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Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab
Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab (Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab) (Muhammad ibn 'Abd Al-Wahhab ibn Sulayman ibn 'Ali ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rashid al-Tamimi) (1703–1792). Hanbali theologian from Najd and the founder of Wahhabism. Already as a young theologian, al-Wahhab began his teaching against the cult of saints, paganism among the Bedouins, sacred trees and some sacred tombs. In 1744, amir Muhammad ibn Sa‘ud of al-Dir‘iyya and Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab swore an oath of mutual loyalty to strive, by force if necessary, to make the kingdom of God’s word prevail. Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s doctrine was very strongly influenced by that of Ibn Taymiyya and opposed to sects which were considered as incompatible with Sunnism, such as Shi‘ism, the Mu‘tazila and the Kharijiyya.
Born in al-‘Uyaynah in Najd, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab belonged to a prestigious family of jurists, both theologians and qadis (judges). Under the tutorship of his father, young Muhammad studied Hanbali jurisprudence and read classical works on tafsir (exegesis), hadith (tradition) and tawhid (monotheism). In his early twenties, he began to denounce what he described as the polytheistic beliefs and practices of his society, rejecting its laxity and insisting on strict adherence to the shari‘a.
Ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab's beliefs alienated him from the establishment ‘ulama‘ and led to the dismissal of his father from the position of qadi. Subsequently, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s family, including his father, had to leave al-‘Uyaynah to neighboring Huraymila in 1726. He himself remained in al-‘Uyaynah for a while, but after the ‘ulama‘ defamed his reputation and instigated the populace against him, he left al-‘Uyaynah and went to Hejaz.
In Hejaz, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab made his pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, where he attended lectures on different branches of Islamic learning. Ibn Bishr reports in ‘Unwan al-majd fi tarikh Najd, that Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab studied under Shaykh ‘Abd Allah ibn Ibrahim ibn Sayf and Shaykh Hayat al-Sindi, both of whom were admirers of the Hanbali ibn Taymiyah. Like Ibn Taymiyah, they opposed taqlid (imitation), which was commonly accepted by the followers of the four Sunni schools of jurisprudence. Both scholars felt the urgent need to reform the socio-religious situation of Muslims in Najd and elsewhere. Their teachings had a great impact on Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, who began to take a more aggressive attitude toward the establishment ‘ulama‘.
Another important event in the intellectual evolution of Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab was his visit to Basra. There he widened his study of hadith and jurisprudence and came into contact with the Shi‘as, who venerate ‘Ali’s shrine in Najaf and the tomb of Husayn in neighboring Karbala. Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s call to reform the Muslim world was rejected by the ‘ulama‘ of both Basra and Karbala, and he was ultimately forced to leave the area.
Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab returned to Huraymila to rejoin his father and immediately began to criticize the innovations and polytheistic acts practiced by Najdis and others. His criticism seems to have been so bitter that he met strong opposition from the ‘ulama‘ and even from his own father. During this period, he composed his most famous work, Kitab al-tawhid (Book of Monotheism), copies of which circulated quickly and widely in Najd. The year 1740 witnessed the death of his father and the consolidation of the Wahhabi movement. The death of his father allowed Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab to adopt a more aggressive line, because he felt less constrained than before. He declared war on those who by word or act were violating the doctrine of monotheism.
In a relatively short time, the influence of Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab spread widely. The consolidation of his movement took place when the ruler of al-‘Uyaynah, ‘Uthman ibn Mu‘ammar, offered him protection. Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab accepted the invitation to reside in al-‘Uyaynah because it allowed him to return to his birthplace, where his family enjoyed high social status, and provided the protection he needed to propagate his ideology. To cement his ties with the town’s leader, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab married al-Jawharah, ‘Uthman’s aunt.
The ruler of al-‘Uyaynah ordered his townsmen to observe the teachings of Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, who began to implement the principles of his call. Among his earliest acts was the destruction of the monument where Zayd ibn al-Khattab was believed to be buried, as well as the tombs of other companions of the Prophet, all of whom were objects of veneration. He also revived the Islamic law of stoning an adulterous woman to death. Both incidents mark the establishment of a Wahhabi society in which the doctrines of tawhid were strictly observed. Indeed, tawhid is considered the central theme in Wahhabi doctrine.
Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s activities and the protection he received from the leader of al-‘Uyaynah antagonized the ‘ulama‘ of the region and led them to intensify their attacks on the Wahhabi movement, warning the rulers that Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab was encouraging the common folk to revolt against established authority. Consequently, the ruler of al-‘Uyaynah terminated his support and asked the teacher to leave the town.
From al-‘Uyaynah, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab sought refuge in al-Dir‘iyah at the invitation of its ruler, Muhammad ibn Sa‘ud. For more than two years, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab propagated his views and wrote letters to various rulers, scholars, and tribal leaders in Arabia. The response he elicited was as much a product of political and economic considerations as of religious dogma. Some leaders joined the new movement because they saw it as a means of gaining an ally against their local rivals. Others feared that their acceptance of the call would diminish their authority in favor of Ibn Sa‘ud and oblige them to pay him at least part of the revenues they collected from their subjects.
By 1746, the time seemed ripe for Ibn Sa‘ud and Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab to declare jihad on those who opposed Wahhabi teachings. In 1773, the prinicipality of Riyadh fell to them, marking a new period in the career of Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab. He concentrated on teaching and worship until his death in 1791. His death, however, did not stop the expansion of the new state. Not only was the movement able to resist its opponents and gain territory in neighboring principalities, it was able within a relatively short period to spread to Mecca and Medina, which were captured in 1805 and 1806, respectively. A new order was established in the Arabian Peninsula, ushering in the period of the first Saudi state and establishing the Wahhabiyah as the religio-political driving force in the peninsula during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab see Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab
Wahhab, Muhammad ibn 'Abd al- see Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab
Muhammad ibn 'Abd Al-Wahhab ibn Sulayman ibn 'Ali ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rashid al-Tamimi see Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab
Wahhab, Muhammad ibn 'Abd al- see Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab
Muhammad ibn 'Abd Al-Wahhab ibn Sulayman ibn 'Ali ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rashid al-Tamimi see Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab
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Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i
Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i (Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i ibn al-‘Arabi) (Muhyi‘d-din ibn ‘Arabi) (al-Shaykh al-Akbar) (July 28, 1165 - November 10, 1240). Andalusian Arab Sufi mystic and philosopher. His full name was Abū 'Abdullāh Muḥammad ibn 'Alī ibn Muḥammad ibn al-`Arabī al-Hāṭimī al-Ṭā'ī. He is considered to be one of the greatest, and certainly the most prolific, Sufis of Islam. Born in Murcia, Andalusia (Spain), he impressed his father’s friend Ibn Rushd (Averroes), who was then a judge in Seville.
He travelled far and wide in the Muslim countries. He traveled throughout the centers of learning of his time: Seville, Cordoba, Marrakech, Tunis, Cairo, Konya, Mecca, Baghdad, and Damascus, where he died and where his tomb has become a popular shrine.
In 1230, Ibn ‘Arabi settled in Damascus where he died and was buried. There seems little doubt that he is the author of some 400 works, among which are a full exposition of the author’s Sufi doctrine, and a summary of the teaching of 28 prophets from Adam to the Prophet. His ideas had their most profound influence in Anatolia. It has been suggested that his description of his “ascension to heaven” (in Arabic, mi‘raj) from the world of being to the station in God’s presence influenced Dante.
Although Ibn ‘Arabi founded no order -- no tariqa --, he nevertheless influenced speculative Sufi thought more profoundly than any other thinker. Ibn ‘Arabi left a list of his own literary output. This list totaled 270 works, 176 of which dealt with Sufism. Two of the 176 works have received special attention. The first, The Meccan Revelations, garnered attention because it is partially autobiographical and otherwise sets forth much of interest about famous Sufis as well as the central teachings of Sufism. The second, The Wisdom of the Prophets (Fusus al-Hikam), in which each of the 27 major prophets is allotted an individual chapter that describes not the prophet but rather the approach to unity -- tawhid -- characteristic of the prophet. Revealed to Ibn ‘Arabi in a single night at age sixty-five, The Wisdom of the Prophets is a brilliant, often insightful book which is without parallel in the history of Sufism.
Ibn ‘Arabi‘s thought, at once radical and comprehensive, scriptural and mystical, inspired defenders and detractors, sparking a debate over “Unity of Being” and “Unity of Witness” that relates to the fundamental question: How does one feel, think, act, and pray as a Muslim?
Ibn ‘Arabi’s ideas represent and culminate the third major phase of Sufi thought. In the first phase, thinkers such as Rabi‘a, Junayd, and Bistami articulated the Sufi concept of mystical experience as the passing away of the human ego-self (nafs) and a Sufi way of life centered in that experience, and a Sufi affirmation of divine union as the immersion of human consciousness in one divine beloved to the point of obviousness to all other things. In the second phase, represented by Sulami, Sarraj, Makki, Qushayri, and al-Ghazali, the Sufi experience of mystical union and the Sufi way of life were more explicitly integrated with ritual Islam and Islamic theology.
With Ibn ‘Arabi, mystical union becomes not only the central moment in the affirmation of divine union and in the life of the Sufi, but it also becomes the central event within mystical language as well, an event that fundamentally transforms all language concerned with ultimate reality, reconfiguring and sometimes shattering the normal dualisms of subject and object, human and divine, before and after, self and other.
Ibn ‘Arabi’s writings mirror his philosophy of “perpetual transformation.” His works continually move through the discourses of law, comparative philosophy, Islamic theology, esoteric sciences (alchemy, astrology, number symbolism, and talismans), meditative practice, Qur‘anic interpretation, hadith sciences, theory of prophecy, and sainthood. Rather than forming a system, and certainly not forming a static philosophy of “oneness of reality” as the “sum” of all things (a conception that was due to later systematizers and followers of Ibn ‘Arabi), his work resists closure and analysis by linear development. Like a moving picture made up of separate frames, it is the moving image that is meaningful, not the series of static frames. This method of writing is a perfect reflection of the dynamism of Ibn ‘Arabi’s philosophy.
Ibn ‘Arabi’s thinking has been labeled as “theosophy,” but its originality and most lasting contribution are in the domain of apophatic thought, sometimes called “negative theology” (having to do with matters that are inexpressible). As with the other practitioners of apophatic thinking, Ibn ‘Arabi begins from a critique of any attempt to refer to or name the transcendent, and ends with a dialectically simultaneous affirmation of absolute transcendence and absolute immanence. Ibn ‘Arabi’s positions are grounded in previous controversies of scholastic theology (kalam). After several centuries of growth, Islamic theology had divided into hundreds of schools of thought, all seeking to harmonize the absolute oneness of the Deity with the various attributes (ninety-nine attributes in the Qur‘an) ascribed to it. Are these attributes (“the hearer,” “the seer,” “the compassionate,” and so forth) the same as the essence of the Deity? If so, then the Deity has a plurality of eternal powers. If the attributes are not co-eternal, then the deity is subject to accident and change, in a state of not-hearing in one instant, for example, and hearing in the next.
The quandary was vividly dramatized in the debate over a hadith (a saying of the Prophet Muhammad), parallel to a passage in Genesis, in which the Deity is said to have created Adam “in his image.” If the “his” refers to the Deity, then how is one to conceive of a transcendent, infinite Deity confined to an “image”? Some theologians responded that the “his” must refer to Adam, to Adam’s being made as a full human, rather than going through a period of gestation, for example. The Deity transcends all images. Ibn ‘Arabi’s solution to this dilemma was to combine the Sufi concept of mystical union with his concept of the “complete human being.” Adam, as the symbol of the complete human, that is, of archetypal human consciousness, is the mirror through which the Deity reveals its own attributes to itself, and the prism through which its undifferentiated unity is refracted into the various attributes.
The attributes of the Deity do not exist in themselves, nor are they purely categories of human imagination. They are actualized only at the point that the mirror of human consciousness is polished and the reflections in it become visible. By combining cosmic and the individual, macrocosm and microcosm, Ibn ‘Arabi treats this polishing of the mirror as any human’s “passing away” in union with the divine beloved. When the Sufi, following the Sufi path outlined by Qushayri and Rabi‘a, achieves a point where his or her ego-self is annihilated, then the Deity reveals itself in the polished mirror of that Sufi’s heart. At this point, to paraphrase the crucial hadith of mystical union, the Deity becomes the hearing with which he hears, the seeing with which he sees, the hands with which he touches, the feet with which he walks, the tongue with which he speaks.
In dialectical terms, this “polishing of the mirror” is a co-creation in which both the Deity and human (as manifested entities endowed with form and categories) are created in the polished mirror of the complete human being. A lord cannot exist without a servant, a creator Deity cannot exist without a creation in which it manifests itself and reflects itself. Ultimate reality, what Ibn ‘Arabi calls the identity of self of the Real (dhat al-haqq), lies beyond all such dualisms. The antecedent of “his” in “in his image” is neither the Deity by itself nor Adam by himself, but the Deity-human at the moment of the mystical union. The image occurs within the polishing of the mirror when the Deity’s image is revealed and prismatically refracted in its attributes within the polished mirror of the human heart.
From the perspective of eternity, this self-revelation always has occurred. However, from the perspective of time, it is ephemeral. It cannot be possessed. Ibn ‘Arabi takes the dynamic notion of “the moment” as developed by earlier Sufis such as Qushayri and makes it the centerpiece of his mystical dialectic. Quoting a Qur‘anic passage that refers to the Deity as being in every moment in a different condition, Ibn ‘Arabi states that the image of the eternal and infinite when it occurs in time is in a state of perpetual transformation. In every moment the image changes. Each image is formed by the linguistic, conceptual, philosophical, and psychological categories of the persons in which it appears. Each is a valid manifestation of the Deity.
The central intellectual error, the cause of religious and philosophical disputes and violence, is the attempt to “bind” the Deity into a particular fixed image. The human analytical intellect functions according to the principle of binding. It constructs both grammar and logic according to bound or delimited categories: self and other, subject and predicate, before and after, here and there. When the binding categories of language and logic are applied to the Deity, an image of the Deity is formed. This image is valid -- but only “for the moment.”
When the human being clings to the image and reifies it, however, “binding” leads to idolatry. The most disastrous idolatry of all occurs when people bind the Deity into their own affirmations of its transcendence. In his critique of the Qur‘anic Noah, who called upon God to annihilate the idolaters, Ibn ‘Arabi suggests that Noah himself “bound” the Deity into the idol of the “beyond the world,” an
image just as limiting (by marking of the Deity from the world) as the polytheists' images of the Deity “within” their images of stones and wood. The unlimited must simultaneously be beyond all things, within all things, other than all things, and identical with all things. This critique applies to Sufis as well as to those who are tempted to bind the Deity into a particular station, vision or experience.
The intellectual activity of binding, therefore, must be complemented by perpetual transformation (taqallub). The polished mirror of the human heart -- as locus not of emotion, but of this higher knowledge -- is capable of every form. This phrase “capable of every form” becomes the central concept in Ibn ‘Arabi’s famous collection of love poetry, Interpreter of Desires, a volume that together with a later commentary plays upon that creative tension -- so important in Sufi thought -- between love poetry and philosophical analysis. Ibn ‘Arabi evokes the classical motif of the lover’s meditation on the lost beloved and his dwelling upon the beloved’s departure with the women of her tribe and the “stations” along their journey away from the poet.
For Ibn ‘Arabi the beloved and the women of her tribe are aligned with the ephemeral images or manifestations of the Real. The movement toward the beloved (symbolized by the movement of the pilgrim through the stations of the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca) are identical to the movements of the divine manifestations away from the human knower. The human being who accepts the condition of fundamental humanity is thus in a state of continual joy and continual sorrow. In every moment he passes away in union with the divine beloved, the beloved appears in the reflection of the polished mirror of his heart, and -- most importantly -- the human accepts the immediate disappearance of that image so that it can be replaced by a new image. The angels who objected to the creation of Adam, a creature who could “spill blood and cause corruption” (Qur‘an, Sura 2:30-33), failed to understand this notion of the role of humanity as the locus of a continuing kaleidoscope of divine manifestation.
When the mystic achieves this state of perpetual transformation, he or she is able to participate fully in the perpetual co-creation. In a Sufi appropriation and transformation of the metaphysics of scholastic theology, the world is annihilated and re-created in every moment. However, instead of the re-creation of the objective world by an independent creator Deity -- as we find in scholastic theology -- the Sufi re-creation is the mutual construction of the divine attributes and human categories within the polished mirror of the human heart, a construction that is renewed in each moment (waqt).
Different people have moments of different lengths. Some never achieve an image of reality. Some achieve one in a lifetime and hold on to it with dogmatic fervor. Some achieve one in a year, some in a month. In a remarkable parallel to the dynamist notion of transcendence and immanence, Ibn ‘Arabi, emphasizes the continual creation of the divine image in every new moment, a creation that simultaneously always has occurred and always is occurring. Ibn ‘Arabi identifies the eternal “breath of the compassionate” by which Allah breathed spirit into his creation, through Adam, with the breaths of the individual Sufi. The goal of Sufi meditation and annihilation in mystical union is to make “his/His moment his/His breath.” The alternate pronouns show that the referent at any moment is both the divine and the human as they mutually construct one another within the polished mirror and prism. Ibn ‘Arabi also speaks of the divine as revealing it(self) to it(self) through it(self), again fusing the two possible pronouns of the pronoun (reflexive and non-reflexive) into one. When Ibn ‘Arabi asks who reveals whom in whom and through whom, he stresses the transformation of categories of reflexive and non-reflexive, self and other, at the moment of mystical union.
Ibn ‘Arabi proclaimed that the heart capable of every form can receive and affirm all valid manifestations: the Torah, the Qur‘an, the Christian monk’s cell, the abode of idol, and the meadow of gazelles. Wherever the “caravan of love” leads, Ibn ‘Arabi writes in his most famous poem from the Interpreter of Desires, that is his religion, his faith. This famous statement is not a call for tolerance, a weak virtue in which one agrees to ignore other beliefs or to allow them to exist. Rather, it is a call for a complete immersion in and acceptance of all manifestations of reality.
Such acceptance is perpetually both critical and self-critical of the ways in which delimited images of ultimate realtiy can be reified and idolized. The heart capable of every form is a conception of a knowing faculty that is dialectical in the sense of seeing each manifestation as the abode of divine immanence which simultaneously points to the Real’s transcendence of all images. It is also dynamic in that the joy of receiving one manifestation is accompanied by the sorrow at losing the previous manifestation, a joy and a sorrow that are ultimately part of the one experience of mystical union, perpetually re-enacted in each moment.
Ibn ‘Arabi’s thought was systematized by later followers, and throughout the period of classical Islam, the influence of Ibn ‘Arabi was central. In the modern period that influence came under attack from some modernists who were influenced by postivist Western ways of thinking and by dogmatists such as the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia (where Ibn ‘Arabi’s works are banned). In recent years there has been a strong worldwide resurgence of interest in Ibn ‘Arabi, -- “The Grand Master” (al-shaykh al-akbar) of Islamic mystical philosophy.
In addition to his mystical treatises, Ibn ‘Arabi is also known for his mystical odes. In these odes, Ibn ‘Arabi, like all Sufis, expresses his longing for Union with God in terms of passionate human love. Many critics have been uncertain whether his poetry is in fact religious or erotic, a difficulty also encountered in the poetry of Hafiz. The philosophy of Ibn ‘Arabi’s poetry appears to combine, as does that of most Sufi poets, elements of Muslim Orthodoxy, Manichaeanism, Gnosticism, neo-Platonism and Christianity. Later Sufi poets, particularly Persians, can scarcely be called Muslims at all. Their beliefs appear to coalesce into an indefinite pantheism.
Some critics have credited Ibn ‘Arabi with making the Muwashshah into a respectable literary form. This is a type of poem, apparently native to Moorish Spain, which ends with a couplet in the colloquial language, and sometimes even in Spanish. The Muwashshah was long despised by Arab literary circles, but after Ibn ‘Arabi established it, many of the finest love poems in Arabic literature came to be written in the Muwashshah form.
Ibn al-'Arabi see Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i
Muhyi'l-Din al-Ta'i ibn al-'Arabi see Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i
Muhyi'd-din ibn 'Arabi see Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i
Shaykh al-Akbar, al- see Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i
Ibn 'Arabi see Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i
"The Grand Master" see Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i
The intellectual activity of binding, therefore, must be complemented by perpetual transformation (taqallub). The polished mirror of the human heart -- as locus not of emotion, but of this higher knowledge -- is capable of every form. This phrase “capable of every form” becomes the central concept in Ibn ‘Arabi’s famous collection of love poetry, Interpreter of Desires, a volume that together with a later commentary plays upon that creative tension -- so important in Sufi thought -- between love poetry and philosophical analysis. Ibn ‘Arabi evokes the classical motif of the lover’s meditation on the lost beloved and his dwelling upon the beloved’s departure with the women of her tribe and the “stations” along their journey away from the poet.
For Ibn ‘Arabi the beloved and the women of her tribe are aligned with the ephemeral images or manifestations of the Real. The movement toward the beloved (symbolized by the movement of the pilgrim through the stations of the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca) are identical to the movements of the divine manifestations away from the human knower. The human being who accepts the condition of fundamental humanity is thus in a state of continual joy and continual sorrow. In every moment he passes away in union with the divine beloved, the beloved appears in the reflection of the polished mirror of his heart, and -- most importantly -- the human accepts the immediate disappearance of that image so that it can be replaced by a new image. The angels who objected to the creation of Adam, a creature who could “spill blood and cause corruption” (Qur‘an, Sura 2:30-33), failed to understand this notion of the role of humanity as the locus of a continuing kaleidoscope of divine manifestation.
When the mystic achieves this state of perpetual transformation, he or she is able to participate fully in the perpetual co-creation. In a Sufi appropriation and transformation of the metaphysics of scholastic theology, the world is annihilated and re-created in every moment. However, instead of the re-creation of the objective world by an independent creator Deity -- as we find in scholastic theology -- the Sufi re-creation is the mutual construction of the divine attributes and human categories within the polished mirror of the human heart, a construction that is renewed in each moment (waqt).
Different people have moments of different lengths. Some never achieve an image of reality. Some achieve one in a lifetime and hold on to it with dogmatic fervor. Some achieve one in a year, some in a month. In a remarkable parallel to the dynamist notion of transcendence and immanence, Ibn ‘Arabi, emphasizes the continual creation of the divine image in every new moment, a creation that simultaneously always has occurred and always is occurring. Ibn ‘Arabi identifies the eternal “breath of the compassionate” by which Allah breathed spirit into his creation, through Adam, with the breaths of the individual Sufi. The goal of Sufi meditation and annihilation in mystical union is to make “his/His moment his/His breath.” The alternate pronouns show that the referent at any moment is both the divine and the human as they mutually construct one another within the polished mirror and prism. Ibn ‘Arabi also speaks of the divine as revealing it(self) to it(self) through it(self), again fusing the two possible pronouns of the pronoun (reflexive and non-reflexive) into one. When Ibn ‘Arabi asks who reveals whom in whom and through whom, he stresses the transformation of categories of reflexive and non-reflexive, self and other, at the moment of mystical union.
Ibn ‘Arabi proclaimed that the heart capable of every form can receive and affirm all valid manifestations: the Torah, the Qur‘an, the Christian monk’s cell, the abode of idol, and the meadow of gazelles. Wherever the “caravan of love” leads, Ibn ‘Arabi writes in his most famous poem from the Interpreter of Desires, that is his religion, his faith. This famous statement is not a call for tolerance, a weak virtue in which one agrees to ignore other beliefs or to allow them to exist. Rather, it is a call for a complete immersion in and acceptance of all manifestations of reality.
Such acceptance is perpetually both critical and self-critical of the ways in which delimited images of ultimate realtiy can be reified and idolized. The heart capable of every form is a conception of a knowing faculty that is dialectical in the sense of seeing each manifestation as the abode of divine immanence which simultaneously points to the Real’s transcendence of all images. It is also dynamic in that the joy of receiving one manifestation is accompanied by the sorrow at losing the previous manifestation, a joy and a sorrow that are ultimately part of the one experience of mystical union, perpetually re-enacted in each moment.
Ibn ‘Arabi’s thought was systematized by later followers, and throughout the period of classical Islam, the influence of Ibn ‘Arabi was central. In the modern period that influence came under attack from some modernists who were influenced by postivist Western ways of thinking and by dogmatists such as the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia (where Ibn ‘Arabi’s works are banned). In recent years there has been a strong worldwide resurgence of interest in Ibn ‘Arabi, -- “The Grand Master” (al-shaykh al-akbar) of Islamic mystical philosophy.
In addition to his mystical treatises, Ibn ‘Arabi is also known for his mystical odes. In these odes, Ibn ‘Arabi, like all Sufis, expresses his longing for Union with God in terms of passionate human love. Many critics have been uncertain whether his poetry is in fact religious or erotic, a difficulty also encountered in the poetry of Hafiz. The philosophy of Ibn ‘Arabi’s poetry appears to combine, as does that of most Sufi poets, elements of Muslim Orthodoxy, Manichaeanism, Gnosticism, neo-Platonism and Christianity. Later Sufi poets, particularly Persians, can scarcely be called Muslims at all. Their beliefs appear to coalesce into an indefinite pantheism.
Some critics have credited Ibn ‘Arabi with making the Muwashshah into a respectable literary form. This is a type of poem, apparently native to Moorish Spain, which ends with a couplet in the colloquial language, and sometimes even in Spanish. The Muwashshah was long despised by Arab literary circles, but after Ibn ‘Arabi established it, many of the finest love poems in Arabic literature came to be written in the Muwashshah form.
Ibn al-'Arabi see Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i
Muhyi'l-Din al-Ta'i ibn al-'Arabi see Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i
Muhyi'd-din ibn 'Arabi see Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i
Shaykh al-Akbar, al- see Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i
Ibn 'Arabi see Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i
"The Grand Master" see Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i
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Ibn al-Haytham
Ibn al-Haytham (Abu ‘Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham) (Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham) (Alhazen) (Avennathan) (965 in Basra - c. 1039 in Cairo). Arab mathematician known in the West as Alhazen or Avennathan. He is considered to be Islam’s greatest scientist who devoted his life to physics, astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. His treatise Optics, in which he deftly used experiments and advanced mathematics to understand the action of light, exerted a profound influence on many European natural philosophers. In addition to his Latinized names of Alhazen and Avennathan, Ibn al-Haytham is sometimes called al-Basri. He is also nicknamed Ptolemaeus Secundus ("Ptolemy the Second") or simply "The Physicist" in medieval Europe.Abu ‘Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham (commonly known as Alhazen, the Latinized form of his first name, al-Hasan) was born in Basra (Iraq) in 965. He was given a traditional Muslim education, but at an early age he became perplexed by the variety of religious beliefs and sects, because he was convinced of the unity of truth. When he was older, he concluded that truth could be attained only in doctrines whose matter was sensible and whose form was rational. He found such doctrines in the writings of Aristotle and in natural philosophy and mathematics.
By devoting himself completely to learning, Alhazen achieved fame as a scholar and was given a political post at Basra. In an attempt to obtain a better position, he claimed that he could construct a machine to regulate the flooding of the Nile. The Fatimid caliph al-Hakim, wishing to use this sage’s expertise, persuaded him to move to Cairo. Alhazen, to fulfill his boast, was trapped into heading an engineering mission to Egypt’s southern border. On his way to Aswan, he began to have doubts about his plan, for he observed excellently designed and perfectly constructed buildings along the Nile, and he realized that his scheme, if it were possible, would have already been carried out by the creators of these impressive structures. His misgivings were confirmed when he discovered that the cataracts south of Aswan made flood control impossible. Convinced of the impracticability of his plan, and fearing the wrath of the eccentric and volatile caliph, Alhazen pretended to be mentally deranged. Upon his return to Cairo, he was confined to his house until al-Hakim’s death in 1021.
