Averroës

Islamic philosopher

• Born: 1126
• Died: 1198

Jurist, physician, and philosopher Averroës, also widely known as Ibn Rushd, was one of the last of a line of medieval Muslim scholars who sought to reconcile the truths of revealed religion and dialectical reasoning. He exercised an overwhelming influence on Latin and European thought through his commentaries on Aristotle.

Early Life

Abū al-Walīd Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Rushd, generally known as Ibn Rushd, and to the medieval Christian West as Averroës (a-VEHR-oh-weez), was born into a distinguished Spanish-Arab family of jurists in Córdoba, the former capital of the Umayyad Caliphate in Spain. His grandfather, who died in the year of his birth, had been a distinguished Malikite jurisconsult, who had held the office of chief qā (Muslim judge) of the city, as well as imam (prayer leader) of its great mosque, still one of the most celebrated monuments of early Islamic architecture. Ibn Rushd's father was also a qā, and in the course of time he too would follow the family calling.

Ibn Rushd's biographers state that he was given an excellent education in all the branches of traditional Islamic learning, including medicine, in which he was the pupil of a celebrated teacher, Abū Jaՙfar Hārūn al-Tajali (of Trujillo), who may also have initiated him into a lifelong passion for philosophy. The young scholar was also influenced by the writings of one of the most famous thinkers of the previous generation, Ibn Bājjah of Saragossa (c. 1095-1138 or 1139), known to the Latin Schoolmen as Avempace.

By 1157, Ibn Rushd, at age thirty, had made his way to Marrakech in Morocco, at that time the capital of the North African and Spanish empire of the Almohads, where he was perhaps employed as a teacher. Ibn Rushd lived during a very distinctive period in the history of Islam in Spain and the Maghreb. A century before his birth, the disintegration of the caliphate of Córdoba had led to the fragmentation of Muslim Spain among the so-called Party Kings (Arabic muluk al-tawāif), who in turn had been overthrown by the Berber tribal confederacy of the Almoravids (Arabic al-murabitun, those dwelling in frontier fortresses). These fanatical warriors from the western Sahara had quickly succumbed to the hedonistic environment of Spanish Islam, only to be replaced by another wave of Berber fundamentalists, the Almohads (Arabic al-muwaḥḥidūn, those who affirm God's unity). Under ՙAbd al-Mu՚min (r. 1130-1163), who assumed the title of caliph, the Almohads conquered all southern and central Spain as well as the North African littoral as far east as modern Libya.

Within the context of the cultural and intellectual history of the Muslim West, the Almohads played a highly ambiguous role. The spearhead of a puritanical movement sworn to the cleansing of Islam of latter-day accretions and to a return to the pristine mores of the days of the Prophet and the Rightly-Guided Caliphs (Arabic al-Khulafā al-Rāshidūn), they were also the heirs, through their conquests, to the intellectually precocious and culturally sophisticated traditions of Muslim Spain. The ruling elite seems to have dealt with this paradox by developing a deliberate “double standard”: Within the walls of the caliph's palace and of the mansions of the great, the brilliant civilization of an earlier age continued to flourish, while outside, in street and marketplace, obedience to the Shariՙa, the law of Islam, was strictly enforced at the behest of the clerical classes, the ՙulama (persons learned in the Islamic sciences) and the fuqaha (those learned in jurisprudence). The life of Ibn Rushd himself points to a similar dichotomy. Outwardly, he was a qā and a faqih, a judge and a jurisprudent; inwardly, he was a faylasuf, a philosopher with an insatiable urge to pursue speculative inquiry by rational argument and to delve deeply into the infidel wisdom of the ancients.

In 1163, ՙAbd al-Mu՚min was succeeded by his son, Abū Yaՙqūb Yūsuf, who throughout his reign (r. 1163-1184) was to be a generous patron and friend to Ibn Rushd. Apparently, it was a contemporary scholar, Ibn Tufayl (c. 1105-1184), known to the Latins as Abubacer, who first presented Ibn Rushd to Abū Yaՙqūb Yūsuf, probably around 1169. Tradition relates that, at their first meeting, the caliph began by asking Ibn Rushd (who may already have been working on a commentary on Aristotle's De caelo) about the origin and nature of the sky. While the latter hesitated, uncertain as to how to reply to questions that raised dangerous issues of orthodoxy, the caliph turned to converse with Ibn Tufayl, and in so doing revealed his own extensive learning. Reassured, Ibn Rushd embarked on a discourse that so displayed the depth and range of his scholarship that the delighted caliph thereafter became his ardent disciple. It was on this occasion, too, that Abū Yaՙqūb Yūsuf complained that the existing translations of the works of Aristotle were too obscure for comprehension and that there was need for further commentaries and exegeses. Ibn Tufayl remarked that he himself was too old to assume such an undertaking, at which Ibn Rushd agreed to assume the task that was to become his life's work.

