Ibn Rushd, Ibn Tufail, and al-Farabi: The Philosophers Europe Called Its Own

Al-Farabi: The Second Teacher

Abu Nasr Muhammad al-Farabi (872–950 CE) was a Turkish-Persian philosopher, musician, and scientist working in Baghdad and Aleppo. Known as the Muallim al-Thani (the Second Teacher, after Aristotle) he was the first Islamic philosopher to systematically integrate Greek philosophy with Islamic theology.

His contributions include: the first systematic Islamic political philosophy; the development of music theory (his Kitab al-Musiqa al-Kabir (Great Book of Music) is the most comprehensive medieval treatment of music theory); and philosophical foundations that influenced both Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd.

Ibn Tufail: The Philosophical Novel

Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Tufail (1105–1185 CE) was an Andalusian physician and philosopher. His Hayy ibn Yaqzan, a philosophical novel about a child raised alone on a desert island who arrives at the truths of philosophy and religion through pure reason, is the first philosophical novel in world literature.

Hayy ibn Yaqzan was translated into Latin as Philosophus Autodidactus in 1671 and directly influenced John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. The influence is documented and specific. The idea of the self-taught philosopher reasoning toward truth without institutional authority (central to the Enlightenment) came from an Andalusian Muslim philosopher.

Ibn Rushd: The Commentator

Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd (1126–1198 CE), known in the West as Averroes, was the most important philosopher in medieval Islamic Andalusia and one of the most influential thinkers in European intellectual history.

His commentaries on Aristotle were so comprehensive, precise, and authoritative that medieval European scholastics called him simply The Commentator (as if there were only one). Thomas Aquinas cited him extensively. Dante placed him in the Limbo of the honoured non-Christians in the Divine Comedy. The 13th-century philosophical movement based on his work is called Averroism.

His specific contributions:

• The complete recovery and transmission of Aristotle to medieval Europe: both Aristotle's texts and the most authoritative interpretation of them came through Ibn Rushd
• The argument for the compatibility of philosophy and religion, which influenced the Scholastic tradition
• The concept of the double truth (that philosophical and theological truth could be simultaneously valid) which became foundational to the secular philosophical tradition
• Major works in medicine, physics, astronomy, and jurisprudence alongside his philosophical output

What Was Obscured

All three were known in Europe by Latinised names (Alfarabius, Abubacer, Averroes) that removed any indication of their Islamic identity. Ibn Rushd is described by some historians as "the founding father of secular thought in Western Europe", a designation that attributes the secularist philosophical tradition to an Islamic scholar, while the popular account of that tradition attributes it to European Enlightenment thinkers.

The secular philosophical tradition of the West grew from a root planted by a Muslim judge in 12th-century Córdoba. This is documented in the academic history of philosophy and ignored in the popular account.

A Note on Ibn Rushd's Legacy Within Islam

Ibn Rushd's philosophical legacy within Islam is complex. His defence of reason as a valid path to religious truth was consistent with Islamic learning; some of his specific philosophical positions on the eternity of the world and prophetic knowledge were criticised by Sunni theologians as departing from revealed doctrine.