text:
Ibn Tufayl
TITLES IN THE MAKERS OF THE MUSLIM WORLD SERIES

Series Editor: Patricia Crone, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi, Samer Akkach

'Abd al-Malik, Chase F. Robinson

Abd al-Rahman III, Maribel Fierro

Abu Nuwas, Philip Kennedy

Ahmad al-Mansur, Mercedes García-Arenal

Ahmad ibn Hanbal, Christopher Melchert

Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi, Usha Sanyal

Akbar, André Wink

Al-Ma'mun, Michael Cooperson

Al-Mutanabbi, Margaret Larkin

Amir Khusraw, Sunil Sharma

Ashraf 'Ali Thanawi, Muhammad Qasim Zaman

Chinggis Khan, Michal Biran

El Hajj Beshir Agha, Jane Hathaway

Eljah Muhammad, Herbert Berg

Fazlallah Astarabadi and the Hurufi s, Shazad Bashir

Ghazali, Eric Ormsby

Hasan al-Banna, Gudrun Krämer

Husain Ahmad Madani, Barbara Metcalf

Ibn 'Arabi,William C. Chittick

Ibn Fudi, Ahmad Dallal

Ikhwan al-Safa, Godefroid de Callatay

Imam Shafi 'i, Kecia Ali

Karim Khan Zand, John R. Perry

Mehmed Ali, Khaled Fahmy

Mu'awiya ibn abi Sufyan, R. Stephen Humphreys

Muhammad Abduh, Mark Sedgwick

Nasser, Joel Gordon

Nazira Zeineddine, miriam cooke

Sa'di, Homa Katouzian

Shaykh Mufi d,Tamima Bayhom-Daou

Usama ibn Munqidh, Paul M. Cobb

For current information and details of other books in the series, please

visit www.oneworld-publications.com

Ibn Tufayl

Living the Life of Reason

Taneli Kukkonen

IBN TUFAYL

A Oneworld Book

Published by Oneworld Publications 2014
This ebook edition first published by Oneworld Publications, 2014

Copyright © Taneli Kukkonen 2014

All rights reserved

Copyright under Berne Convention

A CIP record for this title is available

from the British Library

ISBN 978–1–78074–564–0

eISBN 978–1–78074–617–3

Typeset by Jayvee, Trivandrum, India

Oneworld Publications

10 Bloomsbury Street,

London WC1B 3SR, England

CONTENTS

Preface

Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: An overview

1 LIFE AND TIMES

The Almohad Revolution

A New Intellectual Order

The Caves of Guadix

The Medical Tradition

In Royal Service

Sufi, Musicologist, Medical Author

Sponsor

2 HAYY

Hayy: A Synopsis

An Architectural Design

 Hayy's Theme

Pointers and Reminders

The Spiral Path

Authority and Authentication

Harmony and Hierarchy

3 ISLAND LIFE

The Island

 The Perfect Climate

 From Ceylon to Mali

The Twice-born Child

History or Drama

Seeing with One's Own Eyes

Beginning from the Beginning

Experience and Art

 The Limits of Skill

4 NATURE

Taking in the World

Structure and Scaffolding

Suspended between Worlds

Natures and Powers

Forms and Universals

Synthesis and Analysis

Matter

The Elements

The Heavenly Spheres

5 SOUL

Living Nature

Vital Heat

The Vehicle of the Soul

The Spirit which is God's

Diffusion and Suffusion

Plurality and Unity

The Human Distinction

The Science of the Soul

6 Three Duties

Finitude and Transcendence

Two Worlds

Ought from Is

Three Lives

The Conservation Principle

Kinship with the Heavens

Leaving the World Behind

7 GOD

Unveiling the Mysteries

From Asceticism to Mysticism

Tasting the Truth

Theological Precepts

Like Knowing Like

Annihilation and Restoration

Faces and Names

The "Eastern Wisdom"

