‘Abd al-Latif was a philosopher and polymath who lived between the Second Crusade (1147–1149 AD) and the end of the Fifth Crusade (1217–1231 AD). He was born in Baghdad in 1162 and died there on 9 November 1231 after a pilgrimage of more than forty years during which he travelled throughout Iraq, Syria and Egypt looking for a good teacher in philosophy. He grew up in a Shafi‘i family with excellent links with the Nizamiyya madrasa and he received a solid education in Islamic sciences. Then he turned to natural sciences, medicine, philosophy and, critically, to alchemy. His spasmodic search for knowledge brought him to meet through their writings Avicenna, al-Ghazali and al-Suhrawardi. ‘Abd al-Latif had many generous patrons and was in touch with the most important men of his era including the Saladin and, in Cairo, Maimonides. Cairo represented for ‘Abd al-Latif the much-desired goal of his pilgrimage, the place where he finally met Aristotle and his philosophy as well as that of his commentators Themistius and Alexander, and where he finally encountered the work of the greatest Arabic Aristotelian commentator of the East, al-Farabi. For ‘Abd al-Latif, Cairo also meant the progressive abandonment of Avicenna’s philosophy, which he had held to be the only one possible during the earlier years of his education. ‘Abd al-Latif was a sharp critic, an independent thinker, and a prodigious writer on philosophy and medicine. His stated intellectual program was that to go back to the original Greek works in Arabic translation, and in particular to return to Aristotle in philosophy and to Hippocrates, via Galen, in medicine, but he was able to go back to these sources only through the lens of their reworkings by the philosophers before Avicenna, al-Kindi and al-Farabi.