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Averroes (1126-1198) |
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Medieval Spanish-Arab philosopher, physician, and jurist of the Shariah law, who reintroduced Aristotelian thought to Western Europe. After Latin versions of Averroes' commentaries on Aristotle started to circulate among scholars, the works of the great Greek philosopher were rediscovered. Averroes tried to unite Aristotle with religious thinking. He argued that the teachings of Aristotle are not in conflict with the Holy Law. In the West Averroes was a very important thinker, but in the Islamic world his down-to-earth theology received little attention until the nineteenth century. "For it is evident from more than one verse in the Book of God Almighty that He calls upon men to believe in the existence of the Originator, glory be to Him, through rational arguments detailed specifically therein, such as the saying of the Almighty: "O people, worship your Lord who has created you as well as those who came before you"; and as the other saying of the Almighty: "Is there any doubt about Allah, Maker of the heavens and the earth?" in addition to many other verses in the same vein." (in Faith And Reason In Islam by Averroes, translated by Ibrahim Najjar, Oneworld Publications Ltd, 2001, p. 18) Abu al-Walid ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd, know in Europe as Averroes, was born in Córdova, the capital of Muslim Spain, where he spent the most of his life. He was a scion of a long line of religious judges and statesmen in Andalusia. Following the traditions of his family, Averroes was educated in Islamic law, but also in Hellenistic sciences in their Arab form. Later he served as the religious judge (qadi) of Seville (1169-1172), and chief judge of Córdova (1172-1182). The turning point in Averroes' career came in 1169. His friend Ibn Tufayl, a physician and the author of the philosophical allegory Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, introduced him to the calip Abu Ya'qub Yusuf, who was genuinely interested in philosophy. According to the historian al-Marakushi, the caliph asked Averroes, "What do the philosophers believe regarding heaven? Is it eternal or created in time?" (Averroes: His Life, Work and Influence by Majid Fakhry, Oneworld Publications, 2001, p. 2) Averroes feigned ignorance of philosophy, but Ibn Tafayl recommended Averroes' talents as the Commentator of Aristotle. Thus he was invited to write his famous comments on the texts of the philosopher in their Arabic translations. He often produced short, medium, and long commentaries on the same work. The short commentaries he frequently peppered with insights into contemporary issues. "Arabic philosophy is not important as original thought. Men like Avicenna and Averroes are essentially commentators." (A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell, Simon & Schuster, 2008, p. 427) George F. Hourani has called Averroes as a "master of intellectual alchemy", who blended ideas from different souces into an unified vision. ('Introduction', in Averroes: On the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy, a translation, with introduction and notes by George F. Hourani, Luzac & Co., 1961, p. 39) In his commentary on Plato's Republic Averroes presented his own vision of the Ideal State. Averroes blamed democracy for the emphasis it places on the private and for its inability to order the desires of the citizens. Like Plato, he believed that lying is necessary for the teaching of the citizens, because most of them are like children, who don't know what is good for them. ('Averroes (Ibn Rushd)' by Charles E. Butterworth, in Great Thinkers of the Eastern World, edited by Ian P. McGreal, 1995, pp. 465-467) Noteworthy, Averroes's view of women was progressive. Like Socrates, he believed that women have the same nature as men and he did not rule out the possibility "that there be philosophers and rulers among them." (The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution, 750 B.C.-A.D. 1250, Volume 1, by Prudence Allen, 1985, p. 349) "How wonderful is this man and how different is his nature from human natures generally," Averroes wrote on Aristotle in Talkhīṣ kitāb al-qiyās. "It is as though divine art brought him forth so as to inform us, humans, that ultimate perfection is possible in the human species perceptibly and demonstrably." (Averroes: His Life, Work and Influence by Majid Fakhry, Oneworld Publications, 2001, p. 41) However, it is probable that he was not acquainted with Greek and based his knowledge of Aristotle on Syriac and Arabic translations. In 1182 Averroes succeeded Ibn Tufayl as royal physician to
caliph