Sensation and Intellection

Arrival

8 RELIGION

Religion and Society

Asal and Salaman

Language and Reality

Modeling Perfection

Re-entering the Cave

Human Weakness

Morality and Scripture

Mortality and Revelation

9 AFTERLIFE

Arabic Margins

Hebrew Echoes

Early Modern Success

The "Robinson" Question

Orientalist Ideas

Back to Ibn Tufayl

Bibliography

Index
PREFACE

In this book I introduce Ibn Tufayl, a sixth-/twelfth-century Andalusian philosopher of moderate renown. I do so through examining Ibn Tufayl's only extant philosophical work, the altogether extraordinary narrative, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, best translated as "Living, Son of Wakeful." The title of the book, which at the same time hands us the name of the book's eponymous protagonist, Hayy, was appropriated from the works of the far more famous Muslim philosopher Ibn Sina (the Latin Avicenna, d.428/1037). So were many of its themes, which in any case are treated much more extensively in the works of other philosophers, some of them Ibn Tufayl's contemporaries. To this we may add that because Ibn Tufayl lived his life in the far West in Muslim terms, in Andalusia and present-day Morocco, his influence in shaping later Islamic philosophy proved limited. Why, then, dedicate a volume in the Makers of the Muslim World series to him?

One answer is that Ibn Tufayl has had a disproportionate impact on our impression of the Muslim intellectual universe. Hayy was one of the first Islamic philosophical works to be translated into English, first through Latin in 1674 and then directly from the Arabic in 1708. And although the prior medieval Latin reception of Islamic philosophy had already been long and storied, Hayy, with a narrative that details the exploration and eventual conquest of nature and an ensuing spiritual enlightenment, resonated in a fresh and exciting way with an early modern readership. This led to a slew of Hayy translations and imitative works in multiple European languages, among which we may arguably count Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and – with somewhat better justification – its second-in-line sequel, Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With his Vision of the Angelick World, which far fewer people have ever read. Subsequent generations of Western readers have continued to turn to Hayy in order to assess the role of reasoned inquiry in Muslim thought (for better and for worse, as we shall see).

A better reason for devoting attention to Hayy and its author is that the work rewards the effort. No only is Hayy one of the most delightful literary creations of classical Islamic civilization; it is also about the best introduction to Arabic philosophy one could hope for. In accessible and attractive prose, Hayy portrays much of what is most intriguing about this particular intellectual tradition. Even if Ibn Tufayl did not quite shape the future of Islamic culture to the extent that he – and perhaps we – would have wished, his sole surviving work compellingly conveys some of its perennially fascinating features. In peering at the world through Hayy's lenses, we can learn a great deal about how the universe appeared to a trained twelfth-century Muslim scholar.

Several superlative English translations of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan exist, a rare blessing when it comes to Islamic philosophy. I hope that this book will encourage the reader to pick up one of them and to discover for the first time, or else to re-read and to re-examine, what is a truly remarkable text. At the same time, this book is meant to stand alone rather than be a running commentary (we have those as well). The reader should come away with some sense of Ibn Tufayl's achievement and an appreciation of it, as well as an understanding of the circumstances that shaped this most curious work. I have consequently made my own translations from the Arabic text without, however, claiming to have improved upon existing translations.

Throughout this book, I will only engage with existing scholarship, whether good or bad, in a very limited manner. Mostly, I will try to flag up where someone to my knowledge has made some particularly trenchant observation regarding Ibn Tufayl's thought or its social context. These individual references are not meant either to endorse or to reject a given scholar's overall interpretation of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, which remains a much misunderstood work.

Many of the most profound misrepresentations of Ibn Tufayl's thought have occurred where its interpreters have reached for timeless inspiration and topical import. I will settle for historical verisimilitude, which – so I would claim – ultimately yields more interesting results anyway. It is a profoundly useful exercise to try to come to grips with the very real historical distance that separates us even from a thinker such as Ibn Tufayl, who in some ways can seem to us a strikingly modern conversation partner. Such a distancing exercise can serve to remind us of perspectives we have lost as well as ones we have since acquired, and in some cases to ponder whether our own preoccupations and suppositions are as self-evidently correct or worthwhile as we would like to think.

