Avicenna And Medieval Muslim Philosophy Knowledge Products Production, Library Edition Book

An extremely competently produced, written, and executed audiobook. It felt like listening to a documentary, and could have very easily been made into one.

The introduction was very well done, but I was surprised by how little Averroes was discussed (since his name is the most common one I've run across in terms of Islamic philosophy). The section on Avicenna was humbling (because of how much of a genius polymath he was) and in another way it was humbling to know that essentially all of the Modernist Christian Apologetic points (arguing starting from a first cause, etc.) seem to come from him. The next question is how influenced by Avicenna was Aquinas? It's curious that they have similar arguments and wrote around the same time.

I loved the transition from the cerebral Avicenna to the nuanced fideist (sufi) Al-Ghazali. It was interesting to know that there's as wide a gap within Islam as there is within Catholicism, with Aquinas and St. Francis being rough Christian equivalents to Avicenna and Al-Ghazali respectively.

I was surprised by the seeming universalism of Al-Farabi, by the "philosophy is the source of all truth" that Avicenna promulgated, and by the very premodern (or perhaps even postmodern) questioning of Al-Ghazali who rejected philosophy as a way to ultimate truth (not unlike Luther) and who as a result embraced mysticism and revelation as the only means of ultimate truth (and last but not least, the Erasmus-esq Averroes). I found interesting the point made by Al-Ghazali about both those who seek mysticism and those who seek pure reason as means of solidifying their faith/worldview as both being rejections of traditional authority (scripture, tradition, church fathers/hadith, etc.), specifically: "They have failed to see that a change from one kind of intellectual bondage to another is only a self-deception, a stupidity."