“…After several centuries of flourishing, however, the study of philosophy and science faded in Muslim countries…What happened? How did Western Europe, by the late Middle Ages, become the prime locus for philosophical and scientific research? These are, of course, complex matters. But to see something of the factors at play, we might consider the life and work of Averroës, one of the last great Islamic philosophers, and the one who made the strongest argument on behalf of philosophy” — Robert Pasnau

PLEASE CLICK: Averroes – The Islamic Scholar Who Gave the West Modern Philosophy

Averroes. Line engraving by D. Cunego, 1785, after A. R. Men after Raphael Sanzio. Credit: Wellcome images. Pleasse click on image for article.

~~~~~

HIS HIGHNESS THE AGA KHAN ON AVERROES

His Highness the Aga Khan (1877 – 1957). Photo Credit: © The National Portrait Gallery, UK.

“Ibn-Rushd, the great Muslim philosopher, known to Europe as Averroes, established clearly the great distinction between two kinds of apprehensible human experience: on the one hand, our experience of nature as we recognize it through our sense, whence comes our capacity to measure and to count (and with that capacity all that it brought in the way of new events and new explanations); and on the other hand, our immediate and imminent experience of something more real, less dependent on thought or on the processes of the mind, but directly given to us, which I believe to be religious experience. Naturally, since our brain is material, and its processes and all the consequences of its processes are material, the moment that we put either thought or spiritual experience into words, this material basis of the brain must give a material presentation to even the highest, most transcendent spiritual experience. But men can study objectively the direct and subjective experiences of those who have had spiritual enlightenment without material intervention.” — The Memoirs of Aga Khan

~~~~~

PLEASE CLICK: Averroes – The Islamic Scholar Who Gave the West Modern Philosophy