Averroes (Ibn Rushd)

Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad Ibn Rushd, known in Latin Europe as Averroes, was an Andalusian Muslim philosopher, judge and physician of the twelfth century. He wrote commentaries on almost the whole of Aristotle's work, defended philosophy against the attack of al-Ghazali, and argued that reason and revelation could not truly conflict. His influence was modest in the Islamic world but enormous in Christian and Jewish Europe, where he was known simply as "the Commentator".

Ibn Rushd was born in Córdoba in 1126, into one of the leading families of al-Andalus, the Muslim-ruled part of the Iberian peninsula. His grandfather, also called Ibn Rushd, had been chief judge of the city and a famous authority on Maliki law, the school of Islamic law dominant in the region, and his father was also a judge. To tell the two apart, Arabic writers called the philosopher "the grandson". He was trained in law, theology and Arabic, and studied medicine. Little is known about who taught him philosophy, and because he left no autobiography, many details of his life remain obscure.

His family had served the Almoravid dynasty, the Berber rulers of North Africa and al-Andalus. When Ibn Rushd was in his early twenties, the Almoravids were overthrown by a new Berber power, the Almohad Caliphate, founded on the strict reforming creed of Ibn Tumart. The young scholar had to find a place under the new regime.

According to a well-known account, around 1169 the philosopher Ibn Tufayl introduced Ibn Rushd to the Almohad ruler Abu Ya'qub Yusuf, a keen reader of philosophy. The ruler complained that Aristotle was hard to understand and asked for someone to explain him. Ibn Rushd took on the task, and much of his life's work followed from it. In the same year he was appointed judge of Seville, and later chief judge of Córdoba. In 1182 he succeeded Ibn Tufayl as personal physician to the ruler in Marrakesh, and he moved between Morocco and al-Andalus in royal service.

Late in life he fell from favour. Around 1195 the caliph Abu Yusuf Ya'qub al-Mansur, perhaps seeking the support of conservative religious scholars during his wars against the Christian kingdoms of Spain, had him tried and banished to the town of Lucena, south-east of Córdoba, and some of his philosophical books were ordered burned. The reasons remain unclear. He was restored to favour shortly before his death in Marrakesh in December 1198, and his body was later carried back to Córdoba for burial.

Ibn Rushd considered Aristotle the greatest human mind and set out to recover his true meaning, stripping away the Neoplatonic ideas that earlier philosophers, above all Avicenna, had blended into it. He wrote three kinds of commentary: short summaries, middle-length paraphrases and long, line-by-line commentaries, the last only for the most important works, such as the Physics, the Metaphysics and On the Soul. He also commented on Plato's Republic, since Aristotle's Politics was not available in Arabic, and his commentary contains sharp remarks about tyranny in his own time. Many of these works survive only in Hebrew or Latin translations.

In The Decisive Treatise, a legal opinion on whether Islamic law permits the study of philosophy, Ibn Rushd argued that the Qur'an itself commands believers to reflect on creation, so that for those capable of it, studying philosophy is a religious duty. Truth, he wrote, cannot contradict truth. Where the literal sense of scripture seems to clash with a proven conclusion, scripture should be interpreted allegorically, though such interpretations should be kept among the learned and not spread to the general public, who are best served by the plain teaching of the text. People reach belief in different ways, through demonstration, through dialectical argument or through rhetoric, and religion speaks to all of them.

His other great defence of philosophy was The Incoherence of the Incoherence, a point-by-point reply to Al-Ghazali's Incoherence of the Philosophers. He argued that al-Ghazali had attacked Avicenna's version of philosophy rather than Aristotle's, and that denying real causes in nature made scientific knowledge impossible. He was also a major jurist: his Beginning for the One Who Strives compares the rulings of the different schools of Islamic law and is still studied. His medical encyclopedia, the Kulliyat, was translated into Latin as the Colliget.

His most controversial idea in Europe concerned the human mind. Interpreting a difficult passage of Aristotle, Ibn Rushd concluded in his long commentary On the Soul that the intellect by which humans understand universal truths is one and the same for all of humanity, rather than belonging to each person separately. Christian readers took this to mean that the individual soul could not survive death in a personal way, which clashed with their faith.

In the Islamic world, Ibn Rushd had few direct successors, and his philosophical works were less read than Avicenna's. In Europe the story was very different. His commentaries were translated into Latin from the early thirteenth century, and into Hebrew, where Jewish thinkers drew on them heavily; his near-contemporary Maimonides, also from Córdoba, was read in the same circles. At the University of Paris a group of teachers known as the Latin Averroists, among them Siger of Brabant, followed his readings of Aristotle, prompting church condemnations in 1270 and 1277. Thomas Aquinas relied on his commentaries while writing against his view of the intellect. The idea of a "double truth", one for philosophy and one for faith, was often attributed to Averroists but does not reflect Ibn Rushd's own position.

Dante placed him among the virtuous non-Christians in Limbo, and Raphael is traditionally thought to have included him in The School of Athens. He is a central figure of Islamic and Jewish philosophy and of the Aristotelian revival in medieval Christian philosophy, and a celebrated figure in the history of Spain.