Alhazen then took up residence in a small domed shrine near the Azhar mosque. Having been given back his previously sequestered property, he resumed his activities as a writer and teacher. He may have earned his living by copying mathematical works, including Euclid’s Stoicheia (c. fourth century B.C.T.; Elements) and Mathematike suntaxis (c.150; Almagest), and may also have traveled and had contact with other scholars.
The scope of Alhazen’s work is impressive. He wrote studies on mathematics, physics, astronomy, and medicine, as well as commentaries on the writings of Aristotle and Galen. He was an exact observer, a skilled experimenter, and an insightful theoretician. He put these abilities to excellent use in the field of optics. He has been called the most important figure in optics between antiquity and the seventeenth century. Within optics itself, the range of his interests was wide. He discussed theories of light and vision, the anatomy and diseases of the eye, reflection and refraction, the rainbow, lenses, spherical and parabolic mirrors, and the pinhole camera (camera obscura).
Alhazen’s most important work was Kitab al-Manazir, commonly known as Optics. Not published until 1572, and only appearing in the West in the Latin translation Opticae thesaurus Alhazeni libri vii, it attempted to clarify the subject by inquiring into its principles. He rejected Euclid’s and Ptolemy’s doctrine of visual rays (the extramission theory, which regarded vision as analogous to the sense of touch). For example, Ptolemy attributed sight to the action of visual rays issuing conically from the observer’s eye and being reflected from various objects. Alhazen also disagreed with past versions of the intromission theory, which treated the visible object as a source from which forms (simulacra) issued. The atomists, for example, held that objects shed sets of atoms as a snake sheds its skin; when this set enters the eye, vision occurs. In another version of the intromission theory, Aristotle treated the visible object as a modifier of the medium between the object and the eye. Alhazen found the atomistic theory unconvincing because it could not explain how the image of a large mountain could enter the small pupil of the eye. He did not like the Aristotelian theory because it could not explain how the eye could distinguish individual parts of the seen world, since objects altered the entire intervening medium. Alhazen, in his version of the intromission theory, treated the visible object as a collection of small areas, each of which sends forth its own ray. He believed that vision takes place through light rays reflected from every point on an object’s surface converging toward an apex in the eye.
According to Alhazen, light is an essential form in self-luminous bodies, such as the sun, and an accidental form in bodies that derive their luminosity from outside sources. Accidental light, such as the moon, is weaker than essential light, but both forms are emitted by their respective sources in exactly the same way: noninstantaneously, from every point on the source, in all directions, and along straight lines. To establish rectilinear propagation for essential, accidental, reflected, and refracted radiation, Alhazen performed many experiments with dark chambers, pinhole cameras, sighting tubes, and strings.
In the first book of Optics, Alhazen describes the anatomy of the eye. His description is not original, being based largely on the work of Galen, but he modifies traditional ocular geometry to suit his own explanation of vision. For example, he claims that sight occurs in the eye by means of the glacial humor (what would be called the crystalline lens), because when this humor is injured, vision is destroyed. He also uses such observations as eye pain while gazing on intense light and afterimages from strongly illuminated objects to argue against the visual-ray theory, because these observations show that light is coming to the eye from the object. With this picture of intromission established, Alhazen faces the problem of explaining how replicas as big as a mountain can pass through the tiny pupil into the eye.
He begins the solution of this problem by recognizing that every point in the eye receives a ray from every point in the visual field. The difficulty with this punctiform analysis is that, if each point on the object sends light and color in every direction to each point of the eye, then all this radiation would arrive at the eye in total confusion. For example, colors would arrive mixed. Simply put, the problem is a superfluity of rays. To explain vision, each point of the surface of the glacial humor needs to receive a ray from only one point in the visual field. In short, it is necessary to establish a one-to-one correspondence between points in the visual field and points in the eye.
To fulfill this goal, Alhazen notices that only one ray from each point in the visual field falls perpendicularly on the convex surface of the eye. He then proposes that all other rays, those falling at oblique angles to the eye’s surface, are refracted and so weakened that they are incapable of affecting visual power. Alhazen even performed an experiment to show that perpendicular rays are strong and oblique rays weak. He shot a metal sphere against a dish both perpendicularly and obliquely. The perpendicular shot fractured the plate, whereas the oblique shot bounced off harmlessly. Thus, in his theory, the cone of perpendicular rays coming into the eye accounts for the perception of the visible object’s shape and the laws of perspective.
Book 2 of Optics contains Alhazen’s theory of cognition based on visual perception, and book 3 deals with binocular vision and visual errors. Catoptrics (the theory of reflected light) is the subject of book 4. Alhazen here formulates the laws of reflection. Incident and reflected rays are in the same plane, and incident and reflected angles are equal. The equality of the angles of incidence and reflection allows Alhazen to explain the formation of an image in a plane mirror. As throughout Optics, Alhazen uses experiments to help establish his contentions. For example, by throwing an iron sphere against a metal mirror at an oblique angle, he found that the incident and reflected movements of the sphere were symmetrical. The reflected movement of the iron sphere, because of its heaviness, did not continue in a straight line, as the light ray does, but Alhazen did not contend that the iron sphere is an exact duplicate of the light ray.
Alhazen’s investigation of reflection continues in books 5 and 6 of Optics. Book 5 contains the famous “Problem of Alhazen”: For any two points opposite a spherical reflecting surface, either convex or concave, find the point or points on the surface at which the light from one of the two points will be reflected to the other. Today it is known that the algebraic solution of this problem leads to an equation of the fourth degree, but Alhazen solved it geometrically by the intersection of a circle and a hyperbola.
Book 7, which concludes Optics, is devoted to dioptrics (the theory of refraction). Although Alhazen did not discover the mathematical relationship between the angles of incidence and refraction, his treatment of the phenomenon was the most extensive and enlightening before that of Rene Descartes. As with reflection, Alhazen explores refraction through a mechanical analogy. Light, he says, moves with great speed in a transparent medium such as air and with slower speed in a dense body such as glass or water. The slower speed of the light ray in the denser medium is the result of the greater resistance it encounters, but this resistance is not strong enough to hinder its movement completely. Since the refracted light ray is not strong enough to maintain its original direction in the denser medium, it moves in another direction along which its passage will be easier (that is, it turns toward the normal). This idea of the easier and quicker path was the basis of Alhazen’s explanation of refraction, and it is a forerunner of the principle of least time associated with the name of Pierre de Fermat.
Optics was Alhazen’s most significant work and by far his best known, but he also wrote more modest treatises in which he discussed the rainbow, shadows, camera obscura, and Ptolemy’s optics as well as spheroidal and paraboloidal burning mirrors. The ancient Greeks had a good understanding of plane mirrors, but Alhazen developed an exhaustive geometrical analysis of the more difficult problem of the formation of images in spheroidal and paraboloidal mirrors.
Although Alhazen’s achievements in astronomy do not equal those in optics, his extant works reveal his mastery of the techniques of Ptolemaic astronomy. These works are mostly short tracts on minor problems, for example, sundials, moonlight, eclipses, parallax, and determining the gibla (the direction to be faced in prayer). In another treatise, he was able to explain the apparent increase in size of heavenly bodies near the horizon, and he also estimated the thickness of the atmosphere.
His best astronomical work, and the only one known to the medieval West, was Hay’at al-‘alan (tenth or eleventh century; on the configuration of the world). This treatise grew out of Alhazen’s desire that the astronomical system correspond to the true movements of actual heavenly bodies. He therefore attacked Ptolemy’s system, in which the motions of heavenly bodies were explained in terms of imaginary points moving on imaginary circles. In his work, Alhazen tried to discover the physical reality underlying Ptolemy’s abstract astronomical system. He accomplished this task by viewing the heavens as a series of concentric spherical shells whose rotations were interconnected. Alhazen’s system accounted for the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies in a clear and untechnical way, which accounts for the book’s popularity in the Middle Ages.
Alhazen’s fame as a mathematician has largely depended on his geometrical solutions of various optical problems, but more than twenty strictly mathematical treatises have survived. Some of these deal with geometrical problems arising from his studies of Euclid’s Elements, whereas others deal with quadrature problems, that is, constructing squares equal in area to various plane figures. He also wrote a work on lunes (figures contained between the arcs of two circles) and on the properties of conic sections. Although he was not successful with every problem, his performance, which exhibited his masterful command of higher mathematics, has rightly won for him the admiration of later mathematicians.
For most scientific historians, Alhazen was the greatest Muslim scientist, and Optics was the most important work in the field from Ptolemy’s time to Johannes Kepler’s. Alhazen extricated himself from the limitations of such earlier theories as the atomistic, Aristotelian, and Ptolemaic and integrated what he knew about medicine, physics, and mathematics into a single comprehensive theory of light and vision. Although his theory contained ideas from older theories, he combined these ideas with his new insights into a fresh creation, which became the source of a new optical tradition.
Alhazen's optical theories had some influence on Islamic scientists, but their main impact was on the West. Optics was translated from Arabic into Latin at the end of the twelfth century. It was widely studied, and in the thirteenth century, Witelo (also known as Vitellio) made liberal use of Alhazen’s text in writing his comprehensive book on optics. Roger Bacon, John Peckham, and Giambattista della Porta are only some of the many thinkers who were influenced by Alhazen’s work. Indeed, it was not until Kepler, six centuries later, that work on optics progressed beyond the point to which Alhazen’s ideas had taken the subject matter. Indeed, it would not be going too far to say that Alhazen’s optical theories defined the scope and goals of the field from his day to ours.
Al-Haitham was one of the most eminent physicists, whose contributions to optics and the scientific methods are outstanding. Ibn al-Haitham was born in 965 in Basra (in present day Iraq), and received his education in Basra and Baghdad. He traveled to Egypt and Spain. He spent most of his life in Spain, where he conducted research in optics, mathematics, physics, medicine and development of scientific methods.
Al-Haitham conducted experiments on the propagation
of light and colors, optic illusions and reflections. He examined the refraction of light rays through transparent medium (air, water) and discovered the laws of refraction. He also carried out the first experiments on the dispersion of light into its constituent colors. In detailing his experiment with spherical segments (glass vessels filled with water) , he came very close to discovering the theory of magnifying lenses which was developed in Italy three centuries later. It took another three centuries before the law of sines was proposed by Snell and Descartes.
Al-Haitham’s book Kitab al-Manazir was translated into Latin in the Middle Ages, as was also his book dealing with the colors of sunset. He dealt at length with the theory of various physical phenomena such as the rainbow, shadows, eclipses, and speculated on the physical nature of light. Virtually all of the medieval Western writers on optics based their optical work on al-Haitham’s Opticae Thesaurus. His work also influenced Leonardo da Vinci and Johannes Kepler. His approach to optics generated fresh ideas and resulted in great progress in experimental methods.
Al-Haitham was the first to describe accurately the various parts of the eye and gave a scientific explanation of the process of vision. He contradicted Ptolemy’s and Euclid’s theory of vision that the eye sends out visual rays to the object of the vision. According to al-Haitham, the rays originate in the object of vision and not the eye.
Al-Haitham also attempted to explain binocular vision, and gave a correct explanation of the apparent increase in size of the sun and the moon when near the horizon. He is known for the earliest use of the camera obscura. Through these extensive researches on optics, al-Haitham came to be considered the Father of Modern Optics.
In al-Haitham’s writings, one finds a clear explanation of the development of scientific methods as developed and applied by the Muslims, the systematic observation of physical phenomena and their relationship to a scientific theory. This was a major breakthrough in scientific methodology, as distinct from guess work, and placed scientific study on a sound foundation comprising systematic relationship between observation, hypothesis and verification.
His research in catoptrics focused on spherical and parabolic mirrors and spherical aberration. He made the important observation that the ratio between the angle of incidence and refraction does not remain constant and investigated the magnifying power of a lens. His catoptrics contains the important problem known as Alhazen’s problem. It comprises drawing lines from two points in the plane of a circle meeting at a point on the circumference and making equal angles with the normal at that point. This leads to an equation of the fourth degree. Al-Hazen also solved the shape of an aplantic surface of reflection.
In his book Mizan al-Hikmah, al-Haitham discussed the density of the atmosphere and developed a relation between it and the height. He also studied atmospheric refraction. Al-Haitham discovered that the twilight only ceases or begins when the sun is nineteen degrees below the horizon and attempted to measure the height of the atmosphere on that basis. He deduced the height of homogeneous atmosphere to be fifty-five miles.
Al-Haitham’s contribution to mathematics and physics is extensive. In mathematics, he developed analytical geometry by establishing linkage between algebra and geometry. In physics, he studied the mechanics of motion of a body and was the first to propose that a body move perpetually unless an external force stops it or changes its direction of motion. This is strikingly similar to the first law of motion. He has also discussed the theories of attraction between masses, and it appears that he was aware of the magnitude of acceleration due to gravity.
Alhazen wrote more than two hundred books, very few of which have survived. His monumental treatise on optics has survived through its Latin translation. During the Middle Ages, his books on cosmology were translated into Latin, Hebrew and other European languages. Also, he wrote a book on the subject of evolution.
Alhazen's influence on physical sciences in general, and optics in particular, has been held in high esteem and his ideas heralded in a new era in both theoretical and experimental optical research. He wrote commentaries on Aristotle, Galen, Euclid and Ptolemy. Beer and Medler, in their famous work Der Mond, named one of the surface features of the Moon after Alhazen. It is the name of a ring shaped plain to the West of the hypothetical Mare Crisium. Additionally, on February 7, 1999, an asteroid was discovered by S. Sposetti at Gnosca, Italy. The asteroid was named 59239 Alhazen.
Alhazen, the great Muslim scientist, died in 1039 in Cairo, Egypt.
Abu ‘Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham see Ibn al-Haytham
Haithem, al- see Ibn al-Haytham
Alhazen see Ibn al-Haytham
Avennathan see Ibn al-Haytham
The First Scientist see Ibn al-Haytham
Father of Modern Optics see Ibn al-Haytham
Al-Haitham’s book Kitab al-Manazir was translated into Latin in the Middle Ages, as was also his book dealing with the colors of sunset. He dealt at length with the theory of various physical phenomena such as the rainbow, shadows, eclipses, and speculated on the physical nature of light. Virtually all of the medieval Western writers on optics based their optical work on al-Haitham’s Opticae Thesaurus. His work also influenced Leonardo da Vinci and Johannes Kepler. His approach to optics generated fresh ideas and resulted in great progress in experimental methods.
Al-Haitham was the first to describe accurately the various parts of the eye and gave a scientific explanation of the process of vision. He contradicted Ptolemy’s and Euclid’s theory of vision that the eye sends out visual rays to the object of the vision. According to al-Haitham, the rays originate in the object of vision and not the eye.
Al-Haitham also attempted to explain binocular vision, and gave a correct explanation of the apparent increase in size of the sun and the moon when near the horizon. He is known for the earliest use of the camera obscura. Through these extensive researches on optics, al-Haitham came to be considered the Father of Modern Optics.
In al-Haitham’s writings, one finds a clear explanation of the development of scientific methods as developed and applied by the Muslims, the systematic observation of physical phenomena and their relationship to a scientific theory. This was a major breakthrough in scientific methodology, as distinct from guess work, and placed scientific study on a sound foundation comprising systematic relationship between observation, hypothesis and verification.
His research in catoptrics focused on spherical and parabolic mirrors and spherical aberration. He made the important observation that the ratio between the angle of incidence and refraction does not remain constant and investigated the magnifying power of a lens. His catoptrics contains the important problem known as Alhazen’s problem. It comprises drawing lines from two points in the plane of a circle meeting at a point on the circumference and making equal angles with the normal at that point. This leads to an equation of the fourth degree. Al-Hazen also solved the shape of an aplantic surface of reflection.
In his book Mizan al-Hikmah, al-Haitham discussed the density of the atmosphere and developed a relation between it and the height. He also studied atmospheric refraction. Al-Haitham discovered that the twilight only ceases or begins when the sun is nineteen degrees below the horizon and attempted to measure the height of the atmosphere on that basis. He deduced the height of homogeneous atmosphere to be fifty-five miles.
Al-Haitham’s contribution to mathematics and physics is extensive. In mathematics, he developed analytical geometry by establishing linkage between algebra and geometry. In physics, he studied the mechanics of motion of a body and was the first to propose that a body move perpetually unless an external force stops it or changes its direction of motion. This is strikingly similar to the first law of motion. He has also discussed the theories of attraction between masses, and it appears that he was aware of the magnitude of acceleration due to gravity.
Alhazen wrote more than two hundred books, very few of which have survived. His monumental treatise on optics has survived through its Latin translation. During the Middle Ages, his books on cosmology were translated into Latin, Hebrew and other European languages. Also, he wrote a book on the subject of evolution.
Alhazen's influence on physical sciences in general, and optics in particular, has been held in high esteem and his ideas heralded in a new era in both theoretical and experimental optical research. He wrote commentaries on Aristotle, Galen, Euclid and Ptolemy. Beer and Medler, in their famous work Der Mond, named one of the surface features of the Moon after Alhazen. It is the name of a ring shaped plain to the West of the hypothetical Mare Crisium. Additionally, on February 7, 1999, an asteroid was discovered by S. Sposetti at Gnosca, Italy. The asteroid was named 59239 Alhazen.
Alhazen, the great Muslim scientist, died in 1039 in Cairo, Egypt.
Abu ‘Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham see Ibn al-Haytham
Haithem, al- see Ibn al-Haytham
Alhazen see Ibn al-Haytham
Avennathan see Ibn al-Haytham
The First Scientist see Ibn al-Haytham
Father of Modern Optics see Ibn al-Haytham
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Ibn Battuta
Ibn Battuta (Muhammad ibn Abdullah ibn Battuta) (Ibn Batuta) (Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Abdullah Al Lawati Al Tanji Ibn Battuta) (February 24, 1304–1368/1369/1377). One of the world’s most renowned travellers and authors of travel books. Between 1325 and 1353, his journeys brought him from his native Tangiers to Egypt, Syria, Mecca, Iraq, the Red Sea and Yemen, Oman, Istanbul, Transoxiana, Afghanistan, the Indus, the Maldives, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Bengal, Sumatra and the Chinese port of Zaytun (Ts‘uan-chou), Sardinia, Granada, and across the Sahara to the country of the Niger.
His “Travel-book” -- his Rihlah (Travels) -- is in fact a description of the then known world, and was translated into many languages. Ibn Battuta’s Rihlah (Travels), which was finished in 1357, is thus an important source for the history and geography of the medieval Muslim world.
Ibn Battuta was a Berber born in Tangiers into a family of lawyers. His full name was Muhammad ibn Abdullah ibn Battuta. Beginning with his first journey in 1325, a religious pilgrimage to Mecca, he covered some 120,000 kilometers (some 75,000 miles), extending from Spain in the West to China in the East, from Timbuktu, in West Africa, to the Steppes of Russia. His book -- his Rihlah -- includes descriptions of the Byzantine court of Constantinople and the Black Death of Baghdad (c.1348).
At the age of 21 (in 1325), Ibn Battuta began his travels when he went on the pilgrimage (the hajj) to Mecca to fulfill his religious obligation and to add to his qualifications as a lawyer by consulting the scholars he met. While at Mecca, he was seized by a desire for further travel, and for the next 25 years he wandered from Constantinople to China, and from the Crimea to the Maldive Islands. During his first pilgrimage to Mecca he vowed never, so far as possible, to cover a second time any road that he had once traveled, and he certainly journeyed more extensively than any other recorded medieval traveler.
In 1331, he sailed down the east African coast, at least as far south as Kilwa. His description of that region is the only extant first-hand account between the anonymous Periplus of the Erythraean Sea of the first century of the Christian calendar and Portuguese records of the early sixteenth century.
On his third journey, Ibn Battuta spent two or three years in Mecca. His interest began to turn from piety alone to an ethnographic interest in the cultures and peoples he saw. He then traveled overland in North Africa and Syria, exploring Arabia, Mesopotamia, Persia, and Asia Minor. With the assistance of various Muslim sultans and religious authorities, he made a journey by way of Constantinople (in the retinue of the khan of the Golden Horde) and Samarkand to India, where he resided almost eight years at the court of the sultan of Delhi, Muhammad ibn Tughluq, who deputed Ibn Battuta to China as one of his ambassadors in 1342.
In all, Ibn Battuta’s third journey was an adventurous journey. He was delayed in Calicut, the Maldive Islands, the Coromandel and Malabar coasts, Bengal, Assam, and Sumatra, landing finally in Zayton (Quanzhou, in Fujian), and then journeying to Beijing. Ibn Battuta’s stay in China was relatively short.
During this journey, Ibn Battuta served as a judge in India, and served again as a judge, for 18 months, in the Maldive Islands, where he objected to the women’s scanty dress, which did not conform to Muslim standards. Ibn Battuta was interested in all that he saw, but he seems to have been remarkably casual in practical matters. In one place, he married a wife who bore him a daughter, but wanderlust soon possessed him again and he set off leaving wife and child behind.
In 1347, he returned to the West by way of Sumatra and the Malabar coast, arriving in Tangier around 1350. Later he went to Spain and traveled in West Africa.
During his last great journey in 1353, Ibn Battuta visited West Africa, leaving a vivid description of the Mali Empire. At this professedly Muslim court, he saw the king present a delegation of visiting cannibals with an attractive young girl, who was promptly cut up and publicly eaten by the guests.
Ibn Battuta retired to Fez in 1354 to put together the narrative of his travels. His contemporaries regarded him as a romancer, but his reports, where they can be verified, are accurate. Ibn Battuta dictated his travels to Ibn Juzayy, who put the work into literary style. Ibn Battuta often conflated his experiences into a somewhat artificial itinerary. The full text of his work was rediscovered in North Africa in the early nineteenth century.
Between 1325 and 1354, Ibn Battuta visited and described in detail virtually every known Muslim region of the world, from Southern Spain and West Africa, to East Africa, Russia, India and China. Ibn Battuta’s glowing description of India was treated with skepticism by contemporaneous Arabs but is, on the whole, borne out by comparison with works by Indian historians. His account of his travels in China is not as detailed as much as the rest of his work, perhaps because he viewed his experiences in China as outside the cultural and social history of Islam.
After returning home from his travels in 1354 and at the instigation of the Sultan of Morocco, Abu Inan Faris, Ibn Battuta dictated an account of his journeys to Ibn Juzayy, a scholar whom he had met previously in Granada. The account, recorded by Ibn Juzayy and interspersed with the latter's own comments, is the only source of information on his adventures. The title of the manuscript may be translated as A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling but is often simply referred to as the Rihla, or "The Journey".
After the completion of the Rihla in 1355, little is known about Ibn Battuta's life. He was appointed a judge in Morocco and died in 1368 or 1369 or 1377.
Muhammad ibn Abdullah ibn Battuta see Ibn Battuta
Ibn Batuta see Ibn Battuta
Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Abdullah Al Lawati Al Tanji Ibn Battuta see Ibn Battuta
Ibn Battuta (Muhammad ibn Abdullah ibn Battuta) (Ibn Batuta) (Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Abdullah Al Lawati Al Tanji Ibn Battuta) (February 24, 1304–1368/1369/1377). One of the world’s most renowned travellers and authors of travel books. Between 1325 and 1353, his journeys brought him from his native Tangiers to Egypt, Syria, Mecca, Iraq, the Red Sea and Yemen, Oman, Istanbul, Transoxiana, Afghanistan, the Indus, the Maldives, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Bengal, Sumatra and the Chinese port of Zaytun (Ts‘uan-chou), Sardinia, Granada, and across the Sahara to the country of the Niger.
His “Travel-book” -- his Rihlah (Travels) -- is in fact a description of the then known world, and was translated into many languages. Ibn Battuta’s Rihlah (Travels), which was finished in 1357, is thus an important source for the history and geography of the medieval Muslim world.
Ibn Battuta was a Berber born in Tangiers into a family of lawyers. His full name was Muhammad ibn Abdullah ibn Battuta. Beginning with his first journey in 1325, a religious pilgrimage to Mecca, he covered some 120,000 kilometers (some 75,000 miles), extending from Spain in the West to China in the East, from Timbuktu, in West Africa, to the Steppes of Russia. His book -- his Rihlah -- includes descriptions of the Byzantine court of Constantinople and the Black Death of Baghdad (c.1348).
At the age of 21 (in 1325), Ibn Battuta began his travels when he went on the pilgrimage (the hajj) to Mecca to fulfill his religious obligation and to add to his qualifications as a lawyer by consulting the scholars he met. While at Mecca, he was seized by a desire for further travel, and for the next 25 years he wandered from Constantinople to China, and from the Crimea to the Maldive Islands. During his first pilgrimage to Mecca he vowed never, so far as possible, to cover a second time any road that he had once traveled, and he certainly journeyed more extensively than any other recorded medieval traveler.
In 1331, he sailed down the east African coast, at least as far south as Kilwa. His description of that region is the only extant first-hand account between the anonymous Periplus of the Erythraean Sea of the first century of the Christian calendar and Portuguese records of the early sixteenth century.
On his third journey, Ibn Battuta spent two or three years in Mecca. His interest began to turn from piety alone to an ethnographic interest in the cultures and peoples he saw. He then traveled overland in North Africa and Syria, exploring Arabia, Mesopotamia, Persia, and Asia Minor. With the assistance of various Muslim sultans and religious authorities, he made a journey by way of Constantinople (in the retinue of the khan of the Golden Horde) and Samarkand to India, where he resided almost eight years at the court of the sultan of Delhi, Muhammad ibn Tughluq, who deputed Ibn Battuta to China as one of his ambassadors in 1342.
In all, Ibn Battuta’s third journey was an adventurous journey. He was delayed in Calicut, the Maldive Islands, the Coromandel and Malabar coasts, Bengal, Assam, and Sumatra, landing finally in Zayton (Quanzhou, in Fujian), and then journeying to Beijing. Ibn Battuta’s stay in China was relatively short.
During this journey, Ibn Battuta served as a judge in India, and served again as a judge, for 18 months, in the Maldive Islands, where he objected to the women’s scanty dress, which did not conform to Muslim standards. Ibn Battuta was interested in all that he saw, but he seems to have been remarkably casual in practical matters. In one place, he married a wife who bore him a daughter, but wanderlust soon possessed him again and he set off leaving wife and child behind.
In 1347, he returned to the West by way of Sumatra and the Malabar coast, arriving in Tangier around 1350. Later he went to Spain and traveled in West Africa.
During his last great journey in 1353, Ibn Battuta visited West Africa, leaving a vivid description of the Mali Empire. At this professedly Muslim court, he saw the king present a delegation of visiting cannibals with an attractive young girl, who was promptly cut up and publicly eaten by the guests.
Ibn Battuta retired to Fez in 1354 to put together the narrative of his travels. His contemporaries regarded him as a romancer, but his reports, where they can be verified, are accurate. Ibn Battuta dictated his travels to Ibn Juzayy, who put the work into literary style. Ibn Battuta often conflated his experiences into a somewhat artificial itinerary. The full text of his work was rediscovered in North Africa in the early nineteenth century.
Between 1325 and 1354, Ibn Battuta visited and described in detail virtually every known Muslim region of the world, from Southern Spain and West Africa, to East Africa, Russia, India and China. Ibn Battuta’s glowing description of India was treated with skepticism by contemporaneous Arabs but is, on the whole, borne out by comparison with works by Indian historians. His account of his travels in China is not as detailed as much as the rest of his work, perhaps because he viewed his experiences in China as outside the cultural and social history of Islam.
