Averroes

• 1. Introduction

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  Averroes was born in Córdoba on the 14th of April 1126, into a family whose name was synonymous with legal authority. His grandfather had been the city's chief judge and imam of the Great Mosque. His father held the same office. And yet, by the time Averroes died on the 11th of December 1198, his reputation had traveled far beyond Andalusia, beyond the Islamic world entirely, and into the libraries of Latin Christendom, where scholars who could not pronounce his Arabic name simply called him "The Commentator."

  His full Arabic name was Abū l-Walīd Muḥammad ibn ʾAḥmad Ibn Rushd. Europeans turned that into Averroes, working through the Spanish pronunciation of the Arabic, where "Ibn" softened into "Aben" or "Aven." The result was a name that existed in so many variant spellings across medieval manuscripts that it reads like a game of telephone played across centuries. What stayed constant was the reputation behind the name.

  The questions this documentary will pursue are harder than biography. Why did a twelfth-century Andalusian judge become the figure credited with reintroducing Aristotle to Western Europe? What did he actually believe about the relationship between reason and faith, between philosophy and Islamic law? And why did a man celebrated by caliphs end his career under a tribunal that burned his books?

• 2. A Dynasty of Judges

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  Averroes grew up surrounded by legal authority. His grandfather, Abu al-Walid Muhammad, who died in 1126, had served as chief qadi of Córdoba and imam of the Great Mosque under the Almoravid rulers. His father, Abu al-Qasim Ahmad, held the same judgeship until the Almoravids were displaced by the Almohads in 1146.

  The education Averroes received reflected that inheritance. His traditional biographers called it "excellent," and its breadth was remarkable: hadith, jurisprudence, medicine, and theology. He studied Maliki jurisprudence under al-Hafiz Abu Muhammad ibn Rizq. He studied hadith with Ibn Bashkuwal, who had himself been a student of Averroes's grandfather. His father taught him directly from Imam Malik's foundational text, the Muwatta, which Averroes memorized.

  Medicine came through Abu Jafar Jarim al-Tajail, who probably also introduced him to philosophy. His 13th-century biographer Ibn al-Abbar noted that Averroes was more drawn to the principles of law and their underlying disputes than to the transmission of hadith traditions. Ibn al-Abbar also recorded his early fascination with what he called "the sciences of the ancients," a phrase that almost certainly pointed toward Greek thought.

  In Seville, Averroes joined a regular gathering of philosophers, physicians and poets. Among those who attended were Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Zuhr, and also a figure who would become caliph: Abu Yusuf Yaqub. These were not chance encounters. They were the networks through which intellectual and political life in Almohad Andalusia flowed.

• 3. The Caliph's Commission

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  By 1153, Averroes was in Marrakesh, the Almohad capital, conducting astronomical observations and supporting the construction of new colleges. It was there, probably, that he first encountered Ibn Tufayl, the philosopher and author of Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, who served as the caliph's court physician.

  The introduction to the caliph came in 1169. Historian 'Abd al-Wahid al-Marrakushi recorded what happened: Abu Yaqub Yusuf asked Averroes directly whether the heavens had existed from eternity or had a beginning. The question was loaded with theological danger. Averroes stayed silent. Then the caliph himself began laying out the positions of Plato, Aristotle, and Muslim thinkers on the question, discussing them in detail with Ibn Tufayl. Watching this, Averroes relaxed enough to share his own view. The caliph was impressed. Averroes later said Abu Yaqub possessed "a profuseness of learning I did not suspect."

  What came out of that meeting was a commission that would define Averroes's career. The caliph had complained to Ibn Tufayl about how difficult Aristotle's writings were to understand. Ibn Tufayl suggested Averroes take on the task of explaining them. Averroes's first commentaries on Aristotle were written that same year, 1169.

  Also in 1169, he was appointed qadi in Seville. In 1171 he moved to the same office in Córdoba. He held various judicial posts in both cities over the following years, was appointed qadi in Seville again in 1179, and in 1182 he succeeded Ibn Tufayl himself as court physician. Later that year, he was appointed chief qadi of Córdoba, the exact office his grandfather had once occupied.

• 4. The Fall and the Burning

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  In 1184, Caliph Abu Yaqub died and was succeeded by Abu Yusuf Yaqub. For a time, Averroes remained in favor. Then, in 1195, his situation collapsed. A tribunal in Córdoba tried him, condemned his teachings, ordered his books burned, and banished him to the nearby town of Lucena.

