Avicenna

L E Goodman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134977796
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

the philosophers in the West, none, perhaps, is better known by name and less familiar in actual content of his ideas than the medieval Muslim philosopher, physician, minister and naturalist Abu Ali Ibn Sina, known since the days of the scholastics as Avicenna. In this book the author, himself a philosopher, and long known for his studies of Arabic thought, presents a factual account of Avicenna's philosophy. Setting the thinker in the context of his often turbulent times and tracing the roots and influences of Avicenna's ideas, this book offers a factual philosophical portrait. It details Avicenna's account of being as a synthesis between the seemingly irreconcilable extremes of Aristotelian eternalism and the creationism of monotheistic scripture. It examines Avicenna's distinctive theory of knowledge, his ideas about immortality and individuality, including the famous "floating man argument", his contributions to logic, and his probing thoughts on rhetoric and poetics.

1
LIFE, TIMES, WRITINGS

1 SETTING THE SCENE

Shouldered between India and Arabia and pinched between the Caspian and the Persian Gulf, the great land mass of Iran that lies between the river systems of the Tigris and Euphrates to the west and the Indus and Helmand to the east, widens north of the Arabian sea, into the mountainous highlands of Khorasan, stretching north and eastward as it rounds the Caspian at Jurjān, to the cities of Nīshāpūr, Meshed, Tus, Merw, Herat and Balkh, the Pamir mountains and the Hindu Kush. North and east, beyond the Amu Darya or Oxus river, which drains into the Aral Sea, lie Bukhārā and Samarqand, in the land the Muslim conquerors called Transoxiania, literally: Mā wara al-Nahar, What-lies-beyond-the-River, bounded to the northeast in turn by the Jaxartes (Syr Darya) and the steppes, where Islamic military power and even Islamic faith never displaced the tribal way of life.

When the Arab Muslim armies came to Khorasan in the late seventh and early eighth centuries, they found a rich land, long the granary of Iran and its highway to the east. The rainfall in the highlands was light, less than ten inches annually, but the many fertile river valleys grew wheat, barley, and rice. Zones within the region were known for their oranges, apricots, peaches, pears, sugar cane, cotton, pistachios, pomegranates, rhubarb, melons, almonds, sesame, grapes, or currants, as well as plane tree bark, a remedy for toothaches. The earth yielded copper, lead, iron, mercury, vitriol, carnelian, silver, and gold. There was edible earth as well as turquoise in Nīshāpūr. In Badakhshān there were rubies, garnets, lapis lazuli, and asbestos. The craftsmen of Khorasan made steel, silk, iron, copper, and gold ware, textiles, carpets, incense, raisins, and soap. From 751, when Chinese prisoners of war brought the art to Samarqand, artisans made paper from linen, flax, or rags of hemp, gradually replacing papyrus as the writing medium. In the highlands there were horsebreeders and pastoralists who raised sheep and camels, producing butter, cheese, horns, fur, and hides.

The populace bore arms, but often little loyalty to the fallen empire of the Sassanian Shahs, or to the Zoroastrian priesthood, against which many had rebelled in the century before the rise of Islam. The village lords held their land and feudal privileges more tenaciously than their old Buddhist or Zoroastrian faith. So the Muslims pushed deep into Transoxiania, Farghānā, Kābul, Makrān on the Arabian Sea, spreading Islam to the Syr Darya, the west bank of the Indus, and the edges of the Panjāb and Kashmir. But even by Ibn Sīnā’s time the lands were not uniformly Muslim. Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and Buddhists had made up the population. By 750, only an estimated 8% of the people of an important Khorasanian city like Nīshāpūr were Muslim. The figure did not reach 50% until the early ninth century, but rose to 80% by the century’s end. In rural areas and smaller towns conversion to Islam was much slower, with resistance to the building of mosques and persistence of Zoroastrian seminaries and fire temples into the tenth and eleventh centuries in such places as Musalla and Karkuy in Sistān, Bayhaq in Khorasan, and Varaksha west of Bukhārā. In Nīshāpūr itself, some 5, 000 Zoroastrians, Christians, and Jews adopted Islam in 993. But there were active and activist Zoroastrians in Transoxiania until the late thirteenth century. Avicenna’s hometown of Afshana outside Bukhārā acquired a mosque around 709 and a second by 741; but the citadel of Bukhārā got its mosque four years after Afshana, probably because the site had to be wrested away from the fire temple that still occupied the ground. As conversion continued, a new mosque was built in Bukhārā in 771, then a third, funded by a former Buddhist priest, in 793, and two more, built in the bazaars of the growing city, probably in the ninth century.¹

