Ibn Bajja

Ibn Bajja — Latinized as Avempace, fully Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Yahya ibn al-Sa'igh ("son of the goldsmith") — was the earliest major philosopher of the Aristotelian (Peripatetic) tradition in the Muslim West. He was born in Saragossa (Zaragoza), then capital of the Banu Hud taifa kingdom; sources place his birth "some years before" 1085, and the exact year is disputed. Beyond philosophy he was a noted physician, astronomer, mathematician, poet and musician.

When the Almoravids took Saragossa around 1110, Ibn Bajja entered their service. He is attested as vizier (chief minister) to the Almoravid governor Ibn Tifilwit, for whom he composed panegyric verse. After Saragossa fell to the Christian king Alfonso the Battler in 1118, his life became, in the words of one tradition, a long and unsettled pilgrimage across al-Andalus and North Africa. The sources report that he first sought shelter at Xativa (Jativa), and name Almeria, Granada and (less certainly) Seville among his later stops, where the scholar Ibn al-Imam was his disciple. He was reportedly imprisoned more than once.

Philosophically he absorbed and extended al-Farabi, writing on logic, the soul and human perfection; his best-known work, the Tadbir al-mutawahhid (Governance of the Solitary), argues how a thinking individual can flourish within an imperfect society. He died in Ramadan 533 AH / 1139 CE in Fez. Several sources report he was poisoned — a story naming an eggplant and a rival physician's servant — but this remains a reported tradition, not an established fact.