Averroes

Born in Córdoba in 1126, Ibn Rushd trained in law and medicine but spent his life trying to recover what he saw as the true Aristotle, stripped of Neoplatonist distortion. He argued that philosophy wasn't just permitted in Islam but required of certain minds, and that scripture should bend to reason when the two conflicted. His medical work described Parkinson's symptoms for the first time and proposed new theories of stroke; his legal treatise parsed the roots of disagreement between Islamic schools. But his commentaries on Aristotle - translated into Latin and Hebrew - became his collision with history. They sparked a movement called Averroism in Christian Europe, where his idea that all humans share one intellect drew condemnation in 1270 and 1277. He died in Marrakesh in 1198, his legacy larger in the West he never saw than in the Islamic world that produced him.