Avicenna on theology ibn sina biography

Ibn Sina, known in the west as Avicenna via the Hebrew translation of his name, is one of the most influential thinkers of the Islamic Golden Age.

This article sets out Ibn Sina’s biography, starting with his ancestry, proceeding through his education and his political endeavors, and ending with his death.

Ibn Sina was born in August CE. All of our information about his childhood and adolescence comes from the autobiographical narration he dictated to a pupil.

Indeed, this will be one of the main sources for all further discussion of Ibn Sina’s life, although it is quite clearly an unreliable account, and should be understood as containing only Ibn Sina’s life in the terms in which he would have chosen to describe it.

Ibn Sina’s Cosmopolitan Upbringing

Ibn Sina was born in a large village near Bukhara, known as Kharmaithan, meaning the ‘Land of the Sun’.

His father was from Balkh, given the epithet ‘the glitter