Abu al-Barakat al-Baghdadi

Origins and early life

Abu al-Barakat al-Baghdadi was born around 1080 at Balad, near Mosul, a Jew whose Hebrew name is recorded as Nathanel, also given as Baruch ben Malka.

Work and career

He rose in Baghdad to be court physician to caliphs and Seljuk sultans, and his contemporaries called him Awhad al-Zaman — the Unique One of his Time. His chief work, the Kitab al-Mu'tabar, the Book of What Has Been Established by Personal Reflection, dared to rebuild natural philosophy against Aristotle: his analyses of motion contain concepts that historians of science read as precursors of inertia, and his thought shaped Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, al-Suhrawardi and Ibn Kammuna, reaching medieval Europe's physicists, Jean Buridan and Albert of Saxony, through later transmission.

In old age he converted to Islam — this fiche says it plainly; the sources discuss his motives without settling them, and the Baghdad yeshiva went on studying and copying his commentary on Ecclesiastes into the thirteenth century, keeping the Jewish scholar in its memory. He died in Baghdad in 1164 or 1165.