Averroes
Andalusi philosopher, jurist, physician and polymath (1126–1198), born in Córdoba into a lineage of Maliki jurists, trained in Islamic law, medicine, astronomy and philosophy, and summoned to the Almohad court in Marrakesh, where he served as the caliph's personal physician and supreme judge (qadi) in both Córdoba and Seville before suffering, towards the end of his life, a brief but severe persecution and exile on grounds of religious suspicion. Known in medieval Europe simply as 'the Commentator' for the breadth and depth of his commentaries on almost the entirety of Aristotle's work — short, middle and long commentaries that, once translated into Latin and Hebrew, became the principal gateway for Aristotelian thought into thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Scholastic Europe, decisively influencing Thomas Aquinas, even if largely to refute him on key points. His most combative work, The Incoherence of the Incoherence (Tahafut al-Tahafut), is a point-by-point rebuttal of al-Ghazali's attack on the rationalist philosophers, in which Averroes defends with logical rigour the ultimate compatibility between Aristotelian philosophy and Islamic revelation, arguing that philosophical truth and religious truth, properly understood, can never truly contradict one another, since both emanate from the same God — a thesis that the later Latin tradition simplified and distorted into the doctrine known as 'double truth', never defended in those terms by Averroes himself. In the Fasl al-Maqal (The Decisive Treatise), he argues that philosophical study is not merely permitted but obligatory for Muslims capable of demonstrative reasoning, provided it is conducted with due public caution. A physician of renown, also author of the Kitab al-Kulliyat (a general medical compendium), Averroes represents both the summit and the swan song of Aristotelian rationalism within Andalusi Islam, since after him philosophical falsafa virtually vanished from the western Islamic world, while his influence in the West, paradoxically, would only grow.