This book is lovingly dedicated to my two sons Sulevi and Julian, who have embarked on a journey of discovery all their own.
[HAYY IBN YAQZAN:
AN OVERVIEW](../Text/748_OW-4.xhtml#Hayy-Ibn-Yaqzan--An-overview)

All page numbers in this book are from the 1936 second edition of the Arabic text established by Léon Gauthier. None of the manuscripts bear section headings or show other divides in the text: all such divisions have been imposed by later editors and translators. Here is one possible way of dividing up the text; I discuss my rationale for it in chapter 2.

Preface

3–10 Bliss: Ibn Sina's Eastern Wisdom

10–20 A conspectus of previous thought

Birth and childhood

20–32 Hayy's birth

33–38 Early years

38–47 The death of the mother 7 yrs

Nature as an object

47–52 Experiments with fire and anatomy

52–55 The conquest of nature

One and many 21 yrs

55–59 From human spirit to plant life

60–64 Nature and form

64–68 Excursus: from genera to species

68–72 Matter and the three dimensions

72–74 Form imposed from outside

From the world to Creator, then back 28 yrs

74–80 The heavens: finite, spherical, as if an organism

80–85 The world: eternal or originated?

85–88 Dependence on a Creator

88–90 Providence and generosity

The true self

92–96 The rational soul, immaterial and immortal

96–104 Kinship with the heavens

104–108 Participation in life, the heavens, the other world

The three duties

109–113 The needs of the body

113–117 Imitating the heavens

117–121 Becoming like the Necessary Existent

The divine vision 35 yrs

121–127 The unity of all things

127–130 The series of intellects

130–135 The blessed, the condemned, and the faded

Asal and Sulayman 49 yrs

136–143 Asal's arrival: friendship

144–147 Reason and revelation

147–152 Mission in the city

152–156 Disillusionment and return; closing words

LIFE AND TIMES

Not many philosophers receive a state funeral. Such was the honor bestowed on Abu Bakr Muhammad Ibn 'Abd al-Malik Ibn Tufayl: the Prince of Believers himself, Caliph Abu Yusuf Ya'qub the Victorious (al-Mansur) presided over Ibn Tufayl's funeral procession in 581 ah/1185 ce. The royal presence at Ibn Tufayl's funeral shows how he was firmly ensconced in the court at Marrakesh. More importantly, it shows how the study of philosophy, falsafa, had gained a foothold in the intellectual life of the sixth-/twelfth-century Maghreb or Muslim West.

The development had come despite philosophy being a tradition twice-removed from this distant soil: firstly, it was a discipline of ancient Greek origin and second, its first bloom in the Arabic language had occurred in far-off Baghdad and points east. As a recognized authority on the Greek sciences and sponsor to a generation of scholars, Ibn Tufayl stood at the heart of philosophy's nativization in the Muslim West. Most of Ibn Tufayl's eulogizers in subsequent centuries refer first and foremost to his philosophical achievements.

For all this, it was not Ibn Tufayl the philosopher to whom al-Mansur primarily came to pay his respects, but Ibn Tufayl the physician. (The two activities were related, as we shall see.) Ibn Tufayl had been personal physician both to al-Mansur and to his father and predecessor, Abu Ya'qub Yusuf. The move to sponsor philosophy and to enlist Ibn Tufayl's help had been the father's, not the son's. And although al-Mansur continued to employ philosophers, his reign also showed the first signs of a retreat from this liberal position, culminating in the brief banishment of Ibn Tufayl's famous protégé Ibn Rushd, known to the Western world as Averroes, to the small coastal town of Lucena in 592/1195, together with a banning of the latter's books.

In ten years, then, the prevailing Almohad dynasty had swung from publicly celebrating the life of one court-affiliated philosopher-physician to publicly disgracing another. This testifies to how turbulent were the times in which Ibn Tufayl operated, and how volatile the intellectual climate. In this chapter I shall sketch out a picture of the social and political milieu in which Ibn Tufayl's life and work unfolded. I do so in order for us to appreciate better the different dimensions of Ibn Tufayl's activity and his overall achievement.