Life's Work

The name of Ibn Rushd is inextricably linked with that of Aristotle, and it is for his commentaries on the works of Aristotle that, under the name of Averroës, he became so famous in the Christian West. Since the end of antiquity, no one had studied the writings of Aristotle, or what passed for his writings, so carefully as Ibn Rushd, and in his numerous commentaries, many of which are now lost or are known only through Hebrew or Latin translations, he set out to remove the exegetical accretions of earlier ages. The Great Commentator, as the Latin Schoolmen liked to call him, did not perhaps have a very original mind, but he did have a highly analytical one, capable of great critical penetration.

Ibn Rushd understood Aristotle better than his predecessors had because his powers of analysis enabled him, almost alone in the Arabo-Aristotelian philosophical tradition, to circumvent the glosses superimposed on Aristotle by a spurious tradition that had for so long concealed the real Aristotle, consisting of such works as the Theologia Aristotelis derived from Plotinus, the Liber de causis of Proclus, and the commentary on Aristotle of Alexander of Aphrodisias. This “contamination of Aristotle,” as David Knowles, in The Evolution of Medieval Thought (1962), has described it, laid on medieval Arab and Jewish scholars alike the temptation to undertake “a synthesis in the systems of Plato and Aristotle,” but this was a false trail that, for the most part, Ibn Rushd avoided following, largely on account of his intellectual acuity.

On the other hand, Ibn Rushd was a man of his times. Preoccupied as he was with political thought and its relationship to personal conduct, he nevertheless did not have access to Aristotle's Politics. He was therefore forced to rely on Plato's Politeia (388-368 b.c.e.; Republic, 1701) and Nomoi (360-347 b.c.e.; Laws, 1804) and Aristotle's Ethica Nicomachea (348-336 b.c.e.; Nichomachean Ethics, 1797), and was heavily dependent on his predecessor al-Fārābi. Ibn Rushd had no knowledge of Greek. Therefore, he was compelled to study both Aristotle and Aristotle's Greek commentators in Arabic translations made from Syriac or, more rarely, from the original Greek. This fact alone makes his achievement the more remarkable. It helped him that, from the outset of his career as a scholar, his unabashed admiration for Aristotle as a thinker drove him to try to uncover the authentic mind beneath the palimpsests of later generations, the mind of the man who, in his words (as quoted by Knowles),

was created and given to us by divine providence that we might know all there is to be known. Let us praise God, who set this man apart from all others in perfection, and made him approach very near to the highest dignity humanity can attain.

Although Ibn Rushd has come to be known first and foremost as a philosopher, to his contemporaries he was probably regarded primarily as a jurist and a physician. In 1169, the year that saw the beginning of his long and fruitful intellectual friendship with Abū Yaՙqūb Yūsuf, he was appointed qā of Seville, where, always preoccupied with his writing, he complained of being cut off from access to his library in Córdoba. He returned to Córdoba as qā in 1171, but it seems that throughout the 1170's he traveled extensively within the caliph's dominions, perhaps undertaking roving judicial commissions for the government. In 1182, he was summoned to Marrakech to succeed Ibn Tufayl as the caliph's physician . He had already written extensively on medical subjects, for in addition to the celebrated Kulliyāt (general medicine, c. 1162-1169; a seven-part encyclopedia, later translated into Latin as Colliget), he had written several commentaries on Galen. It is not certain how long he served as Abū Yaՙqūb Yūsuf's physician, for not long afterward he was appointed chief qā of Córdoba, the post that his grandfather had formerly held. Since Abū Yaՙqūb Yūsuf was killed in battle at Santarém (Portugal) in 1184, it is possible that the prestigious appointment was made by Abū Yaՙqūb Yūsuf's son and successor, Abū Yūsuf Yaՙqūb al-Manṣūr (r. 1184-1199). For most of his reign, Abū Yūsuf Yaՙqūb showed himself as well disposed toward Ibn Rushd as his father had been, but during 1195 the philosopher experienced a brief period of disgrace and danger.

