NEW SOLIDARITY

December 19, 1980 Page 6

SPECIAL TO NEW SOLIDARITY

Ibn Sina at 1000: As Powerful as Ever

"In the entire sweep of world history, Ibn Sina is one of a precious handful of men who truly shaped the entire course of human events."

An extraordinary gathering in Paris yesterday and today, convened to honor and evoke the power of a man born 1,000 years ago in the Middle East, managed to provoke the wrath of the descendants of his enemies on four continents. An international symposium on the anniversary of the millennium of the birth of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), sponsored by the Humanist Academy and the Executive Intelligence Review, stirred up more controversy and triggered more excitement than perhaps any other scholarly meeting in memory. A dozen intelligence agencies jockeyed behind the scenes to position themselves on the conference. French newspapers engaged in bitter polemics for and against the event. From London, Teheran, Washington, and Tel Aviv, supporters and apologists for the Ayatollah Khomeini deployed great resources to prevent the conference from even taking place.

To understand why, it is necessary to understand the character of the genius Ibn Sina, statesman and philosopher, scientist and poet. For most Americans, and unfortunately, for most of the world's population, Ibn Sina is an unknown figure. Born in 980 A.D., Ibn Sina lived his life constantly traveling through what is now Afghanistan, Iran, and parts of the southern Soviet Union. Until his death in 1037, Ibn Sina composed dozens of monumental works of philosophy, science, and medicine, while serving as adviser to princes and military commanders seeking to establish a progressive order amid a disintegrating and dying civilization. Today, it is a tragic irony that the Persian city of Isfahan, the magnificent center in which Ibn Sina and his allies lived and worked from 1024 to Ibn Sina's death in 1037, is ten centuries later under the oppressive rule of Khomeini's mullahs. The Lover of Reason In the entire sweep of world history, Ibn Sina is one of a precious handful of men who truly have shaped the entire course of human events. Like Plato and St. Augustine before him, and like Dante, Erasmus, Giordano Bruno, and Leibniz who came later, Ibn Sina is one of the grand old men of the humaniststhose men and women who consciously dedicated their lives to the advancement of scientific progress and human development. Like his fellows, Ibn Sina knew that in order to guarantee a lasting commitment to progress, it is first necessary to educate a great number of teachers, a philosophical elite, who understand that progress can only occur when man realizes that it is his task on earth to shape and mold the universe. It was Ibn Sina's greatest accomplishment that, at a time when civilization was in ruins in that part of the world, and long before the European continent emerged out of the Dark Ages, he was able to create a movement that was dedicated to the deliberate mastery of the physical universe through science and technological advancement. When Ibn Sina was born, the greatest civilization that had existed in history until that time the superb Muslim caliphate of Baghdadhad already declined and fallen into ruins some 200 years earlier. A movement not unlike Khomeini's hordes of reactionary priests had infected most urban

centers, and book-burning inquisitions by feudal oligarchs suppressed all intellectual life. It was into this environment that Ibn Sina introduced the cause of Reason. His opponents of the day, called the Asharites, like Khomeini today, argued that science itself was evil and that man does not have the right to exercise his God-given power of reason. Man, they argued, was a mere beast, incapable of rising up out of day-to-day events to master the future. Ibn Sina proved them wrong in the most practically useful way: he changed the world. His work in medicine provided textbooks that were used as late as the 1800s; his work in botany and astronomy shaped a scientific tradition for centuries. He was the first man in history to declare that economics itself was a science. And he did not merely write books. In the course of his lifetime, Ibn Sina led armies into battle and mapped out military strategy to recapture entire areas of the Middle East from the Asharite-dominated aristocracy and landlords with their mystical cult priests. His greatest accomplishment was the identification, in his Metaphysics, of the precise nature of what Ibn Sina termed the Necessary Existent. For Ibn Sina, the Necessary Existent is the principle whereby the creative, selfdevelopment of the universe according to lawful ordering processes takes place, guided by man's Reason. Man's Reasonsaid Ibn Sinawas the highest expression of that principle. Ibn Sina's work did not only succeed in permanently transforming the course of the Muslim world in which he lived, but with the translation of Ibn Sina's works into Arabic, Spanish, Italian, French, and Latin in later centuries. Ibn role in the creation of the European Renaissance. It is no exaggeration to state that without Ibn Sina, there probably would have been no Dante, no Italian Renaissance, and no United States of America. Today, it is the revival of Ibn Sina's tradition, and the study of his life and works, that can provide both the key to uplift the entire Islamic world and, at the same time, reinvigorate political and intellectual life in a stagnant Europe and America. If the work of Ibn Sina, the great Muslim genius, were known

to everyone, a monstrous fool like Khomeini could never succeed when he pretends to be a Muslim. Fear of the power of Ibn Sina's ideas to produce just such effects is what motivated those who made every effort to sabotage the Paris conference. And it was the power of those same ideas after ten centuries which brought 110 participants from Europe and the Middle East, among them diplomats and journalists from a half-dozen Arab nations to the Ibn Sina conference to deliver, as the French newspaper Quotidien de Paris put it "a forceful rebuff to irrationalism" and to "provoke a renaissance of the scientific spirit in Europe and the Middle East." This article was contributed by Mideast editor Robert Dreyfuss.