at the court of Marrakesh. The caliph died a few years later. When his
son Abu Yusuf Ya'qub, nicknamed al-Mansur, succeeded his father,
Averroes continued to enjoy the royal patronage until 1195 when
he was
tried as a heretic by the religious community of Córdova. According to
some sources, Averroes had referred al-Mansur in the Book of Animals
as the "king of the Berbers" (al-barbar),
which could be read as Barbarians. Averroes was banished in disgrace
and many of his works were burned. After a period of exile, he was
restored to grace and the edicts against him were rescinded. Averroes
died in 1198 in Marrakesh, Morocco. He left behind no autobiography. With his death, Muslim philosophy
in Spain ended. Even during his lifetime Averroes' philosophy was considered controversial, but he had a great impact on Western-European thought. His compendium of medicine, Kitāb al-Kulliyyāt fi-l-ṭibb (in Latin, Colliget) was used for centuries. In Islamic lands, where orthodoxy and al-Ghazali's intuitive and mystical sense of the Divine won, Averroes' rationalism did not have following and he has remained a marginal figure. Farah Antun's translation of Ernest Rénan's (1823-1892) historical essay Averroès et l'Averroïsme (1866, rev. ed., 1882) revived interest in him; Averroes was seen as the harbinger of an attempt to modernize Islam. In his study of the life and philosophy of Averroes, Antun represented him as a victim of religious persecution. During the Middle Ages, Islamic scholars preserved ancient Greco-Roman learning. At the same time Western scholars had almost completely forgotten Aristotle and the great cultural legacy of the Greeks. In Islamic Spain there were numerous important libraries, and Christian scholars travelled south to make use of these resources. Greek texts had been translated into Arabic already after the Arab armies marched into Syria and Iraq. Severus Sebokht, who died in 667, wrote commentaries on the Rhetorica of Aristotle in the Monophysite monastery of Qinnesrin in northern Syria. Also Athanasius of Balad (d. 696) and George, Bishop of the Arabs (d. 724) produced commentaries and translations. Alexandria, the most important center for the study of Greek philosophy in the seventh century, fell in 641. Spain was invaded and overwhelmed by Muslim army in 710-712. With its palaces, mosques and libraries, Córdova became the most brilliant city in Europe. After Greek and Arabic texts began to be translated in great numbers, the writings of the great Arabic philosophers, mostly importantly Avicenna (Ibn Sina, 980-1037) and Averroes, became available. They also offered quite unfamiliar ideas. When Averroes' works started to spread after 1230, they were received with much enthusiasm and curiosity. Pope Gregory IX ordered a commission to examine what measures could be taken to permit Christians to study books that were not allowed to be taught. However, in the 1270s Siger of Brabant, Boethius of Dacia, and Bernier of Nivelles were condemned for Averroistic heresies at Paris. Dante included Averroes in Inferno (Canto IV) in the first circle of Hell with great pagan scientists and writers: Of qualities I saw the good collector, Dante was accused of Averroism shortly after he died and his book, De Monarchia, was burned by the order of Pope John XXII. From the thirteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries scholars regularly read Aristotle with Averroes' commentaries. In Raphael's celebrated fresco The School of Athens (1510-11) in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican, the figure of Averroes is found standing behind Pythagoras and looking over his shoulder. And much later, Averroes' life inspired the Egyptian film director Youssef Chahine's film Destiny (1997), which warned of the dangers of fundamentalism. The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges portaryed the scholar in 'Averroës' Search' (The Aleph, 1949) at work in his library, trying solve the enigma of the words "tragedy" and "comedy". Eventually he writes that tragedy means "panegyric," and that comedy means "satire." Too loyal to Islam, he cannot break circle of his own culture. One of Borges's sources was the French critic and historian
Ernest Rénan, who argued in Averroès et l'Averroïsme (1852)
that Averroes' paraphrase of the Poetics of
Aristotle evinces ignorance of Greek Literature. Borges takes up the
view: "Averroës's blunders in matters of Greek literature cannot but
make one smile. He imagines that tragedy is nothing more than the art
of encomium, comedy the art of censure; he then claims to find
tragedies and comedies in the Arabic panegyrics and satires, and even
in the Koran!" (Borges
and His Fiction: A Guide to His Mind and Art by Gene H.
