“Medicine is not a difficult science, and naturally I excelled in it
in a very short time, so that qualified physicians began to read
medicine with me.”
Never short of confidence, the young prodigy was called in to
help with the care of the amir of Bukhara and promptly cured
him when the amir’s own, much more experienced doctors,
were unable to. The grateful amir offered Ibn Sina gold and
jewels but the young man chose instead to have unrestricted
access to the amir’s personal library, which was said to contain
as many volumes as the great library of Baghdad. Ibn Sina
buried himself in learning, mastering everything he read and
committing it to memory. Books were valuable and rare, but
his prodigious memory allowed him to carry the knowledge he
found in books with him wherever he wandered. And he soon
had to leave Bukhara.
The amir died and warlords began to squabble over Bukhara.
In such a volatile situation, Ibn Sina took to the road. He
first travelled to Gurganj (Konye-Urgench in modern-day
Turkmenistan), where he spent ten years and entered into
a long and increasingly irritable correspondence with another
polymath of the Islamic world, Al-Biruni. When Al-Birunipersisted in not agreeing with him, Ibn Sina delegated the job
of answering Al-Biruni’s objections to one of his students.
Ibn Sina would probably have remained in Gurganj if not
for the man whose shadow would loom over the rest of his
life. The warlord who had emerged as the dominant power
in central Asia, Mahmud of Ghazna, was set on forging a new
Ghaznavid empire and to bolster his legitimacy and burnish
his regime he was keen to bring to his court the most brilliant
Islamic scholars. But Mahmud was resolutely Sunni and
fiercely intolerant of unorthodoxy. Life in his court would
be intolerable for a man like Ibn Sina, who acknowledged no
primacy over intellectual inquiry and whose social life tended
to the unorthodox – he loved the company of musicians and
poets, and used wine to help unlock difficult intellectual
problems. Learning of Ibn Sina’s reputation, Mahmud of
Ghazna ‘requested’ the amir of Gurganj send this brilliant, and
by all accounts extraordinarily handsome, scholar to adorn his
court in Ghazna.
The amir of Gurganj could not ignore Mahmud’s request but
he did warn Ibn Sina, giving him the option to escape before
Mahmud’s soldiers arrived to escort him to Ghazna. In 1012,©^ GettyImagesTOP Ibn Sina
arriving in
Isfahan at
the court of
Ala al-Dawla
ABOVE Ibn Sina’s old
mausoleum in Hamadan,
Iran. It was replaced by
a modern building in the
20th centuryRIGHT While he
was fluent in many
different languages,
Ibn Sina was happiest
in the Persian milieu