Avicenna Quotes

I despised my arrival on this earth and I despise my departure; it is a tragedy.

The world is divided into men who have wit and no religion and men who have religion and no wit.

I would rather have a short life with width rather than a narrow one with length.

Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned.

Time is merely a feature of our memories and expectations.

Hermetic angelology, studied by Corbin in his Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, posits a middle reality between sensory perceptions and divine revelations.

Avicenna California...Museum of my twisted youth, vault of my dearest and most disgusting memories.

إنَّ قوة الفكر قادرةٌ على إحداث المرض والشفاء منه

The knowledge of anything, since all things have causes, is not acquired or complete unless it is known by its causes.

Science and art leave societies in which they are not respected Avicenna

O England,’ said Kiaya Khátún. Her voice, mellow and strong, held an accent or a mingling of accents Philippa was unable to name. ‘O England, the Hell of Horses, the Purgatory of Servants and the Paradise of Women.’ She turned her splendid eyes on the soothsayer. ‘She will be like Avicenna, and run through all the arts by eighteen.

It is only rather recently that science has begun to make peace with its magical roots. Until a few decades ago, it was common for histories of science either to commence decorously with Copernicus's heliocentric theory or to laud the rationalism of Aristotelian antiquity and then to leap across the Middle Ages as an age of ignorance and superstition. One could, with care and diligence, find occasional things to praise in the works of Avicenna, William of Ockham, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon, but these sparse gems had to be thoroughly dusted down and scraped clean of unsightly accretions before being inserted into the corners of a frame fashioned in a much later period.

When a thing standeth long in salt, it is salt, and if any thing stand in a stinking place, it is made stinking; and if any thing standeth with a bold man, it is made bold, and if it stand with a fearefull man, it is made fearefull.

Besides, I long for men's company: the prattle of the little girls — much though I love them — drives me to an earlier and earlier breakfast, to a later and even later dinner, so that presently the two will meet, as they did in Avicenna's tale.

At night I would return home, set out a lamp before me, and devote myself to reading and writing. Whenever sleep overcame me or I became conscious of weakening, I would turn aside to drink a cup of wine, so that my strength would return to me. Then I would return to reading. And whenever sleep seized me I would see those very problems in my dream; and many questions became clear to me in my sleep. I continued in this until all of the sciences were deeply rooted within me and I understood them as is humanly possible. Everything which I knew at the time is just as I know it now; I have not added anything to it to this day. Thus I mastered the logical, natural, and mathematical sciences, and I had now reached the science.

Or written anew. Every spell that exists was once spoken for the first time, by a witch who needed it.” Bella actually claps her hands together. “Then the library could be . . . oh, but it would take so much work.” The Crone huffs. “It always does.” “Always?” “Avalon wasn’t the first library. Alexandria, Antioch, Avicenna . . . They keep burning us. We keep rising again.

They [the Templars] had read Avicenna, and they were not ignorant, like the Europeans. How could you live alongside a tolerant, mystical, libertine culture for two centuries without succumbing to its allure, particularly when you compared it to Western culture, which was crude, vulgar, barbaric, and Germanic?

As the reader will discover in this book, problems that affect the mitochondria are the basic cause of disease; as Avicenna long ago stated in the 3rd Lesson, 2nd Art, “When the organ function becomes abnormal, then there is a problem with its energy, and a problem with organ’s energy causes a disease in the organ.

غذای روح بود باده رحیق الحق که رنگ او کند از دور رنگ گل را دق به رنگ زنگ زداید ز جان اندوهگین همای گردد اگر جرعه‌ای بنوشد بق به طعم، تلخ چوپند پدر و لیک مفید به پیش مبطل، باطل به نزد دانا، حق می‌از جهالت جهال شد به شرع حرام چو مه که از سبب منکران دین شد شق حلال گشته به فتوای عقل بر دانا حرام گشته به احکام شرع بر احمق شراب را چه گنه زان که ابلهی نوشد زبان به هرزه گشاید، دهد ز دست ورق حلال بر عقلا و حرام بر جهال که می‌محک بود وخیرو شر از او مشتق غلام آن می‌صافم کزو رخ خوبان به یک دو جرعه برآرد هزار گونه عرق چو بوعلی می‌ناب ار خوری حکیمان به حق حق که وجودت شود به حق ملحق

I am the sun I am the sea I am the one By infinity I am the spark I am the light I am the dark And I am the night I am Iran I am Xerxes I am Zal’s son And I am a beast I am God’s own Emissary Colour my heart Red, white and green I am Ferdowsi I am Hafez I am Saadi Rolled all in one breath Ibn Sina Omar Khayyam Look at me now Bundled in one I am the present I am the past I am the future My presence will last I am Ismail My soul is unleashed ‘Till the day at least The sun sets in the east

Echoing al-Ghazālī’s opinion that Avicenna’s theories made him an apostate, Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ urged that the death sentence would be appropriate for anyone who refuses to give up on the study of logic and philosophy.

