[ad_1]
Ibn Rushd’s personality has always been an imaginative tributary of numerous literary and critical works, given his troubles in the history of Islamic philosophy. Borges was based on this character in his story “The investigation of Ibn Rushd”, James Joyce in “Ulysses”, Salman Rushdie in “Two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights”, and Abdel-Fattah Kilito in his book “From the balcony from Ibn Rushd “. And here is Gilbert Sinoye, presenting him in “Ibn Rushd or Katib al-Shaitan” (1989 – recently published in Arabic by “Al-Mashurat al-Jamal – translated by Shakir Nasr al-Din), in continuation of his work on figures historical and controversial such as Ibn Sina, Jesus, Muhammad Ali Pasha and Gamal Abdel Nasser, mixed Historical document with imagined narratives.
In this novel, times and consciences are superimposed on a cloth that extends to Ibn Rushd’s time in his life and after his death, closing the arc on the Tenus era between the lights of rationalism and the darkness of the Middle Ages, and how European static thought was disturbed by his explanations of Aristotle and Plato’s philosophy. The narrative spaces conflict with the many faces of Ibn Rushd in his own mirror first, and in the mirror of others: “I am one of the people of sight, not of the people of blasphemy. A man of knowledge, not a seller of illusions. I am a believer and not an unfaithful one ”. A hard-line jurist would describe him as “the devil’s writer,” in a near-death trial after he was accused of writing a blasphemous manuscript, but the Córdoba judge will declare his innocence of the charge.
Ibn Rushd, or “Avirus” according to its Latin name? We will find the two images together, but from two opposite locations. This is due to the fact that the former lived difficult struggles in his attempts to raise his reason alone in front of the occult jurists, which made him pay a high tax by exiling him to a town south of Córdoba and burning his books by order of the caliph Al-Mansur, while “Averus” will become a European icon as a bridge between two cultures. Thus, Islam lost its lights, a great thinker, and gave gifts to the West. The philosopher, who was buried in Marrakech, did not rest long in the land of his ancestors. Three months after his burial, his body was taken from the tomb, taken to Córdoba and there buried a second time. Three people attended his funeral, “a jurist, a copyist and Ibn Arabi.” The Alexandrian-born French novelist, Gilbert Sinoye, evokes figures who left their mark on Ibn Rushd’s thinking such as Ibn Arabi, Ibn Tufail, Ibn Zuhr, and Ibn Maimoun. Traveling treasures of knowledge sharpened his personality in stages, in medicine, astronomy, philosophy and jurisprudence, in dialogues, letters and debates that placed him elsewhere.
More than 100 years after the death of Ibn Rushd, Dante will reserve a place for him in the “Divine Comedy”, but at the gates of Hell, and then he will regain his place in Europe centuries later. The author of “The Silence of the Gods” compiles many quotes from Ibn Rushd’s opponents, disciples and teachers, according to the path of his manuscripts, books and conversations, alternating with his biography such as his relationship with his father, who was a jurist and judge , and his reluctance to marry his cousin Sarah, as well as the first love affair he had with the owner of a library. Especially called “Lubna”. He was twenty-five years old when he was inspired by this charming forty-something who gave him the treasures of her precious manuscripts and books, before his body gave him to discover for the first time the meaning of pleasure: “Love is a need that can hardly be suppressed. , dissolving so much in the other that one of us becomes the other ”. The beginning and the end of my love.
In the course of his trial, Ibn Rushd will deny his connection to a manuscript that incites atheism and blasphemy, some of which accused him of being its author, but he will avoid answering problematic questions, especially regarding the content of his book, “Separating the article and determining between Sharia, wisdom and communication”, stressing that “it is not necessary to look at Sharia it is only a truth that the mind can interpret. The lawsuits against this philosopher will not disappear century after century, as the descendants of Al-Ghazali still circulate the books of Ibn Rushd as a cross-accusation. On the fiftieth anniversary of his absence, one of the Sevillian jurists will tell his disciples: “Above the sky of the mind there is another higher and more sacred sky, it is the sky of the Divine Transfiguration. Then he concluded by saying: Damn the memory of Ibn Rushd.
European static thought interrupted his explanations of the philosophy of Aristotle and Plato
And the crowd chanted the curse. And the sun was covered. “As if this novel were a story of the curse that befell Ibn Rushd and that still haunts him to this day, and a narrative test to deconstruct the historical document and put it in the breath of the imagination, and on the other side is the proof of the novelist’s tools to work on questions of philosophy and load them with doses of life with the intention of breaking the intensity of ideas and designing them in another way. Without ignoring the main focus of the character of fiction, which is “freedom of thought.” This freedom, which allowed our philosopher to wander among the various sciences and formulate a high rationality, has always collided with the opposing fatwas, both of the mosque and of the church. freedom of thought was denied to his opponents “novelists.” Probably, at some point, we will forget that we are reading a pure novel, despite the narrator’s attempts to reinforce it with collater stories ales as his correspondence with his son, with Maimonides, Sarah’s death, and before his Lubna, to relive his stillness here and there and his glide toward information rather than his concern with narrative rhythm. Here we are drowning in the meaning of “the science of theology” and its banners, “Perhaps I should write a science of speech against.” Science of alternative discourse, because I cannot imagine the demolition of a building without adding another building. A spiraling succession in the construction of narrative time returns us to the Church’s position towards Ibn Rushd and his ilk, 300 years after his death, by issuing a decree prohibiting the printing of books before they are controlled by the Church, and condemning those who say that the soul is mortal and considering it a rogue “and the first among them are the Assafs.” Then, the narrator concludes the facts of the novel in the year of Ibn Rushd’s death: “I learned that my books and manuscripts were taken from the libraries of Marrakech, Fez, Córdoba and Seville, to be burned in public squares. I imagine myself with the horror of my books, all those hours of work, times of melting my soul and the souls of those who preceded me and those who taught me, and I died and became the dust of knowledge and insult ”.
Subscribe to «News» on YouTube here
