Ibn Sīnā — The Boy Who Refused to Stop Thinking

Over a thousand years ago, in a small village near Bukhara, a young boy would lie awake at night, staring at the stars. His name was Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbdullāh ibn Sīnā, the world would later know him as Avicenna.

He was no ordinary child. By the age of ten, he had memorised the Holy Qur’an. By sixteen, he was studying medicine. By eighteen, he was already healing patients others could not.

But what made him extraordinary wasn’t just his intelligence, it was his restless faith. He believed that every mystery of the universe was a doorway to understanding the wisdom of Allah.

The Night of Revelation

One night, Ibn Sīnā faced a great problem. He was reading Aristotle’s Metaphysics, a book so complex that he read it forty times and still couldn’t grasp its meaning.

Frustrated and exhausted, he closed the book and walked to the mosque. There, under the glow of the lanterns, he performed two rakʿahs of prayer and supplicated, “O Lord, You are the Opener of hearts. Grant me understanding of this knowledge for the sake of Your pleasure.”

When he returned home, he opened the book once more, and suddenly, as if a veil had been lifted, the meaning became clear.

He later wrote, “Whenever I was faced with a problem I could not solve, I would go to the mosque, pray, and beseech the Creator, and the path would open before me.”

The Physician of the Soul

Ibn Sīnā didn’t see medicine as just curing the body. He wrote, “The physician must first understand the soul, for the sickness of the soul brings sickness to the body.”

He healed the sick, served kings, and wrote over 200 books, including The Canon of Medicine, which became the main medical textbook in Europe for over 600 years.

Yet he remained humble, always saying that true knowledge belongs only to Allah, and that every discovery was a step closer to Him.

The Moral

Ibn Sīnā teaches us that faith and reason are not enemies, they are two wings of the same bird.

One lifts us towards the heavens of belief, and the other helps us understand the signs of Allah in creation.

As Imam ʿAlī (ʿa) saidm “The perfection of the mind is in faith in Allah.”

So be like Ibn Sīnā, when knowledge becomes hard, pray. When the world confuses you, reflect. And when understanding dawns upon you, let your heart bow in gratitude.