The Physician: Who the Heck is Ibn Sina?

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Ben Kingsley, Ibn Sina, Medieval Middle East, Medieval Persia, Noah Gordon, The Physician

Ok, after my last post about Stonewall, I’ve recovered enough to get back to The Physician (2013, dir. Philip Stölzl, based on the novel by Noah Gordon). Our protagonist, the anachronistically-named Rob Cole (Tom Payne) has gotten himself to Isfahan in Persia because he wants to study medicine with Ibn Sina (Ben Kingsley), whom he’s been told is the greatest physician in the world. He discovers that Ibn Sina maintains a hospital in the city where he teaches students and treats patients, up to and including the Shah Ala ad-Daula (Olivier Martinez). So who was Ibn Sina?

Ibn Sina

Abu ʿAli al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd Allah ibn Al-Hasan ibn Ali ibn Sina (d.1037) was one of the giants of medieval Islamic culture. (Incidentally, his name translates to “Father of Ali, Husayn son of Abdullah son of Hasan son of Ali son of Sina” so ‘ibn Sina’ isn’t his ‘last name’ in the Western sense; instead it’s a patronymic, sort of like ‘Lars’ son’, my last name.)

He was born in the Central Asian town of Bukhara in modern Uzbekistan around 980 and enjoyed a remarkably cosmopolitan education, studying mathematics, philosophy, medicine, and fiqh (Islamic legal scholarship). Over the course of his life he worked as a physician, scholar, and eventually advisor to Ala ad-Daula, the ruler of Isfahan. Although known as a great intellectual and physician, he was also known to be arrogant, and extremely fond of both wine and slave girls. Later in life he suffered from colic, which in this case was probably either gallstones or kidney stones. The condition eventually killed him in 1037, perhaps due to a serious blockage or infection of the affected organ.

A 13th century drawing of Ibn Sina

However, his true importance lies in his writings. He wrote at least 450 works, around half of which still survive. His two greatest works were medical treatises, but more than a quarter of his writings dealt with philosophy. He wrote on psychology, metaphysics, epistemology, logic, mathematics, physics, alchemy, astronomy, kalam (Islamic theology), music, and poetry. In particular, he was profoundly influenced by the writings of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, whose works had continued to circulate in the Arabic world even though they had mostly been lost to Western Europe.

He was certainly celebrated for his medical knowledge; he was the first to diagnose meningitis, for example, and his Canon became one of the foundational texts for pharmacology in the medieval period. But it is his impact on philosophy that is probably his greatest legacy. He is generally considered the greatest Muslim philosopher, and he applied his understanding of Aristotle to analyzing and interpreting the Koran and kalam, a path that later Muslim philosophers followed him down. Indeed later Muslim intellectuals of a more religiously stringent mindset accused him of heresy for trying to apply the principles of pagan philosophy to matters of divine revelation.

Another important element in his legacy was that his writings were translated into Latin and began to circulate in Western schools in the early 12^th century, right at the beginnings of the Western intellectual revival that occurred with the establishment of the first universities. Avicenna (as Ibn Sina was known in Latin) exercised an enormous influence on Western understanding of Aristotle’s ideas. Thomas Aquinas, for example, was profoundly influenced by Avicenna, which means that Avicenna has had an influence on modern Catholic theology. In fact, some scholars of philosophy consider him the most influential philosopher ever, although I’d be inclined to give that honor to Plato or Aristotle.

 

Ibn Sina in The Physician

Noah Gordon focuses almost exclusively on Ibn Sina’s work as a physician. He’s presented as running a large hospital dedicated in equal measure to treating the sick and teaching students. In one scene, he and his students discuss astronomy, but apart from that, the film entirely omits Ibn Sina’s other intellectual interests. And the film also gets his personality wrong, making him a gentle, humble, open-minded man rather than the rather intellectually arrogant man he actually was. And it portrays him as a fairly traditional Muslim when both in his intellectual work and his personal life he was more than a little unorthodox. But Kingsley gives a wonderful performance, if you like the whole ‘wise teacher’ trope. Kingsley is pretty much the best part of the film.