After returning home from his travels in 1354 and at the instigation of the Sultan of Morocco, Abu Inan Faris, Ibn Battuta dictated an account of his journeys to Ibn Juzayy, a scholar whom he had met previously in Granada. The account, recorded by Ibn Juzayy and interspersed with the latter's own comments, is the only source of information on his adventures. The title of the manuscript may be translated as A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling but is often simply referred to as the Rihla, or "The Journey".
After the completion of the Rihla in 1355, little is known about Ibn Battuta's life. He was appointed a judge in Morocco and died in 1368 or 1369 or 1377.
Muhammad ibn Abdullah ibn Battuta see Ibn Battuta
Ibn Batuta see Ibn Battuta
Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Abdullah Al Lawati Al Tanji Ibn Battuta see Ibn Battuta
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Ibn Hanbal, Ahmad
Ahmad ibn Hanbal (Ahmad bin Hanbal) (Ahmed ibn Hanbal) (Ibn Hanbal) (780-855). A famous jurist, theologian, and transmitter of traditions. He was also the founder of the Hanbali school of law. His most celebrated work is a collection of traditions, known as Musnad.
Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780 - 855 C.C.) was an important Muslim scholar and theologian born in Khorasan to a family of Arab origin. He is considered the founder of the Hanbali school of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence). His full name was Ahmad bin Muhammad bin Hanbal Abu `Abd Allah al-Shaybani. Shayban or Banu Shaybah is Ibn Hanbal's tribe. It is an Arabic tribe located in Arabia and it still exists in Saudi Arabia.
Ahmad ibn Hanbal was born at Merv, in Khorasan in 780. Ibn Hanbal's family was of Arabic origin and they spoke Arabic. He started his career by learning jurisprudence (fiqh) under the celebrated Hanafi judge Abu Yusuf, the renowned student and companion of Abu Hanifah. He then discontinued his studies with Abu Yusuf in the pursuit of hadith, travelling around the Caliphate, at the age of 16. It is said that as a student he highly impressed his teachers. Ibn al-Jawzi states that Ibn Hanbal had 414 hadith masters whom he narrated from. Imam al-Shafi’i was one of Ibn Hanbal's teachers with whom he had a mutual respect.
Ibn Hanbal did not content himself with merely seeking knowledge. He also acted, by making jihad, performing the guard duty at Islamic frontiers (ribat) and making hajj five times in his life, twice on foot.
Nevertheless, Ibn Hanbal did spend 40 years of his life in the pursuit of knowledge, and only thereafter did he assume the position of a mufti. By this time, he had mastered six or seven Islamic disciplines, according to al-Shafi'i. He became a leading authority in hadith and left a colossal hadith encyclopaedia, al-Musnad, as a living proof of his proficiency and devotion to this science. He is also remembered as a leading, and the most balanced, critic of hadith in his time. Ibn Hanbal became a principal specialist in jurisprudence, benefitting from some of the famous early jurists, such as Abu Hanifah, Malik ibn Anas, al-Shafi'i, and many others. His learning, piety and unswerving faithfulness to traditions gathered a host of disciples and admirers around him. He further improvised and developed upon previous schools, becoming the founder of a new independent school of jurisprudence, known as the Hanbali school. Some scholars, such as Qutaiba ibn Sa’id, noted that if Ibn Hanbal had witnessed the age of Sufyan al-Thawri, Malik, al-Awza’i and Laith ibn Sa’d, he would have surpassed them all. Despite being bilingual, he became an expert in the Arabic language, poetry, and grammar.
The Caliph Al-Ma'mun subjected scholars to severe persecution at the behest of the Mu'tazili theologians, most notably Bishr al-Marrisi and Ahmad ibn Abi Du’ad, mainly to establish the notion that God created the Qur'an as a physical entity (rather than saying that the Qur'an is God's speech in an indescribable way, as held by the orthodox view).
Almost all of the scholars in Baghdad acknowledged the creation-of-Qur'an doctrine, with the notable exceptions of Ibn Hanbal and Muhammad ibn Nuh. This greatly pained and angered Ibn Hanbal, so that he boycotted some of the great traditionists for their acknowledgement and often refused to narrate hadith from them. Amongst those boycotted were a close companion and a colleague of Ibn Hanbal, Yahya ibn Ma’in, about whom it is said that Ibn Hanbal refused to speak to him until he died.
Ahmad ibn Hanbal and Muhammad ibn Nuh were also put to the test on the order of al-Ma’mun, but they refused to acknowledge the literal creation of the Qur'an as created like the other of Allah's creatures. Consequently, they were dispatched in irons to be dealt with by al-Ma’mun himself. On the way, Ibn Hanbal supplicated to Allah to prevent him from meeting al-Ma’mun. His prayer was answered in the sudden death of al-Ma’mun.
Due to the death of al-Ma'mun, both Ibn Hanbal and Muhammad ibn Nuh were sent back. Muhammad ibn Nuh passed away on their return journey, and there was none to prepare his funeral, pray over, and bury him except Ahmad ibn Hanbal.
The policy endorsing the created-Qur'an premise was continued by al-Mu'tasim (who is reported to have had Ibn Hanbal flogged) and by al-Wathiq (who banished Ibn Hanbal from Baghdad).
This was ended, however, by al-Mutawakkil who, unlike his predecessors, had the utmost respect and admiration for the Sunni school. Promptly after assuming the position as Caliph, he sent orders throughout the Caliphate to put an immediate end to all discussions regarding the Quran, released all the prisoners of faith, dismissed the Mu’tazili judges, and more significantly deported the chief investigator of the inquisition, Ahmad ibn Abi Du’ad along with his family. He further ordered that the Mu’tazili judges responsible for the inquisition be cursed from the pulpits, by name. Al-Mutawakkil is said to have treated Ibn Hanbal in a special way with great respect.
After Ibn Hanbal turned 77, he was struck with severe illness and fever, and became very weak. However, he never complained about his infirmity and pain. Nevertheless, after hearing of his illness, masses flocked to his door. The ruling family also showed the desire to pay him a visit, and to this end sought his permission. However, due to his desire to remain independent of any influence from the authority, Ahmad denied them access.
Ahmad ibn Hanbal died in Baghdad in Rabi' al-Awwal, 241 AH (Friday, July 31, 855). The news of his death quickly spread far and wide in the city and the people flooded the streets to attend his funeral. One of the rulers, upon hearing the news, sent burial shrouds along with perfumes to be used for the funeral. However, respecting Ibn Hanbal’s wishes, his sons refused the offering and instead used a burial shroud prepared by his female servant. Moreover, his sons took care not to use water from their homes to wash the body, as Ibn Hanbal had refused to utilise any of their resources because they had accepted the offerings of the ruler.
After preparing his funeral, his sons prayed over him, along with around 200 members of the ruling family, while the streets were teeming with both men and women, awaiting the funeral procession. The funeral was then brought out and the multitudes continued to pray over him outdoors, before and after his burial at his grave. According to the Tarjamatul Imam, over 800,000 men and 60,000 women attended the funeral of Ahmad ibn Hanbal.
Ibn Hanbal, Ahmad see Ahmad ibn Hanbal
Ibn Hanbal see Ahmad ibn Hanbal
Ahmad bin Hanbal see Ahmad ibn Hanbal
Ahmed ibn Hanbal see Ahmad ibn Hanbal
Ahmad bin Muhammad bin Hanbal Abu `Abd Allah al-Shaybani see Ahmad ibn Hanbal
Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780 - 855 C.C.) was an important Muslim scholar and theologian born in Khorasan to a family of Arab origin. He is considered the founder of the Hanbali school of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence). His full name was Ahmad bin Muhammad bin Hanbal Abu `Abd Allah al-Shaybani. Shayban or Banu Shaybah is Ibn Hanbal's tribe. It is an Arabic tribe located in Arabia and it still exists in Saudi Arabia.
Ahmad ibn Hanbal was born at Merv, in Khorasan in 780. Ibn Hanbal's family was of Arabic origin and they spoke Arabic. He started his career by learning jurisprudence (fiqh) under the celebrated Hanafi judge Abu Yusuf, the renowned student and companion of Abu Hanifah. He then discontinued his studies with Abu Yusuf in the pursuit of hadith, travelling around the Caliphate, at the age of 16. It is said that as a student he highly impressed his teachers. Ibn al-Jawzi states that Ibn Hanbal had 414 hadith masters whom he narrated from. Imam al-Shafi’i was one of Ibn Hanbal's teachers with whom he had a mutual respect.
Ibn Hanbal did not content himself with merely seeking knowledge. He also acted, by making jihad, performing the guard duty at Islamic frontiers (ribat) and making hajj five times in his life, twice on foot.
Nevertheless, Ibn Hanbal did spend 40 years of his life in the pursuit of knowledge, and only thereafter did he assume the position of a mufti. By this time, he had mastered six or seven Islamic disciplines, according to al-Shafi'i. He became a leading authority in hadith and left a colossal hadith encyclopaedia, al-Musnad, as a living proof of his proficiency and devotion to this science. He is also remembered as a leading, and the most balanced, critic of hadith in his time. Ibn Hanbal became a principal specialist in jurisprudence, benefitting from some of the famous early jurists, such as Abu Hanifah, Malik ibn Anas, al-Shafi'i, and many others. His learning, piety and unswerving faithfulness to traditions gathered a host of disciples and admirers around him. He further improvised and developed upon previous schools, becoming the founder of a new independent school of jurisprudence, known as the Hanbali school. Some scholars, such as Qutaiba ibn Sa’id, noted that if Ibn Hanbal had witnessed the age of Sufyan al-Thawri, Malik, al-Awza’i and Laith ibn Sa’d, he would have surpassed them all. Despite being bilingual, he became an expert in the Arabic language, poetry, and grammar.
The Caliph Al-Ma'mun subjected scholars to severe persecution at the behest of the Mu'tazili theologians, most notably Bishr al-Marrisi and Ahmad ibn Abi Du’ad, mainly to establish the notion that God created the Qur'an as a physical entity (rather than saying that the Qur'an is God's speech in an indescribable way, as held by the orthodox view).
Almost all of the scholars in Baghdad acknowledged the creation-of-Qur'an doctrine, with the notable exceptions of Ibn Hanbal and Muhammad ibn Nuh. This greatly pained and angered Ibn Hanbal, so that he boycotted some of the great traditionists for their acknowledgement and often refused to narrate hadith from them. Amongst those boycotted were a close companion and a colleague of Ibn Hanbal, Yahya ibn Ma’in, about whom it is said that Ibn Hanbal refused to speak to him until he died.
Ahmad ibn Hanbal and Muhammad ibn Nuh were also put to the test on the order of al-Ma’mun, but they refused to acknowledge the literal creation of the Qur'an as created like the other of Allah's creatures. Consequently, they were dispatched in irons to be dealt with by al-Ma’mun himself. On the way, Ibn Hanbal supplicated to Allah to prevent him from meeting al-Ma’mun. His prayer was answered in the sudden death of al-Ma’mun.
Due to the death of al-Ma'mun, both Ibn Hanbal and Muhammad ibn Nuh were sent back. Muhammad ibn Nuh passed away on their return journey, and there was none to prepare his funeral, pray over, and bury him except Ahmad ibn Hanbal.
The policy endorsing the created-Qur'an premise was continued by al-Mu'tasim (who is reported to have had Ibn Hanbal flogged) and by al-Wathiq (who banished Ibn Hanbal from Baghdad).
This was ended, however, by al-Mutawakkil who, unlike his predecessors, had the utmost respect and admiration for the Sunni school. Promptly after assuming the position as Caliph, he sent orders throughout the Caliphate to put an immediate end to all discussions regarding the Quran, released all the prisoners of faith, dismissed the Mu’tazili judges, and more significantly deported the chief investigator of the inquisition, Ahmad ibn Abi Du’ad along with his family. He further ordered that the Mu’tazili judges responsible for the inquisition be cursed from the pulpits, by name. Al-Mutawakkil is said to have treated Ibn Hanbal in a special way with great respect.
After Ibn Hanbal turned 77, he was struck with severe illness and fever, and became very weak. However, he never complained about his infirmity and pain. Nevertheless, after hearing of his illness, masses flocked to his door. The ruling family also showed the desire to pay him a visit, and to this end sought his permission. However, due to his desire to remain independent of any influence from the authority, Ahmad denied them access.
Ahmad ibn Hanbal died in Baghdad in Rabi' al-Awwal, 241 AH (Friday, July 31, 855). The news of his death quickly spread far and wide in the city and the people flooded the streets to attend his funeral. One of the rulers, upon hearing the news, sent burial shrouds along with perfumes to be used for the funeral. However, respecting Ibn Hanbal’s wishes, his sons refused the offering and instead used a burial shroud prepared by his female servant. Moreover, his sons took care not to use water from their homes to wash the body, as Ibn Hanbal had refused to utilise any of their resources because they had accepted the offerings of the ruler.
After preparing his funeral, his sons prayed over him, along with around 200 members of the ruling family, while the streets were teeming with both men and women, awaiting the funeral procession. The funeral was then brought out and the multitudes continued to pray over him outdoors, before and after his burial at his grave. According to the Tarjamatul Imam, over 800,000 men and 60,000 women attended the funeral of Ahmad ibn Hanbal.
Ibn Hanbal, Ahmad see Ahmad ibn Hanbal
Ibn Hanbal see Ahmad ibn Hanbal
Ahmad bin Hanbal see Ahmad ibn Hanbal
Ahmed ibn Hanbal see Ahmad ibn Hanbal
Ahmad bin Muhammad bin Hanbal Abu `Abd Allah al-Shaybani see Ahmad ibn Hanbal
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Hanbalites
Hanbalites (in Arabic, Hanabila; in singular form, Hanbali). Followers of the Sunni school of theology, law and morality which grew up from the teaching of Ahmad ibn Hanbal. Hanbalism is the youngest of the four orthodox schools of law in Sunni Islam and it is based on a system of law and theology decidedly traditionalist in orientation. Hanbalism recognizes no other sources than the Qur’an and the Sunna of the Prophet. It is hostile to speculative theology (in Arabic, kalam) and to esoteric Sufism.While not rejecting reason altogether as a source of law, the Hanbali school sought vigorously to circumscribe its scope, emphasizing rather the Qur’an and the sunna as the primary sources of law. Among the Sunni schools of law, Hanbalism was closest to that of the Shafi’is, differing from it mainly in the role assigned to reason. Under the Shi‘a Buyids, Hanbalism became a politico-religious opposition party in Baghdad, contributing decisively to Sunni restoration, as is clear from the works of many Hanbali theologians of this period. The final two centuries of the caliphate in Baghdad (1061-1258) are the golden age of Hanbalism. Some of the great Hanbalites of this epoch were ‘Abd al-Rahman ibn al-Jawzi, Ibn Aqil (d. 1120), Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani (d. 1166), and Ibn al-Jauzi (d.1200).
Under the Bahri Mamelukes, Hanbalism remained very active in Syria and Palestine, the most famous Hanbalite then being Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328). It lost some of its importance in Syria and Palestine under the Circassian Mamelukes, and was not favored by the Ottomans, who gave pre-eminence to Hanafism. In the eighteenth century, under Ottoman rule, Shaykh Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab won over to Hanbalism the amir Muhammad ibn Sa‘ud, the founder of the al-Sa‘ud dynasty of Saudi Arabia. Through the writings of Ibn Taymiyya and the efforts of the Wahhabi movement in the eighteenth century, Hanbali influences made their way to India and Southeast Asia, where even today they continue to be felt.
Hanabila see Hanbalites
Hanbali see Hanbalites
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Ibn Hazm
Abū Muḥammad ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad ibn Saʿīd ibn Ḥazm (sometimes with al-Andalusī aẓ-Ẓāhirī as well) (November 7, 994 – August 15, 1064) was an Andalusian-Arab philosopher, litterateur, psychologist, historian, jurist and theologian born in Córdoba, present-day Spain. He was a leading proponent of the Zahiri school of Islamic thought and produced a reported 400 works of which only 40 still survive, covering a range of topics such as Islamic jurisprudence, logic, history, ethics, comparative religion, and theology, as well as The Ring of the Dove, on the art of love.
Ibn Hazm was born into a notable family. His grandfather Sa'id and his father Ahmad both held high positions in the court of the Umayyad Caliph Hisham II and were said to be of Persian descent. Other scholars, however, believe that Iberian converts adopted such genealogies to better identify with the Arabs. Some contend that there is evidence for a Christian Iberian family background of Ibn Hazm going back to Manta Lisham (near Sevilla).
Ibn Hazm served as a minister in the Umayyad government, under the Caliphs of Córdoba, and was known to have worked under Al-Mansur Ibn Abi Aamir, Hajib (Grand Vizier) to the last of the Ummayad caliphs, Hisham III. After the death of the grand vizier al-Muzaffar in 1008, however, the Caliphate of Cordoba became embroiled in a civil war that lasted until 1031 resulting in its collapse and the emergence of many smaller states called Taifas. Ibn Hazm's father died in 1012 and Ibn Hazm continued to support the Umayyads, for which he was frequently imprisoned. By 1031, Ibn Hazm retreated to his family estate at Manta Lisham and began to express his activist convictions in the literary form.
According to a saying of the period, "the tongue of Ibn Hazm was a twin brother to the sword of al-Hajjaj" (a famous 7th century general and governor of Iraq) and he became so frequently quoted that the phrase “Ibn Hazm said” became proverbial.
He opposed the allegorical interpretation of religious texts, preferring instead a grammatical and syntactical interpretation of the Qur'an. He granted cognitive legitimacy only to revelation and sensation and considered deductive reasoning insufficient in legal and religious matters. He did much to revitalize the Zahiri madhhab, which denied the legitimacy of legal rulings based upon qiyas (analogy) and focused upon the literal meanings of legal injunctions in the Qur'an and hadith. Many of his rulings differed from those of his Zahiri predecessors, and consequently Ibn Hazm's followers are sometimes described as comprising a distinct madhhab.
A list of the works by Ibn Hazm include the following:
* Al Kitab al-Muhallā bi'l Athār (The Book Ornamented with traditions), the only existing book of his legal rulings
* Ihkam Al Ahkam fi Usul al Ahkam, usul al fiqh.
* Mukhtasar al-Muhalla li Ibn Hazm, an abridgment of Ibn Hazm's fiqh manual.
* Ṭawq al-Ḥamāmah (The Dove's Necklace or The Ring of the Dove)
In classical Arabic literary tradition, the dove represented love, or romance, while the ring refers to a necklace. In essence, it is the "necklace of love". The book is meant to adorn one's love. It is inspired by 'ishq (defined by Hakim Bey as "crazed, hopeless passion"), and treats equally of desire both for males and females, but cautions the reader against breaking religious injunctions and praises remaining chaste.
Ibn Hazm also wrote more than ten books on medicine.
Among his translated works are:
* Al-Akhlaq wa al-Siyar fi Mudawat al-Nufus (Morals and Right Conduct in the Healing of Souls") [9]
* Maratib al-`Ulum ("The Categories of the Sciences")
* Al-Mujalla
* Al-Fisal fi al-Milal wa al-Ahwa' wa al-Nihal ("The Separator Concerning Religions, Heresies, and Sects"). [10]
Abū Muḥammad ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad ibn Saʿīd ibn Ḥazm (sometimes with al-Andalusī aẓ-Ẓāhirī as well) (November 7, 994 – August 15, 1064) was an Andalusian-Arab philosopher, litterateur, psychologist, historian, jurist and theologian born in Córdoba, present-day Spain. He was a leading proponent of the Zahiri school of Islamic thought and produced a reported 400 works of which only 40 still survive, covering a range of topics such as Islamic jurisprudence, logic, history, ethics, comparative religion, and theology, as well as The Ring of the Dove, on the art of love.
Ibn Hazm was born into a notable family. His grandfather Sa'id and his father Ahmad both held high positions in the court of the Umayyad Caliph Hisham II and were said to be of Persian descent. Other scholars, however, believe that Iberian converts adopted such genealogies to better identify with the Arabs. Some contend that there is evidence for a Christian Iberian family background of Ibn Hazm going back to Manta Lisham (near Sevilla).
Ibn Hazm served as a minister in the Umayyad government, under the Caliphs of Córdoba, and was known to have worked under Al-Mansur Ibn Abi Aamir, Hajib (Grand Vizier) to the last of the Ummayad caliphs, Hisham III. After the death of the grand vizier al-Muzaffar in 1008, however, the Caliphate of Cordoba became embroiled in a civil war that lasted until 1031 resulting in its collapse and the emergence of many smaller states called Taifas. Ibn Hazm's father died in 1012 and Ibn Hazm continued to support the Umayyads, for which he was frequently imprisoned. By 1031, Ibn Hazm retreated to his family estate at Manta Lisham and began to express his activist convictions in the literary form.
According to a saying of the period, "the tongue of Ibn Hazm was a twin brother to the sword of al-Hajjaj" (a famous 7th century general and governor of Iraq) and he became so frequently quoted that the phrase “Ibn Hazm said” became proverbial.
He opposed the allegorical interpretation of religious texts, preferring instead a grammatical and syntactical interpretation of the Qur'an. He granted cognitive legitimacy only to revelation and sensation and considered deductive reasoning insufficient in legal and religious matters. He did much to revitalize the Zahiri madhhab, which denied the legitimacy of legal rulings based upon qiyas (analogy) and focused upon the literal meanings of legal injunctions in the Qur'an and hadith. Many of his rulings differed from those of his Zahiri predecessors, and consequently Ibn Hazm's followers are sometimes described as comprising a distinct madhhab.
A list of the works by Ibn Hazm include the following:
* Al Kitab al-Muhallā bi'l Athār (The Book Ornamented with traditions), the only existing book of his legal rulings
* Ihkam Al Ahkam fi Usul al Ahkam, usul al fiqh.
* Mukhtasar al-Muhalla li Ibn Hazm, an abridgment of Ibn Hazm's fiqh manual.
* Ṭawq al-Ḥamāmah (The Dove's Necklace or The Ring of the Dove)
In classical Arabic literary tradition, the dove represented love, or romance, while the ring refers to a necklace. In essence, it is the "necklace of love". The book is meant to adorn one's love. It is inspired by 'ishq (defined by Hakim Bey as "crazed, hopeless passion"), and treats equally of desire both for males and females, but cautions the reader against breaking religious injunctions and praises remaining chaste.
Ibn Hazm also wrote more than ten books on medicine.
Among his translated works are:
* Al-Akhlaq wa al-Siyar fi Mudawat al-Nufus (Morals and Right Conduct in the Healing of Souls") [9]
* Maratib al-`Ulum ("The Categories of the Sciences")
* Al-Mujalla
* Al-Fisal fi al-Milal wa al-Ahwa' wa al-Nihal ("The Separator Concerning Religions, Heresies, and Sects"). [10]
Ibn Hazm, Abu Muhammad ‘Ali
Ibn Hazm, Abu Muhammad ‘Ali (Abu Muhammad ‘Ali ibn Hazm) (Ibn Hazm al-Andalusi) (Abū Muḥammad ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad ibn Saʿīd ibn Ḥazm) (November 7, 994 – August 15, 1064). Andalusian poet, historian, jurist, philosopher and theologian. Born at Cordoba, he was one of the greatest thinkers of Arab-Muslim civilization and one of greatest figures of eleventh century Hispano-Arab literature. He made scholarly contributions as a psychologist and moralist, as a theoretician of language, as a jurist -- he is the most outstanding representative of the Zahiri school -- and as a historian of religious ideas.
Ibn Hazm was a grandson of a Spanish convert to Islam. He was chief minister at Cordoba, but was forced to withdraw from public life by the odium that his bitter attacks on his theological opponents aroused.
Ibn Hazm was perhaps the greatest figure in eleventh century Hispano-Arab prose literature. He began as a poet, but he is now best known for his book on chivalrous love, Tauq al-Hamama (“The Ring of the Dove” or “The Necklace of the Dove”) [Tawq al-hamamah – “The Ring of the Turtle Dove”]. Tauq al-Hamama is a vivid picture of life in Muslim Spain, describing some of the more intimate experiences of Ibn Hazm himself.
Ibn Hazm belonged to the Zahiri school of Islam. This was a strict sect which interpreted the Qur‘an literally, and which recognized no precedent except that based either on the Qur‘an or on the well-attested customs of the Prophet. Ibn Hazm did, however, write an important book on comparative religion, The Book of Religious and Philosophical Sects, in which he examined and refuted the claims made by the various non-Muslim faiths. In The Book of Religious and Philosophical Sects, Ibn Hazm dealt at length with inconsistencies in the Old and New Testaments. Ibn Hazm attacked many of the most revered authorities of Islam which led to his books being publicly burned in Seville.
Ibn Hazm was renowned for his analysis of language, logical precision, psychological and moral insight, and social cynicism. He made distinctive contributions as a poet, historian of religions, philosopher, theologian, and jurist. The school of law which he espoused, the Zahiri, was a minority tradition in Andalusia, where Malikite jurists prevailed. To bolster the legitimacy of the Zahiri viewpoint, Ibn Hazm tried to redefine fiqh only on the basis of the Qur‘an and hadith (prophetic traditions), rejecting the enormous spate of legal decisions derived from consensus -- ijma -- and individual interpretation -- ijtihad.
Ibn Hazm’s Kitab al-fisal wa‘l-nihal is a brilliant, painstakingly accurate summation of different viewpoints, though the ideas of some opponents are occasionally dismissed with a disdain bordering on mockery and ridicule.
Ibn Hazm sparked both admiration and condemnation after his death. Among his admirers was the noted Sufi theorist, Ibn ‘Arabi.
A list of works by Ibn Hazm includes:
* Al Kitab al-Muhallā bi'l Athār (The Book Ornamented with traditions), the only existing book of his legal rulings
* Ihkam Al Ahkam fi Usul al Ahkam, usul al fiqh.
* Mukhtasar al-Muhalla li Ibn Hazm, an abridgment of Ibn Hazm's fiqh manual
* Ṭawq al-Ḥamāmah (The Dove's Necklace or The Ring of the Dove)
In classical Arabic literary tradition, the dove represented love, or romance, while the ring refers to a necklace. In essence, it is the "necklace of love". The book is meant to adorn one's love. It is inspired by 'ishq (defined by Hakim Bey as "crazed, hopeless passion"), and treats equally of desire both for males and females, but cautions the reader against breaking religious injunctions and praises remaining chaste.
Ibn Hazm also wrote more than ten books on medicine.
Among his translated works are:
* Al-Akhlaq wa al-Siyar fi Mudawat al-Nufus (Morals and Right Conduct in the Healing of Souls")
* Maratib al-`Ulum ("The Categories of the Sciences")
* Al-Mujalla
* Al-Fisal fi al-Milal wa al-Ahwa' wa al-Nihal ("The Separator Concerning Religions, Heresies, and Sects").
Abu Muhammad 'Ali ibn Hazm see Ibn Hazm, Abu Muhammad ‘Ali
Ibn Hazm al-Andalusi see Ibn Hazm, Abu Muhammad ‘Ali
Abū Muḥammad ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad ibn Saʿīd ibn Ḥazm see Ibn Hazm, Abu Muhammad ‘Ali
Ibn Hazm, Abu Muhammad ‘Ali (Abu Muhammad ‘Ali ibn Hazm) (Ibn Hazm al-Andalusi) (Abū Muḥammad ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad ibn Saʿīd ibn Ḥazm) (November 7, 994 – August 15, 1064). Andalusian poet, historian, jurist, philosopher and theologian. Born at Cordoba, he was one of the greatest thinkers of Arab-Muslim civilization and one of greatest figures of eleventh century Hispano-Arab literature. He made scholarly contributions as a psychologist and moralist, as a theoretician of language, as a jurist -- he is the most outstanding representative of the Zahiri school -- and as a historian of religious ideas.
