Al-Farabi, Creation Ex Nihilo, And the Cosmological Doctrine of K. Al-Jam' and Jawabat‪.‬

The two works Kitab al-Jam' bayna ra'yay al-hakimayn (henceforth Jam') and Jawabat 'an masa' it su'ila 'anha (henceforth Jawabat) are attributed to al-Farabi (d. 338/950) in the Arabic tradition. (1) Among the bio-bibliographers, Ibn al-Qifti refers to the former work under the slightly different title Kitab fi ittifaq ara' Aristutalis wa-Aflatun, although he says nothing about the latter work. Ibn Abi Usaybi'a may be referring to Jam' when he lists a Kalam fi ittifaq ara Abuqrat [sic] wa-Aflatun, and he explicitly mentions Jawabat. (2) Modern scholars, however, have questioned the authorship of these works on stylistic and especially doctrinal grounds. In his book entitles Al-Farabi and Aristotelian Syllogistics, published in 1994, Joep Lameer rejects the authenticity of Jam' and Jawabat and presents an array of arguments to defend his claim. He concludes that Jam' is completely spurious, but that Jawabat, although not composed by al-Farabi himself, may preserve some original doctrinal material from his works, especially in the field of logic. Surprisingly, he does not discuss the cosmological content of these two treatises. In the appendix to an article on al-Farabi published in 2008, Marwan Rashed endorses Lameer's criticisms and furthermore argues that Jam' and Jawabat develop a cosmology that is irreconcilable with the one found in al-Farabi's other works. Rashed develops these arguments at length with regard to Jam' in a recent article. Elaborating on Lamcer's comments, Rashed holds that these two treatises should not be attributed to al-Farabi, although Jam' may have been composed by one of his students, perhaps Yahya ibn 'Adi or more likely Ibrahim ibn 'Adi. (3)