THE ALMOHAD REVOLUTION

The major social and political upheavals of Ibn Tufayl's day all stemmed from a change in ruling authority, and with it a cultural shift, from one side of the Gibraltar strait to the other. For centuries, the Muslim West had been ruled by the descendants of the venerable 'Umayyad dynasty, which had once been in control of the entire Muslim world but which had long since settled for dominion over the West only. With its seat of power in al-Andalus (southern Spain) and a proud past reaching back to pre-Islamic Arab tribal life, 'Umayyad culture generally portrayed its southern counterpart in northern Africa as backwards and savage, indeed uncultured and barely Islamicized.

This ancient dynamic became unsettled midway through the fifth/eleventh century when a new ruling family emerged with a power base among the Sinhaja Berbers in Morocco. The dynasty was known as al-murabit, signifying military readiness at the frontiers, which in the mouths of Europeans assumed the form 'Almoravid'. This ruling power in turn was overthrown by a further uprising emanating from among the Masmuda tribes of Berbers, one that rallied under the banner of al-muwahhidun – those who profess divine unity, or 'Almohads' in European parlance. The result was a fundamentally changed cultural landscape, one in which old certainties gave way to a jostling for power, often under the guise of religious and intellectual polemic. Even the human geography of the region provides a durable reminder of this change. With the rise of the Almoravids, an Andalusian influence begins to show in public architecture on the south side of the Mediterranean, while Spanish towns take on the names of Berber tribes.

The Almohad revolt was originally carried to power on a wave of religious revivalism. The founding ideologue of the Almohad movement was Muhammad Ibn Tumart (d. 524/1130), a Berber preacher with what on the surface was a simple agenda. Ibn Tumart railed against the religious culture of his day, which he portrayed as corrupt and ossified and excessively dependent on endless refinements of the various branches (furu') of Islamic law, specifically the Maliki school of interpretation (as dominant in Muslim Africa then as it is today). Ibn Tumart postulated adherence to a simple creed that was meant to be understood and received by all believers in their hearts. As for following God's commandments, such foundational matters could not possibly be so convoluted as to require reams of books of legal opinions (kutub al-ra'y) or a cadre of often venally-minded self-appointed experts; the plain meaning of the primary two sources of religion – the Qur'an and the Prophetic traditions – would suffice (Cornell 1987).

Ibn Tumart's teachings in this regard show a certain affinity with those of the renowned Muslim theologian and spiritual author Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali (d. 505/1111), who had shaken the intellectual world of the eastern 'Abbasid caliphate a generation before. In his famous and abidingly popular Revival of the Religious Sciences, al-Ghazali called for a renewal to a personally committed practice and an unseating of the old religious experts in favor of a reconceived spiritual order based on genuine religious merit.

Now, in a notorious instance of book-burning in the West, the Almoravids had committed early copies of al-Ghazali's Revival to the pyre while the latter still lived. And according to one popular legend, al-Ghazali, who heard about the incident in far-flung Baghdad, personally entrusted Ibn Tumart with avenging this outrage. The encounter, which is supposed to have happened during Ibn Tumart's travels in the East, would make the Almohads al-Ghazali's direct torch-bearers on Maghrebi soil. The story is discussed at length in practically all histories of the Almohad regime, and translated in many, which at the very least speaks to its central positioning in the scholarly imagination (Le Tourneau 1969, 6–8; Fromherz 2010, 30–35).

The account as it stands has to be fictitious. For one thing, al-Ghazali was long gone from Baghdad by the time Ibn Tumart made his way to the city. Still, Ibn Tumart may well have encountered some latter-day Ghazalians when visiting Baghdad's Nizamiyya college, and his thought does resemble al-Ghazali's in more ways than one. This proved important to Ibn Tufayl, who is the subject of our book. Ibn Tufayl, like al-Ghazali before him, had to present Sufism and philosophy in a theologically acceptable light, and the fact that Ibn Tumart's revivalism made allowances for both, and that al-Ghazali was viewed in a favorable light by Almohad intellectuals, made the task that much easier.