Conversion to Islam was steady and perhaps inexorable, but it was not based largely on conviction. It was clearly a way of gaining or maintaining social status and economic position, or survival. For the dingāns, or landholders, of Khorasan the differential taxes upon non-Muslims were a powerful incentive to conversion, along with the increasing social pressures of the emerging Islamic society. But such conversions could hardly be complete or sincere. Even when it was clear that Islam was in the region to stay, the numerous sectarian and schismatic movements and syncretistic trends reveal the spiritual restiveness of the newly and not fully converted. In Transoxiania acculturation to Islam was often violent, involving riots, first of the local populace, casting stones from the housetops at the Islamic call to prayer, but later, as the Muslims grew in numbers, centered on the Muslims’ increasingly aggressive efforts to convert or displace the Zoroastrians, Manichaeans, Buddhists, and Nestorian Christians of such cities as Bukhārā There were numerous conversions, dissimulations and reversions, removals, incentives (both positive and negative), forced confessions of faith, and apostasies. Within less than a century of the arrival of Islam, conversion was scornfully called “going Arab.” And there were intercommunal riots between Muslims and Zoroastrians well into the tenth century.

Whether as Muslims or as Zoroastrians, the dihqāns valued being left alone in peace on their lands and were not overcritical about who received their taxes, so long as those in power could keep the peace. Indeed, the rival communities could unite in the face of an external threat, and did, even as late as the eleventh century. But the relative stability of Khorasan politically and of much of Transoxiania, precisely because of the value placed on civil security by the local populace, was not ā fact of nature but an achievement. The dihqāns would pay their taxes with no more than the usual grumbling, provided the rulers could hold in check the tribal powers to the northeast. But their capacity to do so rested in turn on a paradox. For the chief source of military power in the eastern Islamic lands, and the most strategic export of the steppe land to the north was tribal manpower.

Islam had originated in Arabia but established an Arab kingdom in Syria soon after the death of the Prophet. The Muslim conquests of Iran and Khorasan shifted the center of gravity eastward and led to the `Abbāsid Revolution of 750, whose rallying cry, in the name of Islam, was an end to the Arab hegemony imposed in the name of Islam. Baghdad, founded on the Tigris in 762 as the metropolis of the new Khalifate, gave substance to the eastward orientation of the Islamic state, but in less than a century of the revolution, the eighth Abbāsid Khalif, al-Mu‘tasim, would withdraw to his newly built pleasure palace at Sāmarrā, sixty miles upriver, and surround himself with 4, 000 Turkish retainers to protect him from the Baghdad mob and the turbulent Khorasanian soldiery that had been the backbone and the terror of the Abbāsid dynasty since its bloody rise to power. In the century that followed, the annual import of slave recruits from the northeast increasingly undermined the authority of Baghdad from within and visibly symbolized the threat from without.

By Avicenna’s time, freebooters, mercenaries, and ghulāms, military slaves, seemed to pour out of central Asia inexhaustibly. The slaves were a byproduct of tribal warfare on the steppes. Islamized, trained, and promoted for intelligence, loyalty, and discipline, ²they were easily destabilized in the rivalries of their immediate commanders and the more remote figureheads above them. The tribes themselves were another matter. Oguz Turks lived on both sides of the Aral Sea. Spreading down the Jaxartes valley, poised above Bukhārā and Samarqand from the watershed of Lake Balkhash, were the Qarluqs, restlessly ruled by Qarā-Khāns (or Ilig-Khāns). From them sprung the most aggressive of the many ghulām dynasts of the age, Malimūd of Ghazna. The Qarluqs had been pressing inward upon Muslim lands from the T’ien Shan Mountains of China since 840. East of them were the Uighurs. Still further east, like a great wave building force, that would not break on the Islamic lands until after Ibn Sīnā’s death, were the Qarā-Khitāi, Cathay or China Mongols, whose Khāns ruled China for two centuries (916–1125) before they were expelled. The incursions of other Mongols under Genghis Khān and Hūlāgū and of Turks such as Tīmūr in the fourteenth century would rain blows upon the Middle East from which it has never fully recovered.

