Avicenna on Theology

Abstract:

“The year 1951 is being celebrated throughout the Muslim world, and especially in Persia, as the millennary according to lunar reckoning of the birth of Avicenna, one of the greatest and most original thinkers produced by Islam, Dom in 370 (980) at the little village of Afshana in the province of Bukhara-a region now hopelessly lost within the territories of the Soviet empire -Abu ‘Ali al-Husain ibn ,Abd Allah called Ibn Sina (to give him his Muslim name) largely by virtue of his own exceptional genius and diligent self-instruction became a master alike of the ancient Greek learning and the Arab sciences, and was the author of large works on medicine and philosophy which, translated into Latin, continued to be studied in the medieval universities of Europe to the end of the sixteenth century. Concerning Avicenna genealogy we know virtually nothing. His father ‘Abd Allah, a native of Balkh, was appointed governor of an outlying district of Bukhara by the Samanid ruler Nuh ibn Mansur, and was therefore presumably a man of some”

Ibn Sina, Avicenna On Theology (trans. Arberry)