Artists and Scientists during the First Islamic Caliphate who Pretended to be Muslims and Detested Islam

[Starješina]

Similar to Galileo in Europe, there were many skeptics in the old world concerning the teaching of the Abrahamic poisons, and one of these poisons is known as Islam. In fact, I think that Galileo would have suffered far worse at the hands of the Muslims than the Christians. He would either be stoned or decapitated because of his openness to disagreement with religious superstition that halted scientific development. There are still many crazy imams and mufties who teach people that the Earth is flat, even though that fairy tale was disproven by Galileo.

However, the following are many examples of "Muslim" scientists who contributed to the scientific development of the world. Note that I use quotation marks because these guys pretended to be devoted believers in public while forsaking Islam in privacy, due to obvious reasons.

Ibn al-Haytham (AD 965–?)​

In Basra, a person called Ibn al-Haytham was born who would later become known in Europe as Alhazen. He began his career as a civil service worker but switched careers and started carrying out scientific studies in Baghdad and Persia. One day, al-Haytham caught the attention of the counter-caliph in Cairo. When he mentioned that it was possible to dam up the Nile River and provide irrigation for the fields all year around, he was called to Egypt and assigned to the project. With a large team and a lot of devices at his disposal, he went up the Nile River in order to start the project, but when he saw all the impressive old Egyptian buildings along the Nile River, he began having doubts about the whole idea. If not even those people who were capable of creating such buildings were able to build a dam, how could someone like him succeed? Nevertheless, he kept on and found a suitable spot in Aswan, at the site of today’s Aswan Dam. But soon he would realize that this project couldn’t be carried out. Coming back to Cairo without having achieved anything, he was lucky to get away with his life, considering the magnitude of this disaster. After that, he turned to the kind of job typical of many scientists of that time: he translated ancient scripts. Over the years, he completed translations like the whole edition of Euclid and the Almagest by Ptolemy, as well as scripts by other Greek authors. As a result, he became financially independent and was now able to turn to his most favorite field: physics, especially optics.82 While most of the ancient classical, as well as Arabic, physicists were purely theoreticians, Alhazen focused on carrying out experiments—a great novelty at that time. He produced the first glass lens which, interestingly, he only applied in his experiments but apparently never put to use for any practical purpose such as a hand lens or fieldglass. In contrast to Euclid, he discovered that lightbeams traveled from an object into the eye and that it was not a beam radiating from the eye that scanned the object. Using a concave metal mirror, he worked on a certain mathematical problem which is still known today as the Alhazen’s Problem, which he himself solved in a rather roundabout way. But it would not be until the mid-seventeenth century that a more elegant solution was developed by the Dutch Christiaan Huygens. Alhazen also discovered the primary laws of geometrical perspective as a result of light beams expanding in a straight line. As a consequence, from his studies on light beams he entered the field of astronomy. He observed the world of stars in a very rational way which was as physical units that can be understood and calculated. Based on the principle of refraction, he erroneously calculated the atmosphere to be five miles in thickness because he assumed that it had a clear limit and did not consist of gradually thinning air layers. The magnitude of his work was best described by Alexander von Humboldt who referred to the Arabs as the actual founders of physics. Ibn al-Haytham aka Alhazen was their most significant representative of this field, although only parts of his works are preserved. And it was not before long that his scripts were burnt for being against the Qur’an.

