IBN SINA

Biography

His full name was Hussain ibn Abdullah ibn Hassan ibn Ali ibn Sina and commonly known in English by his Latinized name Avicenna. He was born is Afshana, near Bukhara around 980 to a Persian family. His father, Abdullah, was a respected Ismaili scholar from Balkh, an important town of the Persian Empire. His mother was name Setareh. His father was at the time of his son’s birth the governor in one of the Samanid Nuh ibn Mansur’s estates. He had his sin very carefully educated at Bukhara. Ibn Sina died in June 1037, in his fifty-eighth year, and was buried in Hamedan, Iran.

Main interests

Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (980-1037) is one of the foremost philosophers of the golden age of Islamic tradition that also includes al-Farabi and Ibn Rush. He also was a foremost physician, philosopher, astronomer, chemist, geologist, logician, paleontologist, , mathematician, physicist, poet, psychologist, scientist, and teacher.

He is also known as al-Sheikh al-Rais (Leader among the wise men) a title that was given to him by his students. In the west he is also known as the “Prince of Physicians” for his famous medical text al-Qanun “Canon”.

Ibn Sina’s independent thought was served by an extraordinary intelligence and memory, which allowed him to overtake his teachers at the age of fourteen. As he said in his autobiography, there was nothing that he has not learned when he reached eighteen.

Ibn Sina put under the change of a tutor, and his precocity soon made him the marvel of his neighbours : he displayed exceptional intellectual behavior and was a child prodigy who had memorized the Qu’ran by the age of 10 (10 or 7 / it says 7 in the theology section below) and a great deal of Persian poetry as well.. He learned Indian arithmetic from an Indian greengrocer, he began to learn more from a wandering scholar who gained a livelihood by curing the sick and teaching the young. He also studied Fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) under the Hanafi scholar Ismail al-Zahid.