Imagine serving as a celebrated judge, a royal physician, and a prolific philosopher, only to be put on trial by your own government, banished, and forced to watch your books burn in the town square. Then imagine being painted into Vatican masterpieces centuries later. This episode explores the contradictory life of Ibn Rushd, known to the Latin West as Averroes, the 12th-century Andalusian polymath who was rejected by his own society and became the bridge connecting the ancient world to the modern one.

We set the scene in Cordoba under the strict Almohad Caliphate, recount the terrifying 1169 audience where the caliph asked whether the universe is eternal, and follow the commission that made him simply the Commentator on Aristotle. We cover his medical breakthroughs on the retina, strokes, and Parkinson’s symptoms, his rebuttal to Al-Ghazali in The Incoherence of the Incoherence, his three theories of banishment in 1195, and the explosion of Latin Averroism that forced the Church and Thomas Aquinas to respond.

• Why the question of an eternal universe was a death trap between Greek logic and Islamic theology
• Truth cannot contradict truth: how Averroes reconciled scripture with philosophy through allegorical reading
• The rhetorical, dialectical, and demonstrative methods, and the pragmatic case for keeping combustible ideas in the lab
• His radical argument, following Plato, that women should share in ruling and defending the state
• The unity of the intellect: one universal mind shared by all humanity, described here as a medieval version of the internet