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Abstract
Extract
Abu al-Walid Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Rushd, known in the West as Averroës, died eight hundred years ago in Morocco on 11 December 1198. Latin Scholastics regarded him as ‘the Commentator’, and his wide-ranging works on the philosophers (including Aristotle) were already translated from Arabic into Latin in the thirteenth century. As well as these highly respected commentaries, Averroës also created original texts in which he put forward his own philosophical opinion within the Islamic context. These writings were very little read, but nevertheless aroused the suspicion that he was some sort of freethinker. Pope Gregory IX suggested to Frederick II in 1239 that A verroes had impudently claimed that the world had been tricked by Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, and from then on he was also considered to be the author of the notorious book On the three imposters: did the Emperor not have the works of Averroës translated and explained to him by Michael Scotus? As early as 1270, Thomas Aquinas angrily wrote a book against the Averroists, without actually naming them. In 1852 Ernest Renan showed the thinker in a bad light in his dissertation Averroès et l'Averroïsme (Paris, 1861). P. O. Kristeller was inspired by this frequently reprinted book, which has also been translated into Arabic: the hunt for Averroistic heretics had begun.