Ibn Hazm was a grandson of a Spanish convert to Islam. He was chief minister at Cordoba, but was forced to withdraw from public life by the odium that his bitter attacks on his theological opponents aroused.
Ibn Hazm was perhaps the greatest figure in eleventh century Hispano-Arab prose literature. He began as a poet, but he is now best known for his book on chivalrous love, Tauq al-Hamama (“The Ring of the Dove” or “The Necklace of the Dove”) [Tawq al-hamamah – “The Ring of the Turtle Dove”]. Tauq al-Hamama is a vivid picture of life in Muslim Spain, describing some of the more intimate experiences of Ibn Hazm himself.
Ibn Hazm belonged to the Zahiri school of Islam. This was a strict sect which interpreted the Qur‘an literally, and which recognized no precedent except that based either on the Qur‘an or on the well-attested customs of the Prophet. Ibn Hazm did, however, write an important book on comparative religion, The Book of Religious and Philosophical Sects, in which he examined and refuted the claims made by the various non-Muslim faiths. In The Book of Religious and Philosophical Sects, Ibn Hazm dealt at length with inconsistencies in the Old and New Testaments. Ibn Hazm attacked many of the most revered authorities of Islam which led to his books being publicly burned in Seville.
Ibn Hazm was renowned for his analysis of language, logical precision, psychological and moral insight, and social cynicism. He made distinctive contributions as a poet, historian of religions, philosopher, theologian, and jurist. The school of law which he espoused, the Zahiri, was a minority tradition in Andalusia, where Malikite jurists prevailed. To bolster the legitimacy of the Zahiri viewpoint, Ibn Hazm tried to redefine fiqh only on the basis of the Qur‘an and hadith (prophetic traditions), rejecting the enormous spate of legal decisions derived from consensus -- ijma -- and individual interpretation -- ijtihad.
Ibn Hazm’s Kitab al-fisal wa‘l-nihal is a brilliant, painstakingly accurate summation of different viewpoints, though the ideas of some opponents are occasionally dismissed with a disdain bordering on mockery and ridicule.
Ibn Hazm sparked both admiration and condemnation after his death. Among his admirers was the noted Sufi theorist, Ibn ‘Arabi.
A list of works by Ibn Hazm includes:
* Al Kitab al-Muhallā bi'l Athār (The Book Ornamented with traditions), the only existing book of his legal rulings
* Ihkam Al Ahkam fi Usul al Ahkam, usul al fiqh.
* Mukhtasar al-Muhalla li Ibn Hazm, an abridgment of Ibn Hazm's fiqh manual
* Ṭawq al-Ḥamāmah (The Dove's Necklace or The Ring of the Dove)
In classical Arabic literary tradition, the dove represented love, or romance, while the ring refers to a necklace. In essence, it is the "necklace of love". The book is meant to adorn one's love. It is inspired by 'ishq (defined by Hakim Bey as "crazed, hopeless passion"), and treats equally of desire both for males and females, but cautions the reader against breaking religious injunctions and praises remaining chaste.
Ibn Hazm also wrote more than ten books on medicine.
Among his translated works are:
* Al-Akhlaq wa al-Siyar fi Mudawat al-Nufus (Morals and Right Conduct in the Healing of Souls")
* Maratib al-`Ulum ("The Categories of the Sciences")
* Al-Mujalla
* Al-Fisal fi al-Milal wa al-Ahwa' wa al-Nihal ("The Separator Concerning Religions, Heresies, and Sects").
Abu Muhammad 'Ali ibn Hazm see Ibn Hazm, Abu Muhammad ‘Ali
Ibn Hazm al-Andalusi see Ibn Hazm, Abu Muhammad ‘Ali
Abū Muḥammad ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad ibn Saʿīd ibn Ḥazm see Ibn Hazm, Abu Muhammad ‘Ali
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Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad
Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad (Muhammad ibn Ishaq) (Muhammad ibn Ishaq ibn Yasar) (c.704-767). One of the main authorities on the biography of the Prophet. His work, known as Life of the Prophet was edited by Ibn Hisham.
Muhammad ibn Ishaq ibn Yasar is known as the author of the first complete biography -- the first complete sira -- of Muhammad. Ibn Ishaq was born in Medina into a non-Arab Muslim family of Traditionists. Ibn Ishaq collected traditions, stories, and poems about Muhammad from many sources and, though renowned for his knowledge, came itno conflict with more conservative authorities.
In Baghdad, under the patronage of the ‘Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur, Ibn Ishaq wrote the biography of Muhammad as a school text for the prince al-Mahdi. The work was modeled on the Bible, the history of the world from creation to Muhammad comprising the “Old Testament” portion, and the life of Muhammad comprising the “New Testament” portion. Ibn Ishaq’s work portrays Muhammad as the new Abraham, Moses, Jacob, and particularly Jesus, among others, although it is reasonably historical for Muhammad’s Medinan career. Abridged by Ibn Hisham, Ibn Ishaq’s biography became the most popular biography of Muhammad in the Muslim world.
Muḥammad ibn Isḥaq ibn Yasār, or simply Ibn Isḥaq (meaning "the son of Isaac") was an Arab Muslim historian and hagiographer. He collected oral traditions that formed the basis of the first biography of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. This biography is usually called Sirat Rasul Allah ("Life of God's Messenger").
Ibn Isḥaq was born circa 704 C.C., in Medina. He was the grandson of a man, Yasār, who had been captured in one of Khalid ibn al-Walid's campaigns and taken to Medina as a slave. He became the slave of Ḳays b. Makhrama b. al-Muṭṭalib b. ʿAbd Manāf b. Ḳuṣayy and, having accepted Islam, was manumitted and became his mawlā , thus acquiring the nisba al-Muṭṭalibī. Yasār's three sons, Mūsā, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, and Isḥāq, were all known as transmitters of akhbār, who collected and recounted tales of the past. Isḥāq married the daughter of another mawlā and from this marriage Ibn Isḥāq was born.
There are no details of his early life, but in view of the family nature of early akhbār and ḥadīth transmission, it was natural that he should follow in the footsteps of his father and uncles and become specialized in these branches of knowledge. In 737, he arrived in Alexandria and studied under Yazīd b. Abī Ḥabīb. Ibn Isḥāq returned to Medina from Egypt, before finally travelling eastwards towards what is now ‘Irāq. There, the new Abbasid dynasty, having overthrown the Umayyad caliphs, was establishing a new capital at Baghdad. Ibn Isḥaq moved to the capital and likely found patrons in the new regime. He died in Baghdad around 767 C.C.
Ibn Isḥaq wrote several works, none of which survive. Apart from the Sīra an-nabawiyya he is credited with a Kitāb al-Ḵhulafāʾ, which al-Umawwī related to him and a book of Sunan.
His collection of traditions about the life of Muhammad also called Sīrat Nabawiyya or Sīrah Rasūl Allāh, survives mainly in two sources:
* an edited copy, or recension, of his work by his student al-Bakka'i, as further edited by Ibn Hisham. Al-Bakka'i's work has perished and only Ibn Hisham's has survived, in copies.
* an edited copy, or recension, prepared by his student Salamah ibn Fadl al-Ansari. This also has perished, and survives only in the copious extracts to be found in the volumimous works of historian al-Tabari's.
* fragments of several other recensions.
Muhammad ibn Ishaq see Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad
Muhammad ibn Ishaq ibn Yasar see Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad
Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad (Muhammad ibn Ishaq) (Muhammad ibn Ishaq ibn Yasar) (c.704-767). One of the main authorities on the biography of the Prophet. His work, known as Life of the Prophet was edited by Ibn Hisham.
Muhammad ibn Ishaq ibn Yasar is known as the author of the first complete biography -- the first complete sira -- of Muhammad. Ibn Ishaq was born in Medina into a non-Arab Muslim family of Traditionists. Ibn Ishaq collected traditions, stories, and poems about Muhammad from many sources and, though renowned for his knowledge, came itno conflict with more conservative authorities.
In Baghdad, under the patronage of the ‘Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur, Ibn Ishaq wrote the biography of Muhammad as a school text for the prince al-Mahdi. The work was modeled on the Bible, the history of the world from creation to Muhammad comprising the “Old Testament” portion, and the life of Muhammad comprising the “New Testament” portion. Ibn Ishaq’s work portrays Muhammad as the new Abraham, Moses, Jacob, and particularly Jesus, among others, although it is reasonably historical for Muhammad’s Medinan career. Abridged by Ibn Hisham, Ibn Ishaq’s biography became the most popular biography of Muhammad in the Muslim world.
Muḥammad ibn Isḥaq ibn Yasār, or simply Ibn Isḥaq (meaning "the son of Isaac") was an Arab Muslim historian and hagiographer. He collected oral traditions that formed the basis of the first biography of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. This biography is usually called Sirat Rasul Allah ("Life of God's Messenger").
Ibn Isḥaq was born circa 704 C.C., in Medina. He was the grandson of a man, Yasār, who had been captured in one of Khalid ibn al-Walid's campaigns and taken to Medina as a slave. He became the slave of Ḳays b. Makhrama b. al-Muṭṭalib b. ʿAbd Manāf b. Ḳuṣayy and, having accepted Islam, was manumitted and became his mawlā , thus acquiring the nisba al-Muṭṭalibī. Yasār's three sons, Mūsā, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, and Isḥāq, were all known as transmitters of akhbār, who collected and recounted tales of the past. Isḥāq married the daughter of another mawlā and from this marriage Ibn Isḥāq was born.
There are no details of his early life, but in view of the family nature of early akhbār and ḥadīth transmission, it was natural that he should follow in the footsteps of his father and uncles and become specialized in these branches of knowledge. In 737, he arrived in Alexandria and studied under Yazīd b. Abī Ḥabīb. Ibn Isḥāq returned to Medina from Egypt, before finally travelling eastwards towards what is now ‘Irāq. There, the new Abbasid dynasty, having overthrown the Umayyad caliphs, was establishing a new capital at Baghdad. Ibn Isḥaq moved to the capital and likely found patrons in the new regime. He died in Baghdad around 767 C.C.
Ibn Isḥaq wrote several works, none of which survive. Apart from the Sīra an-nabawiyya he is credited with a Kitāb al-Ḵhulafāʾ, which al-Umawwī related to him and a book of Sunan.
His collection of traditions about the life of Muhammad also called Sīrat Nabawiyya or Sīrah Rasūl Allāh, survives mainly in two sources:
* an edited copy, or recension, of his work by his student al-Bakka'i, as further edited by Ibn Hisham. Al-Bakka'i's work has perished and only Ibn Hisham's has survived, in copies.
* an edited copy, or recension, prepared by his student Salamah ibn Fadl al-Ansari. This also has perished, and survives only in the copious extracts to be found in the volumimous works of historian al-Tabari's.
* fragments of several other recensions.
Muhammad ibn Ishaq see Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad
Muhammad ibn Ishaq ibn Yasar see Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad
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Ibn Jubayr
Ibn Jubayr (Abū al-Ḥusayn Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn Jubayr al-Kinānī) (b. September 1, 1145, Valencia, Emirate of Balansiya [Valencia] — d. November 29, 1217, Alexandria, Egypt). Andalusian traveller and writer. His journey to Mecca, executed between 1183 and 1185, brought him to Sardinia, Sicily, Crete, Alexandria, Cairo, Jidda, Mecca, Medina, Kufa, Baghdad, Mosul, Aleppo and Damascus. A second journey lasted from 1189 to 1191, but of this he left no account. The Travel-book of the first journey is the first and one of the best of its kind. It served as a model to many other pilgrims, and many later authors have borrowed from it. The work has been translated into English, French and Italian.
Ibn Jubayr, in full Abū al-Ḥusayn Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn Jubayr al-Kinānī, was the son of a civil servant. Ibn Jubayr became secretary to the Almohad governor of Granada, but he left that post for his pilgrimage, which was begun in 1183 and ended with his return to Granada in 1185. He wrote a lively account of this journey, Riḥlah.
Rihlah is a valuable source for the history of the time, containing memorable descriptions of his voyages across the Mediterranean in Genoese ships, his unhappy encounters with both Christian and Muslim customs collectors, the Cairo of Saladin, his trip up the Nile to Upper Egypt, and across the Red Sea to Jidda, Mecca, and Medina, and of his return by way of Iraq, Syria, and Sicily. Ibn Jubayr journeyed east twice more without recording his travels. The second trip lasted from 1189 to 1191. The third, begun in 1217, was ended by his death in Egypt.
Ibn Jubayr (b. September 1, 1145 CC, Valencia, Taifa of Valencia (now Province of Valencia, Spain – d. November 29, 1217 CC, Alexandria, Ayyubid dynasty, Egypt), also written Ibn Jubair, Ibn Jobair, and Ibn Djubayr, was an Arab geographer, traveller and poet from al-Andalus. His travel chronicle describes the pilgrimage he made to Mecca from 1183 to 1185, in the years preceding the Third Crusade. His chronicle describes Saladin's domains in Egypt and the Levant which he passed through on his way to Mecca. Further, on his return journey, he passed through Christian Sicily, which had been recaptured from the Muslims only a century before, and he made several observations on the hybrid polyglot culture that flourished there.
Ibn Jubayr was born in 1145 CC in Valencia, Spain, to an Arab family of the Kinanah tribe. He was a descendant of 'Abd al-Salam ibn Jabayr, who, in 740 CC, had accompanied an army sent by the Caliph of Damascus to put down a Berber uprising in his Spanish provinces. Ibn Jubayr studied in the town of Xativa, where his father worked as a civil servant. He later became secretary to the Almohad governor of Granada.
Ibn Jubayr does not explain the reason for his travels. It has been suggested that as secretary for the ruler of Granada in 1182, he was threatened into drinking seven cups of wine. Seized by remorse, the ruler then filled seven cups of gold Dinara, which he gave him. To expiate his godless act, although it had been forced upon him, Ibn Jubayr decided to perform the duty of Hajj to Mecca. Robert Irwin has recently argued that dubious provenance aside, this seems an unlikely explanation, as Hajj was rarely penitential.
He left Granada on February 3, 1183, accompanied by a physician from the city.
Ibn Jubayr left Granada and crossed over the Strait of Gibraltar to Ceuta, then under Muslim rule. He boarded a Genoese ship on February 24, 1183, and set sail for Alexandria. His sea journey took him past the Balearic Islands and then across to the west coast of Sardinia. Offshore, he heard of the fate of 80 Muslim men, women and children who had been abducted from North Africa and were being sold into slavery. Between Sardinia and Sicily, the ship ran into a severe storm. He said of the Italians and Muslims on board who had experience of the sea that "all agreed that they had never in their lives seen such a tempest". After the storm, the ship went on past Sicily and Crete and turned south and crossed over to the North African coast. He arrived in Alexandria on March 26, 1183.
Everywhere that Ibn Jubayr traveled in Egypt, he was full of praise for the new Sunni ruler, Saladin. For example, he said, "There is no congregational or ordinary mosque, no mausoleum built over a grave, nor hospital, nor theological college, where the bounty of the Sultan does not extend to all who seek shelter or live in them". He pointed out that when the Nile did not flood enough, Saladin remitted the land tax from the farmers. He also said that "such is his (Saladin's) justice, and the safety he has brought to his high-roads that men in his lands can go about their affairs by night and from its darkness apprehend no awe that should deter them". Ibn Jubayr, on the other hand, was very disparaging of the previous Shi'a dynasty of the Fatimids.
Of Cairo, Ibn Jubayr noted, the colleges and hostels that were erected for students and pious men of other lands by Saladin. In those colleges, students found lodging and tutors to teach them the sciences that they desired as well as also allowances to cover their needs. The care of the sultan also granted them baths, hospitals, and the appointment of doctors, who could even come to visit them at their place of stay who would be answerable for their cure. One of Saladin's other generous acts was that every day, 2000 loaves of bread were distributed to the poor. Also impressing Ibn Jubayr in the city was the number of mosques, estimated at between 8,000 and 12,000, with four or five of them often in the same street.
Upon arrival at Alexandria, Ibn Jubayr was angered by the customs officials who insisted on taking zakat from the pilgrims, regardless of whether or not they were obliged to pay. In the city, he visited the Lighthouse of Alexandria, which was then still standing, and he was amazed by its size and splendor.
Ibn Jubayr was also impressed by the free colleges, hostels for foreign students, baths and hospitals in the city. They were paid for by awqaf and taxes on the city's Jews and Christians. He noted that there were between 8,000 and 12,000 mosques in Alexandria. After a stay of eight days, he set off to Cairo.
Ibn Jubayr reached Cairo three days later. In the city, he visited the cemetery at al-Qarafah, which contained the graves of many important figures in the history of Islam. He noted that under Saladin, the walls of the citadel were being extended by the Mamluks with the object of reinforcing the entire city from any future Siege by Crusaders. Another work that he saw being built was a bridge over the Nile, which would be high enough not to be submerged in the annual flooding of the river. He saw a spacious free hospital, which was divided into three sections: for men, women and the insane. Ibn Jubayr saw the pyramids and the Sphinx, but he was unaware for whom they had been built. He also saw a device that was used to measure the height of the Nile flood.
In Sicily, at the very late stages of his travels (December 1184 to January 1185), Ibn Jubayr recounted other experiences. He commented on the activity of the volcanoes:
Also impressing Ibn Jubayr was the city of Palermo, which he described as follows:
Ibn Jubayr also travelled to Medina, Mecca, Damascus, Mosul, Acre and Baghdad. At Basra, Ibn Jubayr saw how Indian timber was carefully used to make Lateen sail ships. He returned in 1185 by way of Sicily. His path was not without troubles, including a shipwreck. On both occasions, he travelled on Genoese ships.
Frequently quoted is Ibn Jubayr's famous description of Muslims prospering under the Christian Crusaders' Kingdom of Jerusalem:
We moved from Tibnin - may God destroy it - at daybreak on Monday. Our way lay through continuous farms and ordered settlements, whose inhabitants were all Muslims, living comfortably within the Franks.... They surrender half their crops to the Franks at harvest time, and pay as well a poll-tax of one dinar and five qirat for each person. Other than that they are not interfered with, save for a light tax on the fruit of their trees. The houses and all their effects are left to their full possession. All the coastal cities occupied by the Franks are managed in this fashion, their rural districts, the villages and farms, belong to the Muslims. But their hearts have been seduced, for they observe how unlike them in ease and comfort are their brethren in the Muslim regions under their (Muslim) governors. This is one of the misfortunes afflicting the Muslims. The Muslim community bewails the injustice of the landlord of its own faith, and applauds the conduct of its opponent and enemy, the Frankish landlord, and is accustomed to justice from him.
Ibn Jubayr traveled to the East on two further occasions (1189–1191 and 1217) without leaving an account. He died on November 29, 1217 in Alexandria, during the second trip.
Ibn Jubayr provides a highly-detailed and graphic description of the places he visited during his travels. The book differs from other contemporary accounts in not being a mere collection of toponyms and descriptions of monuments but containing observation of geographical details as well as cultural, religious and political matters. Particularly interesting are his notes about the declining faith of his fellow Muslims in Palermo after the recent Norman conquest and about what he perceived as the Muslim-influenced customs of King William II of Sicily under the Norman-Arab-Byzantine culture.
His writing is a foundation of the genre of work called Rihla, or the creative travelogue. It is a mix of personal narrative, description of the areas traveled and personal anecdotes.
Ibn Jubayr's travel chronicle served as a model for later authors, some of whom copied from it without attribution. Ibn Juzayy, who wrote the account of Ibn Battuta's travels in around 1355 CC, copied passages that had been written 170 years earlier by Ibn Jubayr that described Damascus, Mecca, Medina and other places in the Middle East. Passages copied from Ibn Jubayr are also found in the writings of al-Sharishi, al-Abdari and al-Maqrizi.
A surviving copy of Ibn Jubayr's manuscript is preserved in the collection of the Leiden Universtiy Library. The 210-page manuscript was produced in Mecca in 875 AH (1470 CC) and appears to have been written at high speed: diacritic marks are often missing, words are omitted and there is confusion between certain pairs of letters. The complete Arabic text was first published in 1852 by the orientalist William Wright. An updated edition was published in 1907 by Michael Jan de Goeje. A translation into Italian by Celestino Schiaparelli was published in 1906, a translation into English by Ronald Broadhurst was published in 1952, and a translation into French by Maurice Gaudefroy-Demombynes appeared in three volumes between 1949 and 1956.
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Ibn Khaldun, ‘Abd al-Rahman
Ibn Khaldun, ‘Abd al-Rahman (‘Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun) (Abu Zayd Abd-ar-Rahman ibn Khaldun) (‘Abd al-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun) (Ibn Khaldoun) (Abū Zayd ‘Abdu r-Raḥman bin Muḥammad bin Khaldūn al-Hadrami) (May 27, 1332 - March 17, 1406). Historian, sociologist and philosopher of Tunis. He is one of the greatest intellects in the history of mankind..
Born on May 27, 1332, in Tunis (now in Tunisia), of a Spanish-Arab family, Ibn Khaldun held court positions in what are today Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and in Granada, Spain, and was twice imprisoned. Carefully educated, and having escaped the Black Death, he went to Fez in 1350, then the most brilliant capital of the Muslim West. He was put in prison for two years for having changed his loyalty in the turbulent political situation of the day (around 1360). His friendship with the vizier Ibn al-Khatib ensured him an honorable reception in Granada in 1362, from where he also came in contact with the Christian world.
Abu ‘Abd Allah, the amir of Bougie (in Arabic, Bijaya), meanwhile had regained his amirate and appointed Ibn Khaldun as his chamberlain. After the death on the battlefield of the amir, Ibn Khaldun handed over the town to the conqueror, Abu ‘Abd Allah’s cousin Abu‘l-‘Abbas, amir of Constantine, and entered his service. But, in time, he resigned and went to Biskra where he attempted to lead the life of a man of letters. However, not able to resist intrigue, he was continuously on the move, trying to back the winner although there was no winner in the Muslim West of the fourteenth century. Over time, he came to be regarded with mixed feelings never entirely free from suspicion. He left for Tlemcen, where the sultan once again wanted his services. Pretending to accept, he fled to live in the castle of Ibn Salama (1375-1379), near the present-day Frenda in Algeria.
In 1375, he went into seclusion near modern Frenda, Algeria, taking four years to compose his monumental Muqaddimah, the introductory volume to his Kitab al-Ibar (Universal History). Ibn Khaldun’s fame rests primarily on his Muqaddimah -- his Introduction. It was the author’s intention to write an introduction to the historian’s craft and present it as an encyclopedic synthesis of the methodological and cultural knowledge necessary to produce a truly scientific work. The central point is the study of the symptoms of, and the nature of, the ills from which civilizations die. His Moralistic Examples (from History) is important for the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, especially for the Muslim West and particularly for the Berbers.
The Kitab al-Ibar is a valuable guide to the history of Muslim North Africa and the Berbers. Its six history volumes, however, are overshadowed by the immense significance of the Muqaddimah. In it, Ibn Khaldun outlined a philosophy of history and theory of society that are unprecedented in ancient and medieval writing and that are closely reflected in modern sociology. Societies, Ibn Khaldun believed, are held together by the power of social cohesiveness, which can be augmented by the unifying force of religion. Social change and the rise and fall of societies follow laws that can be empirically discovered and that reflect climate and economic activity as well as other realities.
In 1379, Ibn Khaldun returned to Tunis where he lived as a teacher and scholar. However, enmity from Ibn ‘Arafa, the representative of the Maliki school in Hafsid Tunisia, made Ibn Khaldun decide to leave the Muslim West. The sultan granted him permission for the pilgrimage, and in 1382, he left for Cairo.
In 1382, on pilgrimage to Mecca, Ibn Khaldun was offered a chair at the famous Islamic university of al-Azhar by the sultan of Cairo, who also appointed him judge (qadi) of the Maliki rite of Islam. In Cairo, Ibn Khaldun taught at al-Azhar and was appointed Maliki chief judge, but intrigues forced him to resign. After his pilgrimage, he was placed at the head of the khanqah of Baybars, the most important Sufi convent in Egypt.
Appointed judge again, and dismissed after a year, in 1400, he was obliged to accompany the Burji Mameluke al-Nasir Faraj on his expedition to relieve Damascus, which was threatened by Timur. Left in the besieged town, he played a role in its surrender to the feared conqueror. Having witnessed the horrors of the burning and sacking of Damascus, he returned to Cairo where he was well received. He died during his sixth office as judge. He died on March 17, 1406.
Ibn Khaldun is universally recognized as the founder and father of sociology and sciences of history. He is best known for his famous Muqaddimah (Prolegomena). Abd al-Rahman ibn Muhammad, generally known as Ibn Khaldun after a remote ancestor, was born in Tunis in 1332 to an upper class family that had migrated from Seville in Muslim Spain. His ancestors were Yemenite Arabs who settled in Spain at the very beginning of Muslim rule in the eighth century.
During his formative years, Ibn Khaldun experienced his family’s active participation in the intellectual life of the city, and to a lesser degree, its political life. He was accustomed to frequent visits to his family by the political and intellectual leaders of western Islamic states (i.e., North Africa and Spain), many of whom took refuge there. Ibn Khaldun was educated at Tunis and Fez, and studied the Qur‘an, the Prophet Muhammad’s hadith and other branches of Islamic studies such as Dialectical theology and the shari‘a (Islamic Law of Jurisprudence, according to the Maliki School). He also studied Arabic literature, philosophy, mathematics and astronomy. While still in his teens, Ibn Khaldun entered the service of the Egyptian ruler Sultan Barquq.
Ibn Khaldun led a very active political life before he finally settled down to write his well-known masterpiece of history. He worked for rulers in Tunis and Fez (in Morocco), Granada (in Muslim Spain) and Biaja (in North Africa). In 1375, Ibn Khaldun crossed over to Muslim Spain (Granada) as a tired and embittered man solely for the reasons of escaping the turmoil in North Africa. Unfortunately, because of his political past, the ruler of Granada expelled him. He then went back to Algeria to spend four years in seclusion in Qalat ibn Salama, a small village. It was in Qalat that he wrote the Muqaddimah, the first volume of his world history that won him an immortal place among historians, sociologists and philosophers. The uncertainty of his career continued because of unrest in North Africa. Finally, he settled in Egypt where he spent his last twenty-four years. Theere he lived a life of fame and respect, marked by his appointment as the Chief Malakite Judge. He also lectured at the Al-Azhar University.
Ibn Khaldun had to move from one court to another, sometimes at his own will, but often forced to do so by plotting rivals or despotic rulers. He learned much from his encounters with rulers, ambassadors, politicians and scholars from North Africa, Muslim Spain, Egypt and other parts of the Muslim world.
Ibn Khaldun’s fame rests on the Muqaddimah which forms the first systematic treatise on the philosophy of history. The Muqaddimah (Introduction) is a masterpiece in literature on philosophy of history and sociology. In the Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun sees man as social animal, conditioned by his surroundings and the climate he lives in. Man starts as a nomad of pure and simple manners, loyal to his tribe and eventually settles down to an urbanized, sedentary life. This is both an advance and a regression, for although the arts and sciences can flourish only in urban communities, the townsman loses the virtues of the nomad, and his tribal spirit turns into national patriotism. Nations become corrupted by luxury, and are eventually swept away by a ruder, more vigorous people. As more and more men are contained within city walls, its ruler has to devote more and more attention to keeping the peace and maintaining justice; as his realm grows greater, it needs more and more the unifying force of religion.
