AZM

AZM can mean:

Sadiq Jalal al-Azm

Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm (Arabic: صادق جلال العظم‎) (born in 1934) is a Professor Emeritus of Modern European Philosophy at the University of Damascus in Syria and was, until 2007, a visiting professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Thus far, his main area of specialization has been the work of German philosopher Immanuel Kant, but he now places a greater emphasis upon the Islamic world and its relationship to the West, evidenced by his contribution to the discourse of Orientalism. Al-Azm is also known as a human rights advocate and a champion of intellectual freedom and free speech.

Birth and Education

Al-Azm was born in Damascus, Syria, into the prominent Al-Azm family. He grew up in the well-known Damascene Sunni land-owning family of Al-Azm. The Al-Azm family rose to prominence in the eighteenth century under the rule of the Ottoman Empire in Greater Syria, which was acquired in 1516 by the cosmopolitan Turkish Empire.

Al-Azm was schooled in Beirut, Lebanon, earning a B.A. in Philosophy from the American University of Beirut in 1957. Al-Azm earned an M.A. in 1959 and a Ph.D. in 1961 from Yale University, majoring in Modern European Philosophy.

Averroes

Averroes (/əˈvɛroʊˌiːz/; April 14, 1126 – December 10, 1198) is the Latinized form of Ibn Rushd (Arabic: ابن رشد‎), full name ʾAbū l-Walīd Muḥammad Ibn ʾAḥmad Ibn Rušd (أبو الوليد محمد ابن احمد ابن رشد), a medieval Andalusian polymath. He wrote on logic, Aristotelian and Islamic philosophy, theology, the Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence, psychology, political and Andalusian classical music theory, geography, mathematics, and the mediæval sciences of medicine, astronomy, physics, and celestial mechanics. Averroes was born in Córdoba, Al Andalus (present-day Spain), and died at Marrakesh in present-day Morocco. His body was interred in his family tomb at Córdoba. The 13th-century philosophical movement based on Averroes's work is called Averroism.

Averroes was a defender of Aristotelian philosophy against Ash'ari theologians led by Al-Ghazali. Although highly regarded as a legal scholar of the Maliki school of Islamic law, Averroes's philosophical ideas were considered controversial in Ash'arite Muslim circles. Whereas al-Ghazali believed that any individual act of a natural phenomenon occurred only because God willed it to happen, Averroes insisted phenomena followed natural laws that God created.