Abu Ali al-Hussain Ibn Sina

Abu Ali al-Hussain Ibn Sina 

(980-1037 C.E.) 

Abu Ali al-Hussain Ibn Abdallah Ibn Sina was born in 980 C.E. at Afshana near Bukhara. The young Abu Ali received his early education in Bukhara, and by the age of ten had become well versed in the study of the Qur'an and various sciences. He started studying philosophy by reading various Greek, Muslim and other books on this subject and learnt logic and some other subjects from Abu Abdallah Natili, a famous philosopher of the time. While still young, he attained such a degree of expertise in medicine that his renown spread far and wide. At the age of 17, he was fortunate in curing Nooh Ibn Mansoor, the King of Bukhhara, of an illness in which all the well-known physicians had given up hope. On his recovery, the King wished to reward him, but the young physi-cian only desired permission to use his uniquely stocked library.On his father's death, Bu Ali left Bukhara and travelled to Jurjan where Khawarizm Shah welcomed him. There, he met his famous contempo-rary Abu Raihan al-Biruni. Later he moved to Ray and then to Hamadan, where he wrote his famous book Al-Qanun fi al-Tibb. Here he treated Shams al-Daulah, the King of Hamadan, for severe colic. From Hamadan, he moved to Isphahan, where he completed many of his monumental writings. Nevertheless, he continued travelling and the excessive mental exertion as well as political turmoil spoilt his health. Finally, he returned to Hamadan where he died in 1037 C.E. 

In any age Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna, would have been a giant among giants. He displayed exceptional intellectual prowess as a child and at the age of ten was already pro-ficient in the Qur'an and the Arabic classics. During the next six years he devoted himself to Muslim Jurisprudence, Philosophy and Natural Science and studied Logic, Euclid, and the Almeagest. 

He turned his attention to Medicine at the age of 17 years and found it, in his own words, "not difficult". However he was great-ly troubled by metaphysical problems and in particular the works of Aristotle. By chance, he obtained a manual on this subject by the celebrated philosopher al-Farabi which solved his difficulties. 

By the age of 18 he had built up a reputation as a physician and was summoned to attend the Samani ruler Nuh ibn Mansur (reigned 976-997 C.E.), who, in gratitude for Ibn Sina's services, allowed him to make free use of the royal library, which con-tained many rare and even unique books. Endowed with great powers of absorbing and retaining knowledge, this Muslim scholar devoured the contents of the library and at the age of 21 was in a position to compose his first book. 

At about the same time he lost his father and soon afterwards left Bukhara and wandered westwards. He entered the services of Ali ibn Ma'mun, the ruler of Khiva, for a while, but ultimately fled to avoid being kidnapped by the Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna. After many wanderings he came to Jurjan, near the Caspian Sea, attracted by the fame of its ruler, Qabus, as a patron of learning. Unfortunately Ibn Sina's arrival almost coincided with the depo-sition and murder of this ruler. At Jurjan, Ibn Sina lectured on logic and astronomy and wrote the first part of the Qanun, his greatest work. 

He then moved to Ray, near modern Teheran and established a busy medical practice. When Ray was besieged, Ibn Sina fled to Hamadan where he cured Amir Shamsud-Dawala of colic and was made Prime Minister. A mutiny of soldiers against him caused his dismissal and imprisonment, but subsequently the Amir, being again attacked by the colic, summoned him back, apologised and reinstated him! His life at this time was very strenuous: during the day he was busy with the Amir's services, while a great deal of the night was passed in lecturing and dic-tating notes for his books. Students would gather in his home and read parts of his two great books, the Shifa and the Qanun, already composed. 

Following the death of the Amir, Ibn Sina fled to Isfahan after a few brushes with the law, including a period in prison. He spent his final years in the services of the ruler of the city, Ala al-Daula whom he advised on scientific and literary matters and accompanied on military campaigns. 

Friends advised him to slow down and take life in modera-tion, but this was not in character. "I prefer a short life with width to a narrow one with length", he would reply. Worn out by hard work and hard living, Ibn Sina died in 1036/1 at a com-paratively early age of 58 years. He was buried in Hamadan where his grave is still shown. 

