The Music of the Spheres

He was called the Second Teacher, because the first was Aristotle and there was no third place available.

You have probably never heard of him. That is not an accident, and it is the strangest thing about him.

Abu Nasr al-Farabi gave his civilisation the logic it argued with, the map by which it organised everything it knew, the greatest book on music produced in the medieval world, and the most beautiful description of a human community ever written in Arabic. One of his commentaries, bought secondhand for three coins by a young man who did not want it, unlocked Aristotle for the finest mind of the following age. Three hundred years after he died, Europe was arranging its first universities according to a scheme he had drawn up.

And we know almost nothing about him. Not where he was born, because two of his own contemporaries named two different countries. Not how old he was, because the date in every encyclopaedia rests on a single unsupported sentence written three centuries later. Not why, at seventy, in a Baghdad coming apart around him, he began a book about a perfect city, then carried it unfinished across five hundred miles of desert and finished it among strangers who were not waiting for it.

He left no letters. No description of his face. Two students. A working life of fifty years in the largest city on earth, and the great gossip of that city never once wrote his name.

So they invented him. Careful, well-meaning men opened his file, found it empty, and built him a life, including one perfect night in a prince's hall that never happened at all.

This is the story of what was standing underneath.

• Watch a legend taken apart piece by piece, and discover why the truth underneath it is better
• Follow a seventy-year-old man out of a collapsing capital with the only copy of his life's work in his baggage
• See the thousand-year-old diagnosis of how communities fail, and recognise your own century in it
• Understand why the most consequential work is so often done by people nobody is watching

This is a book for anyone who has ever finished something alone, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with nobody waiting for it.

He never found out what became of any of it.

Open the first page. He has been waiting a thousand years, and he was never in a hurry.