There is one important difference between Ibn Tumart's and al-Ghazali's understanding of religious life and religious authority, which proved crucial to the revolution that swept the Almohads to power. Both Ibn Tumart and al-Ghazali regarded certitude and epistemic warrant in religious matters as being of paramount importance. The question was what to do with the fact that opinions differed on any number of questions relating to belief and practice. Ibn Tumart's and al-Ghazali's preferred solutions diverged sharply in one regard: Ibn Tumart asserted that an infallible and acknowledged Messiah or mahdi was needed, one whose judgment could be trusted implicitly when it came to interpreting God's commands, whereas al-Ghazali blanched at any such notion. For al-Ghazali, Messianism was just one worrisome strain in a broader trend towards blind subservience to the proclaimed expertise of others (taqlid). For original Almohad ideology, by contrast, Messianic sentiment was a crucial engine of religious fervor. Ibn Tumart's followers proclaimed the man himself the awaited mahdi.

Later Almohads gradually backed away from the notion that Ibn Tumart would have been the Messiah. This is understandable, given that the end of the world failed to come with his passing. Instead, Ibn Tumart joined a long line of perfect monotheist teachers dedicated to purifying Islamic belief and practice. Here there was an affinity with the more malleable Islamic notion of a periodic, perhaps centenary, renewal of faith, which itself had been associated with al-Ghazali. The Almohads additionally made common cause with the anti-Almoravid, Ghazali-inspired Sufi rebels of Andalusia who derided the traditional religious scholars' ('ulama') appeals to authority. Thus a new intellectual order was forged: Ibn Tumart's teachings were to be accepted, not because of any miraculous authority they carried, but because of their superior inherent rationality.

A NEW INTELLECTUAL ORDER

When it comes to Ibn Tumart's actual theology, it would be tempting to use the term "Unitarian," if that word did not carry fixed connotations for Anglophone readers. The unity to which the Arabic term refers is the believer's affirmation (tawhid) of the absolute unicity and uniqueness of God, which is supposed to lie at the heart of all Muslim belief: "There is no God but God." The Almohads used this confessional formula as a blunt political instrument, like others had before them. They argued that the old religious establishment had stooped to anthropomorphic descriptions of God and thereby compromised the purity of Islam.

The Almohads' insistence on the intelligibility of right religious belief and conduct and the subsequent presumed unity of the religious community also meant that dogmatic disagreements could be used as a pretext for repression when the need arose. After all, if the simple truth in religion was plain enough for every mature mind to see, what could account for continued heresy except for wilful obstinacy and wickedness? Under the Almohads, Jews and Christians lost their status as protected minorities, while the old adage, according to which all those who exercised their independent judgment would be rewarded for their efforts, was discredited. This was a strange result for a movement that had begun by emphasizing its freedom from false authoritarianism; but such are frequently the realities of any ideology when implemented politically.

Beyond a simple declaration of divine unity, Ibn Tumart seems to have had little appetite for theological refinements, less still for detailed speculation in the manner that had characterized classical Islamic theology (kalam). Nor do we have evidence of Ibn Tumart, or any of the other chief Almohad ideologues, engaging in the endless cataloguing of dialectical disputes in theological manuals, which was another kalam staple. Consistent with the Almohad drive for conceptual clarity and a fresh start, Ibn Tumart and his followers appear to have preferred to construct a streamlined conceptual edifice from first principles (Griffel 2005; Fletcher 1991).

In its own way this kind of pared-down understanding of formalized theology posed just as much a challenge to practitioners of the venerable science of kalam as Ibn Tumart's disparagement of the legal profession did to familiar ways of conceiving of the task of Islamic law (although Almohad rule still brought more relaxed conditions under which to engage in theological speculation – the Almoravids had at one point outlawed theology altogether). The Almohad revolution effectively overturned the entire established hierarchy of learning within the Muslim West.

