The Caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf of the Almohad dynasty had a favorite question. He asked it of every scholar who came to his court in Marrakesh. Are the heavens eternal, or are they created?
The question was Aristotelian. It came out of the Physics and the Metaphysics. It was a live question in the twelfth century because Aristotle had said the heavens were eternal, and the Quran had said Allah created them. Between the two positions, the Muslim philosophers were caught. Al-Farabi had tried to reconcile the two by saying that eternity did not mean uncaused. Al-Ghazali had said the reconciliation was incoherent and had written The Incoherence of the Philosophers to prove it. Ibn Sina had tried again. The debate was open.
The Caliph asked his court philosopher, Ibn Tufayl. Ibn Tufayl demurred. He was an old man. He said: my Caliph, I am not the man for this. There is a younger man in Cordoba named Ibn Rushd, and he understands Aristotle better than any of us. Let him come.
Ibn Rushd was summoned. He came to Marrakesh. He was thirty-six years old. He entered the Caliph's chamber. He was a jurist, a physician, and a philosopher. He had trained in the Maliki fiqh under his grandfather, who had been chief judge of Cordoba. He had trained in medicine and had already written treatises on it. He had spent the last decade reading Aristotle in Arabic translation. He knew the Greek philosopher's work as well as any Muslim then alive.
The Caliph asked him directly: what is your view? Are the heavens eternal, or are they created?
Ibn Rushd hesitated. The question was a trap. Answer wrong and he would be branded a heretic. Answer safely and the Caliph would dismiss him as unworthy.
The Caliph saw him hesitate and understood. He answered the question himself, showing his own reading in Aristotle and in kalam. Ibn Rushd realized this was not a trap. This was a conversation. He engaged. They talked for hours. When Ibn Rushd left, the Caliph had a new court philosopher, and Ibn Rushd had a new commission.
The commission was this: write a set of commentaries on Aristotle that would explain the Greek philosopher clearly to Arabic readers. The existing translations were rough. The existing commentaries were partial. The Caliph wanted a definitive reading.
Ibn Rushd said: I will do it.
He worked on the commentaries for thirty years. He produced three sets of them. The short commentary, the jami, was a summary useful for a first reader. The middle commentary, the talkhis, was a full but selective explanation. The great commentary, the tafsir, was line-by-line: he would quote a sentence from Aristotle in the Arabic translation, then explain what Aristotle had meant, then explain how the sentence fit into the whole system. He wrote great commentaries on the Physics, the Metaphysics, the Analytics, the De Anima, the De Caelo, and most of the other Aristotelian works. He wrote a great commentary on Plato's Republic, because he thought Aristotle's own political work had been lost.
While he was writing the commentaries, he served as chief judge of Cordoba. He continued to write on medicine. He wrote a defense of philosophy against al-Ghazali called The Incoherence of the Incoherence, one of the great works of Arabic rational theology. He wrote a small treatise called The Decisive Treatise on the Harmony between Religion and Philosophy, in which he argued that the Quran itself, in ayah after ayah, commands the study of philosophy. The Quran says: reflect, ponder, look at the heavens, use your reason. Ibn Rushd argued: the Quran cannot forbid what the Quran commands. If revelation and philosophy seem to contradict, one of them has been misread.
When Ibn Rushd died in Marrakesh in 1198 CE, at the age of seventy-two, he had been briefly exiled and rehabilitated. His body was brought back to Cordoba to be buried in his family's plot. The philosopher Ibn Arabi, who was then a young man of thirty-three in Andalusia, described watching the funeral procession in his Futuhat. The body was on one side of the camel, and the books he had written were on the other side. Ibn Arabi looked at the balance of the two loads and said to himself: on one side is the imam, and on the other side is his work. And he asked, is what he had hoped for the same as what actually came to be?
The commentaries were translated into Latin fifty years later by Michael Scot, working at the court of the Emperor Frederick II in Sicily. From Sicily they went to Paris. At the University of Paris in the thirteenth century, Aristotle came back to Europe through Ibn Rushd. Thomas Aquinas quoted him as the Commentator. The Latin philosophers called Ibn Rushd Averroes. His commentaries became the standard European reading of Aristotle for four centuries.
What the story teaches. A scholar keeps a whole tradition alive by translating it well. Ibn Rushd did not agree with every position Aristotle held. He was a devout Muslim. But he believed that clear reading of what an author had actually said was itself an act of faithfulness, both to Allah and to the truth. He spent thirty years on the commentaries because they were the tribute a Muslim philosopher owed to Aristotle. And in the end, when Aristotle came back to Europe, he came back through Cordoba. A city in Andalusia and a scholar at its court kept the Greek philosopher alive for the whole Western world.