I bound myself by a pact to pay it its due—the pact, once struck, holds sway;
until the night withdrew in defeat and morning arrived, smiling.
Alas for the youth, were he but left beneath the shade of pleasant ease, (1)
while Time (2) keeps tally of his years; yet when grey hair reaches him, that is the reckoning.

He passed away in Ramadan of this very year—may Allah Most High have mercy on him.

Abu ‘Ali Ibn Sina (3), the physician-philosopher, al-Ḥusayn (4) ibn ʿAbd Allah ibn Sina, known as the Shaykh al-Raʾīs, was a prodigy of his age [and outstanding in medicine].

His father was from Balkh but moved to Bukhara, where Ibn Sina applied himself to study. By the age of ten he had read the Quran and mastered its sciences; he then excelled in arithmetic, algebra and al-muqābala (equation-balancing), Euclid (5), and the Almagest (6). He next studied under the sage Abu ʿAbd Allah al-Nātili, surpassed the scholars of his day, and people began frequenting him and studying with him when he was only sixteen. He treated one of the Samanid rulers, the amir Nūḥ ibn Naṣr, who rewarded him generously and gave him free rein in his library, where he beheld marvels [and treasures unmatched elsewhere].

It is said that he later attributed some of those works to himself. He wrote many books on metaphysics and natural philosophy.

Ibn Khallikān (7) said: “He composed about one hundred works, large and small, among them: The Canon, The Healing, The Salvation, The Pointers, Salāmān, Absāl, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, and others. He was one of the philosophers of Islam.” He then quoted, from Ibn Sina’s poetry, the ode that opens (8):