Ibn Rushd and Aristotle
The Islamic Golden AgeThe judge before the philosopher
Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Rushd was born in Córdoba in 1126 into a family that had run the city's courts for two generations: both his grandfather and his father served as its chief qadi. He followed them. Under the Almohad caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf he was made judge in Seville in 1169 and qadi of his native Córdoba in 1171, and in 1182 he was summoned to Marrakesh as court physician, taking over from the philosopher Ibn Tufayl; later that same year he was appointed chief qadi of Córdoba. He wrote a general medical textbook, al-Kulliyat, which Latin readers came to know as the Colliget. Almost nothing in his official life was philosophical. The Aristotle work was done around a working docket, by a man who spent his days ruling on inheritance and contracts.
The commission, and one man's word for it
The famous account of how the commentaries began rests on a single chronicler. Abd al-Wahid al-Marrakushi, writing his history al-Mu'jib around 1224 - roughly a quarter-century after Ibn Rushd's death - reports that at their first meeting the caliph asked whether the heavens were eternal or had a beginning. Ibn Rushd, sensing danger, said nothing, until the caliph displayed his own command of Plato and Aristotle and the room relaxed. The commission followed: make Aristotle plain. No independent source confirms the scene, and its shape is suspiciously tidy. That does not make it false. It does mean that the origin story of the largest Aristotle project ever written in Arabic comes to us on one man's authority.
What he was actually reading
Ibn Rushd knew no Greek. His Aristotle arrived as Arabic versions produced in Baghdad some three centuries earlier, many of them turned first into Syriac by Christian translators before reaching Arabic; he leaned especially on those of Ishaq ibn Hunayn. He inherited a text before he improved it. Across roughly thirty-eight commentaries he worked at three depths - short epitomes (jawami), middle paraphrases (talkhis), and long line-by-line commentaries (sharh), of which he finished only five: on the Posterior Analytics, Physics, De Caelo, De Anima and Metaphysics. Aristotle's Politics had never reached al-Andalus in Arabic at all, so where political philosophy belonged he commented on Plato's Republic instead.
1195
In 1195 he fell. The caliph Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur condemned him, banned his writings and had books burned, and Ibn Rushd was confined at Lucena, a town southeast of Córdoba. Why is genuinely disputed. The usual explanation is political - al-Mansur was courting Maliki jurists before the campaign that ended in his victory at Alarcos in July 1195 - but the sources are thin, and historians differ over how much was doctrine, how much court rivalry, how much expedience. The disgrace was brief. He was restored, went to Marrakesh, and died there in December 1198 (9 Safar 595 in the Islamic calendar - conversions give either the 10th or the 11th). Ibn Arabi, then a young man in Córdoba, later wrote that when the body came home for burial the coffin was balanced on the pack animal by Ibn Rushd's own books.
The copies Europe kept
His Latin and Hebrew afterlife dwarfed his Arabic one. Michael Scot put him into Latin in the 1220s; Jewish scholars in Provence and Italy translated him into Hebrew for generations. Some works now survive only that way: the Long Commentary on De Anima exists in Arabic as fragments and whole only in Latin, and the Republic commentary only through Samuel ben Judah of Marseilles' Hebrew version of 1320. Only some, though: the Decisive Treatise, the Incoherence of the Incoherence and al-Kulliyat all survive in Arabic. In Paris his claim that all humans share a single intellect drew Aquinas's rebuttal in 1270 and Bishop Tempier's condemnation of 219 propositions in 1277 - which also pinned on his followers a 'two contrary truths' doctrine no text of theirs, or his, teaches.
Key Dates to Remember
- 1126 — Ibn Rushd is born in Córdoba, into a family that supplied the city's chief qadi across two generations: his grandfather, who dies this same year, and later his father.
- 1169 — Appointed judge in Seville under the Almohad caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf; the years of judicial office are also the years of the Aristotle commentaries.
- 1195 — Condemned by the caliph al-Mansur, his writings banned and books burned; he is confined at Lucena, southeast of Córdoba. Historians still dispute why.
- December 1198 — Dies in Marrakesh, restored to favour shortly before the end. His body is later brought back to Córdoba for burial.
- 1320 — Samuel ben Judah of Marseilles completes the Hebrew translation of the commentary on Plato's Republic - the only route by which that work reaches us at all.