Averroes and His Philosophy (Translated) - Life, Thought, and the Controversy with Muhammad Abduh #1013112

This edition includes:
• New English translation
• Critical introduction

Some books explain an idea; this one fights for it. Farah Antun takes up the case of Averroes — the Andalusian qadi and philosopher denounced as an unbeliever — and defends him as a champion of reason, in a work of intellectual combat that still reads like a brilliant argument delivered at full voice.

You follow Averroes through Cordoba and the Almohad court, his friendship with Ibn Tufayl, his public offices, the envy that curdled into persecution, and the philosophy he built on Aristotle — above all the claim, set out in the Decisive Treatise, that religion and philosophy can live in harmony. But Antun's true subject is the quarrel of his own day: the collision between free inquiry and religious authority, between fanaticism and toleration. His exchange with Muhammad Abduh, the Mufti of Egypt, pushes the book toward a bolder proposal — that reason and faith be given separate spheres and separate authorities, a proposal that still sets the terms of the debate — and that a person's rights belong to him from birth rather than from belief.

This edition brings Antun's Arabic into a literary translation made for readers now: natural, vivid English that carries the drive of his voice, the edge of his polemic and the clarity of his images, faithful to the substance and the tone of the author.

The volume opens with a critical introduction, placed before Antun's text, that leads you into the debate, the people in it and the world that produced it.

A demanding, generous, fearless book about who gets to think freely. Add it to your library.