A1,000-year chain of thinkers

摘要

Science, and indeed thought, at the dawn of the second Christian millennium blossomed in the Arabic world. Abdulla ibn Sina (980-1037) - known to the west as Avicenna - opens the millennium with his first philosophical work in 1001. Over the next 30 years, he produced the five books of the Qanun, which became the best-known and most respected medical treatise up to the seventeenth century, translated and reprinted in more than 80 versions. The first 200 years of the millennium are dominated by eclectic Arab thinkers, scientists as much as elegant writers and poets, such as Omar Khayyam (1050-1126), followed by Averroes (1126-98), as the philosopher and physician ibn Rushd is known to the infidels.