This chapter surveys reactions to Plato’s famous proposal in the Republic to allow women to engage in military action and political rule in his ideal city. After a methodological discussion relating this topic to the issues looked at in the volume as a whole, the chapter goes on to set out some of the interpretive debates concerning women in the Republic in modern-day secondary literature. It is then shown that interpreters from late antiquity to the Renaissance responded to some of the same concerns. For example, Proclus was at pains to reconcile the apparently contrary views on women found in the Republic and Timaeus. On the other hand, we find that in Proclus, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), and Lucrezia Marinella, wider concerns shaped reactions to Plato: for instance Ibn Rushd tries to fit the idea of potential virtue in women into an Aristotelian framework while Marinella offers a reading of Plato on women that brings him into conversation with the Renaissance ’querelle des femmes’.

Chapter 1 is dedicated to the interpretation of a recently discovered, unpublished typescript by Strauss on Averroes’s commentary on Plato’s Republic. In this transcript, available as Appendix A and composed sometime after 1956, Strauss underscores the conflict between philosophy and Islam in Averroes’s commentary on Plato’s Republic. The transcript consists only of short notes and therefore, to reveal its message, it needs to be interpreted in the context of Strauss’s other writings. Strauss’s interpretation of Averroes is based on the idea that Averroes must have been aware of the incompatibility of Islamic revelation with the best regime of Plato. Unlike other scholars, who are mainly preoccupied with Averroes’s access or lack thereof to a reliable translation of Plato’s Republic, Strauss argues that the deficiencies of Averroes’s commentary do not mean that Averroes did not have access to Plato’s Republic; he claims that such apparent deficiencies might be intentional and significant for understanding Averroes’s views.

Chapter Four builds an Islamic theory of natural law from Ibn Rushd’s (Averroes’) Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s Rhetoric (Talkhi? Kitab al-Kha?aba li Aris?u). This chapter provides original exegesis on Ibn Rushd’s text, particularly those passages concerning what Ibn Rushd describes as an unwritten law of nature (sunan ghayr maktuba fi ?abi?at al-jami?). It expounds upon what I argue is a theory of natural law in the commentary that is largely consonant with Aristotelian natural justice as well as thoroughly Islamic in such a way that it can, and even ought to, inform contemporary understandings of shari?a. This chapter contains the most in-depth discussion of the relationship between revealed religion and natural law, as well as the most detailed proposal for a natural law epistemology.