Philosopher, mathematician, doctor, astronomer, poet:
Ibn Sina was all of these things and more, the last man
to master all the fields of human knowledge
Written by Edoardo AlbertI
n his final week, Ibn Sina said:
“I prefer a short life with width
to a narrow one with length.” The
Persian polymath died aged 57 but
during those years he was a doctor,
philosopher, mathematician, grammarian,
astronomer, politician, poet and traveller. Ibn
Sina lived a tumultuous life full of intrigues,
daring escapes, great power and dramatic falls
– all the time working on the deepest problems of
philosophy while still engaging in a notorious social
life and indulging a voracious sexual appetite. Ly i ng
on his death bed, Ibn Sina could look back and see
that he had lived life on his own terms.
He was born in August 980 in a village near
Bukhara, Central Asia, to an important local family
and spent his childhood and youth in the city.
Bukhara was a major staging post on the Silk Road
and a graceful and prosperous city that attracted
peddlers of knowledge as well as sellers of wares.The young Ibn Sina was intellectually precocious
and his father employed the best tutor he could find
to educate his son. But Ibn Sina soon outstripped
his tutor. Never one to undersell himself, he
remarks in his autobiography that he soon began
to teach his teacher.
At the end of the first millennium there was
considerable ferment in the Islamic world and
Ibn Sina’s father and brother became known as
Ismailis, followers of an Islamic sect that drew
bitter repression from orthodox Sunni Muslims.
Although Ibn Sina remained reticent about his
own religious beliefs, his family association would
greatly affect his later life.
By his mid-teens, he had mastered jurisprudence,
the key scholarly field that allowed an Islamic
intellectual freedom of movement around the
Islamic world, but he decided to add another string
to his intellectual arsenal when he was 16: he would
become a doctor. It did not take long. He declared:The Man
Who Knew
Everything
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