At the same time, the shift from Almoravid to Almohad rule provided new opportunities for those educated professionals in a position to seize them. In some ways, the ideal presented by the Almohads harked back to the blossoming of intellectual culture in al-Andalus under the reign of al-Hakam II (d. 366/976). Al-Hakam had amassed a library in Cordoba to rival any found in 'Abbasid Baghdad. In a strategy resembling al-Hakam's, the Almohad rulers now made a show of their openness to intellectual influences from all sides, recalling Muhammad's injunction to "seek knowledge as far as China," as a reputed saying of the Prophet had it.

The policy was outwardly manifested in a practice established by the first Almohad Caliph, 'Abd al-Mu'min (d. 558/1163), originally an early disciple of Ibn Tumart and a military commander in service to the Messiah's cause. The Caliph would open court sessions by positing a learned question, then he would let two groups of scholars respond: first the seekers (talaba) from among Ibn Tumart's original followers, then a second group of more urbane experts employed by the ruler. The ritualized process at once established a clear hierarchy – Berber loyalists from the Almohad movement's early days still sat at the ruler's right hand and were consulted first on any matter of importance – while at the same time offering emerging scholars of all stripes a chance to shine. The practice, which continued under 'Abd al-Mu'min's successors, mimicked the courtly life of the 'Abbasid court, with its emphasis on scholarly brilliance and the ability to muster superior intellectual resources in favor of a given position at a moment's notice.

The onus in Almohad times was thus on individual scholars to prove both their personal worth and that of the goods they had obtained from the world's many storehouses of knowledge. In this new and exciting, yet precarious, environment, Ibn Tufayl too sought to find a place. His success testifies to how Ibn Tufayl's temperament fitted the times in which he operated.

THE CAVES OF GUADIX

Ibn Tufayl's place of birth was Guadix, a small town sixty kilometers northeast of Granada. Granada today is known as the magnificent last bastion of Muslim Spain, which only surrendered to Christian conquerors in 1492, the year Columbus's ships sailed. In the sixth/twelfth century it was a frontier town in the Muslim West, notable primarily for the way in which it came under Sinhaja Berber rule in the era of petty kingdoms, prior to Almoravid consolidation. (Granada was consequently also the first Spanish city to fall to the Almoravids in 483/1090.) Guadix, meanwhile, was a small fortress town whose main claim to fame lay in the way in which many of its houses were carved into the caves that form naturally on the face of its ocher hills. The practice, which allows the inhabitants to cool off in the summer heat, continues to this day.

Very little is known about Ibn Tufayl's upbringing and childhood. He claimed descent from the Arab tribe of Qays and his father was evidently a scholar from Marchena, close to Seville, in the southwest of Spain. From these shards of information a picture emerges of Ibn Tufayl as the scion of a family that was part of the old elite, proud of its ties to life on the Arabian Peninsula stretching back to pre-Islamic times. On the face of it, this parochial elitism will have proved an ill fit with the universalist and relatively egalitarian form of Islam propagated by the incoming Almohad rulers. Ibn Tufayl nevertheless quickly made his way to the heart of the Almohad empire, showing that perhaps the traditional Andalusian elites held some deep-seated advantages after all.

We can be certain that as a boy Ibn Tufayl received a traditional Islamic education. This included literacy skills, Arabic grammar, and extensive study of the Qur'an and the Prophetic traditions. But there is no evidence to suggest that this would have been followed by a curriculum of the more advanced Islamic sciences, law or theology. Instead, Ibn Tufayl's later literary and poetic achievements tell us that his was an education that included a study of the secular aspects of Arabic culture. His father will have been preparing Ibn Tufayl for a life in Almoravid Spain in which the old Arabic achievements still loomed large and in which a cultured man could make his way with ease and grace. These literary skills stood Ibn Tufayl in good stead later, when he had to establish himself as a courtier.

