 To our knowledge, al-Farabi was the first philosopher in the Islamic world who not only displayed a serious interest in philosophy of society and religion, but also developed a highly differentiated account thereof. He did not, however, start from scratch. At his time, the majority of those philosophical texts which were actually translated from Greek (mostly through Syriac) into Arabic were available, and al-Farabi was obviously an avid reader of his predecessors. Accordingly, his writings display (a) intimate familiarity with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics; (b) acquaintance with the essentials of Plato’s Politeia (probably mediated by Galen’s Compendium; cf. Gutas 2012: 85); and, apparently, (c) some knowledge of Aristotle’s Politica, of which only parts were available in Arabic (Pines 1975). Al-Farabi’s philosophy of society and religion can be described as an intelligent and original synthesis, particularly, of these oeuvres, a synthesis which shares the late-ancient commentators’ concern for harmonizing the positions of Aristotle and Plato. Moreover, al-Farabi’s philosophy of society and religion turns out to be a clever adaptation of Greek ethico-political thought to the needs and demands of its new context, the Islamic world of the 10th century.