Events in North African history gave Ibn Khaldun the theory that a dynasty normally lasts four generations. Ibn Khaldun concludes his Muqaddimah with an account of the various Muslim systems of government, and a short survey of the arts and sciences, of education, magic and literature, which constitutes a summary of the extent of knowledge at that time.
The main theme of the The Book of Examples, and the Muqaddimah, seeks to identify psychological, economic, environmental and social facts that contribute to the advancement of human civilization and the currents of history. Ibn Khaldun analyzed the dynamics of group relationships and showed how group feelings, al-‘Asabiyya, produce the ascent of a new civilization and political power. He identified an almost rhythmic repetition of the rise and fall in human civilization, and analyzed factors contributing to it.
Ibn Khaldun’s revolutionary views have attracted the attention of Muslim scholars as well as many Western thinkers. In his study of history, Ibn Khaldun was a pioneer in subjecting historical reports to the two basic criteria of reason and social and physical laws. He pointed out the following four essential points in the study and analysis of historical reports: (1) relating events to each other through cause and effect, (2) drawing analogy between past and present, (3) taking into consideration the effect of the environment, and (4) taking into consideration the effect of inherited and economic conditions.
Ibn Khaldun pioneered the critical study of history. He provided an analytical study of human civilization, its beginning, factors contributing to its development and the causes of decline. Thus, he founded a new science: the science of social development or sociology, as we call it today. Ibn Khaldun writes, “I have written on history a book in which I discussed the causes and effects of the development of states and civilizations, and I followed in arranging the material of the book an unfamiliar method, and I followed in writing it a strange and innovative way.” By selecting his particular method of analysis, he created two new sciences: historiology and sociology simultaneously.
Ibn Khaldun argued that history is subject to universal laws and states the criterion for historical truth: The rule for distinguishing what is true from what is false in history is based on its possibility or impossibility: That is to say, we must examine human society and discriminate between the characteristics which are essential and inherent in its nature and those which are accidental and need not be taken into account, recognizing further those which cannot possibly belong to it. If we do this, we have a rule for separating historical truth from error by means of demonstrative methods that admits of no doubt. It is a genuine touchstone by which historians may verify whatever they relate.
Ibn Khaldun remarked that the role of religion is in unifying the Arabs and bringing progress and development to their society. He pointed out that injustice, despotism, and tyranny are clear signs of the downfall of the state. Ibn Khaldun points out that metaphysical philosophy has one advantage only, which is to sharpen one’s wits. He states that the knowledge of the metaphysical world particularly in matters of belief can only be derived from revelation.
Ibn Khaldun remarked that the role of religion is in unifying the Arabs and bringing progress and development to their society. He pointed out that injustice, despotism, and tyranny are clear signs of the downfall of the state. Ibn Khaldun points out that metaphysical philosophy has one advantage only, which is to sharpen one’s wits. He states that the knowledge of the metaphysical world particularly in matters of belief can only be derived from revelation.
Ibn Khaldun was a pioneer in education. He remarked that suppression and use of force are enemies to learning, and that they lead to laziness, lying and hypocrisy. He also pointed out to the necessity of good models and practice for the command of good linguistic habits. Ibn Khaldun lived in the beginning period of the decline of Muslim civilization. This experience prompted him to spend most of his efforts on collecting, summarizing and memorization of the body of knowledge left by the ancestors. He vehemently attacked those unhealthy practices that created stagnation and stifling of creativity by Muslim scholars.
Ibn Khaldun emphasized the necessity of subjecting both social and historical phenomena to scientific and objective analysis. He noted that those phenomena were not the outcome of chance, but were controlled by laws of their own, laws that had to be discovered and applied in the study of society, civilization and history. He remarked that historians have committed errors in their study of historical events, due to three major factors: (1) Their ignorance of the natures of civilization and people; (2) their bias and prejudice; and (3) their blind acceptance of reports given by others.
Ibn Khaldun pointed out that true progress and development comes through correct understanding of history, and correct understanding can only be achieved by observing the following three main points. First, a historian should not be in any way prejudiced for or against any one or any idea. Second, he needs to conform and scrutinize the reported information. One should learn all one could about the historians whose reports one hears or reads, and one should check their morals and trustworthiness before accepting their reports. Finally, one should not limit history to the study of political and military news or to news about rulers and states. For history should include the study of all social, religious, and economic conditions.
The Muqaddimah was already recognized as an important work during the lifetime of Ibn Khaldun. His other volumes on world history Kitab al-I‘bar deal with the history of Arabs, contemporary Muslim rulers, contemporary European rulers, ancient history of Arabs, Jews, Greeks, Romans, Persians, Islamic History, Egyptian history and North African history, especially that of Berbers and tribes living in the adjoining areas. The last volume deals largely with the events of his own life and is known as Al-Tasrif. As with his other books, it was also written from an analytical perspective and initiated a new tradition in the art of writing autobiography. He also wrote a book on mathematics which is not extant.
Ibn Khaldun’s influence on the subject of history, philosophy of history, sociology, political science and education has remained paramount down to our times. He is also recognized as the leader in the art of autobiography, a renovator in the fields of education and educational psychology and in Arabic writing stylistics. His books have been translated into many languages, both in the East and the West, and have inspired subsequent development of these sciences. Indeed, some commentators consider Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah as superior in scholarship to Machiavelli’s The Prince, a Renaissance classic written a century later.
'Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun see Ibn Khaldun, ‘Abd al-Rahman
Abu Zayd Abd-ar-Rahman ibn Khaldun see Ibn Khaldun, ‘Abd al-Rahman
'Abd al-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun see Ibn Khaldun, ‘Abd al-Rahman
Ibn Khaldoun see Ibn Khaldun, ‘Abd al-Rahman
Abū Zayd ‘Abdu r-Raḥman bin Muḥammad bin Khaldūn Al-Hadrami see Ibn Khaldun, ‘Abd al-Rahman
Haldrami, Abū Zayd ‘Abdu r-Raḥman bin Muḥammad bin Khaldūn al- see Ibn Khaldun, ‘Abd al-Rahman
Ibn Khaldun, ‘Abd al-Rahman (‘Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun) (Abu Zayd Abd-ar-Rahman ibn Khaldun) (‘Abd al-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun) (Ibn Khaldoun) (Abū Zayd ‘Abdu r-Raḥman bin Muḥammad bin Khaldūn al-Hadrami) (May 27, 1332 - March 17, 1406). Historian, sociologist and philosopher of Tunis. He is one of the greatest intellects in the history of mankind..
Born on May 27, 1332, in Tunis (now in Tunisia), of a Spanish-Arab family, Ibn Khaldun held court positions in what are today Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and in Granada, Spain, and was twice imprisoned. Carefully educated, and having escaped the Black Death, he went to Fez in 1350, then the most brilliant capital of the Muslim West. He was put in prison for two years for having changed his loyalty in the turbulent political situation of the day (around 1360). His friendship with the vizier Ibn al-Khatib ensured him an honorable reception in Granada in 1362, from where he also came in contact with the Christian world.
Abu ‘Abd Allah, the amir of Bougie (in Arabic, Bijaya), meanwhile had regained his amirate and appointed Ibn Khaldun as his chamberlain. After the death on the battlefield of the amir, Ibn Khaldun handed over the town to the conqueror, Abu ‘Abd Allah’s cousin Abu‘l-‘Abbas, amir of Constantine, and entered his service. But, in time, he resigned and went to Biskra where he attempted to lead the life of a man of letters. However, not able to resist intrigue, he was continuously on the move, trying to back the winner although there was no winner in the Muslim West of the fourteenth century. Over time, he came to be regarded with mixed feelings never entirely free from suspicion. He left for Tlemcen, where the sultan once again wanted his services. Pretending to accept, he fled to live in the castle of Ibn Salama (1375-1379), near the present-day Frenda in Algeria.
In 1375, he went into seclusion near modern Frenda, Algeria, taking four years to compose his monumental Muqaddimah, the introductory volume to his Kitab al-Ibar (Universal History). Ibn Khaldun’s fame rests primarily on his Muqaddimah -- his Introduction. It was the author’s intention to write an introduction to the historian’s craft and present it as an encyclopedic synthesis of the methodological and cultural knowledge necessary to produce a truly scientific work. The central point is the study of the symptoms of, and the nature of, the ills from which civilizations die. His Moralistic Examples (from History) is important for the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, especially for the Muslim West and particularly for the Berbers.
The Kitab al-Ibar is a valuable guide to the history of Muslim North Africa and the Berbers. Its six history volumes, however, are overshadowed by the immense significance of the Muqaddimah. In it, Ibn Khaldun outlined a philosophy of history and theory of society that are unprecedented in ancient and medieval writing and that are closely reflected in modern sociology. Societies, Ibn Khaldun believed, are held together by the power of social cohesiveness, which can be augmented by the unifying force of religion. Social change and the rise and fall of societies follow laws that can be empirically discovered and that reflect climate and economic activity as well as other realities.
In 1379, Ibn Khaldun returned to Tunis where he lived as a teacher and scholar. However, enmity from Ibn ‘Arafa, the representative of the Maliki school in Hafsid Tunisia, made Ibn Khaldun decide to leave the Muslim West. The sultan granted him permission for the pilgrimage, and in 1382, he left for Cairo.
In 1382, on pilgrimage to Mecca, Ibn Khaldun was offered a chair at the famous Islamic university of al-Azhar by the sultan of Cairo, who also appointed him judge (qadi) of the Maliki rite of Islam. In Cairo, Ibn Khaldun taught at al-Azhar and was appointed Maliki chief judge, but intrigues forced him to resign. After his pilgrimage, he was placed at the head of the khanqah of Baybars, the most important Sufi convent in Egypt.
Appointed judge again, and dismissed after a year, in 1400, he was obliged to accompany the Burji Mameluke al-Nasir Faraj on his expedition to relieve Damascus, which was threatened by Timur. Left in the besieged town, he played a role in its surrender to the feared conqueror. Having witnessed the horrors of the burning and sacking of Damascus, he returned to Cairo where he was well received. He died during his sixth office as judge. He died on March 17, 1406.
Ibn Khaldun is universally recognized as the founder and father of sociology and sciences of history. He is best known for his famous Muqaddimah (Prolegomena). Abd al-Rahman ibn Muhammad, generally known as Ibn Khaldun after a remote ancestor, was born in Tunis in 1332 to an upper class family that had migrated from Seville in Muslim Spain. His ancestors were Yemenite Arabs who settled in Spain at the very beginning of Muslim rule in the eighth century.
During his formative years, Ibn Khaldun experienced his family’s active participation in the intellectual life of the city, and to a lesser degree, its political life. He was accustomed to frequent visits to his family by the political and intellectual leaders of western Islamic states (i.e., North Africa and Spain), many of whom took refuge there. Ibn Khaldun was educated at Tunis and Fez, and studied the Qur‘an, the Prophet Muhammad’s hadith and other branches of Islamic studies such as Dialectical theology and the shari‘a (Islamic Law of Jurisprudence, according to the Maliki School). He also studied Arabic literature, philosophy, mathematics and astronomy. While still in his teens, Ibn Khaldun entered the service of the Egyptian ruler Sultan Barquq.
Ibn Khaldun led a very active political life before he finally settled down to write his well-known masterpiece of history. He worked for rulers in Tunis and Fez (in Morocco), Granada (in Muslim Spain) and Biaja (in North Africa). In 1375, Ibn Khaldun crossed over to Muslim Spain (Granada) as a tired and embittered man solely for the reasons of escaping the turmoil in North Africa. Unfortunately, because of his political past, the ruler of Granada expelled him. He then went back to Algeria to spend four years in seclusion in Qalat ibn Salama, a small village. It was in Qalat that he wrote the Muqaddimah, the first volume of his world history that won him an immortal place among historians, sociologists and philosophers. The uncertainty of his career continued because of unrest in North Africa. Finally, he settled in Egypt where he spent his last twenty-four years. Theere he lived a life of fame and respect, marked by his appointment as the Chief Malakite Judge. He also lectured at the Al-Azhar University.
Ibn Khaldun had to move from one court to another, sometimes at his own will, but often forced to do so by plotting rivals or despotic rulers. He learned much from his encounters with rulers, ambassadors, politicians and scholars from North Africa, Muslim Spain, Egypt and other parts of the Muslim world.
Ibn Khaldun’s fame rests on the Muqaddimah which forms the first systematic treatise on the philosophy of history. The Muqaddimah (Introduction) is a masterpiece in literature on philosophy of history and sociology. In the Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun sees man as social animal, conditioned by his surroundings and the climate he lives in. Man starts as a nomad of pure and simple manners, loyal to his tribe and eventually settles down to an urbanized, sedentary life. This is both an advance and a regression, for although the arts and sciences can flourish only in urban communities, the townsman loses the virtues of the nomad, and his tribal spirit turns into national patriotism. Nations become corrupted by luxury, and are eventually swept away by a ruder, more vigorous people. As more and more men are contained within city walls, its ruler has to devote more and more attention to keeping the peace and maintaining justice; as his realm grows greater, it needs more and more the unifying force of religion.
Events in North African history gave Ibn Khaldun the theory that a dynasty normally lasts four generations. Ibn Khaldun concludes his Muqaddimah with an account of the various Muslim systems of government, and a short survey of the arts and sciences, of education, magic and literature, which constitutes a summary of the extent of knowledge at that time.
The main theme of the The Book of Examples, and the Muqaddimah, seeks to identify psychological, economic, environmental and social facts that contribute to the advancement of human civilization and the currents of history. Ibn Khaldun analyzed the dynamics of group relationships and showed how group feelings, al-‘Asabiyya, produce the ascent of a new civilization and political power. He identified an almost rhythmic repetition of the rise and fall in human civilization, and analyzed factors contributing to it.
Ibn Khaldun’s revolutionary views have attracted the attention of Muslim scholars as well as many Western thinkers. In his study of history, Ibn Khaldun was a pioneer in subjecting historical reports to the two basic criteria of reason and social and physical laws. He pointed out the following four essential points in the study and analysis of historical reports: (1) relating events to each other through cause and effect, (2) drawing analogy between past and present, (3) taking into consideration the effect of the environment, and (4) taking into consideration the effect of inherited and economic conditions.
Ibn Khaldun pioneered the critical study of history. He provided an analytical study of human civilization, its beginning, factors contributing to its development and the causes of decline. Thus, he founded a new science: the science of social development or sociology, as we call it today. Ibn Khaldun writes, “I have written on history a book in which I discussed the causes and effects of the development of states and civilizations, and I followed in arranging the material of the book an unfamiliar method, and I followed in writing it a strange and innovative way.” By selecting his particular method of analysis, he created two new sciences: historiology and sociology simultaneously.
Ibn Khaldun argued that history is subject to universal laws and states the criterion for historical truth: The rule for distinguishing what is true from what is false in history is based on its possibility or impossibility: That is to say, we must examine human society and discriminate between the characteristics which are essential and inherent in its nature and those which are accidental and need not be taken into account, recognizing further those which cannot possibly belong to it. If we do this, we have a rule for separating historical truth from error by means of demonstrative methods that admits of no doubt. It is a genuine touchstone by which historians may verify whatever they relate.
Ibn Khaldun remarked that the role of religion is in unifying the Arabs and bringing progress and development to their society. He pointed out that injustice, despotism, and tyranny are clear signs of the downfall of the state. Ibn Khaldun points out that metaphysical philosophy has one advantage only, which is to sharpen one’s wits. He states that the knowledge of the metaphysical world particularly in matters of belief can only be derived from revelation.
Ibn Khaldun remarked that the role of religion is in unifying the Arabs and bringing progress and development to their society. He pointed out that injustice, despotism, and tyranny are clear signs of the downfall of the state. Ibn Khaldun points out that metaphysical philosophy has one advantage only, which is to sharpen one’s wits. He states that the knowledge of the metaphysical world particularly in matters of belief can only be derived from revelation.
Ibn Khaldun was a pioneer in education. He remarked that suppression and use of force are enemies to learning, and that they lead to laziness, lying and hypocrisy. He also pointed out to the necessity of good models and practice for the command of good linguistic habits. Ibn Khaldun lived in the beginning period of the decline of Muslim civilization. This experience prompted him to spend most of his efforts on collecting, summarizing and memorization of the body of knowledge left by the ancestors. He vehemently attacked those unhealthy practices that created stagnation and stifling of creativity by Muslim scholars.
Ibn Khaldun emphasized the necessity of subjecting both social and historical phenomena to scientific and objective analysis. He noted that those phenomena were not the outcome of chance, but were controlled by laws of their own, laws that had to be discovered and applied in the study of society, civilization and history. He remarked that historians have committed errors in their study of historical events, due to three major factors: (1) Their ignorance of the natures of civilization and people; (2) their bias and prejudice; and (3) their blind acceptance of reports given by others.
Ibn Khaldun pointed out that true progress and development comes through correct understanding of history, and correct understanding can only be achieved by observing the following three main points. First, a historian should not be in any way prejudiced for or against any one or any idea. Second, he needs to conform and scrutinize the reported information. One should learn all one could about the historians whose reports one hears or reads, and one should check their morals and trustworthiness before accepting their reports. Finally, one should not limit history to the study of political and military news or to news about rulers and states. For history should include the study of all social, religious, and economic conditions.
The Muqaddimah was already recognized as an important work during the lifetime of Ibn Khaldun. His other volumes on world history Kitab al-I‘bar deal with the history of Arabs, contemporary Muslim rulers, contemporary European rulers, ancient history of Arabs, Jews, Greeks, Romans, Persians, Islamic History, Egyptian history and North African history, especially that of Berbers and tribes living in the adjoining areas. The last volume deals largely with the events of his own life and is known as Al-Tasrif. As with his other books, it was also written from an analytical perspective and initiated a new tradition in the art of writing autobiography. He also wrote a book on mathematics which is not extant.
Ibn Khaldun’s influence on the subject of history, philosophy of history, sociology, political science and education has remained paramount down to our times. He is also recognized as the leader in the art of autobiography, a renovator in the fields of education and educational psychology and in Arabic writing stylistics. His books have been translated into many languages, both in the East and the West, and have inspired subsequent development of these sciences. Indeed, some commentators consider Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah as superior in scholarship to Machiavelli’s The Prince, a Renaissance classic written a century later.
'Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun see Ibn Khaldun, ‘Abd al-Rahman
Abu Zayd Abd-ar-Rahman ibn Khaldun see Ibn Khaldun, ‘Abd al-Rahman
'Abd al-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun see Ibn Khaldun, ‘Abd al-Rahman
Ibn Khaldoun see Ibn Khaldun, ‘Abd al-Rahman
Abū Zayd ‘Abdu r-Raḥman bin Muḥammad bin Khaldūn Al-Hadrami see Ibn Khaldun, ‘Abd al-Rahman
Haldrami, Abū Zayd ‘Abdu r-Raḥman bin Muḥammad bin Khaldūn al- see Ibn Khaldun, ‘Abd al-Rahman
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Ibn Rushd, Abu‘l-Walid Muhammad
Ibn Rushd, Abu‘l-Walid Muhammad (Abu‘l-Walid Muhammad ibn Rushd) (Abul-Waleed Muhammad ibn Rushd) (Averroes) (1126 - December 10, 1198). Muslim philosopher, physician, Maliki jurist, and Ash'ari theologian. .
Abū 'l-Walīd Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn Muhammad ibn Rushd, better known just as Ibn Rushd, and in European literature as Averroes, was an Andalusian-Arab Muslim polymath: a master of Islamic philosophy, Islamic theology, Maliki law and jurisprudence, logic, psychology, politics, Arabic music theory, and the sciences of medicine, astronomy, geography, mathematics, physics and celestial mechanics. He was born in Córdoba, Al Andalus, modern day Spain, and died in Marrakech, modern day Morocco. His school of philosophy is known as Averroism. He has been described as the founding father of secular thought in Western Europe.
Ibn Rushd was born in Cordoba, Spain, and would spend all of his life in Muslim Spain. His father, a judge in Cordoba, instructed Ibn Rushd in Muslim jurisprudence. In his native city, he also studied theology, philosophy, and mathematics under the Arab philosopher Ibn Tufayl (d.1185) and medicine under the Arab physician Avenzoar (c.1090-1162).
Ibn Rushd was appointed judge in Seville in 1169 and in Cordoba in 1171. In 1182, he succeeded Ibn Tufayl and became chief physician to Abu Yaqub Yusuf, the Almohad caliph of Morocco and Muslim Spain (Andalusia). During the reign of Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur (1184-1199), Ibn Rushd was exiled (in 1195) because of his view that reason takes precedence over religion. He was restored to favor shortly before his death. He died in Marrakesh, from where his body was later brought to Cordoba.
Ibn Rushd’s fields of study were the Qur’anic sciences and the natural sciences, including physics, medicine, biology and astronomy, as well as theology and philosophy. Only a small number of his works in Arabic survive, the majority having been preserved in Latin and Hebrew translations.
Ibn Rushd held that metaphysical truths can be expressed in two ways: through philosophy, as represented by the views of Aristotle, and through religion, which is truth presented in a form that the ordinary person can understand. Although Ibn Rushd did not actually propound the existence of two kinds of truth, philosophical and religious, his view was interpreted in that way by Christian thinkers, who called it the theory of “double truth.”
Ibn Rushd rejected the concept of a creation of the world in the history of time. Instead, he maintained that the world has no beginning. God is the “prime mover,” the self-moved force that stimulates all motion, who transforms the potential into the actual. The individual human soul emanates from the one universal soul.
Ibn Rushd’s extensive commentaries on the works of Aristotle were translated into Latin and Hebrew and greatly influenced the Scholastic school of philosophy in medieval Europe and medieval Jewish philosophy. Ibn Rushd’s main independent work was Tahafut al-Tahafut (Incoherence of the Incoherence), a rebuttal of the attack on Neo-platonic and Aristotelian philosophy by the Islamic theologian al-Ghazzali.
In his philosophical works, Ibn Rushd attacked both Ibn Sina’s and al-Ghazzali’s solutions to major problems. Ibn Rushd’s most notable achievement, the Tahabfut al-Tahafut, was a commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Ibn Rushd was unmatched in his faithfulness to Aristotle’s original text. Many of his writings have been preserved in Latin and Hebrew as well as Arabic.
Ibn Rushd, a noted Spanish-Arab physician and astronomer as well as being a philosopher and jurist, also wrote books on medicine, astronomy, law, and grammar. He was one of the most influential thinkers of the period which has come to be known as the Middle Ages.
Ibn Rushd came from a family of Islamic legal scholars; his grandfather Abu Al-Walid Muhammad (d. 1126) was chief judge of Córdoba under the Almoravid dynasty. His father, Abu Al-Qasim Ahmad, held the same position until the coming of the Almohad dynasty in 1146.
Ibn Rushd began his career with the help of Ibn Tufail ("Aben Tofail" to the West), the author of Hayy ibn Yaqdhan and philosophic vizier of Almohad amir Abu Yaqub Yusuf. It was Ibn Tufail who introduced him to the court and to Ibn Zuhr ("Avenzoar" to the West), the great Muslim physician, who became Ibn Rushd's teacher and friend. Ibn Rushd later reported how it was also Ibn Tufail who inspired him to write his famous Aristotelian commentaries.
Ibn Rushd was also a student of Ibn Bajjah ("Avempace" to the West), another famous Islamic philosopher who greatly influenced his own Averroist thought. However, while the thought of his mentors Ibn Tufail and Ibn Bajjah were mystic to an extent, the thought of Ibn Rushd was purely rationalist. Together, the three men are considered the greatest Andalusian philosophers.
In 1160, Ibn Rushd was made Qadi (judge) of Seville and he served in many court appointments in Seville, Cordoba, and Morocco during his career. At the end of the 12th century, following the Almohads conquest of Al-Andalus, his political career was ended. Ibn Rushd's strictly rationalist views which collided with the more orthodox views of Abu Yusuf Ya'qub al-Mansur led to him banishing Ibn Rushd though he had previously appointed him as his personal physician. Ibn Rushd was not reinstated until shortly before his death. He devoted the rest of his life to his philosophical writings.
Ibn Rushd's works were spread over 20,000 pages covering a variety of different subjects, including early Islamic philosophy, logic in Islamic philosophy, Arabic medicine, Arabic mathematics, Arabic astronomy, Arabic grammar, Islamic theology, Sharia (Islamic law), and Fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence). In particular, his most important works dealt with Islamic philosophy, medicine and Fiqh. He wrote at least 67 original works, which included 28 works on philosophy, 20 on medicine, 8 on law, 5 on theology, and 4 on grammar, in addition to his commentaries on most of Aristotle's works and his commentary on Plato's The Republic.
He wrote commentaries on most of the surviving works of Aristotle. These were not based on primary sources (it is not known whether Ibn Rushd knew Greek), but rather on Arabic translations. There were three levels of commentary: the Jami, the Talkhis and the Tafsir which are, respectively, a simplified overview, an intermediate commentary with more critical material, and an advanced study of Aristotelian thought in a Muslim context. The terms are taken from
Ibn Rushd, Abu‘l-Walid Muhammad (Abu‘l-Walid Muhammad ibn Rushd) (Abul-Waleed Muhammad ibn Rushd) (Averroes) (1126 - December 10, 1198). Muslim philosopher, physician, Maliki jurist, and Ash'ari theologian. .
Abū 'l-Walīd Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn Muhammad ibn Rushd, better known just as Ibn Rushd, and in European literature as Averroes, was an Andalusian-Arab Muslim polymath: a master of Islamic philosophy, Islamic theology, Maliki law and jurisprudence, logic, psychology, politics, Arabic music theory, and the sciences of medicine, astronomy, geography, mathematics, physics and celestial mechanics. He was born in Córdoba, Al Andalus, modern day Spain, and died in Marrakech, modern day Morocco. His school of philosophy is known as Averroism. He has been described as the founding father of secular thought in Western Europe.
Ibn Rushd was born in Cordoba, Spain, and would spend all of his life in Muslim Spain. His father, a judge in Cordoba, instructed Ibn Rushd in Muslim jurisprudence. In his native city, he also studied theology, philosophy, and mathematics under the Arab philosopher Ibn Tufayl (d.1185) and medicine under the Arab physician Avenzoar (c.1090-1162).
Ibn Rushd was appointed judge in Seville in 1169 and in Cordoba in 1171. In 1182, he succeeded Ibn Tufayl and became chief physician to Abu Yaqub Yusuf, the Almohad caliph of Morocco and Muslim Spain (Andalusia). During the reign of Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur (1184-1199), Ibn Rushd was exiled (in 1195) because of his view that reason takes precedence over religion. He was restored to favor shortly before his death. He died in Marrakesh, from where his body was later brought to Cordoba.
Ibn Rushd’s fields of study were the Qur’anic sciences and the natural sciences, including physics, medicine, biology and astronomy, as well as theology and philosophy. Only a small number of his works in Arabic survive, the majority having been preserved in Latin and Hebrew translations.
Ibn Rushd held that metaphysical truths can be expressed in two ways: through philosophy, as represented by the views of Aristotle, and through religion, which is truth presented in a form that the ordinary person can understand. Although Ibn Rushd did not actually propound the existence of two kinds of truth, philosophical and religious, his view was interpreted in that way by Christian thinkers, who called it the theory of “double truth.”
Ibn Rushd rejected the concept of a creation of the world in the history of time. Instead, he maintained that the world has no beginning. God is the “prime mover,” the self-moved force that stimulates all motion, who transforms the potential into the actual. The individual human soul emanates from the one universal soul.
