The Cordoban jurist, physician, and philosopher who spent his life trying to recover what he saw as the authentic Aristotle from the Neoplatonist overlay he believed earlier Muslim thinkers had added, and who answered al-Ghazali's attack on philosophy with a defense of reason as a path to the same truth as revelation — a body of work whose Latin and Hebrew afterlife was far larger than its immediate Islamic philosophical reception, though recent scholarship shows his works did not simply vanish from Muslim intellectual life.
When medieval European scholars wrote 'the Commentator,' every reader knew they meant one man, just as 'the Philosopher' could only mean Aristotle. The Commentator was a Muslim judge from Cordoba who had never set foot in Christian Europe and wrote nothing in Latin. His commentaries on Aristotle were translated, copied, and argued over in Paris and Padua for three centuries, condemned by bishops and quietly mined by saints. In the Islamic world where he lived and worked, his philosophical project left a fainter mark. The strangest fact about Ibn Rushd is that his afterlife belonged to other people's civilizations.