Ibn Rushd and Aristotle in Arabic
A judge and physician of Cordoba spends forty years expounding Aristotle, and it is through his expositions that Jewish sages and the Latin West come to read Aristotle.
Ibn Rushd was born in Cordoba in 1126 into a family of jurists: both his grandfather and his father served as judges of the city. He judged as well, first in Seville and then in Cordoba, and later became court physician to the Almohad rulers in Marrakesh. For forty years he wrote commentaries on Aristotle in three forms: epitomes, middle commentaries and long line by line expositions. Around 1195 he fell from favour, was banished to Lucena near Cordoba, and ended his days in Marrakesh in 1198.
What matters here is what became of his books. The same Almohads at whose court he served had driven the family of Maimonides out of Cordoba a generation earlier, and that persecution stands in this timeline as an event of its own. Maimonides, born in the same Cordoba, obtained Ibn Rushd's commentaries around 1190, by then in Egypt. From the 1230s they were translated into Hebrew, and for four centuries Jewish philosophers read Aristotle through Ibn Rushd. In the Latin West he was translated from those same years and called simply the Commentator, with no name added.
No source speaks of any meeting between Maimonides and Ibn Rushd: what joins them is a city, a time and books, not acquaintance.
Sources
Scholarship
- Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — his dates, service as judge and physician, the fall from favour around 1195 and the banishment to Lucena
- Studies in the history of Arabic and Jewish philosophy — the three forms of commentary, the Hebrew translations from the 1230s and the title Commentator in the Latin West
Basis: documents and evidence.