Birth near Bukhara
Ibn Sina was born at Afshana, near the Samanid capital Bukhara, where his family soon settled; his father governed a nearby district.
Islamic philosophy · Peripatetic falsafa · c. 980 – 1037
Avicenna
Distinguish what a thing is from the fact that it exists.
Bukhara · Hamadan · Isfahan
Biography
The thread of a life.
Avicenna, Ibn Sina in Arabic, was a physician, court official and philosopher born near Bukhara into a Persian-speaking family, who spent his life moving between the princely courts of Central Asia and Iran. Writing mostly in Arabic, he recast Aristotle’s philosophy as a single system built on the distinction between essence and existence and on a Necessary Existent, while his Canon of Medicine became a standard medical textbook for centuries.
The royal library
After successfully treating the emir Nuh ibn Mansur, the young physician was allowed to study in the Samanid palace library.
Exile to Gurganj
When the Qarakhanids took Bukhara and ended Samanid rule, he left for Gurganj in Khwarazm and served its ruler.
Vizier at Hamadan
At Hamadan he became physician and vizier to Shams al-Dawla and began the Book of Healing with his students.
Flight to Isfahan
After months of confinement in the fortress of Fardajan, he slipped away from Hamadan in Sufi dress to the court of Ala al-Dawla at Isfahan.
Death at Hamadan
Taken ill during a campaign of Ala al-Dawla, he died at Hamadan, where a modern mausoleum honours his memory.
Understanding a life in depth
01A self-taught youth in Bukhara
Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina was born at Afshana near Bukhara, traditionally in 980, although the year may have been earlier; his father, who came from Balkh, governed a district for the Samanid emirs. In the autobiography he later dictated to his disciple al-Juzjani, he recalls learning the Quran and much literature as a child, then logic, geometry, astronomy and medicine, largely on his own. He read Aristotle’s Metaphysics forty times without grasping its aim until a cheap copy of al-Farabi’s essay on it, bought in the booksellers’ market, opened it to him. After treating the ailing emir Nuh ibn Mansur, he was admitted to the royal library, and by eighteen, he says, he had mastered all the sciences.
02Courts, patrons and a vizier’s dangers
When the Turkic Qarakhanids took Bukhara in 999 and ended Samanid rule, Ibn Sina left his post in the financial administration and began a life of wandering in search of patrons. He served the Khwarazmshah at Gurganj, moved in 1012 to Jurjan, where al-Juzjani joined him and he began the Canon of Medicine, then passed through Rayy to Hamadan. There the Buyid ruler Shams al-Dawla made him his physician and twice his vizier; mutinous troops once demanded his death, and he had to go into hiding. His evenings were given to teaching, as students gathered to read the Book of Healing while he wrote it.
03Prison, flight and the Isfahan years
After the death of Shams al-Dawla in 1021, Ibn Sina secretly approached Ala al-Dawla, the Kakuyid ruler of Isfahan, and was imprisoned for some months in the fortress of Fardajan, where he still wrote, among other works, the allegory Hayy ibn Yaqzan. Around 1024 he escaped to Isfahan disguised as a Sufi, with his brother, al-Juzjani and two servants. At the court of Ala al-Dawla he spent his last thirteen years or so: he completed the Book of Healing and composed the shorter Salvation, a Persian Philosophy for Ala al-Dawla and finally the Remarks and Admonitions, while also making astronomical observations for his patron.
04Death and a double posterity
Ibn Sina died in 1037 at Hamadan, taken ill with colic while accompanying a campaign of Ala al-Dawla, and was buried there. His system became the main object of debate in the Islamic East: al-Ghazali’s Incoherence of the Philosophers, completed in 1095, condemned his theses on the eternity of the world, God’s knowledge of particulars and bodily resurrection, while later thinkers from Suhrawardi to Mulla Sadra built on his work. At Toledo, Latin versions of the Book of Healing and the Canon gave the scholastics their Avicenna, read closely by Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus.
Avicenna became the reference point of later philosophy in the Islamic East, criticized by al-Ghazali and Averroes and commented on by Fakhr al-Din al-Razi and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. In Latin his metaphysics and psychology shaped Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, and the Canon was taught in European medical faculties into the seventeenth century.
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Linked thinkers
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