Ibn Sina

The London-based, non-Muslim author of this skilfully formulated and (mainly from Wikimedia) illustrated book is of Sri Lankan and Italian extractions. He has written as well on Imam al-Ghazali and produced travel guides for Barcelona, Beijing and Edinburgh. An amusing essay of his, Lion in my garden, is available on the Internet. Rightly so, Albert considers himself skilled at turning complex thoughts into readable prose, claiming as well, however, that he was ‘the only person to appreciate my work’. Even so, he opted for publishing since ‘the flowering of genius requires an audience outside of itself’ (quoted from the author’s Voynich Variations). Surprisingly, the merely 39 pages of well-illustrated text on Avicenna (9801037) do not suffer under such idiosyncrasies. Rather, Ibn Sina is properly described as the outstanding medical doctor, legal mind, administrator (vizier), logician, musical innovator, mathematician, physicist, geologist, astronomer, philologist, philosopher of his time. All that, mind you, before he had turned 18. Ibn Sina’s medical textbook, al-Qanun fi al-Tibb, reprinted in Rome as late as 1593, was used at Löwen University for 600 years, until 1650, and Thomas Aquinas quoted Ibn Sina more than 400 times.