Averroes Quotes

Ignorance leads to fear, fear leads to hatred, and hatred leads to violence. This is the equation.

Knowledge is the conformity of the object and the intellect

It is not growing fanaticism, but growing democracy, that causes my troubles. Did you ever read the life of Averroes? He was protected by kings, but hated by the mob, which was fanatical. In the end, the mob won. Free thought has always been a perquisite of aristocracy.

Gone too from the world, Averroes and Moses Maimonides,

دخلتُ يوماً بقرطبةَ على قاضيها أبى الوليد بن رشد ، وكان يرغب فى لقائى لما سمع وبلغه ما فتح الله به علىَّ فى خلوتى ، فكان يُظهر التعجُّبَ مما سمع . فبعثنى والدى إليه فى حاجةٍ ، قصداً منه حتى يجتمع بى ، فإنَّه كان من أصدقائه ، وأنا (آنذاك) صبىٌّ ما بقل وجهى ولا طرَّ شاربى . فعندما دخلت عليه ، قام من مكانه إلىَّ محبَّةً وإعظاماً ، فعانقنى وقال لى : نعم ! قلت له : نعم ! فزاد فرحه بى لفهمى عنه ، ثم استشعرتُ بما أفرحه ، فقلت : لا ! فانقبض وتغير لونه وشك فيما عنده . وقال لى : كيف وجدتم الأمرَ فى الكشف والفيض الإلهى ، هل هو ما أعطاه لنا النظر ؟ قلت : نعم ولا ، وبين نعم ولا تطيرُ الأرواحُ من موادِّها والأعناق من أجسادها ! فاصفرَّ لونُه وأخذه الأفكل وقعد يحوقل وقال: هذه حالة أثبتناها وما رأينا لها أربابا.

What has officially been declared as the basis of theological studies in the Roman Catholic Church has been enormously influenced by Islam and Muslim beliefs. Funny old world, isn’t it?

El temor de lo crasamente infinito, del mero espacio, de la mera materia, tocó por un instante a Averroes. Miró el simétrico jardín; se supo envejecido, inútil, irreal.

it seems clear that Ibn Khaldun preferred al-Ghazali to Averroes. “He who wants to arm himself against the philosophers in the field of dogmatic beliefs should turn to the works of al-Ghazali.

L'ignorance mène à la peur, la peur mène à la haine et la haine conduit à la violence. Voilà l'équation. Ignorance leads to fear and fear leads to hate and hate leads to violence. And that's the equation.

The great philosophers of Islam were amateurs, and they pursued philosophy during their leisure hours: Farabi was a musician, Avicenna a physician and a vizier, Averroes a judge. Avicenna did philosophy at night, surrounded by his disciples, after a normal workday. And he did not refuse a glass of wine to invigorate him a bit and keep him on his toes. Similarly, among the Jews, Maimonides was a physician and a rabbinic judge, Gersonides was an astronomer (and astrologer), and so on. The great Jewish or Muslim philosophers attained the same summits as the great Christian Scholastics, but they were isolated and had little influence on society. In medieval Europe, philosophy became a university course of studies and a pursuit that could provide a living….You can be a perfectly competent rabbi or imam without ever having studied philosophy. In contrast, a philosophical background is a necessary part of the basic equipment of the Christian theologian. It has even been obligatory since the Lateran Council of 1215.

Averroes, the last of the great medieval Arab philosophers, was fighting a rearguard defense of philosophy that was under attack from theologians, and, though translations of his works were to be much read in the universities of Christian Europe, he had little influence on later generations of thinkers in the Muslim world.

…Время, разоряющее дворцы, обогащает стихи.

The direct translations from the Greek enjoyed by Western scholars contrast with the twice-removed translations used by the likes of the Córdoban Ibn Rushd (“Averroes”) and the Persian Ibn Sina (Latinized “Avicenna,” from the Greek Aβιτζιαvoς), which were Arabic translations made by Christian scholars from Syriac translations also made by Christian scholars from those classical Greek texts preserved by the Greek scholars of the Christian Greek Roman Empire.

