Abu Bakr al-Razi

Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyya al-Razi (Latinized as Rhazes) was a Persian physician, alchemist, and philosopher, born around 865 CE (251 AH) in Rayy, a city near present-day Tehran, and generally reported to have died there around 925 CE (313 AH). He is counted among the most influential clinicians of the medieval world. Tradition holds that as a young man he went to Baghdad to study and practice at its hospital (bimaristan, an endowed teaching hospital), later directing hospitals in both Baghdad and his native Rayy. He is credited with one of the first clinical accounts distinguishing smallpox from measles, and his vast medical encyclopedia (al-Hawi) and the Mansuri (dedicated to a governor of Rayy, Mansur ibn Ishaq) were studied in Latin Europe for centuries. As a philosopher al-Razi was a forthright rationalist. He held that human reason, a gift open to all, suffices to discover truth, and he is reported to have argued that God would not need to single out prophets — a position on prophecy and revelation that later Muslim writers, many of them hostile to him, recorded and condemned. How far his surviving words preserve his actual views is debated, since much is known only through critics. The classical sources praise his medicine while sharply disputing his theology; modern scholarship treats him as a leading exponent of independent reasoning in early Islamic thought. Several of his dates remain traditional estimates rather than firmly attested.