Ibn Rushd’s extensive commentaries on the works of Aristotle were translated into Latin and Hebrew and greatly influenced the Scholastic school of philosophy in medieval Europe and medieval Jewish philosophy. Ibn Rushd’s main independent work was Tahafut al-Tahafut (Incoherence of the Incoherence), a rebuttal of the attack on Neo-platonic and Aristotelian philosophy by the Islamic theologian al-Ghazzali.
In his philosophical works, Ibn Rushd attacked both Ibn Sina’s and al-Ghazzali’s solutions to major problems. Ibn Rushd’s most notable achievement, the Tahabfut al-Tahafut, was a commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Ibn Rushd was unmatched in his faithfulness to Aristotle’s original text. Many of his writings have been preserved in Latin and Hebrew as well as Arabic.
Ibn Rushd, a noted Spanish-Arab physician and astronomer as well as being a philosopher and jurist, also wrote books on medicine, astronomy, law, and grammar. He was one of the most influential thinkers of the period which has come to be known as the Middle Ages.
Ibn Rushd came from a family of Islamic legal scholars; his grandfather Abu Al-Walid Muhammad (d. 1126) was chief judge of Córdoba under the Almoravid dynasty. His father, Abu Al-Qasim Ahmad, held the same position until the coming of the Almohad dynasty in 1146.
Ibn Rushd began his career with the help of Ibn Tufail ("Aben Tofail" to the West), the author of Hayy ibn Yaqdhan and philosophic vizier of Almohad amir Abu Yaqub Yusuf. It was Ibn Tufail who introduced him to the court and to Ibn Zuhr ("Avenzoar" to the West), the great Muslim physician, who became Ibn Rushd's teacher and friend. Ibn Rushd later reported how it was also Ibn Tufail who inspired him to write his famous Aristotelian commentaries.
Ibn Rushd was also a student of Ibn Bajjah ("Avempace" to the West), another famous Islamic philosopher who greatly influenced his own Averroist thought. However, while the thought of his mentors Ibn Tufail and Ibn Bajjah were mystic to an extent, the thought of Ibn Rushd was purely rationalist. Together, the three men are considered the greatest Andalusian philosophers.
In 1160, Ibn Rushd was made Qadi (judge) of Seville and he served in many court appointments in Seville, Cordoba, and Morocco during his career. At the end of the 12th century, following the Almohads conquest of Al-Andalus, his political career was ended. Ibn Rushd's strictly rationalist views which collided with the more orthodox views of Abu Yusuf Ya'qub al-Mansur led to him banishing Ibn Rushd though he had previously appointed him as his personal physician. Ibn Rushd was not reinstated until shortly before his death. He devoted the rest of his life to his philosophical writings.
Ibn Rushd's works were spread over 20,000 pages covering a variety of different subjects, including early Islamic philosophy, logic in Islamic philosophy, Arabic medicine, Arabic mathematics, Arabic astronomy, Arabic grammar, Islamic theology, Sharia (Islamic law), and Fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence). In particular, his most important works dealt with Islamic philosophy, medicine and Fiqh. He wrote at least 67 original works, which included 28 works on philosophy, 20 on medicine, 8 on law, 5 on theology, and 4 on grammar, in addition to his commentaries on most of Aristotle's works and his commentary on Plato's The Republic.
He wrote commentaries on most of the surviving works of Aristotle. These were not based on primary sources (it is not known whether Ibn Rushd knew Greek), but rather on Arabic translations. There were three levels of commentary: the Jami, the Talkhis and the Tafsir which are, respectively, a simplified overview, an intermediate commentary with more critical material, and an advanced study of Aristotelian thought in a Muslim context. The terms are taken from
the names of different types of commentary on the Qur'an. It is not known whether he wrote commentaries of all three types on all the works. In most cases only one or two commentaries survive.
Ibn Rushd did not have access to any text of Aristotle's Politics. As a substitute for this, he commented on Plato's The Republic, arguing that the ideal state there described was the same as the original constitution of the Arab Caliphate, as well as the Almohad state of Ibn Tumart.
Ibn Rushd's most important original philosophical work was The Incoherence of the Incoherence (Tahafut al-tahafut), in which he defended Aristotelian philosophy against al-Ghazali's claims in The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahafut al-falasifa). Al-Ghazali argued that Aristotelianism, especially as presented in the writings of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), was self-contradictory and an affront to the teachings of Islam. Ibn Rushd's rebuttal was two-pronged. He contended both that al-Ghazali's arguments were mistaken and that, in any case, the system of Ibn Sina was a distortion of genuine Aristotelianism so that al-Ghazali was aiming at the wrong target. Other works were the Fasl al-Maqal, which argued for the legality of philosophical investigation under Islamic law, and the Kitab al-Kashf, which argued against the proofs of Islam advanced by the Ash'arite school and discussed what proofs, on the popular level, should be used instead.
Ibn Rushd was also a highly-regarded legal scholar of the Maliki school. Perhaps his best-known work in this field is Bidāyat al-Mujtahid wa Nihāyat al-Muqtaṣid, a textbook of Maliki doctrine in a comparative framework.
In medicine, Ibn Rushd wrote a medical encyclopedia called Kulliyat ("Generalities", i.e. general medicine), known in its Latin translation as Colliget. He also made a compilation of the works of Galen (129-200) and wrote a commentary on The Law of Medicine (Qanun fi 't-tibb) of Avicenna (Ibn Sina) (980-1037).
Jacob Anatoli translated several of the works of Averroes from Arabic into Hebrew in the 1200s. Many of them were later translated from Hebrew into Latin by Jacob Mantino and Abraham de Balmes. Other works were translated directly from Arabic into Latin by Michael Scot. Many of his works in logic and metaphysics have been permanently lost, while others, including some of the longer Aristotelian commentaries, have only survived in Latin or Hebrew translation, not in the original Arabic. The fullest version of his works is in Latin, and forms part of the multi-volume Juntine edition of Aristotle published in Venice 1562-1574.
According to Ibn Rushd, there is no conflict between religion and philosophy, rather that they are different ways of reaching the same truth. He believed in the eternity of the universe. He also held that the soul is divided into two parts, one individual and one divine; while the individual soul is not eternal, all humans at the basic level share one and the same divine soul. Ibn Rushd has two kinds of Knowledge of Truth. The first being his knowledge of truth of religion being based in faith and thus could not be tested, nor did it require training to understand. The second knowledge of truth is philosophy, which was reserved for an elite few who had the intellectual capacity to undertake this study.
The concept of "existence precedes essence", a key foundational concept of existentialism, can also be found in the works of Ibn Rushd, as a reaction to Ibn Sina's concept of "essence precedes existence". Ibn Rushd's most famous original philosophical work was The Incoherence of the Incoherence, a rebuttal to Al-Ghazali's The Incoherence of the Philosophers. In medieval Europe, his school of philosophy known as Averroism exerted a strong influence on Christian philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas and Jewish philosophers such as Gersonides and Maimonides.
At the age of 25, Ibn Rushd conducted astronomical observations near Marrakech, Morocco, during which he discovered a previously unobserved star.
In astronomical theory, Ibn Rushd rejected the eccentric deferents introduced by Ptolemy. He rejected the Ptolemaic model and instead argued for a strictly concentric model of the universe. Ibn Rushd also argued that the Moon is opaque and obscure, and has some parts which are thicker than others, with the thicker parts receiving more light from the Sun than the thinner parts of the Moon. He also gave one of the first descriptions on sunspots.
As a Qadi (judge), Ibn Rushd wrote the Bidāyat al-Mujtahid wa Nihāyat al-Muqtasid, a Maliki legal treatise dealing with Sharia (law) and Fiqh (jurisprudence) which, according to Al-Dhahabi in the 13th century, was considered the best treatise ever written on the subject. Ibn Rushd's summary of the opinions (fatwa) of previous Islamic jurists on a variety of issues has continued to influence Islamic scholars to the present day, notably Javed Ahmad Ghamidi. Ibn Rushd also claimed that women in Islam were equal to men in all respects and possessed equal capacities to shine in peace and in war.
Ibn Rushd discussed Islamic economic jurisprudence, particularly the concept of Riba (usury). He reported that Ibn ‘Abbas, a sahaba (companion) of Muhammad, did not accept Riba al-Fadl (interest in excess) because, according to him, the Prophet Muhammad had clarified that there was no Riba except in credit. He also discussed the role of Islamic criminal jurisprudence in the Islamic dietary laws in regards to the consumption of alcohol. He stated that physical punishment for alcoholic consumption was not originally established as part of the Sharia in Muhammad's time but was later decided by the Shura (consultive council) of the Rashidun Caliphate.
In his Islamic philosophy of law, Ibn Rushd also discussed the concept of natural law. In his treatise on Justice and Jihad and his commentary on Plato's Republic, he writes that the human mind can know of the unlawfulness of killing and stealing and thus of the five maqasid or higher intents of the Islamic Sharia or to protect religion, life, property, offspring, and reason. The concept of natural law entered the mainstream of Western culture through his Aristotelian commentaries, influencing the subsequent Averroist movement and the writings of Thomas Aquinas.
Ibn Rushd was the last major Muslim logician from Al-Andalus. He is known for writing the most elaborate commentaries on Aristotelian logic.
As a physician, Ibn Rushd wrote twenty treatises on Arabic medicine, including a seven-volume medical encyclopedia entitled Kitābu’l Kulliyāt fī al-Tibb (General Rules of Medicine), better known as Colliget in Latin. This encyclopedic work was completed at some time before 1162 and elaborated on physiology, general pathology, diagnosis, medical material, hygiene and general therapeutics. He argued that no one can suffer from smallpox twice, and fully understood the function of the retina. However, his Colliget was largely overshadowed by the earlier medical encyclopedias, Continents by Muhammad ibn Zakariya ar-Razi (Rhazes) and The Canon of Medicine by Ibn Sina (Avicenna). As a result, Ibn Rushd's fame as a physician was eclipsed by his own fame as a philosopher. His Kulliyāt was translated into Latin by the Jewish translator Bonacosa in the late 13th century and again by Syphorien Champier in circa 1537, and it was also translated into Hebrew twice. It has been noted that the prototypes for the physician-philosophers that predominated in Spain were Ibn Zuhr (Avenzoar) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes).
Ibn Rushd discussed the topic of human dissection and autopsy. Although he never undertook human dissection, he was aware of it being carried out by some of his contemporaries, such as Ibn Zuhr (Avenzoar), and appears to have supported the practice.
In urology, Ibn Rushd identified the issues of sexual dysfunction and erectile dysfunction, and was among the first to prescribe medication for the treatment of these problems. He used several methods of therapy for this issue, including the single drug method where a tested drug is prescribed, and a combination method of either a drug or food. Most of these drugs were oral medication, though a few patients were also treated through topical or transurethral means.
In neurology and neuroscience, Ibn Rushd suggested the existence of Parkinson's disease, and in ophthalmology and optics, he was the first to attribute photoreceptor properties to the retina. In his Colliget, he was also the first to suggest that the principal organ of sight might be the arachnoid membrane (aranea). His work led to much discussion in 16th century Europe over whether the principal organ of sight is the traditional Galenic crystalline humor or the Averroist aranea, which in turn led to the discovery that the retina is the principal organ of sight.
As an Arabic music theorist, Ibn Rushd contributed to music theory with his commentary on Aristotle's On the Soul, where Ibn Rushd dealt perspicuously with the theory of sound. This text was translated into Latin by Michael Scot (d. 1232).
In Ibn Rushd's commentary on Aristotle's Physics, he commented on the theory of motion proposed by Ibn Bajjah (Avempace), and also made his own contributions to physics, particularly mechanics. Ibn Rushd was the first to define and measure force as the rate at which work is done in changing the kinetic condition of a material body and the first to correctly argue that the effect and measure of force is change in the kinetic condition of a materially resistant mass. It seems he was also the first to introduce the notion that bodies have a (non-gravitational) inherent resistance to motion into physics, subsequently first dubbed "inertia" by Kepler.
For Ibn Rushd, the human soul is a separate substance ontologically identical with the active intellect, and when this active intellect is embodied in an individual human it is the material intellect. The material intellect is analogous to prime matter, in that it is pure potentiality able to receive universal forms. As such, the human mind is a composite of the material intellect and the passive intellect, which is the third element of the intellect. The passive intellect is identified with the imagination, which is the sense-connected finite and passive faculty that receives particular sensual forms. When the material intellect is actualized by information received, it is described as the speculative (habitual) intellect. As the speculative intellect moves towards perfection, having the active intellect as an object of thought, it becomes the acquired intellect. In that, it is aided by the active intellect, perceived in the way Aristotle had taught, to acquire intelligible thoughts. The idea of the soul's perfection occurring through having the active intellect as a greater object of thought is introduced elsewhere, and its application to religious doctrine is seen. In the Tahafut, Ibn Rushd speaks of the soul as a faculty that comes to resemble the focus of its intention, and when its attention focuses more upon eternal and universal knowledge, it becomes more like the eternal and universal. As such, when the soul perfects itself, it becomes like our intellect.
Ibn Rushd succeeded in providing an explanation of the human soul and intellect that did not involve an immediate transcendent agent. This opposed the explanations found among the Neoplatonists, allowing a further argument for rejecting of Neoplatonic emanation theories.
Ibn Rushd is most famous for his translations and commentaries of Aristotle's works, which had been mostly forgotten in the West. Before 1150, only a few translated works of Aristotle existed in Latin Europe, and they were not studied much or given much credence by monastic scholars. It was through the Latin translations of Ibn Rushd's work beginning in the 12th century that the legacy of Aristotle became more widely known in the medieval West.
In medieval Europe, Ibn Rushd's school of philosophy, known as Averroism, exerted a strong influence on Christian philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas and Jewish philosophers such as Gersonides and Maimonides (Ibn Maymun). Despite negative reactions from Jewish Talmudists and the Christian clergy, Ibn Rushd's writings were taught at the University of Paris and other medieval universities, and Averroism remained the dominant school of thought in Europe through to the 16th century.
Ibn Rushd's argument in The Decisive Treatise provided a justification for the emancipation of science and philosophy from official Ash'ari theology. Accordingly, Averroism has been regarded as a precursor to modern secularism, and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) has been described as one of the founding fathers of secular thought in Western Europe.
Ibn Rushd's work on Aristotle spans almost three decades, and he wrote commentaries on almost all of Aristotle's work except for Aristotle's Politics, to which he did not have access. Ibn Rushd greatly influenced philosophy in the Islamic world. His death coincides with a change in the culture of Al-Andalus. In his work Fasl al-Maqāl (translated as The Decisive Treatise), he stresses the importance of analytical thinking as a prerequisite to interpret the Qur'an. This is in contrast to orthodox Ash'ari theology, where the emphasis is less on analytical thinking but on extensive knowledge of sources other than the Qur'an, i.e. the hadith.
Hebrew translations of his work also had a lasting impact on Jewish philosophy, in particular Gersonides, who wrote supercommentaries on many of the works. In the Christian world, his ideas were assimilated by Siger of Brabant and Thomas Aquinas and others (especially in the University of Paris) within the Christian scholastic tradition which valued Aristotelian logic. Famous scholastics such as Aquinas believed Ibn Rushd to be so important they did not refer to him by name, simply calling him "The Commentator" and calling Aristotle "The Philosopher." Averroes's treatise on Plato's Republic has played a major role in both the transmission and the adaptation of the Platonic tradition in the West. It has been a primary source in medieval political philosophy. On the other hand Ibn Rushd was feared by many Christian theologians who accused him of advocating a "double truth" and denying orthodox doctrines such as individual immortality, and an underground mythology grew up stigmatising Ibn Rushd as the ultimate unbeliever. However, these accusations were largely based on misunderstandings of his work.
The asteroid "8318 Averroes" was named in his honor.
Abu'l-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd see Ibn Rushd, Abu‘l-Walid Muhammad
Abu'l-Walid Muhammad ibn Rushd see Ibn Rushd, Abu‘l-Walid Muhammad
Abul-Waleed Muhammad ibn Rushd see Ibn Rushd, Abu‘l-Walid Muhammad
Averroes see Ibn Rushd, Abu‘l-Walid Muhammad
Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Rushd see Ibn Rushd, Abu‘l-Walid Muhammad
Ibn Rushd did not have access to any text of Aristotle's Politics. As a substitute for this, he commented on Plato's The Republic, arguing that the ideal state there described was the same as the original constitution of the Arab Caliphate, as well as the Almohad state of Ibn Tumart.
Ibn Rushd's most important original philosophical work was The Incoherence of the Incoherence (Tahafut al-tahafut), in which he defended Aristotelian philosophy against al-Ghazali's claims in The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahafut al-falasifa). Al-Ghazali argued that Aristotelianism, especially as presented in the writings of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), was self-contradictory and an affront to the teachings of Islam. Ibn Rushd's rebuttal was two-pronged. He contended both that al-Ghazali's arguments were mistaken and that, in any case, the system of Ibn Sina was a distortion of genuine Aristotelianism so that al-Ghazali was aiming at the wrong target. Other works were the Fasl al-Maqal, which argued for the legality of philosophical investigation under Islamic law, and the Kitab al-Kashf, which argued against the proofs of Islam advanced by the Ash'arite school and discussed what proofs, on the popular level, should be used instead.
Ibn Rushd was also a highly-regarded legal scholar of the Maliki school. Perhaps his best-known work in this field is Bidāyat al-Mujtahid wa Nihāyat al-Muqtaṣid, a textbook of Maliki doctrine in a comparative framework.
In medicine, Ibn Rushd wrote a medical encyclopedia called Kulliyat ("Generalities", i.e. general medicine), known in its Latin translation as Colliget. He also made a compilation of the works of Galen (129-200) and wrote a commentary on The Law of Medicine (Qanun fi 't-tibb) of Avicenna (Ibn Sina) (980-1037).
Jacob Anatoli translated several of the works of Averroes from Arabic into Hebrew in the 1200s. Many of them were later translated from Hebrew into Latin by Jacob Mantino and Abraham de Balmes. Other works were translated directly from Arabic into Latin by Michael Scot. Many of his works in logic and metaphysics have been permanently lost, while others, including some of the longer Aristotelian commentaries, have only survived in Latin or Hebrew translation, not in the original Arabic. The fullest version of his works is in Latin, and forms part of the multi-volume Juntine edition of Aristotle published in Venice 1562-1574.
According to Ibn Rushd, there is no conflict between religion and philosophy, rather that they are different ways of reaching the same truth. He believed in the eternity of the universe. He also held that the soul is divided into two parts, one individual and one divine; while the individual soul is not eternal, all humans at the basic level share one and the same divine soul. Ibn Rushd has two kinds of Knowledge of Truth. The first being his knowledge of truth of religion being based in faith and thus could not be tested, nor did it require training to understand. The second knowledge of truth is philosophy, which was reserved for an elite few who had the intellectual capacity to undertake this study.
The concept of "existence precedes essence", a key foundational concept of existentialism, can also be found in the works of Ibn Rushd, as a reaction to Ibn Sina's concept of "essence precedes existence". Ibn Rushd's most famous original philosophical work was The Incoherence of the Incoherence, a rebuttal to Al-Ghazali's The Incoherence of the Philosophers. In medieval Europe, his school of philosophy known as Averroism exerted a strong influence on Christian philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas and Jewish philosophers such as Gersonides and Maimonides.
At the age of 25, Ibn Rushd conducted astronomical observations near Marrakech, Morocco, during which he discovered a previously unobserved star.
In astronomical theory, Ibn Rushd rejected the eccentric deferents introduced by Ptolemy. He rejected the Ptolemaic model and instead argued for a strictly concentric model of the universe. Ibn Rushd also argued that the Moon is opaque and obscure, and has some parts which are thicker than others, with the thicker parts receiving more light from the Sun than the thinner parts of the Moon. He also gave one of the first descriptions on sunspots.
As a Qadi (judge), Ibn Rushd wrote the Bidāyat al-Mujtahid wa Nihāyat al-Muqtasid, a Maliki legal treatise dealing with Sharia (law) and Fiqh (jurisprudence) which, according to Al-Dhahabi in the 13th century, was considered the best treatise ever written on the subject. Ibn Rushd's summary of the opinions (fatwa) of previous Islamic jurists on a variety of issues has continued to influence Islamic scholars to the present day, notably Javed Ahmad Ghamidi. Ibn Rushd also claimed that women in Islam were equal to men in all respects and possessed equal capacities to shine in peace and in war.
Ibn Rushd discussed Islamic economic jurisprudence, particularly the concept of Riba (usury). He reported that Ibn ‘Abbas, a sahaba (companion) of Muhammad, did not accept Riba al-Fadl (interest in excess) because, according to him, the Prophet Muhammad had clarified that there was no Riba except in credit. He also discussed the role of Islamic criminal jurisprudence in the Islamic dietary laws in regards to the consumption of alcohol. He stated that physical punishment for alcoholic consumption was not originally established as part of the Sharia in Muhammad's time but was later decided by the Shura (consultive council) of the Rashidun Caliphate.
In his Islamic philosophy of law, Ibn Rushd also discussed the concept of natural law. In his treatise on Justice and Jihad and his commentary on Plato's Republic, he writes that the human mind can know of the unlawfulness of killing and stealing and thus of the five maqasid or higher intents of the Islamic Sharia or to protect religion, life, property, offspring, and reason. The concept of natural law entered the mainstream of Western culture through his Aristotelian commentaries, influencing the subsequent Averroist movement and the writings of Thomas Aquinas.
Ibn Rushd was the last major Muslim logician from Al-Andalus. He is known for writing the most elaborate commentaries on Aristotelian logic.
As a physician, Ibn Rushd wrote twenty treatises on Arabic medicine, including a seven-volume medical encyclopedia entitled Kitābu’l Kulliyāt fī al-Tibb (General Rules of Medicine), better known as Colliget in Latin. This encyclopedic work was completed at some time before 1162 and elaborated on physiology, general pathology, diagnosis, medical material, hygiene and general therapeutics. He argued that no one can suffer from smallpox twice, and fully understood the function of the retina. However, his Colliget was largely overshadowed by the earlier medical encyclopedias, Continents by Muhammad ibn Zakariya ar-Razi (Rhazes) and The Canon of Medicine by Ibn Sina (Avicenna). As a result, Ibn Rushd's fame as a physician was eclipsed by his own fame as a philosopher. His Kulliyāt was translated into Latin by the Jewish translator Bonacosa in the late 13th century and again by Syphorien Champier in circa 1537, and it was also translated into Hebrew twice. It has been noted that the prototypes for the physician-philosophers that predominated in Spain were Ibn Zuhr (Avenzoar) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes).
Ibn Rushd discussed the topic of human dissection and autopsy. Although he never undertook human dissection, he was aware of it being carried out by some of his contemporaries, such as Ibn Zuhr (Avenzoar), and appears to have supported the practice.
In urology, Ibn Rushd identified the issues of sexual dysfunction and erectile dysfunction, and was among the first to prescribe medication for the treatment of these problems. He used several methods of therapy for this issue, including the single drug method where a tested drug is prescribed, and a combination method of either a drug or food. Most of these drugs were oral medication, though a few patients were also treated through topical or transurethral means.
In neurology and neuroscience, Ibn Rushd suggested the existence of Parkinson's disease, and in ophthalmology and optics, he was the first to attribute photoreceptor properties to the retina. In his Colliget, he was also the first to suggest that the principal organ of sight might be the arachnoid membrane (aranea). His work led to much discussion in 16th century Europe over whether the principal organ of sight is the traditional Galenic crystalline humor or the Averroist aranea, which in turn led to the discovery that the retina is the principal organ of sight.
As an Arabic music theorist, Ibn Rushd contributed to music theory with his commentary on Aristotle's On the Soul, where Ibn Rushd dealt perspicuously with the theory of sound. This text was translated into Latin by Michael Scot (d. 1232).
In Ibn Rushd's commentary on Aristotle's Physics, he commented on the theory of motion proposed by Ibn Bajjah (Avempace), and also made his own contributions to physics, particularly mechanics. Ibn Rushd was the first to define and measure force as the rate at which work is done in changing the kinetic condition of a material body and the first to correctly argue that the effect and measure of force is change in the kinetic condition of a materially resistant mass. It seems he was also the first to introduce the notion that bodies have a (non-gravitational) inherent resistance to motion into physics, subsequently first dubbed "inertia" by Kepler.
For Ibn Rushd, the human soul is a separate substance ontologically identical with the active intellect, and when this active intellect is embodied in an individual human it is the material intellect. The material intellect is analogous to prime matter, in that it is pure potentiality able to receive universal forms. As such, the human mind is a composite of the material intellect and the passive intellect, which is the third element of the intellect. The passive intellect is identified with the imagination, which is the sense-connected finite and passive faculty that receives particular sensual forms. When the material intellect is actualized by information received, it is described as the speculative (habitual) intellect. As the speculative intellect moves towards perfection, having the active intellect as an object of thought, it becomes the acquired intellect. In that, it is aided by the active intellect, perceived in the way Aristotle had taught, to acquire intelligible thoughts. The idea of the soul's perfection occurring through having the active intellect as a greater object of thought is introduced elsewhere, and its application to religious doctrine is seen. In the Tahafut, Ibn Rushd speaks of the soul as a faculty that comes to resemble the focus of its intention, and when its attention focuses more upon eternal and universal knowledge, it becomes more like the eternal and universal. As such, when the soul perfects itself, it becomes like our intellect.
Ibn Rushd succeeded in providing an explanation of the human soul and intellect that did not involve an immediate transcendent agent. This opposed the explanations found among the Neoplatonists, allowing a further argument for rejecting of Neoplatonic emanation theories.
Ibn Rushd is most famous for his translations and commentaries of Aristotle's works, which had been mostly forgotten in the West. Before 1150, only a few translated works of Aristotle existed in Latin Europe, and they were not studied much or given much credence by monastic scholars. It was through the Latin translations of Ibn Rushd's work beginning in the 12th century that the legacy of Aristotle became more widely known in the medieval West.
In medieval Europe, Ibn Rushd's school of philosophy, known as Averroism, exerted a strong influence on Christian philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas and Jewish philosophers such as Gersonides and Maimonides (Ibn Maymun). Despite negative reactions from Jewish Talmudists and the Christian clergy, Ibn Rushd's writings were taught at the University of Paris and other medieval universities, and Averroism remained the dominant school of thought in Europe through to the 16th century.
Ibn Rushd's argument in The Decisive Treatise provided a justification for the emancipation of science and philosophy from official Ash'ari theology. Accordingly, Averroism has been regarded as a precursor to modern secularism, and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) has been described as one of the founding fathers of secular thought in Western Europe.
Ibn Rushd's work on Aristotle spans almost three decades, and he wrote commentaries on almost all of Aristotle's work except for Aristotle's Politics, to which he did not have access. Ibn Rushd greatly influenced philosophy in the Islamic world. His death coincides with a change in the culture of Al-Andalus. In his work Fasl al-Maqāl (translated as The Decisive Treatise), he stresses the importance of analytical thinking as a prerequisite to interpret the Qur'an. This is in contrast to orthodox Ash'ari theology, where the emphasis is less on analytical thinking but on extensive knowledge of sources other than the Qur'an, i.e. the hadith.
Hebrew translations of his work also had a lasting impact on Jewish philosophy, in particular Gersonides, who wrote supercommentaries on many of the works. In the Christian world, his ideas were assimilated by Siger of Brabant and Thomas Aquinas and others (especially in the University of Paris) within the Christian scholastic tradition which valued Aristotelian logic. Famous scholastics such as Aquinas believed Ibn Rushd to be so important they did not refer to him by name, simply calling him "The Commentator" and calling Aristotle "The Philosopher." Averroes's treatise on Plato's Republic has played a major role in both the transmission and the adaptation of the Platonic tradition in the West. It has been a primary source in medieval political philosophy. On the other hand Ibn Rushd was feared by many Christian theologians who accused him of advocating a "double truth" and denying orthodox doctrines such as individual immortality, and an underground mythology grew up stigmatising Ibn Rushd as the ultimate unbeliever. However, these accusations were largely based on misunderstandings of his work.