The fact is, the great intellectuals of the western religious tradition from Augustine to Aquinas and Peter Abelard became philosophically dominant. The intellectual tradition was preserved. The great intellectuals of the Islamic tradition like Averroes and Avicenna became heretics whose influence disappeared under the weight of rote preaching and practice. Islam as a result has a moral code, a legalistic system of right and wrong, but no evolved ethical tradition.

What, then, of the achievements of Muslim philosophy in Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Ibn al-Haytham, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), al-Razi, al-Kindi, al- Khawarizmi, and al-Farabi? Reformist thinker Ibrahim Al-Buleihi, a current member of the Saudi Shura Council, responds, “These [achievements] are not of our own making, and those exceptional individuals were not the product of Arab culture, but rather Greek culture. They are outside our cultural mainstream and we treated them as though they were foreign elements. Therefore we don’t deserve to take pride in them since we rejected them and fought their ideas. Conversely, when Europe learned from them it benefited from a body of knowledge which was originally its own because they were an extension of Greek culture, which is the source of the whole of Western civilization.”21

Whenever imagination strays and is wasted recklessly, when it ceases to fulfil its function of perceiving and producing the symbols that lead to inner intelligence, the mundus imaginalis…may be considered to have disappeared. In the West, this decadence may date back to the moment when Averroism rejected the Avicennian cosmology with its intermediary angelic hierarchy of the Animae or Angeli caelestes. These Angeli caelestes (on a lower rung of the hierarchy than that of the Angeli intellectuales) had in fact the privilege of imaginative power in its purest form. Once the universe of these souls had disappeared, the imaginative function itself was thrown out of joint and devalued. Thus one can understand the warning issued later by Paracelsus, who cautioned against any confusion…with fantasy, that “madman’s corner stone”.

The muezzins were calling the faithful to their early morning prayers when Averroes entered his library again. (In the harem, the dark-haired slave girls had tortured a red-haired slave girl, but he would not know it until the afternoon.) Something had revealed to him the meaning of the two obscure words. With firm and careful calligraphy he added these lines to the manuscript : 'Aristu (Aristotle) gives the name of tragedy to panegyrics and that of comedy to satires and anathemas. Admirable tragedies and comedies abound in the pages of the Koran and in the mohalacas of the sanctuary.' He felt sleepy, he felt somewhat cold. Having unwound his turban, he looked at himself in a metal mirror. I do not know what his eyes saw, because no historian has ever described the forms of his face. I do know that he disappeared suddenly, as if fulminated by an invisible fire, and with him disappeared the houses and the unseen fountain and the books and the manuscript and the doves and the many dark-haired slave girls and the tremulous red-haired slave girl and Farach and Abulcasim and the rose bushes and perhaps the Guadalquivir.

it is clear that in the study of beings this aim can be fulfilled by us perfectly only through successive examinations of them by one man after another,41 the later ones seeking the help of the earlier in that task, on the model of what has happened in the mathematical sciences. For if we suppose that the art of geometry did not exist in this age of ours, and likewise the art of astronomy, and a single person wanted to ascertain by himself the sizes of the 15 heavenly bodies, their shapes, and their distances from each other, that would not be possible for him—e.g. to know the proportion of the sun to the earth or other facts about the sizes of the stars—even though he were the most intelligent of men by nature, unless by a revelation or something resembling revelation.42 Indeed if he were told that the sun is about 150 or 160 times43 as great as the earth, he would think this statement madness on the part of the speaker, although this is a fact which has been demonstrated in 20 astronomy so surely that no one who has mastered that science doubts it.

we may say that whenever a statement in Scripture conflicts in its apparent meaning with a conclusion of demonstration, if Scripture is considered carefully, 5 and the rest of its contents searched page by page, there will invariably be found among the expressions of Scripture something which in its apparent meaning bears witness to that allegorical interpretation67 or comes close to bearing witness.

Kryterium zdrowego rozsądku nie jest do historii ludzkiej stosowalne. Czy Averroes, Kant, Sokrates. Newton, Wolter, uwierzyliby, że w wieku dwudziestym plagą miast, trucicielem płuc, masowym mordercą, przedmiotem kultu stanie się blaszany wózek na kółkach i że ludzie będą woleli ginąć w nim rozstrzaskiwani podczas masowych weekendowych wyjazdów, aniżeli siedzieć cało w domu?