Al-Qifti states that Ibn Sina completed 21 major and 24 minor works on philosophy, medicine, theology, geometry, astronomy and the like. Another source (Brockelmann) attributes 99 books to Ibn Sina comprising 16 on medicine, 68 on theology and meta-physics 11 on astronomy and four on verse. Most of these were in Arabic; but in his native Persian he wrote a large manual on philosophical science entitled Danish-naama-i-Alai and a small treatise on the pulse. 

His most celebrated Arabic poem describes the descent of Soul into the Body from the Higher Sphere. Among his scientif-ic works, the leading two are the Kitab al-Shifa (Book of Healing), a philosophical encyclopaedia based upon Aristotelian tradi-tions and the al-Qanun al-Tibb which represents the final categorisation of Greco-Arabian thoughts on Medicine. 

Of Ibn Sina's 16 medical works, eight are versified treatises on such matter as the 25 signs indicating the fatal termination of ill-nesses, hygienic precepts, proved remedies, anatomical memo-randa etc. Amongst his prose works, after the great Qanun, the treatise on cardiac drugs, of which the British Museum possesses several fine manuscripts, is probably the most important, but it remains unpublished. 

The Qanun is, of course, by far the largest, most famous and most important of Ibn Sina's works. The work contains about one million words and like most Arabic books, is elaborately divided and subdivided. The main division is into five books, of which the first deals with general principles; the second with simple drugs arranged alphabetically; the third with diseases of particu-lar organs and members of the body from the head to the foot; the fourth with diseases which though local in their inception spread to other parts of the body, such as fevers and the fifth with com-pound medicines. 

The Qanun distinguishes mediastinitis from pleurisy and recognises the contagious nature of phthisis (tuberculosis of the lung) and the spread of disease by water and soil. It gives a scien-tific diagnosis of ankylostomiasis and attributes the condition to an intestinal worm. The Qanun points out the importance of dietetics, the influence of climate and environment on health and the surgical use of oral anaesthetics. Ibn Sina advised surgeons to treat cancer in its earliest stages, ensuring the removal of all the diseased tissue. The Qanun's materia medica considers some 760 drugs, with comments on their application and effectiveness. He recommended the testing of a new drug on animals and humans prior to general use. 

Ibn Sina noted the close relationship between emotions and the physical condition and felt that music had a definite physical and psychological effect on patients. Of the many psychological disorders that he described in the Qanun, one is of unusual inter-est: love sickness! ibn Sina is reputed to have diagnosed this con-dition in a Prince in Jurjan who lay sick and whose malady had baffled local doctors. Ibn Sina noted a fluttering in the Prince's pulse when the address and name of his beloved were men-tioned. The great doctor had a simple remedy: unite the sufferer with the beloved. 

The Arabic text of the Qanun was published in Rome in 1593 and was therefore one of the earliest Arabic books to see print. It was translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona in the 12th cen-tury. This 'Canon', with its encyclopaedic content, its systematic arrangement and philosophical plan, soon worked its way into a position of pre-eminence in the medical literature of the age dis-placing the works of Galen, al-Razi and al-Majusi, and becoming the text book for medical education in the schools of Europe. In the last 30 years of the 15th century it passed through 15 Latin editions and one Hebrew. In recent years, a partial translation into English was made. From the 12th-17th century, the Qanun served as the chief guide to Medical Science in the West and is said to have influenced Leonardo da Vinci. In the words of Dr. William Osler, the Qanun has remained "a medical bible for a longer time than any other work". 

Despite such glorious tributes to his work, Ibn Sina is rarely remembered in the West today and his fundamental contribu-tions to Medicine and the European reawakening goes largely unrecognised. However, in the museum at Bukhara, there are displays showing many of his writings, surgical instruments from the period and paintings of patients undergoing treatment. An impressive monument to the life and works of the man who became known as the 'doctor of doctors' still stands outside Bukhara museum and his portrait hangs in the Hall of the Faculty of Medicine in the University of Paris. 

One of the four parts of this work is devoted to mathematics and ibn Sina includes astronomy and music as branches of math-ematics within the encyclopaedia. In fact he divided mathematics into four branches, geometry, astronomy, arithmetic, and music, and he then subdivided each of these topics. Geometry he subdi-vided into geodesy, statics, kinematics, hydrostatics, and optics; astronomy he subdivided into astronomical and geographical tables, and the calendar; arithmetic he subdivided into algebra, and Indian addition and subtraction; music he subdivided into musical instruments. 

