Averroes, a common heritage

In the year 1999, the University of Lyon hosted here in France an international symposium under the theme “Averroes and Averroism”. Participants asserted that Aristotle or the opponents of Averroes in Europe could not be understood but through understanding Averroes himself. Hence spread the term “Averroism” as from the fourteenth century, not only in France but in Italy and in other countries as well(2).

Averroes, whom academic circles in Europe and the world recognize as the one who deserves all the credit for bringing Europe from “the Dark Ages to the Enlightenment”, is the offspring of Arab Islamic culture. He grew up in Cordoba in a family of scholars and jurisprudents, in which knowledge is passed on from one generation to another. He excelled in Islamic jurisprudence, medicine and philosophy. In addition, he thoroughly studied the works of Aristotle in their original language, Greek, and commented on them, to the extent that he has become known as the “commentator”. Averroes is, therefore, a major component of the richness of the Islamic civilization and Arab culture which did prosper in Andalusia for eight centuries. He constitutes, indeed, a connecting link between the East and the West, and is one of the great thinkers who contributed to cultivating intellectual, scientific, cultural and civilizational relations between the Arab Islamic world and Europe. 

The cultural intercourse between the Arab and Islamic world and Europe extended further to cover philosophy and poetry. The influence of the Arabic poetry was clearly felt in the European poetry. In this respect, a French researcher says: “the philosophy of virtuous love, which remained for long linked to the poetry of courtly love borrowed from Andalusia, and which reigned in the “courtly circles” in Provence, draws its origins from Islam. The Troubadour poets taught by Arab poets did not help using the mystic philosophy and the doctrines of chastity and purity. For they were eager to get inspiration from the feelings of chastity as depicted in the Arabic poetry of Al-Andalus”(3). It is well known that Arabs lived in Provence for some two centuries. Ribera says in his book “Epics between Muslims and Spaniards”: “all epics that were composed in languages of Latin origin were borrowed -in form- from Andalusia.”(4)