. But things are not what they seem. The normal Arabic word for “philosophy” was and is falasifa and a “philosopher” is a faylasuf. Plato was a faylasuf and so were Aristotle, Avicenna, Averroes, and al-Farabi. But the word that Rosenthal has translated as “philosophy” in the passage quoted above is hikma, and hikma has a subtly different range of meaning.

Averroes knew Aristotle better than anybody and had understood what Aristotelian science led to: God is not a manipulator who sticks his nose into everything at random; he established nature in its mechanical order and in its mathematical laws, regulated by the iron determination of the stars. And since God is eternal, the world in its order is eternal also. Philosophy studies this order: nature, in other words. Men are able to understand it because in all men one principle of intelligence acts; otherwise each would see things in his own way and there would be no reciprocal understanding.

Nadie ha sido más cruel en Barcelona que Almanzor en 985 que la quemó por completo. Pusieron sus mezquitas y giraldas, y un rey como Fernando III de Castilla no las destruyó. Tampoco los Reyes Católicos tocaron la Alhambra de Granada. En cambio, los invasores musulmanes demolieron en el siglo xii el monumento fenicio a Hércules y cuando cayó el califato de Córdoba destruyeron Medina Azahara. También desterraron a Averroes por considerar su obra peligrosamente heterodoxa. Y en contra de la visión ingenua que convierte a los moriscos en víctimas y a los españoles en verdugos, no hay que olvidar que está históricamente probada la colaboración entre los moriscos de la costa española y los piratas argelinos (desde su base del centro corsario de Cherchel) que golpeaban continuamente a nuestra flota, y que albergaban intenciones de reconquistar al menos parte de España. La España reconquistada podía luchar contra el islam (que la había invadido) pero tenía tiempo para la Escuela de Traductores de Toledo, una tierra de las tres culturas, un Arcipreste de Hita o un Francisco de Rojas.

The common linguistic and intellectual ground on which Muslim, Christian, and Jewish philosophy flourished then characterized the entire medieval Islamicate world. But within the semiclosed precincts of “this peninsula” (a term of endearment as much as a geographical designation, used by both Jews and Muslims), the commonality is particularly striking, and perhaps easier to follow. Without imposing on al-Andalus a single predominant school of thought (be it Pseudo-Empedoclean or Aristotelian), and without appealing to a spurious Spanish “genius,” one can identify recurring themes in Andalusian speculative thought. The true meaning of tawḥīd and the correct interpretation of the divine attributes run like a thread through Andalusian thought, from Ibn Masarra and Ibn Gabirol to the Almohads and Maimonides. The respective merits of rational thought and revelation, philosophy and scriptures, preoccupied thinkers from Ibn Masarra and Baḥyā Ibn Paqūda to Averroes and Judah Halevi. Key concepts such as tadbīr (as divine providence or as human governance) or iʿtibār (contemplation and drawing a lesson) surface time and again, receiving different interpretations and being put to different uses by Ibn Masarra and Baḥyā, by Averroes and Maimonides. All of these thinkers had to negotiate their way in the political and social framework of al-Andalus, balancing mundane commitments to the court and to their respective communities with a yearning for perfection, for the sublime and the transcendent. We can sometimes trace the movement of these themes from one thinker to another; more often, the transmission lines remain buried, leaving us to choose between assuming an enigmatic osmotic process and admitting the existence of yet unknown contacts.

There is little use in asking for an explanation of the eighty years’ gap: the man for the occasion did not appear sooner, and might never have appeared. When he did, however, the challenge of Ghazālī was still felt to be a live issue; intellectual evolution was slower in those days. In Ibn Rushd's criticisms of Ghazālī we perceive a bantering animosity which treats “Abū Hāmid” almost as a living contemporary.

there is a sense of loneliness: the philosophers are called “weeds” (nawābit), like the grass that springs up among the crops; they are strangers in their own country,

until the interview with the Prince Ibn Rushd was unaware of his favourable interest in philosophy, and feared some harsh penalty if he himself were known to be occupied in such a study.