  Early biographers suggested a personal insult to the caliph somewhere in Averroes's writings. Modern scholars lean toward political explanation. The Encyclopaedia of Islam concluded the caliph needed support from orthodox religious scholars, the ulema, for his military campaigns against Christian kingdoms. Those scholars opposed Averroes. Historian Majid Fakhry added that pressure from traditional Maliki jurists played a role.

  Egyptian writer Abbas Mahmoud al-Aqqad dug into the political mechanics more closely. He pointed to a specific incident: in a commentary on zoology, Averroes referred to the caliph as the "King of the Berbers" rather than using his official royal titles. The source for this detail is the 13th-century historian 'Abd al-Wahid al-Marrakushi, who recorded it in his chronicle Al-Mu'jib fi Talkhis Akhbar al-Maghrib. Al-Aqqad also noted that Averroes's close friendship with Abu Yahya, the caliph's brother and governor of Córdoba, had generated political suspicion during a period of intense military conflict.

  Moroccan philosopher Mohammed Abed al-Jabri offered a different reading: that Averroes had explicitly condemned political tyranny in his commentary on Plato's Republic, and the tribunal was a political purge disguised as a religious one. Al-Aqqad pointed out that the caliph pardoned Averroes and restored him to favor once the political tensions eased. Averroes returned to court in Marrakesh for his final years. He died on the 11th of December 1198. At the Córdoba funeral that followed his burial in North Africa, the future Sufi philosopher Ibn Arabi, then in his early thirties, was present.

• 5. Three Kinds of Commentary

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  Averroes wrote commentaries on nearly every surviving work of Aristotle. The only exception was the Politics, which he could not access, so he wrote on Plato's Republic instead. According to French author Ernest Renan, Averroes produced at least 67 original works: 28 on philosophy, 20 on medicine, 8 on law, 5 on theology, and 4 on grammar, in addition to those commentaries.

  He organized his commentaries into three types. The short commentaries, called jami, were mostly written early in his career and summarized Aristotelian doctrine. The middle commentaries, talkhis, paraphrased Aristotle's texts to make them clearer. Averroes likely wrote these partly in response to the caliph's complaint about the difficulty of the originals. The long commentaries, tafsir or sharh, went line by line through Aristotle's complete text with detailed analysis; these were dense, original, and not intended for general readers.

  Only five of Aristotle's works received all three types of treatment: Physics, Metaphysics, On the Soul, On the Heavens, and Posterior Analytics. The scope of the project across three registers of depth and accessibility suggests Averroes was trying to make Aristotle usable at every level of scholarship.

  A significant portion of the Arabic originals did not survive. Of his long commentaries on Aristotle, only a small number of Arabic manuscripts remain. What the Arabic world lost, however, the Hebrew and Latin translations preserved. The first major Latin translation of the long commentaries began in 1217, when Michael Scot worked in Paris and Toledo on the commentaries on Physics, Metaphysics, On the Soul, and On the Heavens.

• 6. Reason, Revelation, and the Three Audiences

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  Averroes's 1178 treatise Fasl al-Maqal, known in translation as "The Decisive Treatise," opens with a legal question rather than a philosophical one: is philosophy permitted to Muslims? His answer was yes, and probably obligatory for those with the capacity for it. He based this partly on Quranic passages he read as calls to reflect on nature, rendering a fatwa on the grounds that such study deepens knowledge of God.

  The deeper argument in the Decisive Treatise is about what happens when philosophical conclusions appear to contradict scripture. Averroes's position was that this apparent contradiction required allegorical interpretation of the text, not the abandonment of philosophy. He quoted surah Al Imran 3:7 of the Quran, which refers to those "rooted in knowledge," arguing that this phrase designated the philosophers, who had access to the highest methods of reasoning.

  His target throughout was the Ash'ari scholar al-Ghazali, who had written The Incoherence of the Philosophers, a systematic attack on the Neoplatonic philosophical tradition and on Avicenna in particular. Al-Ghazali had charged philosophers with unbelief. Averroes responded in 1180 with Tahafut at-Tahafut, "Incoherence of the Incoherence," arguing that al-Ghazali's critique applied to Avicenna's version of philosophy, not to the Aristotelian philosophy Averroes considered authentic.