The geometric section of the encyclopaedia is, not surprising-ly, based on Euclid's Elements. Ibn Sina gives proofs but the pres-entation lacks the rigour adopted by Euclid. In fact ibn Sina does not present geometry as a deductive system from axioms in this work. We should note, however, that this was the way that ibn Sina chose to present the topic in the encyclopaedia. In other writ-ings on geometry he, like many Muslim scientists, attempted to give a proof of Euclid's fifth postulate. The topics dealt with in the geometry section of the encyclopaedia are: lines, angles, and planes; parallels; triangles; constructions with ruler and com-pass; areas of parallelograms and triangles; geometric algebra; properties of circles; proportions without mentioning irrational numbers; proportions relating to areas of polygons; areas of cir-cles; regular polygons; and volumes of polyhedra and the sphere. Full details are given in. 

Ibn Sina made astronomical observations and we know that some were made at Isfahan and some at Hamadan. He made several correct deductions from his observations. For example he observed Venus as a spot against the surface of the Sun and cor-rectly deduced that Venus must be closer to the Earth than the Sun. This observation, and other related work by ibn Sina, is dis-cussed in. Ibn Sina invented an instrument for observing the coordinates of a star. The instrument had two legs pivoted at one end; the lower leg rotated about a horizontal protractor, thus showing the azimuth, while the upper leg marked with a scale and having observing sights, was raised in the plane vertical to the lower leg to give the star's altitude. Another of ibn Sina's con-tributions to astronomy was his attempt to calculate the differ-ence in longitude between Baghdad and Gurgan by observing a meridian transit of the moon at Gurgan. He also correctly stated, with what justification it is hard to see, that the velocity of light is finite. 

As Ibn Sina considered music as one of the branches of math-ematics it is fitting to give a brief indication of his work on this topic which was mainly on tonic intervals, rhythmic patterns, and musical instruments. Some experts claim that Ibn Sina's pro-motion of the consonance of the major third led to the use of just intonation rather than the intonation associated with Pythagoras. More information is contained in T S Vyzgo's paper "On Ibn Sina's contribution to musicology" in. 

Mechanics was a topic which Ibn Sina classified under mathematics. In his work Mi'yar al-'aqul ibn Sina defines simple machines and combinations of them which involve rollers, levers, windlasses, pulleys, and many others. Although the material was well-known and certainly not original, nevertheless ibn Sina's classification of mechanisms, which goes beyond that of Heron, is highly original. 

Since Ibn Sina's major contributions are in philosophy, we should at least mention his work in this area, although we shall certainly not devote the space to it that this work deserves. He discussed reason and reality, claiming that God is pure intellect and that knowledge consists of the mind grasping the intelligible. To grasp the intelligible both reason and logic are required. But, claims ibn Sina:- 

... it is important to gain knowledge. Grasp of the intelligibles deter-mines the fate of the rational soul in the hereafter, and therefore is crucial to human activity. 

Ibn Sina gives a theory of knowledge, describing the abstrac-tion in perceiving an object rather than the concrete form of the object itself. In metaphysics ibn Sina examined existence. He con-siders the scientific and mathematical theory of the world and ultimate causation by God. His aims are described in as follows:- 

Ibn Sina sought to integrate all aspects of science and religion in a grand metaphysical vision. With this vision he attempted to explain the formation of the universe as well as to elucidate the problems of evil, prayer, providence, prophecies, miracles, and marvels. also within its scope fall problems relating to the organisation of the state in accord with religious law and the question of the ultimate destiny of man. 

Ibn Sina is known to have corresponded with al-Biruni. Eighteen letters which ibn Sina sent to al-Biruni in answer to questions that he had posed are given. These letters cover topics such as philosophy, astronomy and physics. There is other cor-respondence from ibn Sina which has been preserved which has been surveyed in the article. The topics of these letters include arguments against theologians and those professing magical powers, and refutation of the opinions those who having a superficial interest in a branch of knowledge. Ibn Sina writes on certain topics in philosophy, and writes letters to students who must have asked him to explain difficulties they have encoun-tered in some classic text. The authors of see ibn Sina as promot-ing natural science and arguing against religious men who attempt to obscure the truth.