Ibu-e-Sina, or Avicenna as he is known in Europe, was the most famous in a series of Muslim physician–philosophers who preserved Greco-Roman knowledge and wisdom during the Dark Ages which followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. Having enriched it with their own observations and interpretations, they then made it available again five centuries later to Western Civilisation at the coming of the Renaissance.

Avicenna was born at Afshana near Bokhara in Persia in AD 980. His father was a high ranking civil servant and his mother a Tadzhik woman called Sitara. Avicenna was an infant prodigy who was able to recite the Koran from memory by the age of 10, and who, by the time he was appointed physician to the Amir of Bokhara at the age of 17, had not only learned many languages, including Greek, Latin, Moorish and Arabic, but had also mastered a wide range of disciplines, including mathematics, physics, metaphysics, astrology, geology, chemistry, alchemy, anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, toxicology and medicine, as well as philosophy, logic, and ethics. He must have been an insufferably cocky young man because at the age of 16 he wrote: “Next I desired to study medicine and proceeded to read all the books that had been written on the subject. Medicine is not a difficult science and naturally I excelled in it in a very short time so that qualified physicians began to read medicine with me.” But his industry was phenomenal and his intellectual curiosity, tolerance, and imagination were such that he came to be regarded as one of the most profound thinkers of all time.

Besides being a physician …