Person profile
Ibn Sina / Avicenna
أبو علي الحسين بن عبد الله بن سينا
Ibn Sina was not mainly a performer or composer, but he is important for understanding the place of music within medieval Arabic scientific thought. In Musicatea, he should be presented as a polymath who located music inside a broader structure of mathematical, natural, and philosophical knowledge.
- c. 980–1037Years/date
- Bukhara / IranPlace
- PersonType
Role and context
Philosopher, physician, polymath, and scientific encyclopedist whose work placed music within the mathematical sciences
Ibn Sina represents the encyclopedic development of Arabic-Islamic sciences, where music appears within the mathematical sciences.
This profile is linked to The Abbasid Era and the Flourishing of Music and Theory within the Arabic music history timeline.
Biography and life
Ibn Sina was born near Bukhara, educated in the Samanid intellectual environment, and gained early access to the Samanid library. He developed early mastery in philosophy, medicine, and the sciences, then worked as a physician, court adviser, and administrator, moving across political centers after the decline of the Samanids, and died in Hamadan in 1037. In the Musicatea context, his importance is that music appears in his encyclopedic scientific works as part of the mathematical sciences.
Contributions
- Systematized philosophy, medicine, logic, natural science, and metaphysics in a broad encyclopedic project.
- His importance for music history comes from placing music within the mathematical sciences.
- The mathematical section of The Cure includes music and draws on earlier harmonic theory.
- His works shaped Islamic philosophy and Latin medieval scholarship; the Canon of Medicine remained influential for centuries.
Works or related materials
- Kitāb al-Shifāʾ / The Cure — Author
A philosophical and scientific encyclopedia whose mathematical section includes music.
- al-Qānūn fī al-Ṭibb / Canon of Medicine — Author
His most famous medical work.
- al-Najāt — Author
A philosophical summary useful for his general intellectual profile.
- Dānishnāmah-yi ʿAlāʾī — Author
A Persian philosophical encyclopedia connected to his wider scientific legacy.