In 945 the Khalif at Baghdad was made the virtual prisoner of his victorious Buyid (or Buwayhid) commander, chieftain of a clan of Shiite Daylamites from the highlands south of the Caspian, whose power rested in the ranks of their tribal soldiery, and whose quarreling family factions centered their authority not in Baghdad but in Shiraz. The following year the Khalif was blinded and a puppet ruler erected in his place. Until 1055, the Būyids ruled while the Abbāsids reigned, often as prisoners in their own harems. Power was held by ministers and chamberlains and transferred through the intrigues of regents, queen mothers, palace eunuchs, or commanders of the guard. Rebels, raiders, sectarian armies, and disaffected governors beset the central authority. No power was too great or too petty to be defeated in battle or subverted from within by disaffected troops – mercenary, homeborn or slave – rival sons, tribal federations, or treacherous vassals and allies. As early as the 820s the ‘Abbāsid Khalif al-Ma’mun saw his general ’Mir set up an autonomous dynasty in Khorasan. The Khalif’s power to respond was limited, since he was already facing a rebellion in Azerbaijan, and Tahir’s brother was his chief military commander.

Rivals to the Ṭāhirids, whose power was centered in Nishapūr, the Saffarids arose in Sistān, south of Khorasan, initially from the popular defense efforts led by a coppersmith (War) and his brother, against sectarian marauders. Up to the early ninth century the principal sectarian threat had been from the Khārijites, radical opponents of all existing Islamic states, for what they charged were hypocritical compromises of principle. The Khārijites held, heretically, that wicked deeds like allegiance to an illegitimate state are proof of misbelief; evildoers, and even associates of such sinners, must be hunted down and killed as unbelievers. Under the hammering of the Şaffārids and Ṭāhirids, the Khārijite forces, once swollen to armies of the disaffected, were reduced to mere bands of terroristic zealots and brigands. But in the tenth century a new threat emerged in the west, taking formidable shape with the conquest of Egypt by Ismā‘ili Shi’ites, radicals from the opposite end of the sectarian spectrum, and the establishment there of the Fātimid dynasty.

The Ismāilis were the sect that became known as the Assassins. Their quest for authority in the name of the house of the Prophet was widely subversive of Sunni claims, and their charismatic revolutionism often became the voice and vehicle of local ethnic or economic discontents. Yet their sense of frustrated legitimacy and clandestine action in behalf of a long persecuted cause also made the movement a seedbed of esoteric popular philosophy and spiritualism. The Ismäilis were Sevener Shi'ites, holding that the last earthly Imam was Ismāil the son of the Imam Jafar al-Sadiq, an eighth-century descendant of the Prophet through his daughter Fālimah and his nephew Ali, and seventh in the line of Muhammad. Unlike the Twelver Shiites, who later came to prominence in Iran but now remained pensioners of the ‘Abbāsid state, basking in the favor of the Būyids, and, unlike the Zaydi Fivers, who established themselves in the Yemen in 897 and maintained a moderate political stance, the Ismā’ilis were militant revolutionaries. After the conquest of Egypt the Fātimid rulers founded Cairo in 973 on the site of an ancient Egyptian city and named it under the sign of Mars (al-Qāhirah), the planet of victory, establishing the great college of the Azhar as the seat of their learning and the base from which they sent missionary agents to propagate their faith throughout the east.

The Şaffārids broke the power of the Tāhirids, only to be thrust aside in turn by the dynasty Ibn Sinā’s father served, the Sāmānids, whose mandate rested on the powerful dingāns of Khorasan. The Sāmānids came from Balkh, one of the four great cities of Khorasan, an ancient Buddhist and later Zoroastrian center, the capital of Bactria in Greek times and called a metropolis (umm al-bilād) by tenth-century geographers, but today a mere village on the banks of a dried up riverbed in northern Afghanistan. The founder of the dynasty was the Sāmān-Khudāt, lord of the town of Sāmān, a Soghdian who embraced Islam early in the eighth century. Even as the Ṭāhirids were establishing themselves in Khorasan, the Baghdad Khalifate was finding a counterforce in the Samanids. For in 819 alMamūn rewarded four grandsons of the Saman-Khudāt for putting down a rebellion by making them the governors of Samarqand, Herat, Farghanah, and Shash (Tashkent). Nominally these princes were vassals of the Ṭāhirids, but as the Ṭāhirids grew more independent the Samanids were forging a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Arabic Thought and Culture
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• 1 LIFE, TIMES, WRITINGS
• 2 METAPHYSICS
• 3 IDEAS AND IMMORTALITY
• 4 LOGIC, PERSUASION, AND POETRY
• Index