emergence of modern philosophical and scientific thought. Indeed, mankind’s achievements in these domains were primitive and severly limited when compared to the dazzling contributions the early Muslims made in these fields of human thought and endeavour. But our failure to show our appreciation and acknowledge our profound debt to those remarkable early Muslim philosophers and scientists only reflects negatively on us. One man who dominated the field of philosophy and medicine more than probably anyone else in the history of human thought was Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna. This great and hugely influential Muslim philosopher and physician blazed an intellectual trail which continues to burn to this day.
Abu Ali Hussain ibn Abdullah ibn Hasan ibn Ali ibn Sina was born in Afshanah, a small town located close to Bukhara (in present-day Uzbekistan). As the capital of the reigning Samanid dynasty, Bukhara was a bustling centre of learning and commerce. Originally from Balkh, Ibn Sina’s father, Abdullah, moved to Afshanah where he met his Persian wife, Sitara, and became a prominent member of the Samanid civil service. His second son, Hussain (better known as Ibn Sina), was born a few years later. When Ibn Sina was around five, his family left Afshanah for Kharmayathnath, a town located on the outskirts of Bukhara, where his father became governor. Abdullah, Ibn Sina’s father, was a very learned and cultured man who ensured his son received a thorough education in both the religious and philosophical sciences. According to the custom of the day, young Ibn Sina committed the whole Qur’an to memory before he was ten, and became thoroughly familiar with the traditional Islamic sciences. Blessed with a prodigious memory and precocious intellect, he devoured all the religious, philosophical and scientific literature available to him in his locality. His ability to read rapidly and absorb complex ideas and thoughts with ease enabled him to acquire a comprehensive knowledge of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), logic (mantiq), mathematics, philosophy (falsafah), medicine and astronomy. Indeed, he was able to engage in heated discussion and debate with some of the most learned scholars of his time even, before he reached his eighteenth birthday.
Some of Ibn Sina’s early teachers included Shaykh Ismail al-Zahid, who taught him Islamic theology (kalam) and jurisprudence; the eminent mathematician Abu Abdullah al-Natili taught him Ptolemy’s Almagest and Euclid of Alexandria’s Elements, and aspects of logic; Abu Sahl al-Jurjani and Abu Mansur al-Qamari guided him in physics, medicine and philosophy. Such was his thirst for knowledge that he read, and became thoroughly familiar with, al-Farabi’s voluminous commentary on Aristotle’s metaphysics, before he was eighteen. His vast knowledge of all the sciences of his day soon made him a popular figure in his locality. It was also during this period that the reigning Samanid monarch, Nuh ibn Mansur al-Samani, was taken seriously ill and none of his court doctors were able to cure him. But after Ibn Sina’s fame as a skilled medical practitioner reached the corridors of power, he was asked to treat the ailing monarch. He not only diagnosed the illness, he also successfully treated it and restored the monarch to full health. Profoundly impressed with the young doctor, the Samanid ruler gave him the keys to his private library where Ibn Sina found enough religious, philosophical and scientific literature to keep him occupied for a long time. Being an omnivorous reader, he studied everything he found in the library and became a master of medicine, philosophy, logic, theology and literature. Convinced of his superior intellectual ability and maturity of thought, he then began to write profusely. In addition to a treatise on mathematics, he authored a book on ethics and also compiled an encyclopaedia of all the sciences of his time. Astonishingly, he was only twenty-one when he composed these books. Revered by politicians and lay-people alike for his erudition, scholarly achievements and medical skills, it was not long before he became a celebrity in his locality.
