- "The world is divided into men who have wit and no religion and men who have religion and no wit.
- I prefer a short life with width to a narrow one with length"
- "Absence of understanding does not warrant absence of existence "
Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Sīnā - Ibn Sina was born in 980 C.E. in the village of Afshana near Bukhara which today is located in the far south of Russia. His father, Abdullah, an adherent of the Ismaili sect, was from Balkh and his mother from a village near Bukhara.
In any age Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna, would have been a giant among giants. He displayed exceptional intellectual prowess as a child and at the age of ten was already proficient in the Qur'an and the Arabic classics. During the next six years he devoted himself to Muslim Jurisprudence, Philosophy and Natural Science and studied Logic, Euclid, and the Almeagest.
Ibn Sīnā then studied medicine under a physician named Koushyar. He wrote almost 450 treatises on a wide range of subjects, of which around 240 have survived. In particular, 150 of his surviving treatises concentrate on philosophy and 40 of them concentrate on medicine. His most famous works are The Book of Healing, a vast philosophical and scientific encyclopaedia, and The Canon of Medicine, which was a standard medical text at many medieval universities. The Canon of Medicine was used as a text-book in the universities of Montpellier and Louvain as late as 1650. Ibn Sīnā's Canon of Medicine provides a complete system of medicine according to the principles of Galen (and Hippocrates).
He was also an astronomer, chemist, geologist, Hafiz, Islamic psychologist, Islamic scholar, Islamic theologian, logician, paleontologist, mathematician, Maktab teacher, physicist, poet, and scientist. He is regarded as the most famous and influential scientist of the Islamic Golden Age.
This legendary Persian physician became the most famous and influential of all the Islamic philosopher-scientists. He earned royal favour for treating the Kings of Bukhara and Hamadan for ailments other physicians could neither diagnose nor cure. His grave is still maintained in Hamadan, where he died in 1037. Though trained as a physician, Ibn Sina made important contributions to philosophy, mathematics, chemistry, and astronomy. His philosophical encyclopedia, Kitab al-Shifa ("Book of Healing") brought Aristotelian and Platonian philosophy together with Islamic theology in dividing the field of knowledge into theoretical knowledge (physics, mathematics, and metaphysics) and practical knowledge (ethics, economics, and politics).
He died in June 1037, in his fifty-eighth year, in the month of Ramadan and was buried in Hamadan, Iran.
Sources: Ummah.net - http://www.ummah.net/history/scholars/ibn_sina/
The Islamic World 1600 - http://www.ucalgary.ca/applied_history/tutor/islam/learning/ibnsina.html
Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avicenna