The Christian powers of the north were now mustering their forces, and Abū Yūsuf Yaՙqūb needed to rally his subjects for the approaching struggle. For that, he needed the unqualified support of the ՙulama and fuqaha, which in turn involved his unequivocal commitment to orthodoxy. The fuqaha insisted that Ibn Rushd be silenced for spreading doctrines that were subversive of faith, such as the Aristotelian theory of the eternity of the world, which denied God's act of creation, and for his rejection of the divine knowledge of particulars, which called into question God's omniscience. Ibn Rushd was compelled to appear before some kind of hostile gathering in Córdoba, his books were publicly burned, and his enemies bombarded him with false accusations and scurrilous libels. His actual punishment, however, was quite mild temporary exile to the town of Lucena, south of Córdoba and it cannot have done much to assuage the wrath of his foes. Shortly afterward, the caliph won a great victory over the Christians at Allarcos, midway between Córdoba and Toledo (July 19, 1195), the last triumph of Muslim arms in the peninsula. In consequence, he apparently felt less dependent on the goodwill of the fuqaha, and on returning to his capital of Marrakech, he summoned Ibn Rushd to join him. The old man (now in his seventies) did not have long to enjoy his restoration to favor. He died in 1198 in Marrakech, where his tomb still stands, although he was subsequently reinterred in Córdoba. Abū Yūsuf Yaՙqūb died within months of the passing of his most celebrated subject.

As a thinker, Ibn Rushd was in the mainstream of Muslim Scholasticism, as well as being one of its last significant practitioners. Like his great predecessors in the Muslim East, he sought to establish an honored place for philosophy within the broader context of Muslim thought and learning. Contrary to the later and quite erroneous Christian notion of him as a champion of rationalism who denied the truths of revealed religion, Ibn Rushd was a devout Muslim who never set philosophy on a pedestal in order to challenge religious belief. Throughout his life, he stoutly denied that there was any inherent contradiction between philosophical truth, as established by the speculative thinker, and the certainties of faith embodied in the Qur՚ān and the Shariՙa, the religious law that provided the social bounds within which the Muslim community and the individual Muslim lived their lives and which, as a qā was his duty to uphold. In his celebrated Tahāfut at-tahāfut (c. 1174-1180; Incoherence of the Incoherence, 1954) a defense of philosophy against the attacks made on it by the theologian and mystic al-Ghazzālī (1058-1111) in his Tahāfut al-falāsifah (1095; Incoherence of the Philosophers, 1958) he takes it as axiomatic that the philosopher will subscribe to the teachings of the highest form of revealed religion of the age in which he lives (by which he meant Islam). In Kitāb fasl al-maqāl (c. 1174-1180; On the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy, 1961), he assumes the compatibility of philosophical truth and revelation: Where there appears to be a conflict, that is the result of human misunderstanding, as in the case of diverse interpretations of scripture. The Muslims, he writes,

are unanimous in holding that it is not obligatory either to take all the expressions of Scripture in their apparent meaning or to extend them all from their apparent meaning to allegorical interpretation. . . . The reason why we have received a Scripture with both an apparent and an inner meaning lies in the diversity of people's natural capacities and the difference of their innate dispositions with regard to assent.

In other words, people can believe only what their natural abilities allow them to comprehend, and this affects, among much else, the relationship between religion and philosophy, and the philosopher's place in society.

Significance

Ibn Rushd was one of the most formidable thinkers in the entire intellectual history of Islam, but he was also, in a very real sense, the end of a line. In the Muslim East, of which he lacked direct experience, the heritage of speculative philosophy had long since withered away in the face of Ash՚arite orthodoxy and a growing preoccupation with transcendent mysticism. In the Muslim West, which was his home, the end came more rapidly and more completely. It was an accident of history that during the late twelfth century, the caliphs of the puritanical Almohads had tolerated such men as Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Rushd. Fourteen years after Ibn Rushd's death, the Almohads went down in defeat in one of history's truly decisive battles, Las Navas de Tolosa (1212), which heralded the end of Muslim rule in Spain and, with it, Arabo-Hispanic civilization. Thereafter, the Maghreb turned in on itself, and the intellectual life of the Muslim West, to which Ibn Rushd had contributed so much, slowly drew to its close. Its last representative, the Tunisian Ibn Khaldūn (1332-1406), ended his days in Cairo.

Yet Ibn Rushd, whom the Muslim world soon forgot, enjoyed a posthumous and enduring fame in lands he had never visited and in a civilization that, had he known it, he would probably have despised. A principal component of the twelfth century European renaissance was the work of the translators of Toledo (reconquered by Alfonso VI of Castile from the Muslims in 1085), who made available in Latin the riches of Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek thought. When the pace of translation intensified during the thirteenth century, attention centered on the works of Aristotle and on the Aristotelian commentaries of Ibn Rushd. Among Christian translators, Michael Scott (1180-1235) made available Ibn Rushd's commentaries on De caelo and De anima, among others; Hermann the German translated the middle commentaries on the Nichomachean Ethics, Rhetoric, and Poetics; and the Italian William of Lunis translated the commentaries on Aristotelian logic. No less prominent were the Jewish translators. Jacob Anatoli made available Ibn Rushd's middle commentaries on the Categories, De interpretatione, Analytica priora, and Analytica posteriora; Solomon ben Joseph ibn Ayyūb, the middle commentary on De caelo; Shem-Tob ben Isaac ibn Shaprut, the middle commentary on De anima; and Moses ben Samuel ibn Tibbon, a record output of commentaries. As a result of this activity, Ibn Rushd became, along with Aristotle, one of the most explosive elements in the development of medieval Christian thought.

