Reclaiming ‘Avicenna’: Islamic theology and Eastern wisdom behind Ibn Sina’s philosophy and metaphysics

By Humaira Ahad

In the year 997, a teenage boy in the Central Asian city of Bukhara was summoned to the ruler’s palace. The Samanid prince Nuh ibn Mansur lay gravely ill, and none of the court's physicians could help him.

The boy who walked in, barely out of adolescence, diagnosed and treated the prince. In gratitude, the ruler opened to him the royal library, one of the richest collections of manuscripts in the Islamic world.

The boy had already memorized the entire Quran and was an authority on Islamic jurisprudence, medicine, and metaphysics by 18. His name was Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Abdullah Ibn al-Hassan Ibn al-Ali ibn Sina.

Within a generation of his death in 1037, his medical textbooks would be taught in the great capitals of the world. Within two centuries, they would become required reading at the universities of Christian Europe, where he would not be known by his real name.

Europe called him Avicenna. It still does; a Latin transliteration invented by translators who had no interest in preserving "Ibn Sina" as it was actually pronounced.

The name became the version the West would use for the next nine hundred years, largely detached from the “Ibn Sina” still revered across the Islamic world as al-Shaykh al-Ra’is, “the leading master.”

In Iran, Ibn Sina is remembered not merely as a figure of medieval history, but as one of the country's enduring intellectual icons.

His birthday, commemorated on August 23, is observed as Physicians' Day in Iran, linking the legendary Persian physician who lived a millennium ago with the doctors who practice his profession today.

And in that contrast lies a much larger story: how a Muslim scholar from the Islamic world became one of the foundational figures of medicine in Europe, even as the religious and cultural world that shaped his intellectual life often faded from the story told in the West.

Polymath who flourished in crisis

Ibn Sina's life doesn’t read like a biography of a simple scholar, but has elements of a political thriller. Born around 980 near Bukhara, now in Uzbekistan, then the glittering capital of the Samanid dynasty of Persia, he grew up in a household that prized learning.

His father hosted philosophers and mathematicians for discussion; an Indian tutor introduced him to the concept of zero.

By his own account, given in an autobiography written late in life, Ibn Sina outgrew his teachers by his teens and turned to self-study, spending weeks with a knotty problem in Aristotle's Metaphysics until a commentary by the philosopher al-Farabi, picked up from a street bookseller, finally helped him to resolve it.

What followed was four decades of near-constant upheaval. When the Samanid dynasty collapsed around 999, Ibn Sina was forced into the first of many relocations.

He first went to Gurganj, near the Amu Darya river in what is now Turkmenistan, then south into Iran, through Jurjan on the Caspian coast, Rayy near modern Tehran, and Qazvin in the northwest, then into the mountains of western Iran at Hamadan, and finally to Isfahan, in central Iran, where he spent his last and most stable years.

He served two Buyid rulers as vizier, a position that won him enemies among rival courtiers and army officers.

The Persian physician was imprisoned at least once, in a fortress called Fardajan. He escaped Hamadan accompanied by his brother, a student, and two servants, and found a more stable patron in Isfahan, where he spent his final fourteen years.

Through all of it, he researched and wrote. Contemporaries describe him composing chapters of his major works from horseback during his travels, and dictating extracts from his medical and philosophical treatises to students every evening after a full day of court business.

He finally died in 1037, while accompanying his patron on a military campaign.

Out of the political chaos surrounding his life came nearly 200 to 250 works. The two towering ones are “al-Qanun fi al-Tibb” (The Canon of Medicine), a systematic, multi-volume encyclopedia that organized Islamic medical knowledge into a coherent diagnostic and pharmacological system, and “Kitab al-Shifa” (The Book of Healing), an equally vast encyclopedia of logic, physics, mathematics, and metaphysics.

The Canon alone catalogued hundreds of medicines and introduced early versions of clinical-trial thinking, controlling for the timing, dosage, and reproducibility of a treatment's effects before trusting it.

Philosophy built for Islam, not despite it

What tends to get lost in Western biographies is that Ibn Sina did not see himself as doing something separate from his faith when he starring studying Aristotle and Neoplatonism.

He saw himself propagating Islamic philosophy, using the logical tools inherited from late antiquity to work through questions that Islamic theology, or kalam, had already been debating for two centuries: the nature of God's necessary existence, the relationship between the eternal and the created, the fate of the soul after death.

His metaphysics is, at its core, an argument for a "Necessary Existent" whose being is not contingent on anything else, a philosophical proof of God structured for a specifically Islamic theological vocabulary.

Historians of Islamic philosophy point out that Ibn Sina's project was continuous with the work of earlier Muslim philosophers like al-Kindi and al-Farabi, all of whom treated the "foreign" inheritance of Greek philosophy as material to be assimilated into, and tested against, Islamic thought, rather than as a rival system.  

His concept of hikmah (wisdom) is distinctly placed in an Islamic epistemological framework.

Beyond the myth of Islam’s philosophical decline

Two generations after his death, theologian Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali wrote Tahafut al-Falasifa, "The Incoherence of the Philosophers," accusing him of straying into ideas that broke with orthodox Islamic belief.

