An Inquiry into the Indexes of Authoritarianism in The Utopia (Virtuous City)

As a favorite political unit in the classic Islamic political philosophy, utopia has come under the criticism that it is an authoritarian regime. Classic Muslim philosophers, however, classified the totalitarian city-estate as none-utopian state and distinct from utopia. As authoritarianism is different from the classic despotism, it seems necessary to study the relation of utopia to authoritarianism.Some scholars have regarded the organization of utopia as an authoritarian regime and others have embraced some authoritarian indexes in utopia, they have not explicitly mentioned them, though.In his essay, the author has singled out the indexes of authoritarianism in utopia from the domestic and Western texts and then assessed them according to methods of interpretation. First chief, vote-sharing, nawabit[1] (weeds), guardianship, sermon, collectivism are the most important indexes of authoritarianism in utopia examined in this  paper. The presented documents prove that none of the indexes demonstrate that utopia is authoritarian[1]. In al-Farabi’s theory of utopia, nawabit constitutes groups of people who lack values and are useless or even harmful. They are similar to weeds. Al-Farabi has classified them into 9 groups.