  To organize all this, Averroes distinguished three modes of discourse: the rhetorical, which persuades and reaches common people; the dialectical, used by theologians; and the demonstrative, which proceeds by logical deduction and provides the deepest understanding. He argued the Quran uses the rhetorical mode to reach all audiences, while philosophy uses the demonstrative mode available only to trained scholars. The 1179 treatise Al-Kashf 'an Manahij al-Adillah built out his argument for the existence of God using two "teleological" arguments he considered scripturally sound.

• 7. Medicine and the Body

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  Averroes wrote his most influential medical work, Al-Kulliyat fi al-Tibb, around 1162, before his appointment at court. The title translates roughly as "The General Principles of Medicine," and it was designed in deliberate counterpart to a work by his friend Ibn Zuhr, whose book addressed the specificities of medicine. The two intended their texts to complement each other. In Latin, the Kulliyat became known as the Colliget and was used as a medical textbook in Europe for centuries.

  For the most part, the Kulliyat followed the doctrine of Galen, the second-century Greek physician whose theory of the four humors dominated medieval medicine. Averroes's departures from that tradition are where the originality lies. He argued that stroke was produced in the brain and caused by an obstruction of the arteries running from the heart to the brain. Galen had attributed stroke to obstruction between the heart and the body's periphery. Averroes's account is closer to the modern understanding.

  He was also the first to describe the signs and symptoms of what we now recognize as Parkinson's disease, though he did not name the condition. His observation about the retina is contested but significant: he proposed that the retina, not the lens, was the part of the eye responsible for sensing light. Modern scholars debate whether the Kulliyat's phrasing supports this reading, but his commentary on Aristotle's Sense and Sensibilia states the idea more explicitly. Averroes himself acknowledged limited clinical experience, writing in one of his works that he had not "practiced much apart from myself, my relatives or my friends."

  His other surviving medical texts include On Treacle, The Differences in Temperament, Medicinal Herbs, summaries of Galen's works, and a commentary on Avicenna's Urjuzah fi al-Tibb, a medical poem.

• 8. The Western Legacy

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  Averroes had minimal impact on Islamic philosophical thought during and after his lifetime. Geography played a role: Andalusia was at the far western edge of the Islamic world, distant from the intellectual centers of the east. His Aristotelian focus was also, by the twelfth century, somewhat behind the curve in the Muslim world, which had engaged with Aristotle since the ninth century and had moved on to the debates opened by Avicenna and others. It was not until the nineteenth-century Al-Nahda, the Arabic cultural reawakening, that Muslim thinkers turned seriously back to Averroes as a modernizing influence.

  In the West, the trajectory was reversed. Maimonides, who died in 1204, wrote that he had received Averroes's commentaries and found that Averroes "was extremely right." Thirteenth-century Jewish translators made his works available in Hebrew. In 1232, Joseph Ibn Kaspi translated Averroes's commentaries on Aristotle's Organon, the first complete translation by a Jewish scholar. In 1260, Moses ibn Tibbon published translations of nearly all of Averroes's Aristotelian commentaries and some of his medical works. Jewish Averroism peaked in the fourteenth century, with scholars working in Arles, Languedoc, and Candia drawing on his texts.

  In Latin Christendom, the commentaries arrived in the thirteenth century and caused a transformation. Michael Scot began translating the long commentaries from 1217 onward, working in Paris and Toledo. Latin Averroism took hold at Paris and Padua; its prominent thirteenth-century figures included Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia. Thomas Aquinas engaged heavily with Averroes's reading of Aristotle while attacking him on the unity of the intellect and the eternity of the universe. In 1270 and again in 1277, at the request of Pope John XXI, Bishop Étienne Tempier issued condemnations targeting Aristotelian and Averroist theses.

  Despite the condemnations, Latin Averroism persisted through the sixteenth century. Leading figures included John of Jandun and Marsilius of Padua in the fourteenth century, Pietro Pomponazzi in the fifteenth, and Agostino Nifo and Marcantonio Zimara in the sixteenth. Dante Alighieri placed Averroes in the first circle of hell in the Divine Comedy, completed in 1320, describing him as the one "who made the Great Commentary." Raphael included him in his 1501 fresco The School of Athens, painted for the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican, where Averroes appears in a green robe and turban, peering out from behind Pythagoras.