Quid Pro Quo

Al-Ghazali

Al-Ghazali, full name Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad at-Tusi al-Ghazali (1058-1111), Islamic philosopher and theologian whose Latin name is Algazel. He was born in Ţūs, near Mashhad (Meshed), Persia (now Iran). Having gained an excellent reputation as a scholar, in 1091 al-Ghazali was appointed by Nizam al-Mulk, vizier to the Seljuk sultan, to teach at Nizamiya University in Baghdād. In 1095, following a personal crisis of faith, he relinquished his position, left his family, and became an ascetic. After ten years of wandering and meditation, he accepted another teaching position in Neyshābūr (Nishapur) but left it shortly afterward and retired to Ţūs.
Al-Ghazali reported his internal struggle and the religious solution he finally achieved in The Deliverance from Error, a work that has been compared to The Confessions of Saint Augustine. In The Revival of the Religious Sciences he presented his unified view of religion incorporating elements from all three sources formerly considered contradictory: tradition, intellectualism, and mysticism. The work has been considered the greatest religious book written by a Muslim, second only to the Qur'an (Koran). After having mastered the methods of philosophy, al-Ghazali set out to refute the Neoplatonic theories of other Muslim philosophers, particularly those of Avicenna, which were opposed to such orthodox religious doctrines as that of the creation, the immortality of the soul, and divine providence. The resultant attack on philosophical theory and speculation, set forth in al-Ghazali's Destruction of the Philosophers, was in large measure responsible for the eventual decline of the element of rationalism in Islam.

Ibnu Sina

Avicenna (Arabic, Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Abd Allah ibn Sina) (980-1037), Iranian Islamic philosopher and physician, born near Bukhara (now in Uzbekistan). The son of a government official, Avicenna studied medicine and philosophy in Bukhara. At the age of 18 he was rewarded for his medical abilities with the post of court physician to the Samanid ruler of Bukhara. He remained in this position until the fall of the Samanid Empire in 999. After that he traveled and lectured on astronomy and logic at Jurjan, near the Caspian Sea. He spent the last 14 years of his life as scientific adviser and physician to the ruler of Eşfahān (Isfahan).
Regarded by Muslims as one of the greatest Islamic philosophers, Avicenna is an important figure in the fields of medicine and philosophy. His work The Canon of Medicine was long preeminent in the Middle East and in Europe as a textbook. It is significant as a systematic classification and summary of medical and pharmaceutical knowledge up to and including Avicenna's time. The first Latin translation of the work was made in the 12th century, the Hebrew version appeared in 1491, and the Arabic text in 1593, the second text ever printed in Arabic.
Avicenna's best-known philosophical work is Kitab ash-Shifa (Book of Healing), a collection of treatises on Aristotelian logic, metaphysics, psychology, the natural sciences, and other subjects. Avicenna's own philosophy was based on a combination of Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism. Contrary to orthodox Islamic thought, Avicenna denied personal immortality, God's interest in individuals, and the creation of the world in time. Because of his views, Avicenna became the main target of an attack on such philosophy by the Islamic philosopher al-Ghazali. Nevertheless, Avicenna's philosophy remained influential throughout the Middle Ages.

Ibnu Rushd

Averroës, in Arabic, Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Rushd (1126-98), Spanish-Arab Islamic philosopher, jurist, and physician, born in Córdoba, Spain. His father, a judge in Córdoba, instructed him in Muslim jurisprudence. In his native city he also studied theology, philosophy, and mathematics under the Arab philosopher Ibn Tufayl and medicine under the Arab physician Avenzoar. Averroës was appointed judge in Seville in 1169 and in Córdoba in 1171; in 1182 he became chief physician to Abu Yaqub Yusuf, the Almohad caliph of Morocco and Muslim Spain. Averroës's view that reason takes precedence over religion led to his being exiled in 1195 by Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur; he was restored to favor shortly before his death.
Averroës held that metaphysical truths can be expressed in two ways: through philosophy, as represented by the views of Aristotle, and through religion, which is truth presented in a form that the ordinary person can understand. Although Averroës did not actually propound the existence of two kinds of truth, philosophical and religious, his views were interpreted in that way by Christian thinkers, who called it the theory of “double truth.” He rejected the concept of a creation of the world in the history of time; the world, he maintained, has no beginning. God is the “prime mover,” the self-moved force that stimulates all motion, who transforms the potential into the actual. The individual human soul emanates from the one universal soul. Averroës's extensive commentaries on the works of Aristotle were translated into Latin and Hebrew and greatly influenced the Scholastic school of philosophy in medieval Europe and medieval Jewish philosophy. His main independent work was Tahafut al-Tahafut (Incoherence of the Incoherence), a rebuttal of the attack on Neoplatonic and Aristotelian philosophy by the Islamic theologian al-Ghazali. Averroës also wrote books on medicine, astronomy, law, and grammar.