The Arab chroniclers draw the inert body of Averroes loaded on a mule on the way to Cordoba. He had died three months earlier in Marrakesh. Exactly on December 11, 1198. There he had settled again at the court of the Almohad caliph after bitter disagreements with the religious authority. The family of the venerable Cordovan philosopher requested, perhaps at the express wish of the thinker, that his body be repatriated and buried in the city where he was born. And his body was loaded on one of the saddlebags of the mules. In the other, the chronicler recalls, all his books were listed as a counterweight.

The image of the great Cordovan thinker on the back of a beast of burden has an overwhelming poetic force. And, to some extent, it graphically defines one of the most influential intellectuals in the history of philosophy. We are talking about a total sage. From a scholar who explored wide areas of knowledge, from philosophy to medicine to astronomy and legal sciences. Abu Al Walid Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Muhammad Ibn Rushd has been a key figure in modern thought. He rescued Greek rationalism, especially that of Aristotle, and projected it into the future. And he did so at a time when reason was constrained by the dominant dogmatic framework.

From this point of view, we can venture that Averroes advanced modernity by a few centuries and laid the first seed of the European Renaissance. “He represented the dawn of modernity,” says Andrés Martínez Lorca, professor of Medieval Philosophy and one of the leading scholars of his figure. Because modern was to separate already in the Middle Ages philosophy and religion as two different forms of knowledge. Averroes admitted that religion was the “field of belief” of the majority. On the other hand, in the opinion of the Andalusian scholar, the enlightened people preferred philosophy because it was the way to “worship divinity with the highest part of the human being: reason”.

Averroes was born in Cordoba at the end of an amazing civilization that dazzled Europe and the Mediterranean. The year 2026 marks the 900th anniversary of his birth. His family belonged to a reputed lineage of jurists, perfectly positioned within the declining Almoravid power. His grandfather was chief judge of Cordoba and physician to the Almohad court replacing Ibn Tufayl. And he placed himself at the top of the jurists of Seville, first, and Cordoba, later.

As he advanced in his research on the work of Aristotle, he came into conflict with the conservative ulema, who saw in his rationalist thought a threat to their orthodox postulates. “Averroes made a good number of enemies, especially among the Almoravid traditionalists,” says Pedro Mantas, professor of History of Philosophy at the University of Cordoba. “And in 1194 some accusations of impiety” were made against him, which forced him to go into exile in Lucena.

His systematic and rigorous study of Aristotle’ s thought had a “very important influence on the Latin Middle Ages,” says Mantas. His reflections on faith and reason opened heated theological polemics to the point that Bishop Tempier activated in Paris in 1277 a process to Aristotelianism and expressly forbade the so-called “theses of the double truth”, defended by the Averroists. “Thanks to Averroes, Aristotle became for centuries the fundamental reference in philosophy,” he says. The UCO professor assures that the Andalusian thinker was the “most famous and prolific” commentator of the Stagirite. Thirty-eight of his works are still preserved, covering “practically all the formative levels of his time”.

His most relevant work as a jurist was Bidaya, where he studied the fundamentals of Islamic law and offered keys for the professional to make his decisions in the margins of logic based on the Koran as an indisputable source. He also explored the scientific territory of astronomy, especially through the study of Ptolemy, whose work he commented on in his Epitome to the Almagest, of which only a Hebrew version is known. He made direct observations of the firmament, despite the technical limitations of the twelfth century, and developed a naturalistic conception of science.

As a physician, he evidenced a profound knowledge of Galen’ s teachings and his Kulliyat or Book of the Generalities of Medicine had a powerful influence throughout the European Middle Ages. He comprehensively examined various medical disciplines, from anatomy and physiology to pathology, and significantly advanced the study of the peripheral and central nervous system. In pathology, he formulated that each disease corresponds to a symptom and identified more than 300 drugs.

Averroes is, therefore, a decisive author of medieval philosophy. And yet, his work has been, to a certain extent, silenced in Spanish curricula, especially in secondary education. “Together with Maimonides”, argues Pedro Mantas, “they have been two of the most researched, cited and influential Andalusians in the history of universal thought”, which has not prevented them from remaining “great unknowns for Andalusian students”.

The reason behind this “oblivion” of the two Cordovan philosophers, according to the UCO researcher, lies in the attempt by Franco’s dictatorship to “relegate Arab and Jewish thought”. Neither the transition nor democracy corrected this incomprehensible mismatch fostered by the prevailing national Catholic discourse and continued to “prioritize Latin thought, which many focused on Thomas Aquinas”. In university studies, however, the Franco regime was “somewhat more permissive” with the dissemination of Andalusian philosophy, mainly through the research of Miguel Cruz Hernández.

The two famous Cordovan thinkers ended up knowing the bitterness of exile. Maimonides died in Cairo in 1204, although his body was buried shortly after in Tiberias. Averroes died in Marrakesh. The Arab chroniclers reserved for him an epic mule ride to be buried in his native Cordoba. But where is his grave? At the end of the sixties of the last century, with the expansion of the city outside the city walls, a new neighborhood was built beyond the Marrubial Wall of Almohad origin. In the subsoil of Edisol, tombstones with Arabic inscriptions were found. The historian and Arabist Antonio Arjona ventured before his death in September 2013 that one of the niches could belong to the great Averroes. That hypothesis was never verified. The concrete mixer filled in the huge sinkhole on the foundations of which one of the residential areas of Levante was built. And he buried, perhaps forever, the memory of one of the most distinguished thinkers in the history of philosophy.