Ben Kingsley as Ibn Sina

The film also completely misrepresents his death. In the film, a riot breaks out in which the hospital is burned. Rob frantically searches for Ibn Sina and finds him in the library, staring at the burning books. He tells Rob that he has taken poison, gives him a book, and then readies himself for death as Rob leaves. This is 100% untrue, as I’ve already explained.

The film deserves major props for trying to introduce this incredibly important but largely unknown figure to Western audiences. In an age when Islam is mostly associated in Western minds with religious violence and the oppression of women, it’s refreshing to see a film that wants to look at Islam’s great intellectual heritage. It’s too bad the film couldn’t find a way to address the importance of Ibn Sina’s philosophy, but that would probably have blurred the film’s focus a great deal, and honestly, this film isn’t good enough to pull that off anyway. So I guess I’ll have to be content with a nice performance by Ben Kingsley. But as we’ll see in my next post, the Isfahan sequence has way more problems than not getting Ibn Sina exactly right.

Want to Know More?

The Physicianis available on Amazon. Noah Gordon’s The Physician (The Cole Trilogy) is available too.

If you want to know more about Ibn Sina, a good introduction to medieval philosophy in general would be the appropriately-named Philosophy in the Middle Ages, which has a whole chapter on him. You might also consider this short biography of the man, although the author is not a scholar.

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The Physician: Muslims and Jews and Christians! Oh My!

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Medieval Persia, Movies I Hate, Noah Gordon, Religious Issues, The Physician, Tom Payne

Fortunately, I was wrong about feeling an aneurism coming on after the first 20 minutes of The Physician (2013, dir. Philip Stölzl, based on the 1986 novel of the same name by Noah Gordon). A little calming bed rest and I’m ready to take on more of the film, which mercifully is less stroke-inducing than the first part, perhaps because I’m a specialist in medieval England and not in medieval Persia, where the rest of the film is set. But that’s not to say that it’s actually a good movie.

Robert Cole (Tom Payne), the anachronistically-named English protagonist with the magical ability to know if people he touches are going to die, decides that he wants to study medicine with the greatest doctor in the world, so he consults a map of the known world, about 400 years before any such thing existed. Then he sets out for Isfahan, Persia, sometime around 1022.

But he’s been warned that Christians aren’t allowed in Muslim lands. Sigh. Taken as a general statement, this is total bullshit. There was a thriving network of Christian communities across the Islamic world down into the early 21^st century, when the Iraq War released forces that devastated Christian communities in Iraq, forcing them to flee.

Unlike Christianity, Islam has fairly precise rules intended to guarantee Jews and Christians a measure of legal toleration as long as they do not challenge Islamic dominance. The basic rules were established by a document known as the Pact of Umar, traditionally ascribed to the second caliph, Umar ibn Khattab (who died in 644), but probably belonging to a slightly later period. According to the Pact, conquered Jewish and Christian communities could receive the status of dhimmis, or ‘protected persons’, provided that they paid a special tax, the jizya, accepted their inferior status, and obeyed a variety of rules that restricted their religious practices in different ways; for example, they could not build new churches, conduct religious rituals in public, and could not try to prevent conversion to Islam or pursue converts from Islam. If they accepted these rules, the dhimmis were permitted to worship according to their religious practices, were generally judged according to their own law, and could do things that were forbidden to Muslims, such as eating pork or drinking alcohol.

These rules are highly problematic in some ways, and are a far cry from 21^st century Western notions of religious toleration, but they allowed a substantial measure of peace and prosperity to Jews and Christians most of the time, and were far superior to the options that Muslims and Jews found in most Christian territories. They did not completely prevent conflict between different religious groups; anti-Jewish and anti-Christian violence or legislation periodically occurred. But dhimmi status was a part of sharia law, and therefore was not subject to the whims of individual rulers most of the time, because medieval Muslim society did not accord individual rulers much control over the legal system.

Tom Payne as Rob Cole aka Jesse ben Benjamin

So the movie’s claims that Muslim society did not tolerate Christians at all is, taken broadly, completely false. Noah Gordon is probably just talking (or writing) out his ass.

