Ibn Rushd (Averroes)

Averroes [averoheez], whose name is the Latinized form of Ibn Rushd (1126-98) was (with Avicenna) the most famous of the mediaeval Islamic philosophers. He was born in Cordoba, Spain. He wrote commentaries on the Greek philosopher Aristotle, as well as works on jurisprudence and medicine.

His main works survive in Hebrew and Latin, consisting of commentaries on Aristotelian texts and on Plato's Republic. Averroes held that theologians are cannot reach the highest demonstrative knowledge and are therefore unfit to interpret divine law correctly. The main purpose of his Aristotelian commentaries was to recover the true ideas of philosophy by separating them from the theological arguments of earlier Islamic philosophers such as al-Farabi and Avicenna.

His work had little impact in the Islamic world, and there is no Islamic 'school of Averroism'. In 1185 he was banished in disgrace (for reasons now unknown) and many of his works were burnt. Of his thirty-eight commentaries, only twenty-eight survive in the original Arabic: the rest are in Latin and Hebrew translations made by philosophers from the Christian and Jewish tradition. His impact was on these traditions, particularly in the Latin West in the thirteenth century, when he was known simply as 'The Commentator'. His work marked the climax of Aristotelian thought in the Islamic world and, to a large extent, its end.

Much later, beginning in the nineteenth century, his work was rediscovered by Arab nationalists for political purposes, particularly as a reminder of the era when the Islamic East was more scientifically advanced than the Latin West^[1] and by secular or liberal Islamic apologists to show the compatibility of Islam and modern science. Today, in order to counter the Western image of Islam as a repressive and reactionary faith, Averroes is held up as a model for the reconciliation of religion, philosophy and science. However, Butterworth^[2] has argued that this 'Enlightenment' view of Averroes does not correctly relate his thought to that of the European enlightenment.