Living as he did in a volatile period in the history of Muslim Central Asia, Ibn Sina also became a victim of the mindless political rivalry and military hostility which the various Muslim rulers of that region pursued against each other. Following the death of his father in 1002, he left his home town and moved to Jurjaniyyah, the cosmopolitan capital of the Khwarizmi dynasty, where he received a warm welcome from its ruling elites, including the reigning Khwarizmshah Ali ibn al-Ma’mun. Although Ibn Sina did not stay here for long, his time in Jurjaniyyah proved very productive from a literary point of view. During this period he composed two more books on mathematics and astronomy, before he was forced to leave the city due to the growing power of the great Ghaznavid ruler Sultan Mahmud. For the next nine years – that is from 1012 to 1021 – Ibn Sina was compelled by the unfavourable political circumstances of the time to travel from one place to another. During this period of travel and political uncertainty, Ibn Sina found time to write his philosophical masterpiece Kitab al-Shifa (The Book of Healing) in eighteen volumes, and his famous medical encyclopedia Kitab al-Qanun fi al-Tibb (The Canon of Medicine) in another fourteen volumes. He also began work on a summarised version of his Kitab al-Shifa under the title of Kitab al-Najah (The Book of Deliverance) and wrote a collection of essays. On one occasion, he even served as a Minister in the court of the Buwayhid (or Buyid) monarch Shams al-Dawlah, until he fell out with his son and successor, Sama al-Dawlah, who imprisoned him for four months. After escaping from captivity by disguising himself as a Sufi dervish, he fled to Isfahan.
The peace and tranquility of this city was a breath of fresh air for him; he spent the next fifteen years of his life here writing and pursuing academic research. He completed his Kitab al-Najah and wrote a number of other highly rated books and treatises, including Al-Isharat wa’l Tanbihat (The Remarks and Admonitions) and Danishnama-yi alai (The Book of Science Dedicated to Ala al-Dawlah). Under Ala al-Dawlah’s stewardship, Isfahan became a renowned centre of learning and scholarship. In appreciation of the monarch’s kindness and generosity to him, he dedicated his Danishnama-yi alai – written in Persian – to Ala al-Dawlah. It is not known exactly how many books Ibn Sina wrote in total since a large number of his works have perished, including his ten-volume Kitab Lisan al-Arab and twenty-volume Kitab al-Insaf. However, a substantial number of his books and treatises (that is, around two hundred and fifty) have survived, including his world famous Kitab al-Qanun fi al-Tibb, al-Shifa, Kitab al-Najah, al-Isharat wa’l Tanbihat and his incomplete autobiography, which was later completed by his talented student Abu Ubaid al-Jurjani, before al-Bayhaqi and Ibn Khallikan popularised it.
By all accounts, Ibn Sina was a versatile genius whose scholarly interests covered all the major branches of learning known during his lifetime. But it was his seminal contribution in the fields of medicine and philosophy which earned him universal fame and recognition. His accomplishments in medicine were such that it is not possible to speak about them except in superlatives. His Kitab al-Qanun fi al-Tibb, which became known throughout the Western world as the Canon, is considered by medical historians to be one of the greatest medical encyclopaedias of all time. As the Bible of medieval medicine, it was a compulsory textbook for all medical students at the leading European universities until as late as the eighteenth century. In the East, however, it continues to be used as a standard work of reference by the practitioners of traditional medicine to this day. As it happens, Ibn Sina’s popularity as a medical writer and thinker was such that he became known as the ‘Prince of Physicians’ (rais al-atibba) throughout medieval Europe and his Canon became one of the most famous textbooks in medical history. Divided into five main chapters, in turn sub-divided into smaller sections, the Canon consisted of around a million words in total. The first chapter dealt with human physiology, symptomatology and the main principles of diagnostic therapy. In chapter two, he provided an in-depth analysis of animal, vegetable and mineral types, highlighting the meaning, value and purpose of various minerals and herbs as cures for different ailments. Chapter three focused on pathology, where Ibn Sina showed how to diagnose, treat and cure illnesses of different parts of the human body. In chapter four he explained aspects of cosmetics, diseases related to hair, nails and obesity, and he showed how these ailments could be treated successfully. The fifth and last chapter of the book consisted of a large number of prescriptions in the form of tablets, pills, powders, syrup, herbs and various plant extracts. Ibn Sina’s approach to medicine was rational as well as holistic, because he explored the human body in its totality; that is to say, he believed it was important to take both physiological and psychological factors into consideration for an effective treatment of illnesses. Uniquely, he even
