Abstract

One can view the political issues propounded in Ibn Sina's works from different perspectives and, considering the methodological approach adopted, possibly arrive at various conclusions. The present paper discusses some of the political aspects of Ibn Sina's philosophy from a specific point of view. The writer has tried to highlight his place in the history of Islamic political philosophy by mainly focusing on the issue of imagination. The plan of devising a "prophetic philosophy" with Farabi particularly began with writing his book Madina fadilah. Here, by expanding the functions of the imaginal faculty, Ibn Sina tried to explain the phenomenon of prophethood and its relationship with philosophy and politics. His philosophy must be studied within a framework which Farabi founded and, after Ibn Sina, Suhrawardi developed by devising the Illuminative philosophy. The role of Ibn Sina, as a philosopher who expanded Farabi's thoughts and posed the two issues of "conjecture" and "imagining the souls of the spheres", is quite noteworthy in this regard. In this way, he opened the window to a way which two centuries later led to the development of Illuminative Philosophy, one of the basic concepts of which is the world of imagination.