Ibn Sina, known as Avicenna in the West was a Persian polymath who is regarded as one of the most significant physicians, astronomers, thinkers and writers of the Islamic Golden Age, and the father of early modern medicine. His monumental work Al-Qanun fi’l-tibb (The Canon of Medicine) is an encyclopedia of medicine in five volumes which he completed in 1025CE, and was still in use throughout 18^th century in Europe, 700 years later.

Islam and science

Islam never had the same conflict with science that Christianity did. This is because Islam clearly defines the role of the mind, and the areas where free thinking is permitted – rational sciences – and the areas where it was restricted to the text – the religious sciences and legislation.

Ibn Khaldun says, “It should be known that the sciences with which people concern themselves in cities and which they acquire and pass on through instruction, are of two kinds: one that is natural to man and to which he is guided by his own ability to think, and a traditional kind that he learns from those who invented it.

The first kind comprises the philosophical sciences. They are the ones with which man can become acquainted through the very nature of his ability to think and to whose objects, problems, arguments, and methods of instruction he is guided by his human perceptions, so that he is made aware of the distinction between what is correct and what is wrong in them by his own speculation and research, in as much as he is a thinking human being.

The second kind comprises the traditional, conventional sciences. All of them depend upon information based on the authority of the given religious law. There is no place for the intellect in them, save that the intellect may be used in connection with them to relate problems of detail with basic principles.”[1]

This is why Bruno Guiderdoni, Director of the Observatory of Lyon who is a specialist in galaxy formation and evolution, says, “The Qur’an is the only religious book I can believe in as a scientist.”[2]

It was common in Islamic history for scholars of Islam to also be scientists. This harmony between Islam and science allowed the Islamic world to be the centre of scientific development. A huge number of inventions were created along with advancements in medicine which benefited the whole world.

Muhammad Asad says, “The Renaissance, that revival of European arts and sciences with its extensive borrowing from Islamic, mainly Arabic, sources, was largely due to the material contacts between East and West. Europe gained by it, in the domain of culture, far more than the world of Islam ever did; but it did not acknowledge this eternal indebtedness to the Muslims by a diminution of its old hatred of Islam.”[3]

Ibn Sina was not held back by Islam, in fact he was motivated by the Islamic texts which encouraged the seeking of cures to diseases. The Prophet ﷺ said, “There is no disease that Allah has created, except that He also has created its treatment.”[4]