Nevertheless, a few Islamic physicians gradually began to chip away at the edifice of Greek medicine, even as many more used it with dedication and, as Peter Pormann of Warwick University suggests, with some success. However, life for physicians was never quite so encouraging or so supportive as it had been in the early centuries of the Abbasid caliphates. By the time the next great figure in Islamic medicine, ibn-Sina (Avicenna), was born in 980, the empire was no longer under the control of a single caliph. The result was that ibn-Sina spent much of his colourful, varied life moving around trying to find a medical position that would pay him decently and give him the time to carry on with his other scholarly work.Born near Bukhara in present-day Uzbekistan, ibn-Sina was something of a prodigy. By the age of ten, he knew not just the Qur’an but much Arabic poetry by heart, and by the age of sixteen had become a physician. Ibn-Sina proved his competence early on when he successfully treated the Samanid ruler of the eastern Islamic caliphate for a potentially life-threatening diarrhoeal infection. As reward, he was given access to the royal library at Bukhara, and certainly took advantage of it. His skill as a physician became almost legendary, even though the turbulent politics of the time kept him permanently unsettled, either stuck as a teacher or obliged to put himself at the whims of some prince or caliph.
Ibn-Sina managed to become one of the most famous philosophers, mathematicians and astronomers of his time, and wrote books on a range of scientific topics, a vast encyclopedia (one of the first ever written) and even poetry.
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Ibn-Sina made a number of key astronomical observations, devised a scale to help make readings more precise, and made a string of contributions to physics, such as identifying different forms of energy – heat, light and mechanical – and the idea of force. He also noted that if light consists of a stream of particles, then its speed will be finite. The mathematical technique of ‘casting out of nines’, used to verify squares and cubes, is also attributed to ibn-Sina, among others. And he is believed to have suggested the fundamental geological idea of superposition – the concept that in rock layers, the youngest layers are highest – that would not be properly formulated until the 17th century.
Yet his fame, above all, is based on his book al-Qann fi al-Tibb (The Canon of Medicine). Consisting of some half a million words, this multi-volume book surveyed medical knowledge from ancient times to the present day. Its comprehensive, systematic approach meant that it became the reference for Arabic- and Persian-speaking doctors, and once it was translated into Latin it became one of the standard textbooks in Europe for six centuries, with some 60 editions being published between 1500 and 1674, according to the historian Nancy Siraisi.
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There is no doubt that ibn-Sina was a proud, perhaps even arrogant and difficult man. Unfortunately, his absolute certainty that he was right (as he often was), along with his tendency to dismiss his critics as idiots, offended many, including his political patrons. This quality caused him to make some rather bold claims regarding the relationship of science to religion, and it meant that he would one day be charged with heresy.
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Ibn-Sina believed that there exists a single set of principles that can explain the nature of the physical universe, the reason for its creation, and the relationship between mind and body, and he made it his life’s work to find connections between these apparently different fields, and ultimately to discover a theory of everything. This was an ambitious scheme, but then ibn-Sina, according to Yahya Michot of the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, was always supremely confident of his abilities, and believed that God had deliberately made him brighter than the average individual.
So, according to ibn-Sina, miracles must have a physical explanation. To take one example: most Muslims believe that the world will end one day and that when this happens, every member of the human race will return from the dead in a physical form, ready to be judged by God for their conduct during their lifetime. But ibn-Sina held that such bodily resurrection defies the laws of nature, and he thought that the day of judgement might take a different form to that traditionally taught in religion. He also doubted the traditional view of heaven and hell, in part because of his belief that matter cannot be everlasting – no fire can burn forever. And he thought that heaven and hell might take the form of a state of mind, instead of a physical space. The example he gave to support his theory was that of pain. He postulated that if it is possible to feel pain without experiencing pain in the physical sense – such as during a bad dream – it ought to be similarly possible to experience heaven or hell without physically travelling to a different place.
