Averroes - Cultural Influences

Cultural Influences

• Reflecting the respect which medieval European scholars paid to him, Averroes is named by Dante in The Divine Comedy with the great pagan philosophers whose spirits dwell in "the place that favor owes to fame" in Limbo.
• Averroes appears in a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, entitled "Averroes's Search", in which he is portrayed trying to find the meanings of the words tragedy and comedy. He is briefly mentioned in the novel Ulysses by James Joyce alongside Maimonides. He appears to be waiting outside the walls of the ancient city of Cordoba in Alamgir Hashmi's poem In Cordoba. He is also the main character in Destiny, a Youssef Chahine film.
• The claim that Averroes deserves equal respect with Maimonides got the fictional Balthazar Abrabanel banished from Amsterdam by the Amsterdam rabbinate in Eric Flint's novel 1634.
• Averroes is also the title of a play called "The Gladius and The Rose", written by Tunisian writer Mohamed Ghozzi, and which had the first price in the theater festival in Charjah in 1999.
• The asteroid 8318 Averroes was named in his honor. Plant genus Averrhoa was named after him.
• The Muslim pop musician Kareem Salama composed and performed a song in 2007 titled Aristotle and Averroes.
• Averroes is the subject of the film Al Massir by Youssef Chahine.