It is not surprising that Ibn Sina is a national icon in Iran today, and one can find countless schools and hospitals named after him in many countries around the world. Indeed, his legacy stretches even further, for there is an 'Avicenna' crater on the moon, and in 1980 every member country of Unesco celebrated the thousand-year anniversary of Ibn Sina's birth. As a philosopher he is referred to as the Aristotle of Islam; as a physician he is known as the Galen of Islam.

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.

Certainly, one of the greatest achievements of the human intellectual spirit was the Arabic Translation Movement. Over the course of about 100 years, virtually the entire Greek Scientific and philosophical corpus was either translated or summarized into Arabic (McGinnis, 10).

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 young men in our colleges learn through those of Greek and Latin—that is grammar, rhetoric, and logic. After his seven years of study, the young Muhammadan binds his turban upon a head almost as well filled with the things which appertain to these branches of knowledge as the young man raw from Oxford—he will talk as fluently about Socrates and Aristotle, Plato and Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna; (alias Sokrat, Aristotalis, Alflatun, Bokrat, Jalinus and Bu Ali Sena); and,

The Muslims in this day and age are enduring nadir and are being earmarked far and wide in the orb. In order to get the better of this predicament, we are in a moral obligation to foster and precipitate genius scientists, doctors, physists, chemists, intellectuals philosophers and politicians. But, I have a fancy for scientists like Hazen, doctors viz Avicenna, physists like Al-Kindus, chemists viz Jabir, the literati like Rumi and Iqbal; Philosophers viz Ghazzali and leaders like Omar (Radihallahuanhu) by virtue of whose, we would au fond be effectual in getting out of these angst stalemates.

Jenny Marzen made millions of dollars, as opposed to nickels, by writing novels that got seriously reviewed while selling big. Amy had skimmed her first one, a mildly clever thing about a philosophy professor who discovers her husband is cheating on her with one of her grad students, and who, while feigning ignorance of the affair, drives the girl mad with increasingly brutal critiques and research tasks, at one point banishing her to Beirut, first to learn fluent Arabic and then to read Avicenna's Al-Qanun fi al-Tibb, housed in the American University. This was, Amy thought, a showoffy detail that hinted at Marzen's impressive erudition but was probably arrived at within five Googling minutes.

The effect of the current WMS paradigm on the pharmaceutical industry turned out to be catastrophic (for the patient). The rash of drug recalls that has been beleaguering the pharmaceutical industry in the last twenty years is a direct manifestation of drug design based on an incomplete and often incorrect biological and clinical paradigm. Why has the pharmaceutical industry not been capable of producing new drugs that are safe and without severe side effects, that would represent true “therapeutic breakthroughs,” like we were used to seeing in the middle of the twentieth century? Why are the “blockbuster” drugs of recent decades not the safe, therapeutic “breakthroughs” our parents had come to trust in?

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

According to the Persian seer Avicenna, whose 'Canon of Medicine' Marjan often consulted, fenugreek is the first stop to curing winter chills. Combined with the hearty kidney beans and succulent meat of the herb stew, it made for an excellent 'garm', or hot, meal.

al-Juwaynī also understood that the works of Avicenna and other falāsifa contained solutions to many theological problems the Asharite school had wrestled with for centuries.

. 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.

Simply put, Leonardo replaced the mystic black bile, faculties, and spirits that permeated the writings of Galen, Avicenna, de Luzzi, and others, with his physical powers of movement, weight, force, and percussion - the building blocks of mechanics. he further used these mechanical concepts to demystify a whole host of physiological processes.

The physicians and philosophers of traditional medical systems were aware of the physical nature of chemical elements such as iron, arsenic, and others as well as their characteristics, but they still used the four-element concept for its relevance to explaining medical and biological phenomena.

There are many today who dismiss the classical elements theory of the ancient systems as inaccurate and as being in conflict with our current understanding of elemental physics, however, as we will try to demonstrate in this book there is not a real conflict and understanding the Unani elements in a modern biological and biochemical context makes good sense. We will attempt to place this concept within its proper context, provide its relevance within the biological and medical paradigm, and explain how the elements became an integral part of the theoretical and practical basis of the Unani medical system.

