Ibn Al-Nafis Quotes
When hearing something unusual, do not preemptively reject it, for that would be folly. Indeed, horrible things may be true, and familiar and praised things may prove to be lies. Truth is truth unto itself, not because people say it is.
Ibn al-Nafis was one of the great scientists of all time. He analyzed the human heart, lungs, and circulatory system. This quotation is often given by Muslim modernists and reformers to illustrate that Islam at one time was open to new knowledge, dissent, ideas of all kinds. A century later, Islam closed intellectually and later and even today, Muslims are killed for what became heresy. Truth became determined by the Koran and the words of The Prophet only, Christianity and the Church imposed a similar restrictive view of truth using the Bible and Jesus. However, the Reformation and modernity led Christianity to merge and adopt the more modern and scientific view with the exception of some Christian fundamentalists. Islam had the modern view and abandoned it causing the many educated Islamic reformers and modernists of today great difficulty in changing the culture and laws as a whole.
Ibn al-Nafis, 1213-1288, Egyptian Islamic Theologian, Jurist, Philosopher, Scientist & Physician, Sharh’ Ma’na Al Qanun
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He was contrasting the Islamic narrowness of today as compared with Islamic thinking at the height of the intellectual and scientific of 1000 years ago. See {623631}. Islamic modernists like Serageldin are many among the educated Muslims but their views are often drowned out by the violence and extremist statements of the fundamentalists.
Ala-al-Din abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Abi-Hazm al-Qarshi al-Dimashqi (Arabic: علاء الدين أبو الحسن عليّ بن أبي حزم القرشي الدمشقي), known as Ibn al-Nafis (Arabic: ابن النفيس), was an Arab polymath whose areas of work included medicine, surgery, physiology, anatomy, biology, Islamic studies, jurisprudence, and philosophy. He is known for being the first to describe the pulmonary circulation of the blood. The work of Ibn al-Nafis regarding the right sided (pulmonary) circulation pre-dates the later work (1628) of William Harvey's De motu cordis. Both theories attempt to explain circulation. 2nd century Greek physician Galen's theory about the physiology of the circulatory system remained unchallenged until the works of Ibn al-Nafis, for which he has been described as "the father of circulatory physiology".
