Abstract

This article examines the religious views of Abu Nasr al-Farabi within the Western scholarly tradition, focusing on the lack of a unified approach and the contradictory interpretations of the relationship between philosophy and religion in his thought. The study analyzes various approaches to this issue and identifies their methodological foundations. The aim of the research is to systematize and comparatively analyze interpretations of al-Farabi’s religious views in the works of modern Western scholars. The article considers the approaches of Leo Strauss, Muhsin Mahdi, Joshua Parens, Charles E. Butterworth, Peter Adamson, Richard Walzer, and Thérèse-Anne Druart, in which religious issues are examined within political-philosophical, epistemological, and metaphysical frameworks. Special attention is given to the methodological approach of Dimitri Gutas, who critically reconsiders the interpretative framework and emphasizes the need to study al-Farabi’s philosophy within the broader context of the Greco-Arabic intellectual tradition. The study demonstrates that, despite differing interpretations, most scholars acknowledge a close relationship between philosophy and religion in al-Farabi’s system. At the same time, the article argues that reducing religion solely to a derivative form of philosophical knowledge does not fully capture the specificity of his thought. The paper concludes that al-Farabi’s religious philosophy is multi-layered and that no single unified interpretation exists in contemporary historiography.

Key words: al-Farabi; religious views; Islamic philosophy; philosophy and religion; Western historiography; interpretative approaches.