Averroes (Ibn Rushd): Philosopher of Cordoba and Aristotle

Averroes, in Arabic Ibn Rushd (1126–1198), was a philosopher, judge and physician of Córdoba and the most influential interpreter of Aristotle in the Middle Ages. From around 1169, encouraged by the Almohad caliph, he wrote commentaries that explained almost the whole of Aristotle’s work. Translated into Hebrew and Latin, they shaped university teaching in Europe and earned him the title “the Commentator”.

Early life and education

Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd was born in Córdoba on 14 April 1126 into a prominent family of jurists. His grandfather of the same name had been chief judge (qadi) of Córdoba and a famous authority in the Maliki school of Islamic law. Ibn Rushd studied law, theology, medicine and the natural sciences, and he absorbed the philosophical tradition of al-Andalus associated with Ibn Bajja (Avempace).

He grew up as al-Andalus was passing from Almoravid to Almohad rule. The new Almohad Caliphate based in Marrakesh demanded religious conformity, but its rulers also valued learning, especially in medicine and philosophy.

At the Almohad court

Around 1168–1169 the philosopher and physician Ibn Tufayl introduced Ibn Rushd to the caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf. According to a well-known account preserved by a later historian, the caliph questioned him about whether the heavens were eternal and later complained that Aristotle’s writings were obscure, asking for someone to explain them. Ibn Tufayl, feeling too old, passed the task to Ibn Rushd.

The same year, 1169, Ibn Rushd was appointed qadi of Seville; later he served as qadi in Córdoba, eventually becoming its chief judge. In 1182 he succeeded Ibn Tufayl as court physician to the caliph. Travelling between Seville, Córdoba and Marrakesh, he wrote most of his works alongside demanding official duties.

The commentaries on Aristotle

Ibn Rushd produced three kinds of commentary. Short commentaries or epitomes summarised the ideas of a work; middle commentaries paraphrased it section by section; and long commentaries quoted the text passage by passage with detailed explanation. He wrote long commentaries on the Physics, Metaphysics, On the Soul, On the Heavens and the Posterior Analytics.

His aim was to recover what Aristotle had really meant, stripping away layers of interpretation added by earlier thinkers such as Avicenna (Ibn Sina), whom he criticised for mixing Aristotle with Neoplatonism. Because Aristotle’s Politics was not available to him, he wrote a commentary on Plato’s Republic instead.

Philosophy and religion

In the Decisive Treatise (Fasl al-maqal), written around 1178–1180, Ibn Rushd asked whether Islamic law permits the study of philosophy. He answered that it commands those capable of it to reflect on the universe through demonstrative reasoning. Since truth cannot contradict truth, apparent conflicts between philosophy and scripture should be resolved by interpreting scripture allegorically, though such interpretations should not be spread among ordinary believers.

His Incoherence of the Incoherence (Tahafut al-tahafut), written around 1180, answered al-Ghazali’s Incoherence of the Philosophers, a powerful attack written nearly a century earlier. Ibn Rushd defended causation, the eternity of the world as understood by Aristotle and the philosophers’ account of God’s knowledge.

He was also a major legal scholar, author of Bidayat al-mujtahid, a comparative manual of Islamic law still studied today, and a physician whose medical encyclopedia al-Kulliyat was known in Latin as the Colliget.

Medicine, astronomy and other works

Ibn Rushd was a practising physician as well as a theorist. His al-Kulliyat (“General Principles”), completed in the early 1160s and revised later, set out anatomy, physiology, disease, diagnosis, drugs and diet in an orderly system based on Galen and Aristotle. It was translated into Latin in the thirteenth century and printed several times in the Renaissance.

He also wrote commentaries on Galen and on the medical poem of Avicenna, and was interested in astronomy. Following Aristotle, he objected to the epicycles and eccentrics of Ptolemy’s system, which he thought could not describe the real structure of the heavens, though he did not produce a workable alternative. His criticism encouraged later Andalusian astronomers such as al-Bitruji to seek new models.

Key works

The dates of many works are approximate, and Ibn Rushd often revised his writings over many years. Several survive only in Hebrew or Latin translation, the Arabic originals having been lost.

Disgrace and death

In 1195 the caliph Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur, preparing for war in Spain and needing the support of conservative religious scholars, turned against Ibn Rushd. Some of his books were burned and he was banished to Lucena near Córdoba. Historians disagree on the exact reasons, which may have mixed politics, religious pressure and court rivalries.

He was restored to favour after about two years and called to Marrakesh, where he died in December 1198. His body was later brought back to Córdoba for burial.

Averroes in Europe

Ibn Rushd had few direct followers in the Islamic world, but his works flourished in translation. Jewish scholars in Spain and Provence translated many of them into Hebrew, and they shaped medieval Jewish philosophy alongside the work of his contemporary and fellow Cordoban Maimonides. From the 1220s Michael Scot and others translated his commentaries into Latin, and they became essential reading at the universities of Paris and Oxford.

Some Paris masters, notably Siger of Brabant, followed his interpretation that there is a single intellect shared by all humans, which seemed to deny personal immortality. Thomas Aquinas wrote On the Unity of the Intellect against the Averroists in 1270, and Bishop Étienne Tempier of Paris condemned lists of propositions in 1270 and 1277. Averroism nevertheless remained influential, especially at Padua, into the sixteenth century. Dante placed Averroes among the great non-Christian thinkers in Limbo.

In the Islamic world his philosophical works were less widely copied after his death, partly because the Almohad state collapsed and Andalusian learning declined. Interest revived in the nineteenth century: the French scholar Ernest Renan’s Averroès et l’averroïsme (1852) drew attention to him in Europe, and Arab reformers later held him up as a model of rational inquiry within Islam.

Myths and facts

• Myth: Averroes taught a “double truth”, that something can be true in philosophy and false in religion. Fact: This was a charge made against some Latin Averroists; Ibn Rushd himself held that truth is one.
• Myth: He was an opponent of Islam. Fact: He was a practising Muslim judge and jurist who argued that philosophy was religiously commanded.

Timeline

• 1126, 14 April: Ibn Rushd is born in Córdoba.
• c. 1168–1169: Ibn Tufayl introduces him to the caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf.
• 1169: Appointed qadi of Seville; begins commentaries on Aristotle.
• c. 1180: Writes the Incoherence of the Incoherence.
• 1182: Becomes court physician to the caliph.
• 1195: Falls from favour; books burned; exiled to Lucena.
• 1198, December: Dies in Marrakesh.
• 1270 and 1277: Bishop Tempier condemns Averroist propositions in Paris.

Why it matters

Ibn Rushd’s commentaries transmitted a rigorous Aristotle to medieval Europe at the moment its universities were taking shape. His defence of reason within a religious framework still informs debates on faith and philosophy, and he remains a symbol of the intellectual achievements of al-Andalus.