Objective: This article examines the place of “civil science” in the Islamic classification of the sciences and asks how, in the works of al-Fārābī, Avicenna, and Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī, the governance of the city moves beyond domination, personal command, or the mere skill of ruling. It argues that civic governance in this tradition is linked to knowledge of ends, public interest, practical aptitude, and judgment in particular cases. The article does not seek to extract a later institutional theory from classical texts. Rather, it aims to recover conceptual elements through which authority over common life was understood in relation to knowledge, purpose, public interest, and prudent governance.

Method: The study adopts a historical-conceptual method based on close textual analysis and comparative interpretation. It examines al-Fārābī’s Iḥṣāʾ al-ʿulūm, Avicenna’s al-Madkhal from al-Shifāʾ, and Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī’s Akhlaq-i Nasiri as its principal texts. Concepts such as voluntary action, happiness, civic leadership, practical philosophy, law, cooperation, common interest, general rules, and the governance of particular affairs are analyzed in relation to one another.

Finding: The findings show that civil science in al-Fārābī is a science of voluntary actions, dispositions, human ends, happiness, and civic leadership. The validity of civic governance in this framework depends on craft, cultivated disposition, and the ability to connect universal principles with particular cases. Avicenna recasts this legacy within practical philosophy and relates politics to general human association and the normative ordering of action. Ṭūsī reformulates the same tradition through cooperation, common interest, general laws, and the governance of particular affairs according to time and public interest.

Results: The results indicate that the Islamic classification of the sciences was not merely a pedagogical ordering of disciplines. It also contained a way of thinking about knowledge, action, the city, and the validity of civic governance. In this tradition, rule is not reduced to power or command; it is connected with practical wisdom, moral formation, public interest, general norms, and judgment in changing circumstances.

Conclusions: The Islamic tradition of civil science should not be read as a ready-made institutional doctrine belonging to later public law vocabularie. Its significance lies elsewhere. It offers conceptual materials for a non-voluntarist understanding of civic governance and shows that authority over common affairs could be imagined as knowledge-based, purposive, limited, and practically guided before the emergence of later institutional vocabularies.