However, the early 11^th century did see a considerable decree of tensions between Christians and Muslims within the Shi’ite Fatimid Empire, which included Egypt and Palestine. For example, in 1009, the Fatimid Caliph Al-Hakim (who died in 1021) ordered the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. He instituted force conversions of Jews and Christians, which is contrary to general Islamic law. His actions were, strictly speaking, a violation of sharia, but Al-Hakim is often considered to have been insane, and the Fatimid caliphs enjoyed greater control over sharia in their territories than other rulers did.

Isfahan is about in the center of the green Abbasid zone on this map

Al-Hakim died in 1021 (unless you’re a Druze and you believe he went into occultation, a state of mystical hiding in which he continues to abide to this day), and the persecution of Christians and Jews came to an end, but since the film is vague about exactly when Rob is making his journey, perhaps he got to Egypt a bit earlier. Or perhaps Rob got out of date information and just didn’t bother to double-check it when he reached Cairo. But al-Hakim’s persecution of Christians did not apply to Persia, which was on the other side of Iraq from the Fatimid state, so the film is still basically wrong on this issue. Rob might have had to pretend to be a Jew while he was passing through Egypt, but once he reached Iraq he would have been able to admit to being a Christian again. I suppose we could say that by the time he gets to Persia he’s been depending on the support of other Jews, so that he continues his deception because he doesn’t want to offend his hosts, but I think that’s stretching things a bit too far.

Because he can’t be an open Christian, Rob decides to disguise himself as a Jew. He adopts the name Jesse ben Benjamin and (wince) circumcises himself. In for a penny, in for a pound I suppose. Exactly why he does this isn’t entirely clear. It’s not like the Jews he meets are going to make him drop trou while they shake his hand, so he could probably get by just by keeping his pants on, which is generally a polite thing to do around strangers.

Once he gets to Isfahan he settles in with a Jewish family there, and at one point fakes his way through a Hebrew table blessing, despite knowing neither Hebrew nor anything about Jewish rituals. At least, there’s no sign he knows Hebrew. Everyone in the film just speaks English, with no indication of what language it’s substituting for. He also miraculously learns to read Arabic at some point, despite not being literate at all earlier in the film when he’s shown an Arabic book. It’s not clear how long Rob spends in Isfahan, so I perhaps we should assume that he just learns to read during his medical studies, but unlike in some films, there’s no training montage to suggest it, and the idea that he mastered Arabic in a year or two is pretty implausible.

But the film does deserve points for exploring, at least in a half-assed way, the way that Jews lived in medieval Persia. The Jews of Isfahan live in a distinct quarter, have their own synagogue, and seem to be allowed to follow their own laws. They engage in commerce and education right alongside the Muslims of the city. We see a Hebrew worship service, and when the synagogue is set on fire, the camera focuses on the burning of the Torah scroll, treating it as the serious loss it would be. The film touches on the fact that Muslims are forbidden to drink alcohol but the Jews are permitted to do so.

The Molla Neissan Synagogue in modern Isfahan

Part of the film’s climax involves a Muslim riot that targets the Jewish quarter. The cause of this riot is rather muddled and cliché-ridden, and I’ll tackle it in my next post, but taken on its own, it’s reasonable example of how fraught with peril the situation of the dhimmi communities could be when religious tensions were inflamed. When they realize the rioters are coming for them, the Jews barricade the entrance to their quarter and defend it until they are overwhelmed, at which point they retreat to their synagogue and barricade themselves into that structure, also unsuccessfully. When the Muslims break in, they light the synagogue on fire and trap the terrified Jewish survivors in the mikvah, the synagogue’s ritual bath. Fortunately, our hero rather improbably manages to save the day.

Overall, the complexity of the religious situation is probably the best thing about the film. Very rarely do big-budget films explore the three-sided religious dynamics of the Muslim world, and even if this film does so rather imperfectly, it’s still interesting. It doesn’t make me hate the movie any less for its godawful opening scenes though.

Want to Know More?

The Physicianis available on Amazon. Noah Gordon’s The Physician (The Cole Trilogy)is available too.

