In Jumādā II 441/November 1049, the Nestorian Christian physician al-Mukhtār ibn Buṭlān (d. after 455/1063) arrived in Cairo from Baghdad. Shortly thereafter, he sent an essay on a scientific topic to cAlī ibn Riḍwān (d. 460/1067–8), chief physician to the Fāṭimid caliph al-Mustansir (r. 427–87/1036–94), and invited him to comment. Ibn Riḍwān's response was two withering public critiques full of ad hominem invective (only one of these now survives), and quite predictably they provoked an equally abusive reply from Ibn Buṭlān. Ibn Riḍwān then countered with five further missives: a follow-up critique in reference to the issues already raised in the debate, a more general open letter to ‘the physicians of old and new Cairo’ in which he poured scorn and abuse on his adversary with even greater violence, and three other now-lost essays bearing titles suggesting the continuation of similar diatribes against his adversary. Ibn Buṭlān eventually left Cairo defeated and humiliated, but some time after his departure from Egypt he returned to the fray with a last shot of his own entitled Waqcat al-aṭibbā' (‘Battle of the Physicians’). This work too is lost.

This controversy was long remembered in medical and scientific circles, and the ten essays comprising its literary side were evidently in widespread circulation in later times. In 1937, the German orientalists Joseph Schacht and Max Meyerhof published the five extant works as ‘a contribution to the history of Greek learning among the Arabs’. The essays have been widely read ever since; and indeed, among historians of Islamic science and medicine the Ibn Riḍwān/Ibn Buṭlān polemic has become one of the best-known episodes in the field.