Note 155 — Chapter VIII · FREETHOUGHT UNDER ISLAM1

Very different was the part played by Averroës (Ibn Roshd), the most famous of all Moslem thinkers, because the most far-reaching in his influence on European thought. For the Middle Ages he was pre-eminently the expounder of Aristotle, and it is as setting forth, in that capacity, the pantheistic doctrine which affirms the eternity of the material universe and makes the individual soul emanate from and return to the soul of all, that he becomes important alike in Moslem and Christian thought. Diverging from the asceticism and mysticism of Avempace and Abubacer, and strenuously opposing the anti-rationalism of Al Gazzali, against whose chief treatise he penned his own Destruction of the Destruction of the Philosophers, Averroës is the least mystical and the most rational of the Arab thinkers.155 At nearly all vital points he oppugns the religious view of things, denying bodily resurrection, which he treats (here following all his predecessors in heretical Arab philosophy) as a vulgar fable;156 and making some approach to a scientific treatment of the problem of “Freewill” as against, on the one hand, the ethic-destroying doctrine of the Motecallemîn, who made God’s will the sole standard of right, and affirmed predestination (Jabarism); and against, on the other hand, the anti-determinism of the Kadarites.157 Even in his politics he was original; and in his paraphrase of Plato’s Republic he has said a notable word for women, pointing out how small an opening is offered for their faculties in Moslem society.158 Of all tyrannies, he boldly declared, the worst is that of priests.