 Fârâbî and his contemporaries use the word “philosophy” (in Arabic “falsafa”), borrowed from the Greek, only for those schools and disciplines that present themselves as continuing ancient Greek philosophy. Before Fârâbî’s time this kind of philosophy was mainly practiced, in the Muslim world, by Christians, often Syriac-Arabic bilinguals (and almost all the translators of Greek texts were Christian); although Christian philosophers also had Muslim and Jewish students, and although some Ismaʿili Shiʿites had integrated a version of Greek philosophy into their ideal of what the imam must know. Fârâbî wants to break the association of philosophy with particular (and often marginalized) linguistic and religious communities. The Arabic grammarian Sîrâfî had accused Fârâbî’s Christian teacher Abû Bishr Mattâ of presenting as universal rules of logic, normative for any rational being, what were simply rules of Greek grammar, as translated from Greek through Syriac into Arabic and probably damaged in translation. Against this charge, Fârâbî wants to show that logic, and philosophy is general, is not community-bound like Arabic grammar or Muslim kalâm. Logic is to thought as the grammar of a particular language is to that language: its rules apply to all thought insofar as it is correct, whatever language it may be expressed in, and they give the common core shared by all languages, abstracted from the merely conventional and community-relative aspects of particular languages. And philosophy is to religion as logic is to grammar, giving rules for how to think about God and the physical world and human beings, and therefore for how to act to achieve the aim of human life, which apply to all humans insofar as they reason and act correctly; and these rules give the common core of doctrines and practical prescriptions shared by all religions, or at least by a plurality of correct religions, abstracted from the merely conventional and community-relative aspects of particular religions.