Ibn Sina The Man Who Knew Everything

In his final week, Ibn Sina said: “I prefer a short life with width to a narrow one with length.” The Persian polymath died aged 57 but during those years he was a doctor, philosopher, mathematician, grammarian, astronomer, politician, poet and traveller. Ibn Sina lived a tumultuous life full of intrigues, daring escapes, great power and dramatic falls – all the time working on the deepest problems of philosophy while still engaging in a notorious social life and indulging a voracious sexual appetite. Lying on his death bed, Ibn Sina could look back and see that he had lived life on his own terms.

He was born in August 980 in a village near Bukhara, Central Asia, to an important local family and spent his childhood and youth in the city. Bukhara was a major staging post on the Silk