The asteroid "8318 Averroes" was named in his honor.
Abu'l-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd see Ibn Rushd, Abu‘l-Walid Muhammad
Abu'l-Walid Muhammad ibn Rushd see Ibn Rushd, Abu‘l-Walid Muhammad
Abul-Waleed Muhammad ibn Rushd see Ibn Rushd, Abu‘l-Walid Muhammad
Averroes see Ibn Rushd, Abu‘l-Walid Muhammad
Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Rushd see Ibn Rushd, Abu‘l-Walid Muhammad
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Ibn Sina
Ibn Sina (Abu 'Ali al-Hussain ibn Abdallah Ibn Sina) (Abu ‘Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina) (Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥusayn ibn ‘Abd Allāh ibn Sīnā') (Abū Alī Sīnā) (Avicenna) (c. 980 - 1037). Persian polymath and the foremost physician and philosopher of his time. Known in the West as Avicenna, he was also an astronomer, chemist, geologist, logician, paleontologist, mathematician, physicist, poet, psychologist, scientist and teacher.
Ibn Sīnā studied medicine under a physician named Koushyar. Ibn Sina wrote almost 450 treatises on a wide range of subjects, of which around 240 have survived. In particular, 150 of his surviving treatises concentrate on philosophy and 40 of them concentrate on medicine. His most famous works are The Book of Healing, a vast philosophical and scientific encyclopaedia, and The Canon of Medicine, which was a standard medical text at many medieval universities. The Canon of Medicine was used as a text-book in the universities of Montpellier and Louvain as late as 1650.
Ibn Sina was born near Bukhara (now in Uzbekistan), which was then the capital of the Persian Samanid dynasty. The son of a government official, Ibn Sina studied medicine and philosophy in Bukhara. Endowed with extraordinary intelligence and intellectual independence, he was largely self-taught and by the age of eighteen had mastered all the then known sciences.
At the age of 18, Ibn Sina was rewarded for his medical abilities with the post of court physician to the Samanid ruler of Bukhara. He remained in this position until the fall of the Samanid Empire in 999. After that, Ibn Sina traveled extensively. He spent the last fourteen years of his life as the scientific adviser and physician to the rulers of Isfahan, first with Shams al-Dawla, and later with Sama’ al-Dawla. In these last years of his life, Ibn Sina made astronomical investigations.
Ibn Sina died at Hamadhan, where a monument was later erected to celebrate the millennium of his birth.
Regarded by Muslims as one of the greatest Islamic philosophers, Avicenna is an important figure in the fields of medicine and philosophy. Ibn Sina’s work The Canon of Medicine was long pre-eminent in Southwest Asia and North Africa and was used in Europe as a textbook. It is significant as a systematic classification and summary of medical and pharmaceutical knowledge up to and including Ibn Sina’s time. The first Latin translation of the work was made in the 12th century of the Christian calendar, the Hebrew version appeared in 1491, and the Arabic text in 1593, the second text ever printed in Arabic.
Ibn Sina’s best known philosophical work is Kitab al-Shifa (“Book of Healing”), a collection of treatises on Aristotelian logic, metaphysics, psychology, the natural sciences, and other subjects. Ibn Sina’s own philosophy was based on a combination of Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism. Contrary to orthodox Islamic thought, Ibn Sina denied personal immortality, the existence of any individual soul, that God has an interest in individuals, and that there had been any creation of the world in time. Ibn Sina believed that there was a dualism of mind and matter, where matter was passive, and creation had been an act of instilling existence into the passive substance. For Ibn Sina, the only place where there was no such dualism was in God. Because of his views, Ibn Sina became the main target of an attack on philosophy by the Islamic philosopher al-Ghazzali. Nevertheless, Ibn Sina’s philosophy remained influential throughout the Middle Ages.
Ibn Sina’s Kitab al-Najat (“Book of Salvation”) is a compendium of his work in metaphysics. In spite of Ibn Sina’s interest in metaphysics, he remained an orthodox Muslim, and wrote a number of books on theology. In his later years, Ibn Sina also wrote some allegorical mystical works. These works were important in the development of Sufism.
Most scholars agree that Ibn Sina was the most renowned and influential philosopher of medieval Islam. Ibn Sina’s works united philosophy with the study of nature. Over a hundred of Ibn Sina’s works have survived. His texts cover such subjects as philosophy and science as well as religious, linguistic and literary matters. Ibn Sina’s works are not the product of a man who simply lived in books, since most of his energies were taken up with the day-to-day affairs of state.
In 1954, 131 authentic and 110 doubtful works were listed in his bibliography. Known primarily as a philosopher and physician, Ibn Sina contributed also to all the sciences that were accessible in his day: natural history, physics, chemistry, astronomy, mathematics and music. He wrote on economics, politics, moral and religious questions, Qur’anic exegesis, and poetry. Ibn Sina’s influence on medieval European philosophers such as Michael Scot, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, and Thomas Aquinas is undeniable.
Ibn Sina was born in August or September of 980, in Afshena, Transoxiana Province of Bukhara to Abd-Allah of Balkh (now in Afghanistan). Abd-Allah was the well-to-do governor of Transoxiana Province under the Samanid ruler Nuh II ibn Mansur. Ibn Sina may have descended from a Turkish family on his father’s side, but his mother, Sitara, was clearly Persian.
After his brother, Mahmud, was born five years later, the family moved to Bukhara, one of the principal cities of Transoxiana and capital of the Samanid emirs from 819 to 1005. Exhibiting an early interest in learning, young Ibn Sina had read the entire Qur’an by age ten. His father was attracted to Isma‘ili Shi‘ite doctrines, preached locally by Egyptian missionaries, but Ibn Sina resisted his father’s influence. There was much discussion in his home regarding geometry, philosophy, theology, and even accounting methods. Ibn Sina was sent to study with an Indian vegetable seller who was also a surveyor. It was from him that Ibn Sina became acquainted with the Indian system of calculation, making use of the zero in computations.
A well-known philosopher came to live with the family for a few years and had an extraordinary influence on the young scholar. Abu ‘Abd Allah al-Natili stimulated Ibn Sina’s love of theoretical disputation, and the youth’s earlier readings in jurisprudence enabled him to tax al-Natili’s powers of logic daily. The tutor convinced Abd-Allah that Ibn Sina’s career should be an academic one. Ibn Sina was studying Aristotelian logic and Euclidean geometry when the teacher decided to move to a different home. Undaunted, Ibn Sina soon mastered texts in natural sciences and metaphysics, then medicine, which he did not consider very difficult. He taught physicians, even practicing medicine for a short time. At the age of sixteen, he was also engaging in disputations on Muslim law.
For the next year and a half, Ibn Sina returned to the study of logic and all aspects of philosophy, keeping files of syllogisms and praying daily at the mosque for guidance in his work. So obsessed did he become with philosophical problems and so anxious to know all that he hardly took time for sleep. Aristotle’s Metaphysica (Metaphysics) became an intellectual stumbling block until his reading of a work by Abu Nasr al-Farabi clarified many ideas for him. Soon all of Aristotle became understandable, and Ibn Sina gave alms to the poor in gratitude.
When Sultan Nuh ibn Mansur of Bukhara became ill, he sent for Ibn Sina, upon the advice of his team of physicians. Because of his help in curing the ruler, Ibn Sina gained access to the palace library, thus acquainting himself with many new books. When not studying, Ibn Sina was given to drinking wine and satisfying a large sexual appetite which he retained to the end of his life. Ibn Sina claimed that after the age of eighteen he learned nothing new, only gained greater wisdom. When the palace library was destroyed in a fire, critics blamed Ibn Sina, who, they said, wished to remove the sources of his ideas. There is no proof of that charge.
Ibn Sina’s writing career began in earnest at the age of twenty-one with al-Majmu (1001), a comprehensive book on learning for Abu al-Hasan, a prosodist. Then he wrote al-Hasil wa al-mahsul (“The Sun and Substance” -- c. 1002), a twenty-volume commentary on jurisprudence, the Qur’an, and asceticism. There soon followed a work on ethics called al-Birr wa al-ithm (“Good Works and Evil” -- c. 1002). However, the sponsors made no copies of them.
Ibn Sina's father died in 1002, and Ibn Sina was forced to enter government service. He reluctantly left Bukhara for Gurganj, the capital of Khwarazm, where he met Emir 'Ali ibn Ma’mun. From Gurganj, he moved to Fasa, Baward, Tus, Samanqan, and thence to Jajarm on the extreme end of Khurasan. He served Emir Qabus ibn Wushmagir until a military coup forced Ibn Sina to leave for Dihistan, where he became ill. After recovering, he moved to Jurjan.
In Jurjan, Ibn Sina met his pupil and biographer, Abu ‘Ubaid al-Juzjani, who stayed with him throughout much of the remainder of his life. Juzjani thought him exceptionally handsome and wrote that when Ibn Sina went to the mosque on Friday to pray, people would gather to observe at first hand “his perfection and beauty.” While in Jurjan, Ibn Sina wrote al-Mukhtasar al-awsat (The Middle Summary on Logic), al-Mabda’ wa al-ma‘ad (The Origin and the Return), and al-Arsad al-kulliya (Comprehensive Observations). There also Ibn Sina wrote the first part of al-Qanun fi al-tibb (Canon of Medicine), Mukhtasar al-Majisti (Summary of the Almagest), and other treatises. One modern scholar lists one hundred books attributed to Ibn Sina. Another says that the list of Ibn Sina’s works includes several hundred in Arabic and twenty-three in Persian.
From Jurjan, Ibn Sina next moved to al-Rayy, joining the service of al-Saiyyida and her son, Majd al-Dawlah. Civil strife forced him to flee to Qazwin. From there he moved to Hamadhan, where he managed the affairs of Kadhabanuyah. He was called to the court of Emir Shams al-Dawlah to treat the ruler for colic, after which Ibn Sina was made the vizier of his emirate. Because of a mutiny in the army, however, the emir was forced to discharge him. After matters calmed down, Ibn Sina was called back and reinstated as vizier. During this period, public affairs occupied his daytime hours, and he spent evenings teaching and writing. When the emir died, Ibn Sina went into hiding, finishing work on his Kitab al-shifa (Book of Healing). He was arrested for corresponding with a rival ruler, but when Emir ‘Ala’ al-Dawlah attacked Hamadhan four months later, Ibn Sina was set free.
Ibn Sina left Hamadhan for Isfahan with his brother, two slaves, and al-Juzjani to serve Emir ‘Ala’ al-Dawlah. The emir designated every Friday evening for learned discussions with many other masters. However, excluded from the gatherings was a famous scholar and rival of Ibn Sina, Abu al-Rayhan al-Biruni, with whom he carried on a rather bitter correspondence. They had been clients at many of the same courts, but never at the same time. At Isfahan, Ibn Sina completed many of his writings on arithmetic and music. He was made an official member of the court and accompanied the emir on a military expedition to Hamadhan.
When he was rebuked by the emir’s cousin, Abu Mansur, for feigning expertise in philology, Ibn Sina was so stung by the criticism that he studied this subject frantically, compiling his discoveries in a book entitled Lisan al-‘Arab (The Arab Language). During these years, he also continued other experiments in medicine and astronomy. He introduced the use of medicinal herbs and devised an instrument to repair injured vertebrae. He understood that some illnesses arose from psychosomatic causes, and he wrote extensively on the pulse, preventive medicine, and the effects of climate on health. On May 24, 1032, he observed the rare phenomenon of Venus passing through the solar disk.
When he became ill in Isfahan, one of his slaves filled his meal with opium, hoping for his death and an opportunity to steal his money. But Ibn Sina managed to recover under self-treatment. Soon, however, he had a relapse. He died in 1037. Most authorities say that he died and was buried in Hamadhan.
Ibn Sina’s Canon of Medicine remained a principal source for medical research for six centuries, perhaps second only to the Christian Bible in the number of copies produced. Between 1470 and 1500, it went through thirty editions in Latin and one in Hebrew; a celebrated edition was published on a Gutenberg press in Rome in 1593. Ibn Sina’s principal literary contribution was the invention of the Rubaiyat form, quatrains in iambic pentameter, later made famous by Omar Khayyam. Most important of all, Ibn Sina’s philosophical system helped to stimulate a genuine intellectual renaissance in Islam that had enormous influence not only in his own culture but in Western Europe as well. Thomas Aquinas, Averroes (Ibn Rushd), John Duns Scotus, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon learned much from Ibn Sina, even though they disagreed on some particulars.
Most intriguing to the medieval Scholastics were Ibn Sina’s insistence upon essences in everything, the distinction between essence and existence (a notion derived from al-Farabi), the absence of essence in God (whose existence is unique), and the immortality of the soul (which animates the body but is independent of it).
According to some scholars, Ibn Sina’s insistence upon observation and experimentation helped to turn Western thought in the direction of the modern scientific revolution. His theories on the sources of infectious diseases, his explanation of sight, his invention of longitude, and his other scientific conclusions have a truly remarkable congruence with modern explanations. The application of geometrical forms in Islamic art, his use of the astrolabe in astronomical experiments, and his disputations on the immortality of the soul demonstrate Ibn Sina’s universal genius.
Abu 'Ali al-Hussain ibn Abdallah ibn Sina see Ibn Sina
Abu 'Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina see Ibn Sina
Avicenna see Ibn Sina
Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥusayn ibn ‘Abd Allāh ibn Sīnā' see Ibn Sina
Abū Alī Sīnā see Ibn Sina
Ibn Sina (Abu 'Ali al-Hussain ibn Abdallah Ibn Sina) (Abu ‘Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina) (Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥusayn ibn ‘Abd Allāh ibn Sīnā') (Abū Alī Sīnā) (Avicenna) (c. 980 - 1037). Persian polymath and the foremost physician and philosopher of his time. Known in the West as Avicenna, he was also an astronomer, chemist, geologist, logician, paleontologist, mathematician, physicist, poet, psychologist, scientist and teacher.
Ibn Sīnā studied medicine under a physician named Koushyar. Ibn Sina wrote almost 450 treatises on a wide range of subjects, of which around 240 have survived. In particular, 150 of his surviving treatises concentrate on philosophy and 40 of them concentrate on medicine. His most famous works are The Book of Healing, a vast philosophical and scientific encyclopaedia, and The Canon of Medicine, which was a standard medical text at many medieval universities. The Canon of Medicine was used as a text-book in the universities of Montpellier and Louvain as late as 1650.
Ibn Sina was born near Bukhara (now in Uzbekistan), which was then the capital of the Persian Samanid dynasty. The son of a government official, Ibn Sina studied medicine and philosophy in Bukhara. Endowed with extraordinary intelligence and intellectual independence, he was largely self-taught and by the age of eighteen had mastered all the then known sciences.
At the age of 18, Ibn Sina was rewarded for his medical abilities with the post of court physician to the Samanid ruler of Bukhara. He remained in this position until the fall of the Samanid Empire in 999. After that, Ibn Sina traveled extensively. He spent the last fourteen years of his life as the scientific adviser and physician to the rulers of Isfahan, first with Shams al-Dawla, and later with Sama’ al-Dawla. In these last years of his life, Ibn Sina made astronomical investigations.
Ibn Sina died at Hamadhan, where a monument was later erected to celebrate the millennium of his birth.
Regarded by Muslims as one of the greatest Islamic philosophers, Avicenna is an important figure in the fields of medicine and philosophy. Ibn Sina’s work The Canon of Medicine was long pre-eminent in Southwest Asia and North Africa and was used in Europe as a textbook. It is significant as a systematic classification and summary of medical and pharmaceutical knowledge up to and including Ibn Sina’s time. The first Latin translation of the work was made in the 12th century of the Christian calendar, the Hebrew version appeared in 1491, and the Arabic text in 1593, the second text ever printed in Arabic.
Ibn Sina’s best known philosophical work is Kitab al-Shifa (“Book of Healing”), a collection of treatises on Aristotelian logic, metaphysics, psychology, the natural sciences, and other subjects. Ibn Sina’s own philosophy was based on a combination of Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism. Contrary to orthodox Islamic thought, Ibn Sina denied personal immortality, the existence of any individual soul, that God has an interest in individuals, and that there had been any creation of the world in time. Ibn Sina believed that there was a dualism of mind and matter, where matter was passive, and creation had been an act of instilling existence into the passive substance. For Ibn Sina, the only place where there was no such dualism was in God. Because of his views, Ibn Sina became the main target of an attack on philosophy by the Islamic philosopher al-Ghazzali. Nevertheless, Ibn Sina’s philosophy remained influential throughout the Middle Ages.
Ibn Sina’s Kitab al-Najat (“Book of Salvation”) is a compendium of his work in metaphysics. In spite of Ibn Sina’s interest in metaphysics, he remained an orthodox Muslim, and wrote a number of books on theology. In his later years, Ibn Sina also wrote some allegorical mystical works. These works were important in the development of Sufism.
Most scholars agree that Ibn Sina was the most renowned and influential philosopher of medieval Islam. Ibn Sina’s works united philosophy with the study of nature. Over a hundred of Ibn Sina’s works have survived. His texts cover such subjects as philosophy and science as well as religious, linguistic and literary matters. Ibn Sina’s works are not the product of a man who simply lived in books, since most of his energies were taken up with the day-to-day affairs of state.
In 1954, 131 authentic and 110 doubtful works were listed in his bibliography. Known primarily as a philosopher and physician, Ibn Sina contributed also to all the sciences that were accessible in his day: natural history, physics, chemistry, astronomy, mathematics and music. He wrote on economics, politics, moral and religious questions, Qur’anic exegesis, and poetry. Ibn Sina’s influence on medieval European philosophers such as Michael Scot, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, and Thomas Aquinas is undeniable.
Ibn Sina was born in August or September of 980, in Afshena, Transoxiana Province of Bukhara to Abd-Allah of Balkh (now in Afghanistan). Abd-Allah was the well-to-do governor of Transoxiana Province under the Samanid ruler Nuh II ibn Mansur. Ibn Sina may have descended from a Turkish family on his father’s side, but his mother, Sitara, was clearly Persian.
After his brother, Mahmud, was born five years later, the family moved to Bukhara, one of the principal cities of Transoxiana and capital of the Samanid emirs from 819 to 1005. Exhibiting an early interest in learning, young Ibn Sina had read the entire Qur’an by age ten. His father was attracted to Isma‘ili Shi‘ite doctrines, preached locally by Egyptian missionaries, but Ibn Sina resisted his father’s influence. There was much discussion in his home regarding geometry, philosophy, theology, and even accounting methods. Ibn Sina was sent to study with an Indian vegetable seller who was also a surveyor. It was from him that Ibn Sina became acquainted with the Indian system of calculation, making use of the zero in computations.
A well-known philosopher came to live with the family for a few years and had an extraordinary influence on the young scholar. Abu ‘Abd Allah al-Natili stimulated Ibn Sina’s love of theoretical disputation, and the youth’s earlier readings in jurisprudence enabled him to tax al-Natili’s powers of logic daily. The tutor convinced Abd-Allah that Ibn Sina’s career should be an academic one. Ibn Sina was studying Aristotelian logic and Euclidean geometry when the teacher decided to move to a different home. Undaunted, Ibn Sina soon mastered texts in natural sciences and metaphysics, then medicine, which he did not consider very difficult. He taught physicians, even practicing medicine for a short time. At the age of sixteen, he was also engaging in disputations on Muslim law.
For the next year and a half, Ibn Sina returned to the study of logic and all aspects of philosophy, keeping files of syllogisms and praying daily at the mosque for guidance in his work. So obsessed did he become with philosophical problems and so anxious to know all that he hardly took time for sleep. Aristotle’s Metaphysica (Metaphysics) became an intellectual stumbling block until his reading of a work by Abu Nasr al-Farabi clarified many ideas for him. Soon all of Aristotle became understandable, and Ibn Sina gave alms to the poor in gratitude.
When Sultan Nuh ibn Mansur of Bukhara became ill, he sent for Ibn Sina, upon the advice of his team of physicians. Because of his help in curing the ruler, Ibn Sina gained access to the palace library, thus acquainting himself with many new books. When not studying, Ibn Sina was given to drinking wine and satisfying a large sexual appetite which he retained to the end of his life. Ibn Sina claimed that after the age of eighteen he learned nothing new, only gained greater wisdom. When the palace library was destroyed in a fire, critics blamed Ibn Sina, who, they said, wished to remove the sources of his ideas. There is no proof of that charge.
Ibn Sina’s writing career began in earnest at the age of twenty-one with al-Majmu (1001), a comprehensive book on learning for Abu al-Hasan, a prosodist. Then he wrote al-Hasil wa al-mahsul (“The Sun and Substance” -- c. 1002), a twenty-volume commentary on jurisprudence, the Qur’an, and asceticism. There soon followed a work on ethics called al-Birr wa al-ithm (“Good Works and Evil” -- c. 1002). However, the sponsors made no copies of them.
Ibn Sina's father died in 1002, and Ibn Sina was forced to enter government service. He reluctantly left Bukhara for Gurganj, the capital of Khwarazm, where he met Emir 'Ali ibn Ma’mun. From Gurganj, he moved to Fasa, Baward, Tus, Samanqan, and thence to Jajarm on the extreme end of Khurasan. He served Emir Qabus ibn Wushmagir until a military coup forced Ibn Sina to leave for Dihistan, where he became ill. After recovering, he moved to Jurjan.
In Jurjan, Ibn Sina met his pupil and biographer, Abu ‘Ubaid al-Juzjani, who stayed with him throughout much of the remainder of his life. Juzjani thought him exceptionally handsome and wrote that when Ibn Sina went to the mosque on Friday to pray, people would gather to observe at first hand “his perfection and beauty.” While in Jurjan, Ibn Sina wrote al-Mukhtasar al-awsat (The Middle Summary on Logic), al-Mabda’ wa al-ma‘ad (The Origin and the Return), and al-Arsad al-kulliya (Comprehensive Observations). There also Ibn Sina wrote the first part of al-Qanun fi al-tibb (Canon of Medicine), Mukhtasar al-Majisti (Summary of the Almagest), and other treatises. One modern scholar lists one hundred books attributed to Ibn Sina. Another says that the list of Ibn Sina’s works includes several hundred in Arabic and twenty-three in Persian.
From Jurjan, Ibn Sina next moved to al-Rayy, joining the service of al-Saiyyida and her son, Majd al-Dawlah. Civil strife forced him to flee to Qazwin. From there he moved to Hamadhan, where he managed the affairs of Kadhabanuyah. He was called to the court of Emir Shams al-Dawlah to treat the ruler for colic, after which Ibn Sina was made the vizier of his emirate. Because of a mutiny in the army, however, the emir was forced to discharge him. After matters calmed down, Ibn Sina was called back and reinstated as vizier. During this period, public affairs occupied his daytime hours, and he spent evenings teaching and writing. When the emir died, Ibn Sina went into hiding, finishing work on his Kitab al-shifa (Book of Healing). He was arrested for corresponding with a rival ruler, but when Emir ‘Ala’ al-Dawlah attacked Hamadhan four months later, Ibn Sina was set free.
Ibn Sina left Hamadhan for Isfahan with his brother, two slaves, and al-Juzjani to serve Emir ‘Ala’ al-Dawlah. The emir designated every Friday evening for learned discussions with many other masters. However, excluded from the gatherings was a famous scholar and rival of Ibn Sina, Abu al-Rayhan al-Biruni, with whom he carried on a rather bitter correspondence. They had been clients at many of the same courts, but never at the same time. At Isfahan, Ibn Sina completed many of his writings on arithmetic and music. He was made an official member of the court and accompanied the emir on a military expedition to Hamadhan.
When he was rebuked by the emir’s cousin, Abu Mansur, for feigning expertise in philology, Ibn Sina was so stung by the criticism that he studied this subject frantically, compiling his discoveries in a book entitled Lisan al-‘Arab (The Arab Language). During these years, he also continued other experiments in medicine and astronomy. He introduced the use of medicinal herbs and devised an instrument to repair injured vertebrae. He understood that some illnesses arose from psychosomatic causes, and he wrote extensively on the pulse, preventive medicine, and the effects of climate on health. On May 24, 1032, he observed the rare phenomenon of Venus passing through the solar disk.
When he became ill in Isfahan, one of his slaves filled his meal with opium, hoping for his death and an opportunity to steal his money. But Ibn Sina managed to recover under self-treatment. Soon, however, he had a relapse. He died in 1037. Most authorities say that he died and was buried in Hamadhan.
Ibn Sina’s Canon of Medicine remained a principal source for medical research for six centuries, perhaps second only to the Christian Bible in the number of copies produced. Between 1470 and 1500, it went through thirty editions in Latin and one in Hebrew; a celebrated edition was published on a Gutenberg press in Rome in 1593. Ibn Sina’s principal literary contribution was the invention of the Rubaiyat form, quatrains in iambic pentameter, later made famous by Omar Khayyam. Most important of all, Ibn Sina’s philosophical system helped to stimulate a genuine intellectual renaissance in Islam that had enormous influence not only in his own culture but in Western Europe as well. Thomas Aquinas, Averroes (Ibn Rushd), John Duns Scotus, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon learned much from Ibn Sina, even though they disagreed on some particulars.
Most intriguing to the medieval Scholastics were Ibn Sina’s insistence upon essences in everything, the distinction between essence and existence (a notion derived from al-Farabi), the absence of essence in God (whose existence is unique), and the immortality of the soul (which animates the body but is independent of it).
According to some scholars, Ibn Sina’s insistence upon observation and experimentation helped to turn Western thought in the direction of the modern scientific revolution. His theories on the sources of infectious diseases, his explanation of sight, his invention of longitude, and his other scientific conclusions have a truly remarkable congruence with modern explanations. The application of geometrical forms in Islamic art, his use of the astrolabe in astronomical experiments, and his disputations on the immortality of the soul demonstrate Ibn Sina’s universal genius.
Abu 'Ali al-Hussain ibn Abdallah ibn Sina see Ibn Sina
Abu 'Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina see Ibn Sina
Avicenna see Ibn Sina
Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥusayn ibn ‘Abd Allāh ibn Sīnā' see Ibn Sina
Abū Alī Sīnā see Ibn Sina
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Ibn Taymiyya
Ibn Taymiyya (Taqi ad-Din Ahmad ibn Taymiyya) Taqī al-Dīn Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad ibn ʿAbd al-Salām ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Muḥammad ibn Taymiyyah) (1263, in Harran, Mesopotamia - September 26, 1328, in Cairo). Hanbalite theologian and jurist. Ibn Taymiyya was born in Harran to a family of Hanbali scholars (including his paternal grandfather, uncle, and father). Ibn Taymiyya was himself a Hanbali in many, though not all, juridical and theological matters, and a Salafi on a wider plane. He has had a strong influence on conservative Sunni circles and, in the modern period, on both liberals and conservatives.
Ibn Taymiyyah was one of Islam’s most forceful theologians who, as a member of the Pietist school founded by Ibn Ḥanbal, sought the return of the Islamic religion to its sources: the Qurʾān and the sunnah, revealed writing and the prophetic tradition. He is also the source of the Wahhābīyah, a mid-18th-century traditionalist movement of Islam.