Abu Ali ibn Sina (ca. AD 979–1037)​

Under the name Avicenna, Abu Ali ibn Sina became one of the most famous medieval personalities in Europe. In areas of the old “Orient,” he is still celebrated today. Iran, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan compete for the honor of calling him one of their own. There are still many mysteries about Avicenna’s life. The first one has to do with the year of his birth. There are four different numbers regarding his age at death, none of which is clear, not even whether it refers to lunar or solar years, providing scholars with eight dates from which to choose. (According to Lüling, Avicenna most likely reached an age of fifty-eight years. This means that Avicenna would have been born around AD 979.) His family was originally from the Buddhist stronghold Balch83 in today’s Afghanistan. They later moved to the Samanid residence town of Kharmitan nearby Bukhara (Uzbekistan) where Avicenna was born. His father was a high-level civil officer at the Royal Court of the Buddhist Samanid Dynasty.84 Avicenna came from a wealthy family, which ensured that he could be given the best education possible at that time. The study of Porphyrios’s Eisagoge and other classical works was part of the basic education. Naturally, he also studied mathematics, geometry, physics, and medicine, the latter of which he regarded as not being a difficult science. He was an extraordinarily busy worker who, at least according to his own words, also worked through the nights. At the age of twenty-two years, his easy life was over. The Turk tribe called Qara-Khanids destroyed the Samanid Empire and deported the surviving members of the dynastic family. Avicenna (“Distress called upon me to move away”) fled to Urgench, the capital of Choresmia Province (today’s Turkmenistan). At the same time, the Samanid Prince al-Muntasir tried to win back his power in a five-year battle, but eventually failed. Avicenna was his follower, and doors that had been open to him were now closed for political reasons. Avicenna next left Urgench and continued his migration from place to place, accompanied by his longtime teacher and companion Abu Sahl al-Masihi who was a highly prominent, learned man and former personal physician of the Samanids. “Distress called upon me to move away”—this became the trademark of Avicenna’s life. Throughout his whole life, he remained a political refugee from a Buddhist world that came under Islamic pressure. Avicenna moved from Urgench to Nisa, then Abiwerd, and other places, and eventually arrived in Gurgan at the Caspian Sea. His companion didn’t survive this journey. During his travels, he occasionally worked as a physician under a false name. His hopes for employment with Sheikh Qabus in Gurgan remained unfulfilled. For that reason, he moved to the Royal Court of Shams-ad-Daula in the Hamadan Province in Persia. Here he was given a ministerial position. One day, a military revolt directed against him got him into serious trouble. The cause for the revolt most likely had to do with his ministerial essay regarding “the food supply and pay of the army, military slaves, and soldiers, and land tax of estates.” He barely survived this crisis but was put in jail for four months soon afterward for allegedly having conspired with an enemy emir from Esfahan. He used his jail time to produce several works. After a long series of detail-rich imbroglios, he eventually retreated in secret to Esfahan disguised as a monk. We can only speculate about what the true political background for this might have been. During the final period of his life, Avicenna was one of the closest confidents of the emir of Esfahan and accompanied him on his war campaigns as his physician. And it was during one of those war campaigns that Avicenna died in AD 1037. He was fifty-eight years old. The circumstances of his death are recorded: in order to prepare for escape after an expected military defeat, he instructed one of the physicians to mix a reviving medicine. The potion accidently contained an overdose of parsley seeds and opium. Avicenna lived a very intense life. During the day, he was busy working in various bread-and-butter jobs; in the evenings he gave lectures and produced scripts. But that was not all, as one of his students and coworkers, al-Guzgani,85 reported: “When we were finished for the day, singers of all kinds appeared, an all-inclusive wine delight was prepared, and we got on with it.” And: “All of the master’s strengths were very well developed, that especially applied to the most desiring part of the soul, the sex drive. It was the strongest and most overpowering.” It was known nationwide that Avicenna lived a licentious life. Apparently, Avicenna saw his calling as politics; he earned his living as a physician, judge, and scholar. It was the latter profession in which he produced his philosophical work. His life was strongly influenced by the collapse of the Samanid Empire, which took place simultaneously with the collapse of the “eastern-Iranian Renaissance.” Most likely, Avicenna’s roots were Buddhist. He never directly made any statements regarding his roots and painstakingly avoided showing any partisan spirit. He never showed any kind of religious inclination and was wellknown for living an un-Islamic life. This also included the fact that he, most likely, carried out dissections of cadavers, a practice which is banned by the Qur’an. Avicenna refused to accept that a prophet was necessary for conveying divine revelation86 (this idea represents the key concept of the Sumaniyya, or Buddhists), an attitude that was a continuous source of trouble with the Islamic orthodoxy. Avicenna’s legacy contains extensive philosophical and medical text materials, though his works on arts and humanities might be overrated. The Book of Healing and the Canon of Medicine, a systematic work on medicine, were standard works that made him famous in medieval Europe. He was rather “high-spirited” or arrogant, as one would say today, and had a ruthless character. Accusing Rhazes of making concessions to religious viewpoints, Avicenna wrote that Rhazes had better keep to “investigating skin diseases, urine, and bowel movements.” It can be assumed that he edited works of his companion and teacher al-Masihi, and published them under his own name. In the history of science, there was a great leap that took place from Hippocrates to Galen, but the advancing step from Galen to Avicenna was even more significant. For as long as five hundred years, his works had a dominating influence in the field of medicine in the old “Orient” and Europe—until Paracelsus ushered in a new era in medicine in 1530. Avicenna was a remarkable scientist of arts and humanities, and the greatest physician of the medieval epoch. But just like the previously mentioned “Islamic scholars,” he was not a Muslim, either.

Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi (ca. AD 800–?):​

Al-Kindi grew up in the city of Kufa, the cultural center located in Mesopotamia during the enlightened regency of the knowledgehungry ruler al-Mamun in Baghdad. Al-Kindi’s educational life is unknown, but he was appointed the private tutor of one of al-Mamun’s nephews, Mu’tasim, who would later become a ruler. Some of his teaching materials have been preserved (e.g., an essay about why it was possible that the ball-shaped earth could float through space). Another article dealt with calculating methods by using “Indian numbers.” This is exactly the number system which we refer to as “Arabic numbers.” This system, most certainly, was derived from India and made it to Europe through Arabic works. Al-Kindi tried to explain the phenomenon of high tide and low tide by the occurrence of frictional heat that resulted from the moon’s rotation. In another work, he attempted to forge logical links to Qur’anic statements (e.g., the one in which stars and trees throw themselves at God’s feet and pray). In these statements, al-Kindi sees the principle of absolute conformity with a natural law—despite the fact that he attributes to the stars the ability to see and hear. His work on “cause and effect” he dedicated to Mamun. By doing so, he put himself in sharp contrast to one of the main Qur’anic schools of thought, which strictly rejects the idea of causality and replaces it with God’s will. Al-Kindi’s approach was based on ideas by Aristotle and Ptolemy and flavored by ancient “Oriental” traditions; he seemed to have been particularly close to old-Babylonian star worshippers. Al-Kindi’s legacy contains more than two hundred works. In some places in his texts, he appears confused and his ideas half-baked, but he always propagates free and independent thinking as the central issue. He refers to himself by using the foreign term of “philosopher” and keeps on pointing out the importance of recognizing truth, regardless of its origin. He was the first in a series of Arabic philosophers. His way of thinking represents the exact opposite of traditional Qur’anic teachings.

Muhammad ibn Zakariya ar-Razi (865–925)​

One important Arabic medical authority started his career as lute player: Muhammad ibn Zakariya ar-Razi, born in Rajj, today’s Tehran. Only a little is known about his life (e.g., he was in charge of hospitals in Baghdad and Rajj, and was also a friend of the local emir al-Mansur ibn Ishaq). He left an extensive legacy, however, in the form of specialized literature; ar-Razi was the greatest clinician of the Arab world and has been well-known, especially in Europe, as Rhazes. He dedicated one of his medical encyclopedias to his patron Mansur. The Latin translation of its ninth chapter, which became very popular in Europe, is Liber Nonus Almansurus. It contained cures that were grouped according to individual diseases from head to toe, and was even available in some common European languages. Another ar-Razi work that became very famous in Europe dealt with measles and smallpox. This work was still being published even in the eighteenth century in England. When he died in AD 925, ar-Razi had left a tremendous number of Greek excerpts about clinical cases, to which he had added his observations and experiences. This legacy was later systemized by students and resulted in the work titled Liber Continens, which was published in AD 1486. It filled two large tomes. As was common for every famous physician at that time, Rhazes, too, had great philosophical knowledge, as medical understanding was largely derived from philosophy. He was very familiar with Greek philosophers like Hippocrates79 and Galen.80 Rhazes showed that he largely was a free thinker, but he never introduced innovations without paying respect to the great Galen: “Indeed, it was painful to me to stand up against the one who, of all humans, showered me with the largest number of charities, who was the most helpful one to me, by whom I was guided, the one I followed step-by-step. But the field of medicine is a philosophy that doesn’t tolerate any standstill.” While Galen was of the opinion that the soul depended on the condition of the body, Rhazes said that the soul’s condition actually decided the condition of the body. As a practical consequence, he suggested to physicians that they should always be encouraging to their patients even if they weren’t sure regarding the exact diagnosis. Ar-Razi also went his own way when it came to philosophy. Inspired by Democritus, he assumed that matter was atomic in nature (earth, fire, air, and water). Besides that, he viewed God, the world’s soul, as the absolute order in space and time; to him, the cosmos was apparently multidimensional. The creator of the Bible and the Qur’an was only appointed to the task but not really almighty. Rhazes viewed prophets as necessary connecting links between God and men, but excluded the “three criminals Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad”81 from this idea because they had only sowed the seeds of discord. His “imam” (he used exactly this term) was Socrates. Ar-Razi’s identification as a Muslim has been the most natural thing, but can we really assume that a Muslim would talk like this? During his final years, Rhazes lost his eyesight; he died in AD 925.

