Avicenna's Role in Arabic Literature

The master and doyen, Avicenna, is one of the prominent savants of the fourth century A.H. Besides medicine and philosophy, he was a master in sciences of his time, and was proficient in Arabic literature. He has peerless anthologies in poetry and prose, in both Arabic and Persian literature. In mysticism, he was tending to the symbolic and allusive style. Hence we find ourselves mystics when we float in “Resalat Altair” (the message of the birds) and “Hai ebn Yagdan” (Alive son of the Yagdan), and when we look at his Arabic poems and quatrains we find ourselves at a hospital with the poetry as a cure, and when we enter “Al-Esharat” of Avicenna we find ourselves in a wisdom court, as we are kids obsessed by thousand fictions stalking gravely after wisdom and logic. In this article, an attempt has been made to pick bouquets of colorful flowers, ornated with rhetoric, eloquence, language, inflection, derivation and poetic meters, as we pick from symbolic prose that is full of mystic symbols.