Ali ibn Sahl Rabban al-Tabari
838 CE–870 CE · Amol
Ali ibn Sahl Rabban al-Tabari (Persian: علی ابن سهل ربن طبری آملی; c. 838 – c. 870 CE; also given as 810–855 or 808–864 also 783–858), was a Persian Muslim scholar, physician and psychologist, who produced one of the first Islamic encyclopedia of medicine titled Firdaws al-Hikmah ("Paradise of Wisdom"). Ali ibn Sahl spoke Syriac and Greek, the two sources of the medical tradition of Antiquity which had been lost by medieval Europe, and transcribed in meticulous calligraphy. His most famous student was the physician and alchemist Abu Bakr al-Razi (c. 865–925). Al-Tabari wrote the first encyclopedic work on medicine. He lived for over 70 years and interacted with important figures of the time, such as Muslim caliphs, governors, and eminent scholars. Because of his family's religious history, as well as his religious work, al-Tabarī was one of the most controversial scholars. He first discovered that pulmonary tuberculosis is contagious. Outside the rational sciences, as a convert from Christianity to Islam he was also involved in interreligious polemics, writing two works critical of his former religion, al-Radd ´alā l-Nasārā (The Refutation of the Christians) and Kitāb al-Dīn wa-l-Dawla (The Book of Religion and Empire), both of which having been published by Brill in 2016 in a single book, The Polemical Works of ʿAlī al-Ṭabarī.
Adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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Amol
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About Amol
Amol, in the Tabaristan region (modern Mazandaran) on the Caspian coast of northern Iran, was the chief city of that region in the early Islamic period. The great historian and Qur'an commentator al-Tabari (d. 923), author of the universal History and the major tafsir, was born in Amol and took the nisba al-Tabari from Tabaristan.
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