Al-Farabi (AD 890–950)​

Most of the Arabic scholars were also physicians, either in their main profession or in a side job. Al-Farabi was “only” a scientist—he mainly interpreted texts of Aristotle and other philosophers by adding his own versions to them. He purposely separated the field of medicine from philosophy because its purpose was to cause a physical reaction in the body but didn’t have anything to do with finding truth. “Al-Farabi” simply means “the one from Farab,” a city in today’s Kazakhstan where he was born in AD 890. By his physical appearance, Farabi was most likely an ethnic Kazakh. It is said that throughout his whole life, he neglected his external appearance and always wore a shabby Kazakh-style caftan. Little is known about his childhood. We only know that when he was a young boy, he left for the Persian village of Harran and then moved on further to Baghdad. In Baghdad, several Christian teachers took care of him. As it turned out, he spent most of his time in Baghdad; during his final years, he lived in Aleppo, Syria, at the Court of the emir Saif al-Daula. Right before his death, Farabi traveled to Cairo. He died upon his return to Syria. The Islamic clergy made a point of not attending his funeral. And there were certainly reasons for that: although Farabi always tried to find a balance between philosophy and religion, he taught many things of which the imams could hardly approve. But he mainly worked on his interpretations of Aristotle. He portrayed the world as a unity: its origin is God but not in the sense of his being its creator, as viewed by the Qur’an or the Bible, but as the impersonal source of its being. It is the principle source from which things flow or pour forth, the so-called emanation. It is matter that forms the lowest level of the hierarchy, and it is also the level in which the human being is involved. The human being can only reach higher-level worlds by the process of thinking, mystical contemplation, or death. The foremost task of men is to become one with the Universal Intellect by understanding the world and the universe. But only few people can reach this kind of happiness—for the others, there is religion. Hence, Farabi viewed religion as an artificial product but as one that is necessary for the vast majority of people. Based on this thinking, he created the concept of an Ideal Nation. Similarly to Plato, he called for a philosopher-king who should, however, have a prophet by his side, in order to provide instructions to the less-reasonable common people. Despite the fact that his philosophy was antireligious, Farabi still had in mind that clergymen should influence the illiterate masses in their day-to-day lives. In contrast to others, al-Farabi was never in the spotlight but rather preferred to spend his time at the pond in the garden.

Hunayn ibn Ishaq (AD 808–873)​

Originally from al-Hira in southern Mesopotamia, Ishaq was born the son of a pharmacist. His goal was to become a medical doctor, and for that reason he moved to Baghdad. There, he attended the lectures of Yuhanna ibn Masawayh. Yuhanna was a Syrian Christian, just like Hunayn, and also the private physician of the caliph. Customary teaching materials included works by Greek authors, especially those works produced by the famous physician Galen of Pergamon. For some reason (he was allegedly too cheeky), Hunayn was expelled from attending the lectures. He left and started a journey, traveling from one city to another. He probably also made it to Byzantium. Six years later, he returned to Baghdad and started translating standard scientific works of the classical world of the Romans and Greeks into Arabic or into the language his client preferred. He was quite proficient in classical languages, but also in all of the commonly used languages of the region. Due to his medical education, he was qualified to produce field-specific translations, but his spectrum of knowledge included every scientific field that was known back then. One of his works he extended to his former teacher, Ibn Masawayh, without mentioning himself as author. “The one who produced this work must have had support of the Holy Spirit,” Masawayh is said to have called out, deeply impressed. Hunayn became such a busy man that he would soon teach his son and his nephew how to translate standard texts, while he kept dealing with the scientific part of the job. This included the initial step of searching for old handwritten scripts. A large number of incomplete works were available that consisted of fragments written in various languages or by different copyists. When Hunayn had collected a sufficient number of items, he began comparing them. He was wary of the fact that handwritten products could always contain mistakes and errors: misspellings, erroneous translations, and forgeries. Based on these comparisons, he then produced the most reliable translations possible. He also wrote a catalogue on these translations (the catalogue was just found in 1918). He had the habit of renaming the old gods that were mentioned in the texts, calling them either the One God, or naming them after angels or saints. In contrast to other authors, he was not satisfied with the usage of technical terms in Greek, and therefore, he created Arabic words for them. He would also make sure to order extra heavy paper from Samarkand, a region where the technique to produce Chinese paper was known. At that time, his works were already paid for in silver. Hunayn ibn Ishaq was what today would be called a scientific publisher and editor. When he died in AD 873, he left a significant legacy in the form of works by authors of the classical-ancient world. He was a great Arabic scientist, but not a Muslim one.

