 The natural ruler of the excellent city, nation, or “union of all the societies in the inhabitable world”  (section 2.1,  first quotation) is, against the backdrop of al-Farabi’s philosophy of society and religion, someone who is at once an accomplished philosopher, prophet, supreme ruler, lawgiver, and imam. She truly understands reality and its underlying principles and is able to verify her knowledge demonstratively. However, she also has the ability to ‘translate’ her knowledge into metaphors and symbolic representations and present them, by means of rhetorical devices, in a convincing  fashion.[33]  From the perspective of the majority of people, this metaphorical account appears to be some sort of supernatural, divine revelation. In a way, it is certainly ‘divine’, given al-Farabi’s cosmology. However, from the perspective of philosophy, it is clearly not supernatural; it is merely a symbolic representation faithfully encapsulating the essentials of metaphysics, natural philosophy, anthropology, and philosophy of  society.[34]