Where were Avicenna and Rhazes from?

To the Editor: I read with interest the reply of Dr. Farid S. Haddad to the Letter of Dr. Farrokh Habibzadeh.1 I found that the composition of the reply is somewhat incongruent insofar as the first part is aggressive and attacks the commentator (Dr. Habibzadeh), while the second part is more pacifistic, advising universalism and preaching the tenets of a “science sans frontier.”

I, for one, believe that the best answer is the one that has already been written by Dr. Habibzadeh. I would only add that in the last 22 years, I had three publications on the nationality of Avicenna (Poure-Sina) and Mohammad Zakaria Razi and documented that they were all thoroughbred-Iranian2–4 as Abu-Nowas and Al-Mutanabi were Arabs. Even the fair Arab investigator, Professor Azeem Majeed, clearly admitted the fact that Iran was one of the sources of Islamic science5 and stated that “as Islam spreads out of the Arabian Peninsula into Syria, Egypt and Iran, it met long established civilizations and centers of learning.”

One point which should be clarified is the wrong statement of Dr. Haddad that “how could ibn sÿna, who died 1000 years before ‘Iran’ was scripted on a map, be Iranian? I have yet to see a work by ibn sÿna or by alrazÿ written in Persian.” If one work is enough, I advise Dr. Haddad to study the excellent book of “Daneshnameh Aalaie” by Poure-Sina and “Dar Amadi bar Elmeh Pezeshki” (an introduction to medicine) by Mohammad Zakaria Razi (according to Ibn Abi Usaybi’ah)6,7 both written originally in Persian.

Concerning the name, “Iran” was firmly put on the map over a thousand years ago by Ferdowsi, one of the greatest world poets, who created the masterpiece of Shahnameh where he mentioned the name of this country as “Iran” several times. Accidentally, Ferdowsi and Poure-Sina were contemporary. To convince Dr. Haddad, I quote Professor Majeed that “Arab scholars translated philosophical and scientific works from Greek, Syriac, Pahlavi (the scholarly language of pre-Islamic Iran) and Sanskrit into Arabic.”5

Back to the anatomy charts presented by Dr. Haddad, I want to emphasize that the two plates presented so far, are from a treatise written by Mansouri Shirazi. The number of these charts as mentioned in his book is limited to five.8 The language of that book is Persian and the work has not yet been translated to any other languages.