High Middle Ages · Africa · Culture

1166

Ibn Rushd appointed qadi of Seville

1166

The Almohad caliph named the young Cordoban philosopher Abu al-Walid ibn Rushd - known to Latin Europe as Averroes - chief judge of Seville, beginning a remarkable dual career in Islamic jurisprudence and Aristotelian commentary that would reshape both Muslim and Christian intellectual life. His uncompromising insistence that philosophical reason and divine revelation could never truly contradict each other made him the most controversial thinker of the twelfth century.