Averroes

Averroes, the Latinized name of Ibn Rushd, was an Andalusian philosopher, physician and jurist born in Córdoba in 1126 and who died in Marrakesh in 1198. He lived under the Almoravid and Almohad dynasties and belongs to the Aristotelian strand of Islamic philosophy. He matters because his commentaries on Aristotle reached Latin and Hebrew readers and gave rise to Averroism, one of the most debated movements in medieval Latin Christendom.

He came from a family of judges: his grandfather and his father both served as chief qadi of Córdoba. His education combined hadith, Maliki law, medicine, theology and philosophy. In Seville he joined a circle of philosophers, physicians and poets that included Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Zuhr. Around 1153 he was in Marrakesh, trying without success to find physical laws behind celestial motion. There he met Ibn Tufayl, who introduced him in 1169 to the Almohad caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf. According to the chronicler Abdelwahid al-Marrakushi, the caliph asked whether the heavens had existed forever or had been created. Averroes chose not to answer, and the caliph himself set out the views of Plato and Aristotle. Tradition holds that Ibn Tufayl's request that he clarify Aristotle led to his long series of commentaries.

His legal career was busy. He served as qadi of Seville in 1169 and of Córdoba in 1171, returned to Seville in 1179, and in 1182 succeeded Ibn Tufayl as court physician. He also wrote on medicine, astronomy and law. Among his major works are the Bidāyat al-Mujtahid, on the differences between schools of law, and the Colliget, a medical encyclopedia that remained a textbook in Europe for centuries. In The Incoherence of the Incoherence he answered Al-Ghazali, who had accused philosophy of contradicting religion. Averroes argued that philosophy was permissible and that scriptural passages seeming to clash with reason should be read allegorically.

In his theory of knowledge he distinguished material, habitual, agent and acquired intellects. He held that knowledge begins with the sensory perception of individual things and that universality is achieved in the understanding, which does not exist apart from the soul. His thesis of the unity of the intellect, according to which all humans share one agent intellect, became the most debated Averroist doctrine.

His fortunes changed. After Abu Yaqub died in 1184, his successor Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur turned against him in 1195. A tribunal in Córdoba condemned his writings to be burned and banished him to Lucena and Cabra. Scholars debate the causes, pointing to political motives, such as the caliph's need for the support of orthodox jurists, and to personal ones. Reconciled with the caliph shortly before his death, he returned to Marrakesh. Many of his Arabic works are lost, and he is known mainly through Hebrew and Latin translations. His legacy was more modest in the Islamic world than in Europe, where the condemnations of 1270 and 1277 and Thomas Aquinas's refutations weakened Latin Averroism, which still attracted followers into the sixteenth century.