Avicenna
Avicenna was born in Afshana, a village near Bukhara (in present-day Uzbekistan), the capital of the Samanids, a Persian dynasty in Central Asia and Greater Khorasan. His mother, named Sitāra, was from Bukhara; his father, Abdullāh, was a respected Ismaili scholar from Balkh, an important town of the Samanid Empire, in what is today Balkh Province, Afghanistan. His father worked in the government of Samanid in the village Kharmasain, a Sunni regional power. After five years, his younger brother, Mahmoud, was born. Avicenna first began to learn the Quran and literature in such a way that when he was ten years old he had essentially learned all of them.
Ali ibn Yusuf al-Ilaqi
Contrary to Carl Brockelmann's information (GAL 1:485; Suppl. 1:887), Sharaf al-Zamān Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī al-Īlāqī of Bākharz (in Khorasān, Iran), who was most probably active in Balkh (today's Afghanistan), was not a figure of the 6th/12th century. He did not die in 536/1141 (in the battle of the Qatwan steppe) but most probably around 460/1068 and should be counted among Avicenna's (d. 429/1037) direct students. Al-Ilāqī produced an epitome of the first book of the Canons of Medicine by Avicenna which was known under various titles: "Kitāb al-Fuṣūl al-Ilāqiyya" ("The Aphorisms of al-Ilāqī") and "Kitāb al-asbāb wa-al-`alāmāt" ("The Book of Causes and Symptoms"). Al-Ilāqī's greatly abbreviated version of the first book of the Canon was very popular, and many copies have survived.