Bell-Villada, University of North Carolina Press, 1981, p. 172)
Borges's story is a postmodern fiction-about-fiction. At
the end Averroes vanishes, to give room to the voice of the author, who
explains that he tried to narrate the process of failure, but on the
last page he felt that "Averroës, trying to imagine what a play is
without ever having suspected what a theater is, was no more absurd
than I, trying to imagine Averröes yet with no more material than a few
snatches from Renan, Lane, and Asín Palacios." (Averroës'
Search', in Collected Fictions
by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley, Penguin Books, 1999,
p. 241) Averroes' works include medical and astronomical writings, commentaries, and judicial and conceptual defenses of philosophy. Referring to Aristotle, he wrote in De Substantia Orbis, that "it is apparent in the case of th that it is dense and dark by its very nature and that it receives its light from another planet, namely, the sun". (Averroes' De Substantia Orbis: Critical Edition of the Hebrew Text with English Translation and Commentary, edited by Arthur Hyman, 1986, p. 93) Averroes criticized Ptolemaic astronomy – especially its eccentrics and epicycles – for contravening the physical priciples of Aristotelian cosmology. "For nothing of the (true) science of astronomy exists in our time, the astronomy of our time being only on agreement with calculations (al-ḥusbān) and not with what exists (al-wuğūd)." ('Averroes' Critique of Ptolemy and Its Reception by John of Jandun and Agostino Nifo' by Dag Nikolaus Hasse, in Averroes' Natural Philosophy and Its Reception in the Latin West, edited by Paul J.J.M. Bakker, Leuven University Press, 2015, p. 72) Averroes' dogma was the circular movement of the heavenly spheres. As a physician he argued that the most important aspects of preserving health are a good digestion and a sound bowel-movement. Fruits and herbs should be avoided. Averroes became an authority among both Jews and Christians, and his commentaries on Aristotle influenced such theologians as Rabbi Moses ibn Maimon (1135-1204), St. Thomas Aquinas, who quoted him five hundred and three times, and Albert the Great. Ibn Maimon declared himself to be a disciple of a pupil of Ibn Bajja. Averroes' commentaried he began to read in exile in Egypt. Averroes opposed the Ash'arite theologians, led by the great Muslim thinker Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058-1111), whose onslaught on Greek-Arabic philosophy is said to have signaled the death of philosophy in the East. Al-Ghazali believed that it is impossible to proof the existence of God rationally. As an answer to al-Ghazali's Tahāfut al-Falāsifah (Incoherence of the Philosophers) Averroes wrote Tahâfut al-tahâfut (Incoherence of the Incoherence). He also criticized in it Ibn Sina's Neoplatonic metaphysics. In Exposition of the Method of Proof Averroes dealt with the question of God's existence and proposed his own proofs. The treatise was not translated into Latin but St. Thomas Aquinas' (1225-1274) famous approach to the question in Summa Theologicae rely upon Aristotle in similar way. Averroes thought that not everybody was capable of interpreting
Qur'anic texts – only the adept or "people of demonstration" are able
to undertake the interpretation of ambiguous passages in the Qur'an.
But there are certain doctrines about God, which must be accepted in
toto,
such as the existence of God as Creator and Sustainer of the world, the
creation of the world by God, the validity of prophecy, and the
resurrection of the body on the Last Day. Rejecting the traditional
view, he argued that creation is a continuous process with no
beginning: there is no first man, but the series of men is infinite. (Averroes' Tahafut al-Tahafut (The Incoherence of the
Incoherence), Volume II, translated from the Arabic with introduction and notes by Simon van den Bergh, 1954, p. 10) Averroes did not
see any real conflict between philosophy and religion, or philosophical
texts (Aristotle) and religious texts (Qur'an).