The Physician: Medieval People are Dumb

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Crappy Prologue Texts, Medical Stuff, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Movies, Movies I Hate, Noah Gordon, Stellan Skarsgard, The Physician, Tom Payne

The Physician (2013, dir. Philip Stölzl) is based on a best-selling novel of the same name by Noah Gordon. It opens in England in 1012, when a young boy named Robert Cole…

Ok, hold it right there. I can’t even get past the main character’s name without having to comment. In 1012, there were no English people named Robert Cole. ‘Robert’ is a French name originally, and this film starts more than half a century before the Norman Conquest of English caused the importation of French names into England. Also, surnames like Cole won’t be in use for about another 300 years.

It’s a serious problem when a historical film, based on a historical novel, can’t even bother to give its protagonist a name that a person could actually have had during the period in question. The main character should have been called something like Aethelstan or Aedward or something like that, a good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon name like the ones used in England in the period before the Norman Conquest. And the fact that Noah Gordon couldn’t be bothered to do the elementary research it would have taken to come up with an accurate name speaks volumes about the source material for this film. I haven’t read the novel, just a summary of it on Wikipedia, but it seems like the screenwriter was about as free with his adaptation of the novel as the novel is with the period it’s dealing with, and the result is a total shitstorm of inaccuracy that left me feeling very stabby. Within five minutes the film had me making such angry noises that my husband prudently left the room lest I accidentally injure him in a momentary fit of rage.

Noah Gordon

Ok, let’s see if I can get through today’s post without triggering an aneurism.

<Deep breath>

Ok, the film opens in 1012 with a young boy who works…

Crap. First we need to cover the prologue text.

“In the Dark Ages the art of healing developed in the Roman era has been widely forgotten in Europe. There are no doctors, no hospitals, only traveling barbers with poor knowledge. At the same time on the other side of the world medical science is prospering.”

So, medieval people live in the Dark Ages, when no one ever bathed or turned on a light. We know they’re ignorant because they’ve forgotten Roman medicine when the ‘other side of the world’, which turns out to be Persia, hasn’t. So, got that? Medieval people are dumb. All they have for doctors are traveling barbers who don’t actually know anything, while other people living someplace else still have medicine.

Ok, the film opens in 1012 with a young boy who works as a miner, exchanging whatever it is he’s digging out of the ground for lumps of bread that he takes home to give to his mother and younger siblings. Because medieval people use children as miners and are too stupid to have money, so they just trade rocks for bread.

On the way home one day, young Robert stops to see a traveling barber-surgeon (Stellan Skarsgard, in a role credited simply as ‘Barber’, so that’s what I’ll call him), who acts like a traveling salesman at an American county fair around 1900.

Grrr! I can’t even get three sentences into this summary without having another issue! Technically there were barber-surgeons in 1000, but they were a brand new thing at the time, and probably mostly based in monasteries, not wandering around in covered wagons acting like showmen. But this film doesn’t give a shit about things like that because it’s not really set in 1012. It’s set in Generic Olde Tyme Medieval England, where nothing changed for 1000 years because it was the Dark Ages. So 11^th century people can have 14^th century names and dress like 14^th century people and live in 13^th century architecture because history is just something we teach in high schools so high schools can have an excuse to hire a football coach.

Let me take a break and play with my stress ball for a minute.

<squish squish>

Soon thereafter Robert’s unfortunate mother is feeding them dinner when she has a momentary bout of pain. And we all know what that means. It means she’s about to die from “side sickness”, which is what they used to call appendicitis back in Generic Olde Tyme Medieval England before the disease had even been recognized medically. Rob runs to fetch Barber, but by the time they get back home, the local priest has wandered in and given her Last Rites and then declares that nothing can possibly help her except witchcraft and when Rob says maybe Barber can do something, the priest accuses Rob of challenging the authority of the Holy Church because GAAHHH! I hate this film already and we’re not even five minutes into it!

This is when my husband left the room. Maybe you should too.

How many fucking clichés about how bad the Middle Ages were can we fit into one five-minute sequence? Quite a lot, it seems. Where’s my stress ball?

<squish squish squish squish>

Ok, so where was I? Oh yeah, mom’s just died. The priest parcels out Rob’s younger siblings to local strangers, and bribes them to take the kids by offering them all the utensils. Then the priest claims the rest of the property as his fee for his services and leaves because apparently Rob’s mom has no earthly relatives who might intervene and no one cares that that means that the property would legally belong to Rob and his siblings, because they hadn’t invented law yet in Generic Olde Tyme Medieval England.