It is worth mentioning here that the Western translations of traditional medical systems have always referred to the basic constituents of biological entities as the elements, however, in the tibb system they are termed the basics, origins (‘ousoul, ), or phases, and never as elements. It was the Greek-Sicilian philosopher Empedocles (ca. 450 BCE) who termed the elements the four “roots” (rhizōmata, ιζματα)—a very close term to the Arabic term for origins. Plato seems to have been the one who introduced the term element (stoicheion, στοιχεον). We are using the term elements here because it is ubiquitous in the literature and used to refer to the same concept in Chinese traditional medicine and ayurvedic medicine. Although the ancients’ concepts

Like other traditional medical systems, Unani follows a holistic approach to health maintenance, diagnosis of illness, and restoration of health. As a holistic system, it recognizes all factors that contribute to a healthy body, it promotes the natural recuperative power of the body, and it avoids harming sound parts of the body when pursuing treatment options for a disease.

Unani physicians practice individualized medicine, an idea that has just started to take hold in modern medicine but is without solid practice yet.

within the Unani paradigm, Avicenna had long ago given us an accurate general understanding of cancer’s biochemistry that is compatible with our recent findings about cancer and, in a step far ahead of its time, prescribed a suitable diet for individuals with cancer that is consistent with the ketogenic diet (calorie-restricted diet with high-fat and high-protein content) that is now emerging as the most suitable diet for cancer patients. This last point tells us that one may find some remedies in Unani medicine for certain ailments that the WMS does not offer.

While the WMS views the invasion and establishment of a pathogen as the beginning of the disease, Unani attributes the success of the pathogen to the individual’s susceptibility to infection (host factors) due to dystemperament or humoral imbalance. Supporters of the Unani view observe that in an epidemic (even of catastrophic proportions) not everyone gets infected despite the ubiquity of the infectious agent, just as most people with streptococcus in their respiratory tract do not develop strep throat infection.

The first decade of the twenty-first century has witnessed the revisiting of cellular energetics to explain issues with cancer, degenerative disease, and drug toxicities.

Whether one agrees with all, some, or none of Avicenna’s tenets, there is no doubt that his disease concept in Unani is a sound one. It is truly amazing that an eleventh-century physician could have had this incredible power of observation, understanding of biological nature, and ability to synthesize and communicate his science. This truth logically makes one wonder whether we really need to expend all the trouble, time, and expense on the latest state-of-the-art technologies to effectively diagnose a disease!

it is appropriate to quote Gruner, who wrote, “Advances of modern sciences in molecular biology, biochemistry, physiology, and pharmacology have not replaced or diminished the basic tenets of Avicenna’s system; to the contrary, they have revealed to us the need to explain them in light of the new knowledge and find a way to reconcile the two.

Our new understanding of Avicenna’s humors, as presented in this book, reveals that the humors can now be seen as the biochemical classes known today as proteins, lipids, and organic acids. And humors are the macromolecules of the food we eat after they have been absorbed from the stomach and the intestines and gone into the bloodstream.

Aging and dying are still enigmatic on the molecular scale to modern sciences. However, Avicenna had the broad concept figured out, and his explanation is congruent with our recent knowledge, and with new facts at hand we now can explain his reasoning at the cellular and biochemical levels. Avicenna states, “After the period of youth heat starts to diminish due to the decline in moisture, and in agreement with the internal innate heat and support of physical and psychological actions that are needed, therefore, in the absence of a natural reversal, all bodily functions reach their end

We have seen physicians who take the route of using recent technology to translate technical data into the Unani medical paradigm for the diagnosis and treatment of illness. These are by far the superior physicians.

It should be obvious to us now that, wherever these medical systems may have fallen short on detail, they compensated by elaborating comprehensive, coherent, and useful general concepts that remain a source of strength and a reason for their survival. Not only have their concepts stood the test of time, but modern medical science also now lends support and validation to many of them.

However, the four-elements concept is a different system of classification of matter than is our periodic table of elements; it is based on the physical state (solid, liquid, gas, energy), acceptance or rejection of moisture (wet, dry), acceptance or rejection of heat (hot, cold), and relationship to other elements (inner, middle, outer, mixed). Why is such a classification needed? The answer is simple: because it is compatible with the biological nature of living organisms. The physical state, heat, and water are three criteria that can describe the conditions of a biological entity—organs, structures, biochemical compounds, liquids, and such.

