Q. & A. 711 to 1707 with solved Papers css 1971 to date

Ibn Sina (980-1030)
In spite of his decisive importance in the development of philosophical thinking, Farabi has remained far less famous in the Western world than Ibn Sina, known universally as Avicena. It is not so much any one book or any one achievement of his accounts for his great renown. It is rather the universality of his labours that has made him pre- eminent. Whatever subject he touched, were it science or medicine, philosophy or psychology, he illumined by the peculiar brilliance of his mind, by the liveliness and incisiveness of his intellectual grasp.
Abu Ali al-Hussain Ibn Abdullah Ibn Sina was born in Afshana in Persia in 980 and he died in 1030 at Hamadhan. Within the brief span of fifty-seven years he was able to produce an astounding number of works on dozens of different subjects, an achievement that can only be accounted for by his unequalled ability of mind and a power of assimilation of which history offers few such striking examples. To mention but a few subjerts on which he wrote: there were medicine and philosophy, mathematics and astronomy, problems of motion, vacuum, infinity, light, music, geology, chemistry and pharmaceutics. Only in Leonardo da Vinci, of course in enjoyment of a more considerable legacy from earlier thinkers, do we find a similar universality of mind.
If any one statement could summarize Ibn Sina’s philosophy, it might be said that it is not the fruit of a one-sided intellectual approach, but that it required the combination of both reason and intuition. While a great deal in his philosophy derives from Aristotle and Farabi, his notion that all reality is a flux or movement is entirely his own. That notion proves him to have foreseen intuitively some of the fundamental concepts of twentieth-century physics.
Although first and foremost a scientist and a philosopher, Ibn Sina never departed from the tenants of Islamic monotheism, and in his scheme of creation, God is the apex and cause of everything. God alone is the Necessary Being in whom essence and existence are identical. Everything else is merely possible: it might or it might not
Scientific and Literary Progress under the Abbasids 629
exist, its existence being accidental. Likewise multiplicity and thus individuality can exist only in creatures other than God. Matter is the principle responsible for multiplicity and individuality, matter being the limitation of the operation of the spirit. Inevitably Ibn Sina refrained from trying to define matter, describing it is potentiality which, though eternal, has no ’being’ per se or, at least, a tendency towards ’not-being’ as opposite to pure being inherent in God.
Ibn Sina devoted much time to problems of logic and to the operations of the mind in its process of acquiring knou ledge Though in his respective theories he drew upon the findings of Kindi and Farabi, his own conclusion shows a greater clarity and perspicacity than those of his forebears. There is not much that Modern psychology Cot;:rf arfu fo his doctrine r.~ •&<; way:, ;- V-ich the rr:»nd works, doctrine rr> which he tabulates the different faculties of mental perception. There is little in St. Thomas’ notions of human knowledge that we do not find already in the theories of Ibn Sina. Likewise Ibn Sina’s highly intuitive recognition of the fact that the mind exists independently of the body (and thus that the soul is immortal) precedes by more than half a millennium the notion by Descartes that we are able to imagine that we have no body but cannot imagine that we do not exist.
Many of Ibn Sina’s philosophical concepts were taken over by western thinkers without, however, a due acknowledgement of their true source His influence is even more noticeable in the doctrines of the Jewish philosophers, especially Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), many of whom in fact acted as a sort of bridge between the thinkers of Islam and Christian schoiasticists.
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critical tor rr>e further development of Islamic philosophy, either as a religious or as a philosophical system. The work of the philosophers was not always viewed in a favourable light b> the representatives of orthodoxy, for it appeared to threaten the simplicity and directness of the faith. Even more dangerous for orthodoxy was Sufisin. that is the , mystical movement that developed within the fold ot Islam Siifism, which originally tried to formulate a system whereby a more intimate and personal relationship with the deity could be achieved, had been Assuming extravagantly emotional, forms Many of its adherents clain,*^ that a religious life did not depend upon adherence to the five caro’.’^ai precepts of Islam, implying thus that orthodoxy and religious auf’ority could be disregarded, and that each individual

630 - Political and Cultural History of Islam

was the sole arbiter of the nature of his relationship with God. Others felt entitled to disregard not merely religious laws but also the accepted moral code. Many of them became drink addicts or gave themselves up to morbid exhibitionist emotionalism and lecherous habits, all of which aberrations they tried to explain away as the legitimate concomitants to their religious life. Torn between these extravagant interpretations of the creed, on the one hand, and the rationalism of the philosophers on the other, orthodoxy was threatened with disintegration, and Islam, as a whole, with spiritual chaos.