 Al-Fârâbî’s Summary of Plato’s Laws caused much controversy, which Butterworth narrates in the introduction to his translation (2015: 97–127). In 1995 Joshua Parens, making use of a draft of Druart’s edition, published Metaphysics as Rhetoric: Alfarabi’s Summary of Plato’s “Laws”. He argued that al-Fârâbî takes metaphysics, or maybe more exactly special metaphysics or the Neo-Platonic descent, i.e., what treats of immaterial beings rather than ontology, as a form of rhetoric, and that such was already the case for Plato. Whether or not we should read Plato as Parens and other Straussians claim al-Fârâbî understood him is a hotly debated question. 