BIOGRAPHY

Ab al-Wald Muhammad Ibn Ahmed Ibn Rushd, better known as Averroës, was born into a prominent family of jurists in Córdoba, Spain. Moving in high society, Averroës made the acquaintance of the sultan of Marrakesh and, through the sultan's favor, became a qadi, or judge, serving first in Seville and later in Córdoba. The sultan also expressed an interest in philosophy and commissioned Averroës to write three sets of commentaries (short, intermediate, and long) on each of Aristotle's writings. These commentaries were to become so influential in Western Europe that Averroës became known simply as "The Commentator."

The Alhambra in Spain: The palace for the Islamic rulers of Granada.

In addition to the thirty-eight commentaries he produced on Aristotle, Averroës also wrote books on politics, religion, logic, astronomy, and medicine. His expertise in medicine led to his being called to Marrakesh to serve as the sultan's personal physician in 1182. He remained in that post until 1195 when he was forced to leave for religious reasons (apparently because of his glorification of Aristotle). He regained his standing and returned to Marrakesh shortly before his death in 1198. Soon after his death, Islamic culture in Spain virtually disappeared; and even though his thought continued to influence Latin Europe, Averroës had surprisingly little impact on the Muslim world.

BASIC THOUGHT

Through his writings, Averroës sought to counter two misconceptions. First, he wrote his commentaries to rid Aristotle of the misinterpretations of Avicenna and others. For example, Averroës rejected Avicenna's doctrine of the immortality of the soul. Instead he agreed with Aristotle that individual souls cannot exist apart from a body. But in agreement with the teachings of the Qur'an, Averroës also taught that there is a bodily resurrection. According to Averroës, after death we receive new bodies that "emanate from the heavenly bodies." In this way he denied Avicenna's immortality of the soul and managed to agree with both Aristotle and the Qur'an.

Averroës was opposed to several of Avicenna's teachings, but he was even more opposed to Avicenna's chief critic, al-Ghazali. Al-Ghazali (1058-1111) had opposed Avicenna's three controversial positions (see the previous introduction to Avicenna), claiming that Avicenna had put philosophy above the Qur'an. In his major work, The Incoherence of Philosophy, al-Ghazali had argued that philosophy led to disbelief in Allah. In his rejoinder, The Incoherence of the Incoherence, Averroës sought to refute al-Ghazali by dividing people into three classes. The majority of people can understand truth only in imaginative form. For them philosophy would, indeed, be dangerous and they must take the Qur'an literally. A smaller group of people, the theologians, can understand dialectical arguments and draw probable inferences from the Qur'an. But the elite, the philosophers, are capable of understanding truth in its pure, rational form. For them, the Qur'an can be read for its "deeper" allegorical meanings.

As Averroës' teachings reached Christendom, this last (allegorical) conviction was taken to mean he advocated a "double truth": Truth in philosophy might be entirely different--even opposite--from truth in religion. Averroës himself denied this, claiming that there is only one truth, but that there are many ways to access this truth. Unfortunately for Averroës' reputation, the work that made this clear, his Decisive Treatise Determining the Nature of the Connection Between Religion and Philosophy, was lost to the West until the Renaissance.