"Philosophy has
always existed among the adepts of revelation, i.e., the prophets,
peace
be upon them. Thus, the soundest proposition in this regard is that
every prophet is a philosopher, but not every philosopher is a
prophet." (Dante's Pluralism and the Islamic Philosophy of Religion by Gregory B. Stone, Macmillan, 2006, p. 109) Truth may be discovered by philosophers through logic, but
it may also be reveled figuratively, as it is in scriptures. Averroes said in On the Harmony of Religions and Philosophy:
"So if such is the case, and everything that is required in the study
of the subject of intellectual syllogisms by the ancients, presumably
we ought to lay hands on their books in oder to study what they said
about that subject; and if it is all correct we should accept it from
them, while if there is anything incorrect in it, we should draw
attention to that." (Ibid., 1961, p. 47) In the West, Averroes' support to the idea that there are different paths to the truth, was misunderstood. His attempt to harmonize religion and philosophy led to accusations of accepting the doctrine of "double truth", that a thing can be true in philosophy or according to reason while its opposite is true in theology or according to faith. The strict Averroist Pietro Pomponazzi (1462-1525) went even further and argued, that Averroes proved that religious laws are neither true nor false, but designed to lead people to salvation and happiness (Averroes and his Philosophy by Oliver Leaman, 1997, p. 171). Diverging from many Islamic thinkers, Averroes showed little ethusiasm for mysticism. He believed that the intellect is universal and immortal. The relationship between the Active Intellect and the material intellect is what form is to matter; the Active Intellect is a "power of in the soul" and common to all mankind and eternal. According to Averroes, all generable and corruptible entities are made up of matter and form; soul is the the form or first perfection of a natural body. For these thoughts he was condemned for not believing in the immortality of the individual soul. In popular myth he was regarded as an atheist refuted by St. Thomas Aquinas. For further reading: Averroès et l'Averroïsme by E. Rénan (1852); Philosophie und Theologie von Averroes by M.J. Müller (1875); Metaphysik des Averroes by M. Horten (1912); Die durch Averroes erhaltene Fragmente Alexanders zur Metaphysic des Aristoteles by J. Freudenthal and S. Fränkel (1884); Ma ba'd al-Tabi'a, ed. M. al-Qabbani (1303/1885); Epitome der Metaphysik, by S. van der Bergh (1924); Ibn Rochd (Averroes) by L. Gauthier (1948); Averroës on the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy by George F. Hourami (1961); Ibn Rushd wa Falsafuh by Farah Antun (1988, orig. publ. 1903); Ibn Rushd (Averroes) by Dominique Urvoy (1991); Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect, and Theories of Human Intellect by Herbert Alan Davidson (1992); Averroes, Aquinas, and the Rediscovery of Aristotle in Western Europe by Majid Fakhry (1997); Averroes and the Enlightenment, ed. by Murad Wahbah (1996); Averroes and his Philosophy by Oliver Leaman (1997); Averroes: His Life, Works and Influence by Majid Fakhry (2001); The Philosophy of Ibn Rushd by Ehsan Ashraf (2010); Al-Ghazali, Averroës and the Interpretation of the Qur'an: Common Sense and Philosophy in Islam by Avital Wohlman; translated by David Burrell (2010); Averroes (Ibn Rushd): Scholar of Classical and Islamic Philosophy by Bridget Lim and Liz Sonneborn (2016); Interpreting Averroes: Critical Essays, edited by Peter Adamson, Matteo Di Giovanni (2018); Averroism Between the 15th and 17th Century, edited by Jozef Matula (2020); Averroes on Intellect: from Aristotelian Origins to Aquinas's Critique by Stephen R. Ogden (2022); Plato's Republic in the Islamic Context: New Perspectives on Averroes's Commentary, edited by Alexander Orwin (2022); Coherence of the Incoherence: Between Al-Ghazali and Ibn Rushd on Nature and the Cosmos by Edward Omar Moad (2023); Averroes and Averroism in Medieval Jewish Thought, edited by Racheli Haliva, Yoav Meyrav and Daniel Davies (2024); Islamic Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Leo Strauss's Relationship with al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes by Georges Tamer; translated by Ezra Tzfadya (2024) Editions:
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