The Sage of al-Andalus

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 1, “The Sage of al-Andalus,” sketches a portrait of Ibn Firnās’s personality, and his social and intellectual contexts, which has come down to us thanks to the Arabic sources. It introduces the earliest and most substantive account of Ibn Firnās’s career, the Arabic chronicle compiled by the eleventh-century Córdoban court historian Ibn Ḥayyān (d. 1076), its discovery by Arabists, subsequent loss to scholars, and eventual rediscovery. The chapter then discusses the portrait of Ibn Firnās as related in the chronicle’s sources. These sources characterize Ibn Firnās as a polymath who had mastered both ancient and modern fields of knowledge. It sets the polymath’s personality and reputation into a broad historical context of early Islamic intellectual culture.