We know Rob’s the main character because unlike everyone else, he gets to wear color

Well, you can probably guess that, in a movie called The Physician, when Barber is the only remaining character left for Rob to interact with, Rob is going to wind up traveling with Barber.

So we flash forward an unspecified number of years, maybe a decade. So now it’s about 1022. Rob’s an adult, more or less, and played by Tom Payne. He’s become Barber’s apprentice.

URK! GAK! AARGH! There’s no such thing as apprentices in 1022 in England! It’s a concept developed by guilds, which don’t exist yet. But this is Generic Olde Tyme Medieval England, so they can apparently have any concepts they need to.

<squishsquishsquishsquishsquishsquishsqui…>

Shit! I just ruptured my stress ball.

Ok, deep breaths. It’s ok. You can do this.

<deep breathing>

Skarsgard and Payne as Barber and Rob

So Rob and Barber travel around long enough for us to see just how crappy medicine was back then. We get to see a tooth extraction with a pair of pliers. During the extraction, Rob suddenly gets a strange feeling, just like the feeling he had when he touched his mom the night she died, and he realizes the guy who just lost a tooth is going to die soon. Barber laughs him off, and they go off to romp in something that’s either a brothel or a tavern held in an old Roman sewer. It could be either, because neither such institution existed in the 11^th century, so take your pick.

Then the unfortunate dental patient turns up dead, and the locals immediately starts screaming that tooth extraction is a form of witchcraft because EVERYONE IN GENERIC OLDE TYME MEDIEVAL ENGLAND IS STUPID! APPARENTLY THE ONLY TIME PEOPLE DIE OR HAVE TEETH EXTRACTED IS WHEN WITCHES ARE INVOLVED. God I hate this movie.

<thumpthumpthump>

That sound you’re hearing is me smacking my head against the wall because I don’t have a stress ball to squeeze anymore and I’m all out of my meds. Go to your happy place, Andrew. It will be ok.

Of all the tropes about medieval society, this one perhaps annoys me more than any other, because it suggests that medieval people were utterly ignorant of basic facts of life and were therefore inclined to suspect supernatural forces at work whenever anything they disliked happens. Medieval people were less knowledgeable than we are today about things involving science and medicine, but they weren’t complete morons. In fact, they were just as smart as we are; they just had a different knowledge base to work with. They knew what tooth extraction involved, and that it wasn’t evil magic.

But anyway, they attack Barber and Rob and burn the wagon and burn Barber’s hands, which means that Rob has to take over the medical practice while Barber recovers. So we get to watch Rob perform his first amputation when a guy is brought in with a broken toe. And when he does it, the guy literally says “My first amputation!” like having body parts removed is a traditional rite of passage in Generic Olde Tyme Medieval England.

I hate this movie so much.

Barber after the attack

Well, eventually Barber develops a cataract, and lucky for him and Rob, they run across a family of Jews somewhere that includes a physician who knows how to couch cataracts, which rather astoundingly is an actual medieval practice that the film accidentally knows about. Rob is astonished by how much the physician knows, and the physician tells him that he studied with Ibn Sina, a genuine 11^th century Persian scholar. Why this smart Jew has decided to travel half-way across the known world to treat stupid patients in Generic Olde Tyme Medieval England is never explained, nor is how he manages to do medicine without getting accused of witchcraft.

Rob decides that he’s going to travel all the way to Isfahan in Persia because he wants to learn medicine and he can’t do that in England because everyone in Medieval England is stupid except the Jews and because Rob probably hates Generic Olde Tyme Medieval England every bit as much as I do. So he sets off on a journey to Persia. I’ll cover that in my next post because right now, after only 20 minutes of film, I am so full of hate and stabbiness that I’m pretty sure I feel an aneurism coming on.

Want to Know More?

No, trust me you don’t. Seriously, you don’t. Please, don’t make me do this.

Sigh, ok. The Physician is available on Amazon. Noah Gordon’s The Physician (The Cole Trilogy) is available too. Oh, lord! It’s part of a trilogy. I can’t even.