There are thousands of unknown compounds in the human body that have not yet been identified, and their abnormal qualitative and quantitative changes that contribute to disease have not yet been explored.

Raw humor is a quality issue that has to be dealt with; the quality of the humor, or a metabolite in our modern biology, is an important factor in health preservation, a fact that is rarely given attention when merely measuring the quantity of a biomolecule. In a Western-type clinical environment, the physician or nurse may not be aware of this issue since all blood indicators they deal with are quantitative and only measured in the blood, the assessment and treatment is based on whether the test results show above or below the normal range. According to Avicenna, in many instances the raw humor may be higher in concentration within the organ, and not within the vessels, and its effect is local rather than systemic.

In WMS, the temperaments are considered obsolete and therefore are rarely invoked as the causal agents of a disease. The humors have been replaced by precise molecules such as cholesterol, hemoglobin, and dozens of other measures that appear today on any routine blood work. So, the general health or sickness profile of the Unani concept, based on either dystemperament or humoral imbalance, or both, has been replaced by a series of single, isolated indicators as the basis for diagnosis and treatment. It is exactly here that the modern physicians fail to connect the details supplied to them by the remarkable achievements of modern science. And here the medicine of Avicenna offers a rationalization that is currently missing in modern medicine.

So in a modern interpretation, the humors are not the blood components, as some have interpreted, but rather the chemical classes derived from food such as carbohydrates, proteins, lipids, organic acids, and their intermediates, which replenish the body with nutrients carried in the blood. Abnormal humors result from the incomplete breakdown of these classes of molecules in the bloodstream, or their aggregation (polymerization) and precipitation.

Where else was I to go? My family had no desire to apprentice me to a physician, for though the admission grieves me, over most of Europe my profession is composed of a poor lot of leeches and knaves. There is a large hospital in Paris, the Hôtel Dieu, that is merely a pesthouse for the poor into which screaming men are dragged to die. There is a medical school in Salerno, a sorry place. Through communication with other Jewish merchants my father was aware that in the countries of the East the Arabs have made a fine art of the science of medicine. In Persia the Muslims have a hospital at Ispahan that is truly a healing center. It is in this hospital and in a small academy there that Avicenna makes his doctors.

Parmenides said: “To think and to be are one and the same.” Philosophers had similar thoughts about this question from Plato, Aristotle, and Saint Augustine to Avicenna. “Je pense, donc je suis“ (“I think, therefore I am, “or “I am thinking, therefore I exist.“) Descartes used first in French in his Discourse on the Method (1637) and later in Latin in Principles of Philosophy and Meditations on First Philosophy. One of the easiest ways to reconcile Descartes’ cogito ergo sum argument with counterarguments against it would be to modify it slightly: I am the thought. This thought exists. Therefore, I exist. Everything that exists, regardless of whether it is aware of its existence, is information itself, a message, or a thought of the Universal Eternal Source of everything. The I that thinks, whatever it may be, exists. An I is not the source of thinking, but thinking is the source of an I. An I is the consequence of thinking. An I does not presuppose existence but is only a confirmation of existence. Existence is not the consequence of an I. I do not exist because I am an I. Thinking I is a confirmation of existence per se, independent of whether I am that I or not. The sole possibility that I may think I am thinking is enough to prove the existence of a being that thinks or thinks that it (he-she) thinks. Otherwise, this being would not be able to be wrong or right, delusional, or deceived. Identification of an I, and with an I, or with the self, is not the source of existence: I do not exist because I think, but my thinking, even if not mine, proves the existence of whatever or whoever is thinking.

Sohravardi also found fault with Avicenna for not going far enough in another area, the master’s critique of the non-mystical theologians of the Islamic world. In Avicenna’s time these nonmystical theologians lived to the west of Iran, and therefore Avicenna called them “Westerners” to indicate not only their geographical location (from Baghdad to Spain) but also their unfortunate lack of interest in “Illumination” offered by the eastern rising of the mystical sun.

E fu solo dopo altro tempo che lui riuscì a riprendere tra le mani quei fogli del Risâla fîl-ishq di Avicenna, a sedersi a un tavolo, a ricominciarne la lettura. «Ogni ente determinato da un piano divino tende, per natura, alla propria perfezione, per esempio a un dato bene intravisto nella realtà, il quale fluisce però in ultima istanza dalla realtà del Puro Bene, mentre per natura ogni ente rifugge dal suo specifico male, per esempio dalla materialità e dal non-essere, perché ogni male deriva in definitiva dall’attaccamento alla materia e al non-essere. Quindi è necessario che ogni ente determinato da un piano provvidenziale possegga un desiderio naturale e un amore congenito, e ne segue di necessità che in tali enti l’Amore sia il fondamento della loro stessa esistenza».

