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Editorial
The Collective City
by AmirAli Maleki
“The collective city [al-madīnah al-jamāʿiyyah – a society with a free and inclusive government] is the city of freedoms… In such cities, there are many aims and purposes, and the methods are diverse.”
(Al-Farabi Al-Madīnah, p.192).
Iran, Winter of 2025/6.
This sentence by the medieval Islamic philosopher Al-Farabi is not a relic. It is an invitation. It opens philosophy not as a finished cathedral but as a crowded square, noisy with intentions, crossed by different routes, and alive with unfinished conversations. To read Islamic Philosophy today is not to inherit certainty, but to inherit plurality. Al-Farabi’s city does not promise harmony in advance; it promises coexistence. And coexistence, as anyone who has lived among others knows, is always imperfect, provisional, and open to revision. That is why we must learn how to spell Islamic philosophy rather than pretend to pronounce it fluently. Spelling is slow, it hesitates and it allows mistakes. Every philosophy stutters, because all human knowledge stutters. There is no system that speaks without a tremor, no tradition that delivers itself whole and complete. To deny this is to replace thinking with dogma. To accept it is to make room for learning.
Hans-Georg Gadamer spent the later years of his life returning, with quiet insistence, to a simple and unsettling thought: the other may also be right. This was not a slogan of politeness, but the ethical core of hermeneutics. Understanding, for Gadamer, was never the conquest of meaning, but a shared event that happens between horizons. We come with our prejudices, our histories, our partial visions. We risk error. Yet error is not a failure; it is the condition of experience. What becomes dangerous is not being wrong, but clinging stupidly to our preconceptions as if they were immune to encounter. Dialogue, then, is not decoration. It is necessity. To face otherness is the only way to move beyond the shallow certainty of our limited assumptions. In this sense, hermeneutics reveals itself as an ethics of discourse: an ongoing responsibility to listen, to respond, and to revise. It has no final justification, no last word, precisely because the conversation never ends.
Al-Farabi’s city of freedoms anticipates this ethics. A city with many aims cannot be governed by a single voice. Its vitality depends on difference, on the friction between purposes, on the creative disorder of plural methods. Philosophy, within such a city, cannot be complete or closed. Its task is not to legislate truth once and for all, but to keep pathways open. The philosopher, then, is not a guardian of certainty but a mediator of imagination. To think is to establish relations with imagined others across time and context. Why imagined? Because in the end, meaning converges. Beneath our differences, we discover not identity, but direction: a shared movement toward dialogue itself. Imagination allows us to rehearse encounters, to stretch our concepts, and to recognize ourselves in unfamiliar forms.
Islamic philosophy is no exception. It is unfinished, radically interpretable, and vibrantly incomplete. Treating it as a sealed archive betrays its spirit. We have gathered around this special issue not to preserve a monument, but to breathe contemporary air into an old conversation. We read Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Suhrawardi, and others not to escape our time, but to inhabit it more attentively. Philosophy does not live only in libraries. It shows up in supermarkets, in metro stations, in amusement parks, and in classrooms. It waits in ordinary gestures and daily decisions. When Islamic philosophy matters, it matters there. It matters where life is happening, where questions are practical, embodied, and sometimes messy. Philosophy is present where a child laughs and licks the candy of thought, playful and curious, unashamed of sweetness. This playfulness is not frivolity. It is courage. To allow oneself to stutter is to accept vulnerability. Our aim in assembling this issue was to grant ourselves permission to live with stammering, to even love it. The stutter is not a weakness of thought; it is its human power. Thinking begins where certainty breaks.
Islamic philosophy, read hermeneutically, teaches us not what to conclude, but how to continue. It invites us into a city without final maps, where freedom means exposure to others, and wisdom means staying in conversation. If there is a lesson to take seriously, it is this: philosophy is never finished, and that is precisely why it matters. To insist on completeness is to misunderstand tradition. Traditions survive not by purity but by translation, misreading, and renewal. Each generation spells the words again, differently, with accents shaped by its fears and hopes. Islamic philosophy has always traveled this way, crossing languages, cities, and disciplines. Its vitality lies in its capacity to be mispronounced productively.
Learning to spell philosophy also means slowing down. It resists the impatience of slogans and the tyranny of instant clarity. In a world addicted to speed, the pause of reflection becomes a quiet form of resistance. The stutter interrupts domination. It forces us to remain attentive to nuance, to context, and to the fragile presence of the other. When philosophy enters everyday life, it loses its ceremonial distance. It becomes risky. It can fail in public. Yet this risk is precisely its strength. In the metro, among strangers, we practice coexistence. In the supermarket, we negotiate value and choice. In the classroom, we encounter disagreement not as threat but as resource. These are not metaphors; they are sites of thinking.
To read Islamic philosophy today is to let it be contemporary without forcing it to be modern. It is to allow ancient concepts to encounter present realities without demanding obedience or nostalgia. Such encounters transform both sides. The past becomes mobile, and the present gains depth. This issue was assembled as an experiment in such encounters. Its texts do not aim at consensus. They invite response. They risk misunderstanding. They open space for readers to continue the conversation elsewhere, beyond these pages, in their own words and hesitations. Take your time, reread slowly, argue generously, and let uncertainty remain a companion rather than an enemy. After reading this dossier, return here:
Islamic philosophy means: “ ”
AmirAli Maleki is Guest Editor of this issue and Islamic Philosophy Editor of Philosophy Now. (Currently uncontactable for 3 weeks due to the internet shutdown in Iran. We wish good health and safety to our colleague. The Philosophy Now team.)
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