Avicenna (Ibn Sina)

Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina, known in Europe as Avicenna, was born near Bukhara, in present-day Uzbekistan. By his own account he had memorized the Quran by ten, mastered logic and mathematics as a teenager, and was practicing medicine at sixteen. He said he read Aristotle's Metaphysics forty times without understanding it until a commentary by al-Farabi made it clear. After curing the ruler of Bukhara, he was given access to the royal library. Political upheavals forced him to move from court to court across Persia, serving as physician and sometimes as minister, and he was once imprisoned. He wrote some 450 works. His Canon of Medicine, a vast encyclopedia, organized the medicine of Galen and Hippocrates with his own observations, describing contagious diseases, testing of drugs, and the use of quarantine. Translated into Latin in the twelfth century, it was a standard medical textbook in European universities for about six hundred years. His Book of Healing covered philosophy and science, and he argued for the existence of God as the necessary being. He died at Hamadan in 1037.

Avicenna (Ibn Sina) is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: The preeminent philosopher and physician of the Islamic world. Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy