Ibn Sīnā

Ibn Sīnā, known in Latin as Avicenna, was born in 980 near Bukhara, in Central Asia. By his own account, he had mastered the Qurʾān, logic, mathematics and medicine as a boy, and read Aristotle’s Metaphysics forty times without understanding it, until a short treatise by al-Fārābī opened it for him. While still young he cured the Samanid ruler of Bukhara and was given the use of his library.

After the fall of the Samanids he served a series of rulers in Iran as physician and vizier, often in danger, writing at night and on journeys. His Canon of Medicine was a standard textbook in the Islamic world and in Europe for centuries. His philosophical encyclopedia, The Healing (al-Shifāʾ), and his later Pointers and Reminders (al-Ishārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt) set out a system that transformed Aristotelian philosophy. He died at Hamadan in 1037.

His philosophy shaped Islamic theology, even among his critics such as al-Ghazālī, and, through Latin translations, Jewish and Christian scholasticism. The last chapters of the Pointers, on the stations of the knowers, describe the mystic’s path, and the relation of his philosophy to mysticism remains debated.