Western textbooks often treat that confrontation as the end of philosophy in Islam and its emergence in Europe. However, it didn’t happen that way.

His ideas kept developing across the Islamic world for centuries. The 12th-century Persian mystic Shihab al-Din Yahya al-Suhrawardi built a whole new school of thought, "illuminationism," largely in conversation with him rather than against him.

During the Safavid period in Iran, four hundred years later, the philosopher Sadr al-Din Muhammad Shirazi, better known as Mulla Sadra, folded Ibn Sina’s metaphysics into what many historians regard as the most sophisticated philosophical system the Islamic world ever built.

French philosopher Henry Corbin, one of the few Western academics who actually traced this history, had a phrase for how far Ibn Sina’s influence spread across the Islamic East: he called it "la pandemie avicennienne," the Avicennian pandemic.

Wisdom that never reached Europe

Towards the end of his career, Ibn Sina mentioned a project he called “al-hikmah al-mashriqiyyah,” sometimes translated as "Eastern" or "Oriental" wisdom, which he said went beyond the standard philosophy he had written about.

Most of the writing describing it hasn’t survived. What’s left is a handful of fragments and a scholarly argument about what he even meant by it, whether it was a more intuitive, spiritually rooted form of knowledge, or simply his existing logic dressed up differently.

What is not disputed is that this material did not reach Latin Europe.

The texts translated in the 12th and 13th centuries, largely through the Toledo School of Translators, transmitted Ibn Sina’s logic, his medical writing, and his metaphysical proof of a “Necessary Existent,” material that fit comfortably into a Christian scholastic curriculum.

Whatever he meant by "Eastern wisdom" was not among it. Scholars now distinguish between what is sometimes called "Latin Avicennism," the version of his thought absorbed into European scholasticism, and the broader Islamic reception of his work, which continued to develop along different lines for centuries.

The distinction reflects a historical fact that European translators selected the portions of Ibn Sina’s corpus that could function independently of the Islamic theological framework he had built them within.

Ibn Sina they chose to remember

Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University and among the most widely published scholars of Islamic philosophy alive today, has spent much of his career arguing that Ibn Sina’s later work contains a genuine mystical and illuminationist dimension, distinct from the formal logic that made his early reputation.

Nasr traces this "Eastern wisdom" directly to the Islamic mystical tradition, Sufism, and argues it fed forward into later thinkers such as Suhrawardi.

In Nasr’s reading, dismissing this side of Ibn Sina as a misunderstanding erases a real and distinctly Islamic part of his thought, one that Western academic philosophy has never fully reckoned with because it sits closer to spirituality than to the logic-driven system Europe found easier to absorb.

Dimitri Gutas, professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at Yale University, has taken the opposing view. He argues that Ibn Sina’s "Eastern wisdom" was simply a more advanced restatement of his existing rational philosophy, not a separate mystical system, and that 20th-century Western scholars read a hidden spirituality into the phrase because they expected the East to contain one.

The disagreement between the two has continued for decades without resolution. Historians of the field generally treat its persistence as evidence of a broader difficulty: that Western scholarship has struggled to categorize Ibn Sina without relying on frameworks developed originally to describe a generalized, undifferentiated idea of "the East."

A related argument comes from the late Edward Said, the Columbia University professor whose books Orientalism and Covering Islam contend that Western intellectual history has tended to detach thinkers such as Ibn Sina from their specific religious and historical context, absorbing them instead into a broader, less particular "world philosophy" canon.

That framing, Said argued, serves a narrative connecting Aristotle to Aquinas, but obscures the extent to which Islamic theology supplied the actual intellectual context in which Ibn Sina worked.

Banned in Europe

The debate over which Ibn Sina Europe received was not limited to a question for scholars. Medieval Europe was already wrestling with his ideas, and, at times, trying to ban them.

In 1210, a council at Sens, with the Bishop of Paris among its members, banned the teaching of Aristotle's natural philosophy "publicly or in secret" in Paris, on pain of excommunication, and named Ibn Sina's commentaries alongside it. The ban wasn't incidental. By then, Latin readers rarely encountered Aristotle's metaphysics without Ibn Sina's commentary attached.

Ibn Sina had used Aristotle's logic to build his own proof that God exists, a proof rooted in Islamic belief. Five years later, church officials banned the material again, this time naming the specific book.

The ban barely worked. Within a couple of generations, Thomas Aquinas, the most important Catholic thinker in history, was using that same "banned" Muslim scholar's ideas to build his own arguments for God. A Persian philosopher the Church had once called dangerous had become one of its most-used sources.

UNESCO has awarded an Ibn Sina Prize for Ethics in Science every two years since 2004, a formal acknowledgment, if a limited one, of the debt. That a thinker once banned in Europe is now commemorated by an international institution bearing his name.

But the fuller story of the scholar who memorised the Holy Qur’an before studying Aristotle, and built his philosophy within the intellectual world of Islam, remains an active area of historical research nearly a thousand years after his death.

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