Thabit ibn Qurra, (AD 834–901?)​

“Who were the ones who built the harbors and canals, who spread the secret sciences? Who were the ones, to whom Deity was revealed, to whom oracles were given, and to whom future things were taught, if it had not been to the wise ones among the pagans? They are the ones who have studied all that, who have explained the healing of the souls and have spread the word of their salvation. They have also studied the curing of the body, and they have filled the world with wisdom, the most important virtue of all.” The above lines were written by someone who was a pagan himself—the Sabean76 Thabit ibn Qurra, in Harran, in today’s eastern Turkey. And he was a firm-believing pagan. One time, when he discussed the emerging new Islamic religion with some of its followers, they emphasized the omnipotence of God, and he asked back: “Can your God also bring about that five times five is not twenty-five?” To him, this newfangled God had, if anything, omnipotence over creatures, but not over Creation itself. He saw God himself as a creature, an understanding rooted in the old-Babylonian star-cult and influenced by classical-Greek thought. The Sabeans revered and worshipped wise men of the past as prophets, among which there were Greek philosophers as well.77 One slogan stated: “Plato said: ‘The one who knows his own nature becomes divine.’”78 Passing through the city of Harran, a personality of high social status noticed this well-educated Sabean and took him back to Baghdad. There, Thabit produced scientific works for this would-be scientist, under whose name these works were published. In addition, Thabit became some kind of freelance employee in Hunayn’s publishing company, for whom he answered astronomical questions. Later, he was admitted to the circle of Royal Court Astronomers, and became confidant and close friend of ruler al-Mutatid. All of the important scientists and philosophers, without exception, had been at least temporarily appointed to one of the royal courts or that of a local emir. Back then, this was the only way to have a career. Thabit was perfectly fluent in Greek and dealt with issues in the fields of philosophy, mathematics, and medicine. Among other books, he produced a collection of questions that a physician should ask his patient. Also, he was of the opinion that there were actually four people who were behind the name “Hippocrates.” As a Sabean, however, Thabit’s strong point was the field of astronomy. He was especially intrigued by the fact that the lengths of each individual year slightly differed. Following Ptolemy’s system, he assumed that the spheres of fixed stars performed slight movements, the so-called trepidation. This concept was even picked up by Copernicus. Thabit is also mentioned by the poet Wolfram von Eschenbach as Thebit in the major medieval German romance Parzival.

Ibn Rushd (AD 1126–1198)​

We are now leaving the easternmost area of the Arabic Empire for the westernmost region called “al Gharb”—that is, Andalusia, southern Spain. There, Ibn Rushd was born in Cordoba. As Averroes, he became a household name at European universities; in the Arabian world, he remained unnoticed. But his great fame made him known there in the modern age only. He received the best education available back then, which as we know, included philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and therapeutics, and, as he was a member of the judiciary guild, he also studied law. In AD 1148, the Almohad Berber Dynasty conquered Andalusia under the command of Caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf. In AD 1153, Ibn Rushd was called to the ruler’s residence in Marrakesh. Though worried about the meeting, Ibn Rushd followed the ruler’s call. He was introduced to court by Ibn Tufayl, who was also quite well-known in Europe as the author of the philosophical novel The Natural Man, which tells the story of people who get stranded on an unpopulated island in the ocean and, there, come to realize and understand the world as a result of observation and rationalization.89 Subsequently, Ibn Rushd began his job as judge (qadi) in Seville and Cordoba, but his main focus remained on his philosophical work. He was particularly passionate about challenging the teachings by al-Ghazali because, in his opinion, they were destroying philosophy as well as Islam. In 1195, destiny struck: he had been a thorn in the imams’ flesh for quite some time and now the imams eventually incited the public and forced the ruler to formally take proceedings against him. The tribunal’s answer was “no” regarding Ibn Rushd’s orthodoxy. His books were publicly burned, and the whole of philosophy was declared forbidden by edict. Rushd himself was banned from Cordoba and was denied any teaching activities. He died three years later in exile. It is no surprise that there is almost nothing written in Arabic about Ibn Rushd. Information about him appeared in Hebrew translations. Even Averroes often used to write in the Arabic language by using Hebrew letters. It was a kind of insider language that he used, which indicates the level of intolerance he experienced in his surroundings. Rushd’s idea about jurisprudence had already been that of a passed epoch. While the Qadi (Judge) Ibn Rushd searched for judiciary principles in general terms, the administration of justice in Spain began changing to one based on precedent cases from the life of the Prophet. In the increasingly Islamic Empire, the fields of jurisprudence, philosophy, and science were declining and eventually spiraling toward their end. North of the Mediterranean, however, his statements were fiercely discussed; Thomas of Aquinas spared no effort in proving Averroes wrong. On one side, Averroes was hailed, but he was also mocked for his belief in authority. On one hand, he defended the Qur’an because, in his opinion, it demanded rational research, but on the other hand, he called for its reinterpretation whenever statements were in contradiction to scientific evidence. The right to carry out this task could only be in the hands of educated personalities. The common people, he believed, were incapable of carrying out logical argumentation and had to keep to drawing analogies regarding the revelation—only philosophers were capable of getting to the core of things. He must have viewed himself as a Muslim, but his contemporaries saw him very differently—and that was what sealed his fate. The age of independent thinkers in Arabic intellectual history ended with Ibn Rushd.