Insomma l'amore, come dice Avicenna, e Cavalcanti in Donna me prega, è una pulsione dell'anima sensitiva, un accidens, che non dà tregua all'innamorato e lo induce a cercare ossessivamente la corresponsione. In quanto passione dell'anima sensitiva, s'insedia in noi senza chiederci il permesso: semplicemente accidit, succede. Ma non si limita a succedere, si trasforma anche in passione travolgente e fatale perché "non condona l'amare all'amata", non sa essere disinteressato, e trasforma l'innamorato ossessivo in un potenziale killer, come Paolo che non frenando il proprio impeto condanna sé e Francesca a un destino di morte (un accidente che sovente è fero, crudele, dice Cavalcanti in Donna me prega). L'unica possibilità per uscire da questa trappola mortale (in un'epoca di impunità e delitti d'onore) è "condonare l'amare all'amata": è ciò che ha fatto Dante a partire da Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore; è ciò che ripete possibile nel XVIII del Purgatorio: si può distinguere tra amori che possono essere vissuti e rei amori, amori che fanno male. Questi ultimi sono a rigore accidenti come tutti gli altri: non si può fare a meno di provarli, ma si può fare a meno di viverli; il libero arbitrio vige anche in amore, occupa la soglia dell'assenso, dice sì o no, non alla passione che se accidit accidit, ma alla possibilità di tradurla in atto. È questa la luce (della coscienza, della ragione) che tace nell'inferno dell'amore.

l'innamoramento, come dice lo stesso Avicenna in un suo trattato specifico sull'amore100, consiste dunque in una sorta di ammutinamento dell'immaginazione, che si arroga i compiti della ragione (come un servo quelli del padrone) illudendo l'innamorato di poter conseguire autonomamente la perfectio umana (che per Aristotele è invece razionale e contemplativa), mentre lo spinge ossessivamente a cercarla nella direzione opposta, nella mercede da parte dell'amata e nell'unione fisica con lei: l'oggetto d'amore, insomma, mentre provoca nell'intelletto - attraverso la contemplazione della bellezza - un surrogato dell'ebbrezza contemplativa, produce poi semplicemente nell'amante (cito - non conoscendo l'arabo - dalla traduzione inglese del trattato avicenniano) the urge to embrace it, to kiss it and for conjugal union with it. Insomma lo induce ad anelare alla bellezza, che è oggetto puro di contemplazione, non with an intellectual consideration (la consideratio è appunto la "contemplazione pura"), ma with animal desire.

Matter, therefore, also has its utopia; in objective real possibility, it stops being abstract.

Of the matter of melancholy, there is much question betwixt Avicenna and Galen, as you may read in Cardan’s Contradictions, Valesius’ Controversies, Montanus, Prosper Calenus, Capivaccius, Bright, Ficinus, that have written either whole tracts, or copiously of it in their several treatises of this subject. ‘What

Tu te crois un néant et c’est en toi que réside le monde

If in doubt about the soul, Avicenna reasoned, one has only to conceive himself fully formed but isolated perceptually from all external objects. Our ability to think of ourselves floating amid the spheres, even our fingertips separated, so they can- not touch each other or our bodies, proves, he argues, that the soul does not de- pend on the body as, say, the color of a shirt depends on the shirt. For the thought of our consciousness in such a state does not presume the existence of a body. If the idea of consciousness is independent of the idea of embodiment, Avicenna rea- sons, then the mind does not depend for its being on the body it renders conscious.

هَبَطَتْ إِلَيْكَ مِنَ المَحَلِّ الأَرْفَعِ وَرْقَاءُ ذَاتُ تَعَزُّزٍ وَتَمَنُّـــعِ مَحْجُوبَةٌ عَنْ مُقْلَةِ كُلِّ عَارِفٍ وَهْيَ الَّتِي سَفَرَتْ وَلَمْ تَتَبَرْقَـعِ وَصَلَتْ عَلَى كُرْهٍ إِلَيْكَ وَرُبَّمَا كَرِهَتْ فِرَاقَكَ وَهْيَ ذَاتُ تَفَجُّعِ أَنِفَتْ وَمَا أَلِفَتْ فَلَمَّا وَاصَلَتْ أَنِسَتْ مُجَاوَرَةَ الخَرَابِ البَلْقَـعِ

Ibn Tufayl, following in Avicenna’s wake, takes a different tack, abstracting not from the physical but from the social world. What would human thought be like in the absence not of a body but of culture and tradition? What would a curious, in- sightful, and dedicated human being think about God and the world, the self and its place in the cosmos, without the help—or interference—of religion, or even lan- guage?

