science investigates the sorts of voluntary actions and ways of life; the dispositions, moral habits, inclination, and states of character from which those actions and ways of life come about; the goals for the sake of which they are performed; how they ought to exist in a human being; how to order them in him according to the manner they ought to exist in him; and the way to preserve them for him.

It distinguishes the goals for the sake of which the actions are performed and the ways of life practiced.

It explains that some of them are truly happiness and that some are presumed to be happiness without being so and that it is not possible for the one which is truly happiness to come to be in this life, but rather in a life after this one, which is the next life, whereas what is presumed to be happiness – life affluence, honor, and pleasures – is what is set down as goals only for this life.

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