Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

The Mosque, the Laboratory, and the Market • 101degree, conflicts engaged the best minds of that time in debates thathave left a rich legacy of intellectual interaction: an al-Ghazali versusan Ibn Sina, an Ibn Rushd against an al-Ghazali. It should again benoted that these conflicts are not, strictly speaking, conflicts betweenscience and Islam; rather, these are conflicts between views of onephilosopher and another, both of whom are attempting to produce asystematic account of the cosmos based on rational thought.One of the most important philosophical cosmology in Islambelongs to the Peripatetic School, best represented by Ibn Sina.Honorifically called al-Shaykh al-Ra’is, the Grand Shaikh, IbnSina’s prodigious learning is legendary. Born in Afshanah, a villagein present-day Uzbekistan not far from Bukhara, in August orSeptember 980, to the governor of that village, Ibn Sina had masteredmany traditional sciences and a large part of Greek philosophy beforehe was twenty. He studied Isagoge, Porphyry’s introduction to theOrganon of Aristotle, with a reputed philosopher of the time, al-Natili,and then moved on to study the works of Euclid and Ptolemy. Soonhis teacher left Bukhara, but he “continued the study of texts—theoriginal and commentaries—in natural sciences and metaphysics.” Atthe age of sixteen, he embarked upon reading logic and other partsof philosophy, as he tells us in his short autobiography:Then, for the next year and a half, I dedicated myself tolearning and reading; I returned to reading logic and all partsof philosophy. During this time I did not sleep completelythrough a single night nor devoted myself to anything else byday… thus I mastered the logical, natural, and mathematicalsciences, and I had now reached the science of metaphysics. Iread the Metaphysics [of Aristotle], but I could not comprehendits contents, and its author’s objective remained obscure tome, even when I had gone back and read it forty times andhad got to the point where I had memorized it. In spite of thisI could not understand it nor its objective and I despaired ofmyself and said: “This is a book for which there is no way ofunderstanding”. But one day in the afternoon when I was atthe booksellers’ quarter, a seller approached me with a book inhis hand which he was selling by calling out loud. He offeredit to me but I refused it with disgust believing that there wasno merit in this science. But he said to me, “buy it, because its