Man schreibt das Jahr 1000. Soeben hat in Bagdad der Buchhändler Ibn an-Nadim seinen „Katalog der Wissenschaften“ veröffentlicht. Das Werk enthält in zehn Bänden die Titel aller bisher in arabischer Sprache erschienenen Bücher aus Philosophie, Astronomie, Mathematik, Physik, Chemie, Medizin. Studierende aus allen Gegenden des Orients und selbst aus dem Okzident lockt der Ruf von Cordobas hohen Schulen und von seiner Bibliothek, deren halbe Million Bücher einer der gelehrtesten Männer seiner Zeit, der vor vierundzwanzig Jahren verstorbene Kalif al-Hakam II. durch Dutzende von Aufkäufern gesammelt und größtenteils mit seinen Randbemerkungen versehen hat. In Kairo betreuen mehrere hundert Bibliothekare in den beiden kalifischen Bibliotheken zusammen zwei Millionen zweihundert Bände; das entspricht dem Zwanzigfachen des Bestandes an Buchrollen der einstigen Bibliothek von Alexandrien. „Es ist notorisch, daß es in Rom niemand gibt, der so viel Bildung besitzt, daß er sich zum Türsteher eignet. Mit welcher Stirn kann der sich anmaßen zu lehren, der selbst nichts gelernt hat!“ stöhnt der Mann, der am besten wissen muß, Gerbert von Aurillac, der im letzten der tausend Jahre nach Christo – 999 – selber in Rom den Stuhl Petri besteigt. In diesem Jahr verfaßt Abulkasis das durch Jahrhunderte gültige Standardwerk der Chirugie, erörtert Albiruni, an universaler Geistigkeit der Aristoteles der Araber, die Drehung der Erde um die Sonne, entdeckt Alhazen die Gesetze des Sehens und experimentiert mit der camera obscura und mit sphärischen, zylindrischen und konischen Spiegeln und Linsen. In diesem Jahr, in dem die arabische Welt dem Scheitelpunkt ihres goldenen Zeitalters entgegeneilt, erwartet das Abendland erschreckt, geängstigt das Ende der Zeiten. Mit dem ekstatischen Ausruf: „Jetzt kommt Christus, mit Feuer das Weltall zu richten!“ pilgert der zwanzigjährige Kaiserjüngling Otto III. „wegen begangener Verbrechen der strengen Regel des heiligen Romualdus gehorchend mit nackten Füßen von der Stadt Rom zum Berge Garganus“. Und der junge Avicenna, eben zwanzigjährig wie er, beginnt die Welt mit seinem weithin strahlenden Ruhm zu erfüllen.

Avicenna.

Medical science in the West began with the import of Greek and Arabic texts, especially the works of Galen and Avicenna, in the eleventh century. Salerno in Italy established the first medical school. It seems to have been astonishingly enlightened. After Salerno, medical schools were organized at Bologna, Montpellier, and elsewhere.

Allah SWT akan menjawab segala sesuatunya dengan sangat indah pada saat yang TEPAT dan TERBAIK!

In this way it would be possible to trace a faint line from the Buddhist argument method via Ibn Sina/Avicenna to the medieval scholasticism of the early universities. If this is right, the ghost of Xuanzang’s beloved Yogacara Buddhist texts can be seen lurking somewhere in the background of many of the most important ideas and arguments underpinning western thought during the Middle Ages.54

Width of life is more important than length of life. ― Avicenna Any width or length doesn't matter if life is devoid of discipline. ― Ehsan Sehgal

After his seven years of study, the young Muhammadan binds his turban upon a head almost as well filled with the things which appertain to these branches of knowledge as the young man raw from Oxford—he will talk as fluently about Socrates and Aristotle, Plato and Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna; (alias Sokrat, Aristotalis, Alflatun, Bokrat, Jalinus and Bu Ali Sena);

earliest mention of this mental illness was over a thousand years ago in 'The Canon of Medicine' by the Persian thinker, Avicenna.