Ibn al-Sid al-Batalyawsi

Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh Ibn al-Ṣīd al-Baṭalyawsī, also spelled Ibn Assid or Abenasid (Badajoz, 1052 or 1053-Valencia, 1127) was an Andalusian ulema, famous grammarian and philosopher, noted for his rhetoric. He is the first Western Islamic philosopher whose works have survived.

Biography

He was educated by teachers from Badajoz, in the context of the Aftasí taifa of Badajoz. After the Almoravid conquest of the city of Badajoz, he also lived in Teruel (c. 1110), Toledo, Zaragoza and Valencia, where he died in 1127.

He stood out for the defense of the Toledo poet Abú I al Waqqasi, accused of infidelity when raising the dilemmas between reason and revelation. Ibn al Sid took the poet in his defense, alleging the Eastern tradition of linking science and philosophy, demonstrating only the methodological superiority of the first, in addition to establishing that the second maintains the cohesion of society by determining which philosopher is right.

Philosophical content

His doctrine is neopythagorean, with influences from the neoplatonism of Alfarabi and Avempace. During his life he traveled throughout Al-Andalus visiting the different philosophical schools of the peninsula, he passed through Albarracín, Toledo, Zaragoza and Valencia.

It has an intellectualist concept of God where the idea of a God as pure intelligence stands out, which is the model of all knowledge. Thus the knowledge of things is an approximation to the knowledge that God possesses and to the knowledge of God himself. The human soul, therefore, graduates according to the stages of knowledge, from ignorance to knowledge of God. The degrees of reality are for him, therefore, parallel to the degrees of perfection. The creation for Abenalsid was developed based on emanations of divine knowledge from the absolute unity of the Supreme Being.

Works

• Book of the Pigs (Kitāb al-hadā'iq)
• Book of issues (Kitāb al-masā'il)
• Book of improvisation (Kitāb al-iqtidāb fi sarh adad al-kutāb)
• Notice of the causes of opinion discrepancies in Islam (Al-insāf fi al-tanbīb 'alā' al-asbāb al-mūyiba liijtilāf al-umma)

Additional bibliography

• Peña, Salvador (1988). University of Granada, ed. The linguistic and philological work of Ibn Al-Sid Al-Batalyawsi: theory and method of the Islamic Arab sciences of language and text through a specialist of the 5th century H.-XI-XII C. (Doctoral thesis).