al-Biruni (AD 976–1048)​

Regarding the fields of nonmedical sciences, today’s researchers are inclined to give yet another Uzbek even greater recognition than Avicenna: al-Biruni. In Europe, he remained rather unknown. That may have been due to the fact that there was no biography of him available for a long time. He was a contemporary and countryman of the slightly younger Avicenna. The two met as well but never developed a friendship—something that was apparently difficult to achieve with Avicenna. Biruni was born in Kath, south of the Aral Sea, and came from a humble background. He owed his career to a local dynastic family that admitted him into their family and made available to him the best education possible. At the age of sixteen years, he carried out a geographic calculation of the position of his hometown and, also at a young age, he created a half globe with the northern hemisphere.87 For political reasons, Biruni had to leave his hometown in AD 995, presumably for the same reasons for which Avicenna was forced to flee. Without taking his research devices, he moved to Rajj, nowadays Tehran. There, he met an astronomer who was busy building an instrument that measured the position of the sun. Biruni sent a letter to an astronomer in Baghdad, suggesting carrying out simultaneous measurements on the expected lunar eclipse in AD 997. This would give the distance angle of two positions. After that, he temporarily moved to Gurgan at the Caspian Sea where he spent time together with Avicenna. Soon after, Biruni was appointed to the Royal Court of Urgench. But the city was captured by an enemy, Prince Masud, who allegedly deported Biruni to Ghazna in today’s Afghanistan. But what probably really happened, however, was that Biruni was part of a ransom payment. Ghazna was a Hindu stronghold and Prince Masud was very interested in sciences.88 Al-Biruni had now a new supporter. He attributed the Masudic Canon, which was the largest astronomical encyclopedia of the medieval times, to his name. Another duty was to accompany his ruler on numerous war campaigns, which brought him all the way to India. From this trip resulted his unique work about the cultural history of India: Verification of What Is Said about India. In order to understand Indian mathematics and astronomy, he learned Sanskrit. All in all, he reported very sensitively about Indian culture. It was something that came naturally to him as he, just like Avicenna, had a Buddhist background. Biruni was the only one who, at least to some extent, had the intellectual capabilities to challenge the Aristotlean system. He was astronomer, physicist, geographer, and philosopher—but, in contrast to all the others previously mentioned—he was not a medical doctor. And he was no Muslim either. He died while preparing an essay on a legal problem.

Some more examples of skeptics and thinkers.

1. Umer khayyam: (Persian mathemation and poet - wrote several poems openly and harshly critising islam)
2. Zakariya razi: (Persian physician - wrote two books critising religion and prophet hood)
3. Ibn Sina: (philosopher and scientist) Stated late in his life that he was critical of Islam but couldn't say it bcuz of muslim rulers at the time. Denied prohethood and afterlife
4. Ferdousi: in shahnameh called the Islamic conquests of Iran "one of the most tragic events in the history of Iran" and crirised religion, desired to preserve Iranian culture and was against Arab colonization
5. Ibn rushd : (critisised theologians for using their own Interpretations of scripture to answer questions that should have been left to philosophers
6. AL-maari: (Arab poet) critisised dogmatism and superstition in Islam. Called hajj a pagans journey
7. Abu Isa AL warraq : (Arab scholar) challenged revealed religion and rejected prohethood
8. Ibn AL rwandi : (writer) was an Atheist