Avicenna

"Ibn Sina, or Avicenna, is remembered today in two totally different contexts. First, he’s known as the man who, 1000 years ago, wrote a six-volume book on medicine. In modern editions it fills six fat volumes. This became the standard medical textbook from Spain to deep into India. Everyone used Ibn Sina/Avicenna: he was Mister Medicine. Now, in some respects he was startlingly modern, and other respects he was not. But his goal was to be comprehensive and to set it out the way it was. He wasn’t a research scientist. He said, ‘This is what we know.’ And that very sense of authority is what gave his Canon—he was the first to use the term in this sense—such authority. Over 700 years, up to the 17th century, every medical school in Europe used Ibn Sina. So that’s one Ibn Sina. The other Ibn Sina is the philosopher, the metaphysician, the master of logic, the direct heir of Aristotle who even saw himself, towards the end of his life, as, perhaps, the new Aristotle. His philosophical and metaphysical writings are very, very difficult to come to grips with, but it’s extremely important to do so. They are important for the world of Islam, of Judaism, of Christianity and the world of thought in general. Ibn Sina was one of the world’s great thinkers. I mention Lenn Goodman’s fine book—one of several, by the way, that have been written recently—as an absolutely authoritative and accessible guide to Ibn Sina/Avicenna’s thought. Do not expect to find here a volume to peruse over a drink on your terrace, for it is not easy going. Hats off to Lenn Goodman for bringing clarity to it all. But if you are patient and read through this fine volume, you will gain a basic understanding of why this is one of the great figures of world thought. No, not the medicine. This is one of the reasons I wrote The Genius of Their Age —which is a dual biography of Ibn Sina and Biruni. I’d been reading Plutarch, who paired Roman and Greek thinkers and compared them. I was inspired by Plutarch , and justified my comparative biographies of Ibn Sina and Biruni because the two knew each other, were contemporaries, and came from the same world in many respects. There are very few efforts to combine the medical side and the philosophical, metaphysical side of Ibn Sina/Avicenna. And, least of all, do we find the person. Who was this astonishing man? He ended his life, not happily, in Iran, where he suffered a painful death and is buried there. In 1950, the Iranians opened his tomb and took photographs of his skull, front and side. These were published, and a clever scholar in Wales reconstructed what Ibn Sina must have looked like. As people had said, he was a very handsome man. He was sociable and good at politics—he served in several top leadership posts. What a contrast to Biruni, his contemporary and rival! Biruni did spend a few years in a civil service job as a vizier or foreign minister. But the country where he was born and served as vizier was destroyed by Mahmud of Ghazni, whose specialty was pillaging and rape. Mahmud of Ghazni took Biruni captive for his collection of geniuses at his court in Ghazni in Afghanistan. Mahmud of Ghazni’s great aspiration was to capture both Ibn Sina and Biruni to his court as adornments. He succeeded with Biruni, who did most of his work in Afghanistan at Ghazni. And he almost succeeded with Ibn Sina, but in the end failed. Biruni’s India is a remarkable book. It was discovered and translated from medieval Arabic, first into German and then into English, by the same person, a German scholar—Eduard Sachau. Not only did he edit it, but he made two different translations of it! Biruni went to India because although he hated astrology, he was named astrologer to Mahmud of Ghazni. He was in Mahmoud’s entourage, traipsing around India, and then made some trips on his own. His boss was marching hundreds of thousands of Indian slaves back to Afghanistan, but Biruni had a different approach. He was asking, ‘How is it that Indian science and mathematics are so sophisticated? Where did this great effervescence come from?’ We speak of Arabic numerals, but they came from India. How did they come up with these number systems? Why was their astronomy so sophisticated? Biruni learned Sanskrit well enough to translate books from it. He made contact with Indian intellectuals, especially in the area of Lahore, which is now in Pakistan. His book is a work of genius. He laid out a way of proceeding for intellectual history, for cultural history, for anthropology, for sociology. And the great question that he focused on was, ‘To what extent was Indian religion responsible for, or retarding the development of, astronomy, mathematics and science?’ That was the great question he addressed, and he did it with an open mind that is so impressive, even today. He was one of the great pioneers of social science. I mentioned at the beginning that Biruni was from Khwarezm in what is now Uzbekistan. One of his predecessors in Khwarazm, who lived a couple of centuries before him, began the campaign for Indian numbers. His name was Al-Khwarizmi—i.e., “from Khwarazm.” Biruni pushed that campaign to success. I wrote about Al-Khwarazmi in Lost Enlightenment . He is of interest to us today for two reasons. First, he created the modern field of algebra. It had been pioneered by the ancient Greeks, but Al-Khwarazmi took it further. When he presented algebra as a field, he did it with words, not numbers and formulae. He got his reader to think through what the actual operation you’re trying to perform is. Only then come the numbers. Today that’s considered a new and very fashionable approach to the teaching of algebra, which is just beginning to catch on again—after 1000 years. The other thing that Al-Khwarizmi did was give his name to algorithms. Algorithm is a distortion of Al-Khwarazmi’s name. He was accepted in Europe as a genius of mathematics and therefore, the way to begin an irrefutable argument was to say, ‘Al-Khwarazmi said’ or ‘Dixit Al-Khwarazmi.’ From that phrase, we got the modern term algorithm, which is all over our world today. He lived a millennium ago! They’re both extraordinarily interesting and dramatically different. On the one hand, Biruni is ultra-modern in that he presented all his thoughts as a work in progress. He said, ‘If you want to carry this further, here’s what you have to do.’ He was one of the first modern scientists. There’s also the significance of his work. He measured the diameter of the Earth more accurately than anyone else down to the sixteenth century. Using home-made equipment he also hypothesized the existence of North and South America as inhabited continents. That is a big deal! So, I respect and admire Biruni. On the other hand, if someone said, ‘You have a choice of going out tonight with Ibn Sina or Biruni, which would you take?’ I’d go with Ibn Sina. He was a very public figure, very visible and communicative. He sustained personal fights and vendettas against many competitors. We have some hints about his private life—and we probably don’t want to know a lot more, for he was a bon vivant . He was surrounded by a bevy of students with whom he partied late into the night."