Ibn Taymiyyah was born in Harran, Mesopotamia. Educated in Damascus, where he had been taken in 1268 as a refugee from the Mongol invasion, he later steeped himself in the teachings of the Pietist school. Though he remained faithful throughout his life to that school, of whose doctrines he had an unrivalled mastery, he also acquired an extensive knowledge of contemporary Islamic sources and disciplines: the Qurʾān (Islamic scripture), the Ḥadīth (sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad), jurisprudence (fiqh), dogmatic theology (kalām), philosophy, and Ṣūfī (Islamic mystical) theology.
The life of Ibn Taymiyyah was marked by persecutions. As early as 1293 Ibn Taymiyyah came into conflict with local authorities for protesting a sentence, pronounced under religious law, against a Christian accused of having insulted the Prophet. In 1298 he was accused of anthropomorphism (ascribing human characteristics to God) and for having criticized, contemptuously, the legitimacy of dogmatic theology.
During the great Mongol crisis of the years 1299 to 1303, and especially during the occupation of Damascus, he led the resistance party and denounced the suspect faith of the invaders and their accomplices. During the ensuing years, Ibn Taymiyyah was engaged in intensive polemic activity: either against the Kasrawān Shīʿah in Lebanon; the Rifāʿīyah, a Ṣūfī religious brotherhood; or the ittiḥādīyah school, which taught that the Creator and the created become one, a school that grew out of the teaching of Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 1240), whose monism he denounced.
In 1306, Ibn Taymiyyah was summoned to explain his beliefs to the governor’s council, which, although it did not condemn him, sent him to Cairo. There he appeared before a new council on the charge of anthropomorphism and was imprisoned in the citadel for 18 months. Soon after gaining his freedom, he was confined again in 1308 for several months in the prison of the qāḍīs (Muslim judges who exercise both civil and religious functions) for having denounced the worship of saints as being against religious law (Sharīʿah).
He was sent to Alexandria under house arrest in 1309, the day after the abdication of the sultan Muḥammad ibn Qalāwūn and the advent of Baybars II al-Jāshnikīr, whom he regarded as a usurper and whose imminent end he predicted. Seven months later, on Ibn Qalāwūn’s return, he was able to return to Cairo. But in 1313 he left Cairo once more with the Sultan, on a campaign to recover Damascus, which was again being threatened by the Mongols.
Ibn Taymiyyah spent his last 15 years in Damascus. Promoted to the rank of schoolmaster, he gathered around him a circle of disciples from every social class. The most famous of these, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawzīyah (died 1350), was to share in Ibn Taymiyyah’s renewed persecutions. Accused of supporting a doctrine that would curtail the ease with which a Muslim could traditionally repudiate a wife and thus ease the ill effects of the practice, Ibn Taymiyyah was incarcerated on orders from Cairo in the citadel of Damascus from August 1320 to February 1321.
In July 1326, Cairo again ordered him confined to the citadel for having continued his condemnation of saint worship, in spite of the prohibition forbidding him to do so. He died in prison, deprived of his books and writing materials, and was buried in the Ṣūfī cemetery amid a great public gathering. His tomb still exists and is widely venerated.
Ibn Taymiyyah left a considerable body of work—often republished in Syria, Egypt, Arabia, and India—that extended and justified his religious and political involvements and was characterized by its rich documentation, sober style, and brilliant polemic. In addition to innumerable fatwās (legal opinions based on religious law) and several professions of faith, the most beautiful of which is the Wāsitīyah, two works merit particular attention. One is his As-Siyā-sat ash-sharʿīyah (“Treatise on Juridical Politics”), available in French and English translations. The other, Minhāj as-sunnah (“The Way of Tradition”), is the richest work of comparative theology surviving from medieval Islam.
Ibn Taymiyyah desired a return to the sources of the Muslim religion, which he felt had been altered too often, to one extent or another, by the different religious sects or schools. The sources were the Qurʾān and the sunnah: revealed writing and the prophetic tradition. The ijmāʿ, or community consensus, had no value in itself, he insisted, unless it rested on those two sources. His traditionalism, however, did not prevent Ibn Taymiyyah from allowing analogical reasoning (qiyās) and the argument of utility (maṣlaḥah) a large place in his thought, on the condition that both rested on the objective givens of revelation and tradition. Only such a return to sources, he felt, would permit the divided and disunited Muslim community to refind its unity.
In theodicy (the justification of God as good when evil is observable in the world), Ibn Taymiyyah wished to describe God as he is described in the Qurʾān and as the Prophet did in the sunnah, which led him to side with theological schools in disagreement with contemporary opinion. This position was the point of departure for a critique, often conducted with very subtle argument, of the ideas of such dogmatic theologians as al-Ashʿarī or Fakhr ad-Dīn ar-Rāzī, such philosophers as Avicenna and Averroës, or such mystics as Ibn al-ʿArabī.
Concerning praxes (practices), Ibn Taymiyyah believed that one could only require, in worship, those practices inaugurated by God and his Prophet and that one could only forbid, in social relations, those things forbidden by the Qurʾān and the sunnah. Thus, on the one hand, he favored a revision of the system of religious obligations and a brushing aside of condemnable innovations (bidʿah), and, on the other, he constructed an economic ethic that was more flexible on many points than that espoused by the contemporary schools.
In politics, Ibn Taymiyyah recognized the legitimacy of the first four caliphs, but he rejected the necessity of having a single caliphate and allowed for the existence of many emirates. Within each emirate he demanded that the prince apply the religious law strictly and rely on it for his legal opinion, and Ibn Taymiyyah demanded from those under the prince’s jurisdiction that they obey the established authority except where it required disobedience to God, every Muslim being required to “will the good and forbid the bad” for the benefit of the common welfare.
Though Ibn Taymiyyah had numerous religious and political adversaries in his own time, he has strongly influenced modern Islam for the last two centuries. He is the source of the Wahhābīyah, a strictly traditionist movement founded by Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (d. 1792), who took his ideas from Ibn Taymiyyah’s writings. Ibn Taymiyyah also influenced various reform movements that have posed the problem of reformulating traditional ideologies by a return to sources.
Ibn Taymiyyah left a considerable body of work (350 works listed by his student Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya and 500 by another student al-Dhahabi). His work extended and justified his religious and political involvements and was characterized by its rich content, sobriety, and skillful polemical style.
Extant books and essays written by Ibn Taymiyyah include:
* A Great Compilation of Fatwa — (Majmu al-Fatwa al-Kubra) This was collected centuries after his death, and contains several of the works mentioned below
* Minhaj as-Sunnah an-Nabawiyyah — (The Pathway of as-Sunnah an-Nabawiyyah) — Volumes 1–4
* Majmoo' al-Fatawa — (Compilation of Fatawa) Volumes 1–36
* al-Aqeedah Al-Hamawiyyah — (The Creed to the People of Hamawiyyah)
* al-Aqeedah Al-Waasittiyah — (The Creed to the People of Waasittiyah)
* al-Asma wa's-Sifaat — (Allah's Names and Attributes) Volumes 1–2
* 'al-Iman — (Faith)
* al-Jawab as Sahih li man Baddala Din al-Masih (Literally, "The Correct Response to those who have Corrupted the Deen (Religion) of the Messiah"; A Muslim theologian's response to Christianity)—seven volumes, over a thousand pages.
* as-Sarim al-Maslul ‘ala Shatim ar-Rasul—The Drawn Sword against those who insult the Messenger. Written in response to an incident in which Ibn Taymiyyah heard a Christian insulting Muhammad. The book is well-known because he wrote it entirely by memory, while in jail, and quoting more than hundreds of references.
* Fatawa al-Kubra
* Fatawa al-Misriyyah
* ar-Radd 'ala al-Mantiqiyyin (Refutation of Greek Logicians)
* Naqd at-Ta'sis
* al-Uboodiyyah — (Subjection to Allah)
* Iqtida' as-Sirat al-Mustaqim' — (Following The Straight Path)
* al-Siyasa al-shar'iyya
* at-Tawassul wal-Waseela
* Sharh Futuh al-Ghayb — (Commentary on Revelations of the Unseen by Abdul-Qadir Gilani)
Some of his other works have been translated to English. They include:
* The Friends of Allah and the Friends of Shaytan
* Kitab al Iman: The Book of Faith
* Diseases of the Hearts and their Cures
* The Relief from Distress
* Fundamentals of Enjoining Good and Forbidding Evil
* The Concise Legacy
* The Goodly Word
* The Madinan Way
* Ibn Taymiyya against the Greek logicians
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Ibn Taymiyya (Taqi ad-Din Ahmad ibn Taymiyya) Taqī al-Dīn Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad ibn ʿAbd al-Salām ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Muḥammad ibn Taymiyyah) (1263, in Harran, Mesopotamia - September 26, 1328, in Cairo). Hanbalite theologian and jurist. Ibn Taymiyya was born in Harran to a family of Hanbali scholars (including his paternal grandfather, uncle, and father). Ibn Taymiyya was himself a Hanbali in many, though not all, juridical and theological matters, and a Salafi on a wider plane. He has had a strong influence on conservative Sunni circles and, in the modern period, on both liberals and conservatives.
Ibn Taymiyyah was one of Islam’s most forceful theologians who, as a member of the Pietist school founded by Ibn Ḥanbal, sought the return of the Islamic religion to its sources: the Qurʾān and the sunnah, revealed writing and the prophetic tradition. He is also the source of the Wahhābīyah, a mid-18th-century traditionalist movement of Islam.
Ibn Taymiyyah was born in Harran, Mesopotamia. Educated in Damascus, where he had been taken in 1268 as a refugee from the Mongol invasion, he later steeped himself in the teachings of the Pietist school. Though he remained faithful throughout his life to that school, of whose doctrines he had an unrivalled mastery, he also acquired an extensive knowledge of contemporary Islamic sources and disciplines: the Qurʾān (Islamic scripture), the Ḥadīth (sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad), jurisprudence (fiqh), dogmatic theology (kalām), philosophy, and Ṣūfī (Islamic mystical) theology.
The life of Ibn Taymiyyah was marked by persecutions. As early as 1293 Ibn Taymiyyah came into conflict with local authorities for protesting a sentence, pronounced under religious law, against a Christian accused of having insulted the Prophet. In 1298 he was accused of anthropomorphism (ascribing human characteristics to God) and for having criticized, contemptuously, the legitimacy of dogmatic theology.
During the great Mongol crisis of the years 1299 to 1303, and especially during the occupation of Damascus, he led the resistance party and denounced the suspect faith of the invaders and their accomplices. During the ensuing years, Ibn Taymiyyah was engaged in intensive polemic activity: either against the Kasrawān Shīʿah in Lebanon; the Rifāʿīyah, a Ṣūfī religious brotherhood; or the ittiḥādīyah school, which taught that the Creator and the created become one, a school that grew out of the teaching of Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 1240), whose monism he denounced.
In 1306, Ibn Taymiyyah was summoned to explain his beliefs to the governor’s council, which, although it did not condemn him, sent him to Cairo. There he appeared before a new council on the charge of anthropomorphism and was imprisoned in the citadel for 18 months. Soon after gaining his freedom, he was confined again in 1308 for several months in the prison of the qāḍīs (Muslim judges who exercise both civil and religious functions) for having denounced the worship of saints as being against religious law (Sharīʿah).
He was sent to Alexandria under house arrest in 1309, the day after the abdication of the sultan Muḥammad ibn Qalāwūn and the advent of Baybars II al-Jāshnikīr, whom he regarded as a usurper and whose imminent end he predicted. Seven months later, on Ibn Qalāwūn’s return, he was able to return to Cairo. But in 1313 he left Cairo once more with the Sultan, on a campaign to recover Damascus, which was again being threatened by the Mongols.
Ibn Taymiyyah spent his last 15 years in Damascus. Promoted to the rank of schoolmaster, he gathered around him a circle of disciples from every social class. The most famous of these, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawzīyah (died 1350), was to share in Ibn Taymiyyah’s renewed persecutions. Accused of supporting a doctrine that would curtail the ease with which a Muslim could traditionally repudiate a wife and thus ease the ill effects of the practice, Ibn Taymiyyah was incarcerated on orders from Cairo in the citadel of Damascus from August 1320 to February 1321.
In July 1326, Cairo again ordered him confined to the citadel for having continued his condemnation of saint worship, in spite of the prohibition forbidding him to do so. He died in prison, deprived of his books and writing materials, and was buried in the Ṣūfī cemetery amid a great public gathering. His tomb still exists and is widely venerated.
Ibn Taymiyyah left a considerable body of work—often republished in Syria, Egypt, Arabia, and India—that extended and justified his religious and political involvements and was characterized by its rich documentation, sober style, and brilliant polemic. In addition to innumerable fatwās (legal opinions based on religious law) and several professions of faith, the most beautiful of which is the Wāsitīyah, two works merit particular attention. One is his As-Siyā-sat ash-sharʿīyah (“Treatise on Juridical Politics”), available in French and English translations. The other, Minhāj as-sunnah (“The Way of Tradition”), is the richest work of comparative theology surviving from medieval Islam.
Ibn Taymiyyah desired a return to the sources of the Muslim religion, which he felt had been altered too often, to one extent or another, by the different religious sects or schools. The sources were the Qurʾān and the sunnah: revealed writing and the prophetic tradition. The ijmāʿ, or community consensus, had no value in itself, he insisted, unless it rested on those two sources. His traditionalism, however, did not prevent Ibn Taymiyyah from allowing analogical reasoning (qiyās) and the argument of utility (maṣlaḥah) a large place in his thought, on the condition that both rested on the objective givens of revelation and tradition. Only such a return to sources, he felt, would permit the divided and disunited Muslim community to refind its unity.
In theodicy (the justification of God as good when evil is observable in the world), Ibn Taymiyyah wished to describe God as he is described in the Qurʾān and as the Prophet did in the sunnah, which led him to side with theological schools in disagreement with contemporary opinion. This position was the point of departure for a critique, often conducted with very subtle argument, of the ideas of such dogmatic theologians as al-Ashʿarī or Fakhr ad-Dīn ar-Rāzī, such philosophers as Avicenna and Averroës, or such mystics as Ibn al-ʿArabī.
Concerning praxes (practices), Ibn Taymiyyah believed that one could only require, in worship, those practices inaugurated by God and his Prophet and that one could only forbid, in social relations, those things forbidden by the Qurʾān and the sunnah. Thus, on the one hand, he favored a revision of the system of religious obligations and a brushing aside of condemnable innovations (bidʿah), and, on the other, he constructed an economic ethic that was more flexible on many points than that espoused by the contemporary schools.
In politics, Ibn Taymiyyah recognized the legitimacy of the first four caliphs, but he rejected the necessity of having a single caliphate and allowed for the existence of many emirates. Within each emirate he demanded that the prince apply the religious law strictly and rely on it for his legal opinion, and Ibn Taymiyyah demanded from those under the prince’s jurisdiction that they obey the established authority except where it required disobedience to God, every Muslim being required to “will the good and forbid the bad” for the benefit of the common welfare.
Though Ibn Taymiyyah had numerous religious and political adversaries in his own time, he has strongly influenced modern Islam for the last two centuries. He is the source of the Wahhābīyah, a strictly traditionist movement founded by Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (d. 1792), who took his ideas from Ibn Taymiyyah’s writings. Ibn Taymiyyah also influenced various reform movements that have posed the problem of reformulating traditional ideologies by a return to sources.
Ibn Taymiyyah left a considerable body of work (350 works listed by his student Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya and 500 by another student al-Dhahabi). His work extended and justified his religious and political involvements and was characterized by its rich content, sobriety, and skillful polemical style.
Extant books and essays written by Ibn Taymiyyah include:
* A Great Compilation of Fatwa — (Majmu al-Fatwa al-Kubra) This was collected centuries after his death, and contains several of the works mentioned below
* Minhaj as-Sunnah an-Nabawiyyah — (The Pathway of as-Sunnah an-Nabawiyyah) — Volumes 1–4
* Majmoo' al-Fatawa — (Compilation of Fatawa) Volumes 1–36
* al-Aqeedah Al-Hamawiyyah — (The Creed to the People of Hamawiyyah)
* al-Aqeedah Al-Waasittiyah — (The Creed to the People of Waasittiyah)
* al-Asma wa's-Sifaat — (Allah's Names and Attributes) Volumes 1–2
* 'al-Iman — (Faith)
* al-Jawab as Sahih li man Baddala Din al-Masih (Literally, "The Correct Response to those who have Corrupted the Deen (Religion) of the Messiah"; A Muslim theologian's response to Christianity)—seven volumes, over a thousand pages.
* as-Sarim al-Maslul ‘ala Shatim ar-Rasul—The Drawn Sword against those who insult the Messenger. Written in response to an incident in which Ibn Taymiyyah heard a Christian insulting Muhammad. The book is well-known because he wrote it entirely by memory, while in jail, and quoting more than hundreds of references.
* Fatawa al-Kubra
* Fatawa al-Misriyyah
* ar-Radd 'ala al-Mantiqiyyin (Refutation of Greek Logicians)
* Naqd at-Ta'sis
* al-Uboodiyyah — (Subjection to Allah)
* Iqtida' as-Sirat al-Mustaqim' — (Following The Straight Path)
* al-Siyasa al-shar'iyya
* at-Tawassul wal-Waseela
* Sharh Futuh al-Ghayb — (Commentary on Revelations of the Unseen by Abdul-Qadir Gilani)
Some of his other works have been translated to English. They include:
* The Friends of Allah and the Friends of Shaytan
* Kitab al Iman: The Book of Faith
* Diseases of the Hearts and their Cures
* The Relief from Distress
* Fundamentals of Enjoining Good and Forbidding Evil
* The Concise Legacy
* The Goodly Word
* The Madinan Way
* Ibn Taymiyya against the Greek logicians
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Ibn Tufayl
Ibn Tufayl (Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Tufayl) (Abubacer) (Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Abd al-Malik ibn Muhammad ibn Tufail al-Qaisi al-Andalusia) (Abubacer Aben Tofail) (Abu Jaafar Ebn Tophail) (Ibn Tufail) (c. 1105, Guadix, Spain – 1185). Known in the West as Abubacer. He was a noted Andalusian-Arab Muslim polymath: an Arabic writer, novelist, Islamic philosopher, theologian, physician, vizier, and court official.
As a philosopher and novelist, Ibn Tufayl is most famous for writing the first philosophical novel, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, also known as Philosophus Autodidactus in the Western world. As a physician, he was an early supporter of dissection and autopsy, which was expressed in his novel.
He was born in Wadi Ash (today Guadix), near Granada, in Spain, he was educated by Ibn Bajjah (Avempace). He served as a secretary for the ruler of Granada, and later as vizier and physician for Abu Yaqub Yusuf, the Almohad ruler of Al Andalus, to whom he recommended Ibn Rushd (Averroes) as his own future successor in 1169.
Ibn Rushd became Ibn Tufayl's successor after he retired in 1182. He died several years later in Morocco in 1185. The astronomer Nur Ed-Din al-Betrugi was also a disciple of Ibn Tufayl.
Ibn Tufayl’s mystical philosophy was presented in his novel Hayy ibn Yaqzan (Hayya ibn yaqzhan) (Walk on, you bright boy) where a boy (called Hayy {walk on!}) was brought up in isolation on an island. All by himself, the boy investigates the universe, and he passes through several stages, each lasting seven years. At the highest level the boy came to understand the ultimate nature of the universe; the emanations coming from the One that goes from level to level, how spirit takes material form, and how the spirit strives to reach up to the One. The boy finally meets another human being, and when returning to the world of people, he understands that his ultimate understanding is the same as the revealed religion, but that not all can reach this highest form of understanding. Moreover, Man is divided into three groups: (1) Those who can understand the highest truth by reason alone (very few); (2) those who can understand by the help of symbols of the religious revelation; and (3) those who accept the laws coming from the symbols of the religious revelation. Hayy tries to enlighten people, but fails, and returns to his island. The moral seems to be that each of these groups of people should accept their standing, and not strive for more.
Ibn Tufayl drew the name of the book and most of its characters from an earlier work by Ibn Sina (Avicenna). Ibn Tufayl's book was neither a commentary on nor a mere retelling of Ibn Sina's work, but rather a new and innovative work in its own right. It reflects one of the main concerns of Muslim philosophers (later also of Christian thinkers), that of reconciling philosophy with revelation. At the same time, the narrative anticipates in some ways both Robinson Crusoe and Rousseau's Emile. It tells of a child who is nurtured by a gazelle and grows up in total isolation from humans. In seven phases of seven years each, solely by the exercise of his faculties, Hayy goes through all the gradations of knowledge. The story of Hayy ibn Yaqzan is similar to the later story of Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book in that a baby is abandoned on a deserted tropical island where he is taken care of and fed by a mother wolf.
Iby Tufayl's Hayy ibn Yaqzan (Philosophus Autodidactus) was written as a response to al-Ghazali's The Incoherence of the Philosophers. In the 13th century, Ibn al-Nafis later wrote the Al-Risalah al-Kamiliyyah fil Siera al-Nabawiyyah (known as Theologus Autodidactus in the West) as a response to Ibn Tufayl's Philosophus Autodidactus.
Hayy ibn Yaqzan (Philosophus Autodidactus) had a significant influence on both Arabic literature and European literature, and it went on to become an influential best-seller throughout Western Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. The work also had a "profound influence" on both classical Islamic philosophy and modern Western philosophy. It became "one of the most important books that heralded the Scientific Revolution" and European Enlightenment, and the thoughts expressed in the novel can be found
Ibn Tufayl (Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Tufayl) (Abubacer) (Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Abd al-Malik ibn Muhammad ibn Tufail al-Qaisi al-Andalusia) (Abubacer Aben Tofail) (Abu Jaafar Ebn Tophail) (Ibn Tufail) (c. 1105, Guadix, Spain – 1185). Known in the West as Abubacer. He was a noted Andalusian-Arab Muslim polymath: an Arabic writer, novelist, Islamic philosopher, theologian, physician, vizier, and court official.
As a philosopher and novelist, Ibn Tufayl is most famous for writing the first philosophical novel, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, also known as Philosophus Autodidactus in the Western world. As a physician, he was an early supporter of dissection and autopsy, which was expressed in his novel.
He was born in Wadi Ash (today Guadix), near Granada, in Spain, he was educated by Ibn Bajjah (Avempace). He served as a secretary for the ruler of Granada, and later as vizier and physician for Abu Yaqub Yusuf, the Almohad ruler of Al Andalus, to whom he recommended Ibn Rushd (Averroes) as his own future successor in 1169.
Ibn Rushd became Ibn Tufayl's successor after he retired in 1182. He died several years later in Morocco in 1185. The astronomer Nur Ed-Din al-Betrugi was also a disciple of Ibn Tufayl.
Ibn Tufayl’s mystical philosophy was presented in his novel Hayy ibn Yaqzan (Hayya ibn yaqzhan) (Walk on, you bright boy) where a boy (called Hayy {walk on!}) was brought up in isolation on an island. All by himself, the boy investigates the universe, and he passes through several stages, each lasting seven years. At the highest level the boy came to understand the ultimate nature of the universe; the emanations coming from the One that goes from level to level, how spirit takes material form, and how the spirit strives to reach up to the One. The boy finally meets another human being, and when returning to the world of people, he understands that his ultimate understanding is the same as the revealed religion, but that not all can reach this highest form of understanding. Moreover, Man is divided into three groups: (1) Those who can understand the highest truth by reason alone (very few); (2) those who can understand by the help of symbols of the religious revelation; and (3) those who accept the laws coming from the symbols of the religious revelation. Hayy tries to enlighten people, but fails, and returns to his island. The moral seems to be that each of these groups of people should accept their standing, and not strive for more.
Ibn Tufayl drew the name of the book and most of its characters from an earlier work by Ibn Sina (Avicenna). Ibn Tufayl's book was neither a commentary on nor a mere retelling of Ibn Sina's work, but rather a new and innovative work in its own right. It reflects one of the main concerns of Muslim philosophers (later also of Christian thinkers), that of reconciling philosophy with revelation. At the same time, the narrative anticipates in some ways both Robinson Crusoe and Rousseau's Emile. It tells of a child who is nurtured by a gazelle and grows up in total isolation from humans. In seven phases of seven years each, solely by the exercise of his faculties, Hayy goes through all the gradations of knowledge. The story of Hayy ibn Yaqzan is similar to the later story of Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book in that a baby is abandoned on a deserted tropical island where he is taken care of and fed by a mother wolf.
Iby Tufayl's Hayy ibn Yaqzan (Philosophus Autodidactus) was written as a response to al-Ghazali's The Incoherence of the Philosophers. In the 13th century, Ibn al-Nafis later wrote the Al-Risalah al-Kamiliyyah fil Siera al-Nabawiyyah (known as Theologus Autodidactus in the West) as a response to Ibn Tufayl's Philosophus Autodidactus.
Hayy ibn Yaqzan (Philosophus Autodidactus) had a significant influence on both Arabic literature and European literature, and it went on to become an influential best-seller throughout Western Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. The work also had a "profound influence" on both classical Islamic philosophy and modern Western philosophy. It became "one of the most important books that heralded the Scientific Revolution" and European Enlightenment, and the thoughts expressed in the novel can be found
in different variations and to different degrees in the books of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Immanuel Kant.
A Latin translation of the work, entitled Philosophus Autodidactus first appeared in 1671, prepared by Edward Pococke the Younger. The first English translation (by Simon Ockley) was published in 1708. These translations later inspired Daniel Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe, which also featured a desert island narrative and was the first novel in English. Ibn Tufayl's novel also inspired the concept of "tabula rasa" developed in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) by John Locke, who was a student of Pococke.
Ibn Tufayl's work went on to become one of the principal sources of empiricism in modern Western philosophy, and influenced many enlightenment philosophers, such as David Hume and George Berkeley. Hayy's ideas on materialism in the novel also have some similarities to Karl Marx's historical materialism. Other European writers influenced by Ibn Tufayl include William Molyneaux, Gottfried Liebniz, Melchisedech Thevenot, John Wallis, Christiaan Huygens, George Keith, Robert Barclay, the Quakers, Samuel Hartlib, and Voltaire.
Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Tufayl see Ibn Tufayl
Abubacer see Ibn Tufayl
Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Abd al-Malik ibn Muhammad ibn Tufail al-Qaisi al-Andalusia see Ibn Tufayl
Abubacer Aben Tofail see Ibn Tufayl
Abu Jaafar Ebn Tophail see Ibn Tufayl
Ibn Tufail see Ibn Tufayl
A Latin translation of the work, entitled Philosophus Autodidactus first appeared in 1671, prepared by Edward Pococke the Younger. The first English translation (by Simon Ockley) was published in 1708. These translations later inspired Daniel Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe, which also featured a desert island narrative and was the first novel in English. Ibn Tufayl's novel also inspired the concept of "tabula rasa" developed in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) by John Locke, who was a student of Pococke.
Ibn Tufayl's work went on to become one of the principal sources of empiricism in modern Western philosophy, and influenced many enlightenment philosophers, such as David Hume and George Berkeley. Hayy's ideas on materialism in the novel also have some similarities to Karl Marx's historical materialism. Other European writers influenced by Ibn Tufayl include William Molyneaux, Gottfried Liebniz, Melchisedech Thevenot, John Wallis, Christiaan Huygens, George Keith, Robert Barclay, the Quakers, Samuel Hartlib, and Voltaire.
Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Tufayl see Ibn Tufayl
Abubacer see Ibn Tufayl
Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Abd al-Malik ibn Muhammad ibn Tufail al-Qaisi al-Andalusia see Ibn Tufayl
Abubacer Aben Tofail see Ibn Tufayl
Abu Jaafar Ebn Tophail see Ibn Tufayl
Ibn Tufail see Ibn Tufayl
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