Ibn Rushd (averroes): the Great Commentator Who Shaped Two Civilizations

Introduction

In the long history of human thought, very few individuals have left their mark on two civilizations simultaneously and in fundamentally different ways. Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd, known in the Latin West as Averroes, is one of those rare exceptions. Born in 1126 CE in Córdoba, the cultural capital of Islamic Spain, he spent his life as a physician, jurist, and philosopher of the first rank within the Islamic world. But it was his extraordinary commentaries on the works of Aristotle — so thorough, so precise, so philosophically penetrating that European scholars simply called him "The Commentator" without further qualification — that ensured his second and perhaps even greater life in the universities of medieval Christian Europe.

The paradox of Ibn Rushd is that he was celebrated in the civilization he had not fully belonged to, and largely forgotten in the civilization he had served. In the Islamic world, his philosophical work was suppressed during his lifetime, his books were burned, and he was sent into exile by the very ruler he had served. After his death in 1198 CE, his philosophical legacy slowly faded from the mainstream of Islamic intellectual life. Yet in Europe, where his commentaries arrived in Latin translation in the thirteenth century, they transformed the landscape of university philosophy, sparked a movement called Averroism, provoked Thomas Aquinas into some of his most vigorous intellectual engagement, and remained central to university curricula for nearly four centuries.

This article traces Ibn Rushd's life in full — his origins in a distinguished Córdoban family, his medical achievements, his monumental project of Aristotle commentary, his controversial philosophical positions on the intellect and on the relationship between philosophy and religion, his dramatic fall from favor and exile, his rehabilitation and death, and the extraordinary, branching influence his thought has exercised on Christian and Jewish philosophy, on the European university system, and on the history of ideas from the thirteenth century to the present day. It addresses questions that readers and students frequently ask: "why was Averroes important to the history of philosophy," "what did Ibn Rushd believe about reason and religion," "what is the theory of the unity of the active intellect," "who were the Averroists and what did they teach," and "why is Ibn Rushd in Raphael's School of Athens."

Córdoba in the Twelfth Century: the World into Which He Was Born

To understand Ibn Rushd, one must first understand Córdoba, the city of his birth and the civilization it represented. In the twelfth century, Córdoba was one of the most important and culturally sophisticated cities in the Western world. It had been, under the Umayyad Caliphate of al-Andalus (the Islamic name for the Iberian Peninsula), the largest city in Europe west of Constantinople, with a population at its peak estimated at several hundred thousand people. Its library at the height of the caliphate was said to contain over 400,000 volumes — more books than existed in all of Christian Europe combined at the time. It had been a place where Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived and worked in an atmosphere of relative cultural tolerance that historians call the convivencia, or coexistence.

By the twelfth century, the political landscape had changed considerably. The great Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba had fragmented in the early eleventh century into small competing principalities called taifas, and these had subsequently been absorbed by two successive North African Berber dynasties: first the Almoravids (who entered al-Andalus in 1086) and then the Almohads (who took control of al-Andalus beginning in the 1140s). The Almohads were a reformist religious movement of markedly more conservative theological orientation than the Umayyads, and their rule would ultimately have fateful consequences for Ibn Rushd himself. But in the intellectual life of Córdoba, the traditions of learning, philosophical inquiry, and scholarly achievement that the Umayyad era had established had not entirely disappeared. It was in this complex, historically layered environment — the remnants of a brilliant civilization now under more austere religious governance — that Ibn Rushd came of age.