- Lived:
- c. 801–873 CE · Kufa, Basra, and Baghdad, at the height of the Abbasid caliphate
- Tradition:
- The founder of falsafa — Greek-inspired philosophy in Arabic; "the Philosopher of the Arabs"
- The Big Idea:
- Truth has no passport. Wisdom from foreign nations and past ages does not threaten a civilization's faith — it completes it, and we should be ashamed only of refusing it.
- In their words:
- "We ought not be ashamed of appreciating the truth, and of acquiring it wherever it comes from, even if it comes from races distant and nations different from us."
- If you remember one thing:
- One man in ninth-century Baghdad argued Greek philosophy through the gates of a scriptural civilization — and along the way produced an argument for God's existence that people are still debating on stages today, and invented the technique that breaks secret codes.