Misread and misunderstood, Ibn Rushd became the personification of human reason, unaided by divine illumination, arrogantly pitting itself against Providence. Almost from the first appearance of Latin translations of his works, there was an odor of brimstone about him. In 1277, the bishop of Paris censured 219 errors held by Aristotle or Averroës, by which time his alleged disciples, the Latin Averroists, headed by Siger of Brabant, were drawing on themselves the magisterial denunciations of Thomas Aquinas, whose schematic endeavor to reconcile faith and reason nevertheless derived from the labors of Ibn Rushd a century earlier. Dante, encountering him in Limbo, was correct in his emphasis when he wrote, “Averroës, che’l gran comento feo” (Averroës, who made the Great Commentary), but even he could not have imagined the extent of Ibn Rushd's influence on the intellectual history of late medieval Europe.

Bibliography

Arnaldez, R. “Ibn Rushd.” In Islamic Desk Reference. Edited by E. van Donzel. Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1994. This is a strongly recommended, succinct, detailed article on Ibn Rushd’s life and thought, to which is added an excellent bibliography.

Averroës. Averroës’ Middle Commentaries on Aristotle’s Categories and “De interpretatione.” Translated by Charles E. Butterworth. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983. This is the first volume in a series of translations of Ibn Rushd’s middle commentaries, based on the critical edition of the Arabic texts.

Averroës. Averroës on Plato’s “Republic.” Translated by Ralph Lerner. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974. The translator maintains that his version is “an improvement in accuracy and intelligibility” over its predecessor, Erwin Rosenthal’s Commentary on Plato’s “Republic” (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1956). The Arabic original is missing, and this translation is based on a Hebrew translation of the early fourteenth century by Samuel Ben Judah. This work provides an excellent example of Ibn Rushd’s methods as a commentator.

Averroës. On the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy. Translated by George F. Hourani. London: Luzac, 1961. A translation of the Kitāb fasl al-maqāl, in which Ibn Rushd argues that the apparent contradictions between faith and reason are reconcilable.

Averroës. Tahāfut al-tahāfut (Incoherence of the Incoherence). Translated by Simon van den Bergh. London: Luzac, 1954. This is an excellent translation of Ibn Rushd’s spirited rejoinder to the assault made on philosophy by al-Ghazzālī in Incoherence of the Philosophers.

Fakhry, Majid. Averroës (Ibn Rushd): His Life, Works, and Influence. Oxford, England: Oneworld, 2001. Part of the Great Islamic Thinkers series, this concise biography looks at Averroës and his realm.

Hitti, Philip K. Makers of Arab History. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1968. The chapter on Ibn Rushd in this collection of popular biographies provides a lively introductory account of the man and his thought, a useful starting point for further study. The book also contains biographies of al-Ghazzālī, al-Kindī, and Avicenna.

Kemal, Salim. The Philosophical Poetics of al-Fārābi, Avicenna and Averroës: The Aristotelian Reception. New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003. Explores Aristotle’s poetics and aesthetics in the light of work by Averroës, al-Fārābi, and Avicenna. Includes a bibliography and index.

Knowles, David. The Evolution of Medieval Thought. 1962. 2d ed. New York: Longman, 1988. A classic in the field, by one of the twentieth century’s most well respected medievalists.

Peters, F. E. Aristotle and the Arabs: The Aristotelian Tradition in Islam. New York: New York University Press, 1969. A scholarly as well as lively and stimulating account of the place of Aristotelian thought within the Islamic intellectual tradition. This book is essential reading for anyone seriously interested in the background to Ibn Rushd’s life and work, written by one of the leading Western scholars in the field.

Rosenthal, Erwin I. J. Political Thought in Medieval Islam: An Introductory Outline. 1958. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985. Provides an excellent discussion of Ibn Rushd’s political and social thought, based on his knowledge of such Platonic and Aristotelian texts as were available to him, as well as the writings of al-Fārābi, but stressing Ibn Rushd’s undoubtedly original contribution.

Watt, W. Montgomery. Islamic Philosophy and Theology. 2d ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995. This is one of the best and shorter general accounts of Islamic philosophy, written by a leading scholar in the field.

Whaba, Mourad, and Mona Abousenna, eds. Averroës and the Enlightenment. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1996. This collection, based on an international philosophy conference held in Cairo, includes chapters on Averroës’ influence on Enlightenment thought concerning religion, law, philosophy, and Western science. Several chapters also address his place in Islamic and African scholarship.