Remembering Ibn Rushd

Abstract

This year is the 800th anniversary of Ibn Rushd's (1128-1198) death. Our editorial is dedicated to his memory as a great Muslim scholar. His legacy is one of the greatest contributions to human understanding and intellectual scholarship. The occasion deserves much more than an editorial. This issue reports on a conference celebrating Ibn Rushd's achievements and later this year MISS will have a report on the seminar that the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) is organizing in Amman, Jordan, honoring his work. In this editorial I will try to clarify Ibn Rushd's place in Islamic Intellectual history and underscore his contributions to the development of philosophical, theological, and scientific thought in the Muslim and Western worlds. Although Ibn Rushd has an important position in the Islamic intellectual legacy, his contributions have not received due recognition in the Muslim world. Even among those who are aware of his works, to a great extent, he has been misunderstood and misrepresented, and his position has undergone multiple distortions. We feel it is essential to understand his work free of historical and contemporary ideological biases and distortions in order to fully comprehend the problems and concerns that motivated Muslim scholars and provided the framework for Islamic thought. It is also important that we understand the reasons why he was not given the place he deserves in the Islamic heritage and why he is often misinterpreted. Ibn Rushd was a great integrator of knowledge. He was a preeminent physician and a prominent judge of his time. He was also a philosopher and theologian. His mastery of knowledge demonstrated two dimensions- he was both encyclopedic and specialist. In the areas of his specializations- medicine, jurisprudence, and philosophy-he was a master without peer. Ibn Rushd had two outstanding qualities. He was extremely intelligent and he was also extraordinarily just and fair in his approach to religion. It is important that we understand and appreciate his unprejudiced approach to the study of religion. Indeed, it is one of his most distinctive qualities. Ibn Rushd was a committed Muslim and a very humble man. This humility manifests itself in his writings as well as in his methodology. His search for truth allowed him to explore all sources, including early Greek philosophers. He believed that we must examine all sources, even ...