The World That Surrounded Them

Mahdawiyyah, Part 24 · The Architecture of Guidance, Part 8 · The Brothers of Baghdad, Part 4 of 4 The philosopher whose textbook was taught in Paris six hundred years later was writing it under the same shelter as the men this arc has followed. Ibn Sina — Avicenna — was an exact contemporary of the brothers, dying the year after Sayyed al-Murtada. When his Samanid homeland broke apart, he found shelter in a cousin branch of the same Shia world: a Daylamite amir in Isfahan, kin to the Buyid house that protected Baghdad. There he finished the Canon of Medicine, taught in Paris, Bologna and Padua for centuries afterwards. Two rooms of one house, not two separate worlds. That house was crowded. A Mu'tazilite judge in Rayy wrote a twenty-volume encyclopaedia against the Imamate; Sayyed al-Murtada answered it, volume for volume, in al-Shafi — the Healer. A rising school of Sunni theology, born from one teacher's public break over an unanswerable question, was becoming the age's new orthodoxy. Eleven years after his death, the Seljuq conquest burned his library to ash. When the fire finally came, what actually survived it? What the evening covers Two rooms of one house. How Ibn Sina's philosophy and Sayyed al-Murtada's theology moved through the same manuscripts and the same courts. A twenty-volume duel. The Mu'tazilite encyclopaedia that provoked al-Shafi fi al-Imama, and why Sayyed al-Murtada chose to answer it rather than refuse it. The question that broke a school. The exchange that ended one theologian's career as a rationalist and launched Sunni Islam's dominant theological school. The fire of 447 AH. What the Seljuq conquest destroyed — and why it could not destroy what had already been given away.

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