 The Perfect City sweeps away this introductory framework, and starts directly with the thesis-statement, “The first being [mawjûd] is the first cause of existence [wujûd] to all other beings [mawjûdât]”. Fârâbî’s strategy is to argue that there is a unique “first being”, and then to derive its attributes, including that it produces other things, and indeed produces everything else either directly or indirectly; in the process he hopes to have shown that this first being has enough of the traditional attributes of God, suitably reinterpreted, that the readers will acknowledge it as God. The Perfect City never once uses the word “God”, and this is surely a deliberate strategy. We cannot validly deduce “God exists”, or “God is F” for any value of F, unless we have at least one premise containing the term “God”, and no such premises are available. Especially in Islam it is very common to refer to God, not by the name “God”, but by one of his attributes, and Fârâbî in the Perfect City consistently uses “the First”, one of the standard Qurʾânic attributes (Q  57:3).[46]