THE MEDICAL TRADITION

More important still was the training Ibn Tufayl received as a physician. In the Islamic world, this type of education typically came as a kind of a package deal. Medicine was one of the Greek sciences inherited from the ancient world and was accompanied by a hefty theoretical component, often leading to the study of philosophy. The reason for this is that the principal medical authority throughout the Islamic world was Galen of Pergamon, a second-century Greek-speaking philosopher-physician who practiced mainly in Rome and who in addition to being a medical theorist of the first order was also a noted philosopher of science (Gill 2009; on Islamic medicine, Pormann and Savage-Smith 2007).

Galen wrote synopses of Plato as well as philosophical treatises of his own. These circulated together with his many empirically oriented medical works. He even wrote several treatises on logic because, he contended, the ability to distinguish between valid and invalid forms of reasoning was crucial to any doctor who, for example, had to ascertain what the real cause of some particular ailment might be, or who had to stop to ponder what the appropriate level of conviction was that a specific type of diagnosis carried. Because the study of human physiology tied in with issues in elemental physics and biology, because the treatment of psychic disorders depended on one's understanding of the makeup of the soul, and because ideas about optimal human health aligned with more general questions regarding human flourishing, the foundations of medicinal practice quickly opened themselves up to philosophical exploration at all levels – physics, psychology, and ethics. Excepted from this picture was only metaphysical speculation, a topic on which the famously down-to-earth Galen would not be drawn. For this area of inquiry, other intellectual resources were readily available, not only in philosophy but in Sufi spiritual literature.

All in all, Ibn Tufayl is likely to have received as comprehensive a philosophical training as was available to an Andalusian youth in late Almoravid times. This will have included the works of Aristotle (384–322 bce), the "first teacher" and master of all philosophers in the Arabs' estimation, but it will have been an Aristotle seen through the eyes of al-Farabi (d. 339/950), the "second teacher," a tenth-century Baghdadi philosopher equally as skilled in logic as in developing an idiosyncratic brand of political thought. Al-Farabi, frequently overlooked in the Muslim East, loomed exceptionally large in al-Andalus, and his influence can be seen in much of Ibn Tufayl's preserved philosophy. Furthermore, Ibn Tufayl, according to his own testimony (Hayy, 5–6, 9–10), read the works of Ibn Bajja (d. 533/1139), the most luminous Andalusian philosopher up until then, who followed the approach of al-Farabi when he was not putting forward some striking observations of his own in natural philosophy and metaphysics.

Most important of all, from the far reaches of the Islamic world, an even more powerful influence was first making its presence. this was the encyclopedic, even panoptic, philosophy of Ibn Sina, or the Latin Avicenna (d. 428/1037), together with its partial critique and partial adaptation in the works of al-Ghazali. Ibn Tufayl appears to have reached only a partial understanding of Ibn Sina, though this did not stop him from citing him as a shaykh. Al-Ghazali was equally important to him, as to most Andalusian thinkers, in shaping his understanding of Ibn Sina.

IN ROYAL SERVICE

The biographers first mention Ibn Tufayl as someone making a living as a medical practitioner in Granada. In 542/1147 his name comes up as a travelling companion to the former ruler of Guadix, Ibn Milhan, when the latter embarked on a professional mission to Marrakesh. Ibn Milhan is said to have been working on an architectural commission. Once more, this speaks to Ibn Tufayl's life being led among front-row educated professionals: more than that, one cannot say.

Ibn Tufayl had good reason to seek distance from Granada and Guadix. The eastern front was a contested and war-torn area until 557/1162, when Granada was recaptured for the Almohads by 'Abd al-Mu'min, in what turned out to be the Caliph's last major campaign. If Ibn Tufayl chose to stay on the southern side of the Gibraltar strait for the sake of security alone that would hardly be surprising. But it is also true that much of the cultural excitement of the early Almohad era was concentrated on the southern side of the Mediterranean. This is contrary to the many accounts prevalent to this day which have sought to portray the African side of the Muslim West as a barbaric backwater. Such accounts – which, we should note, originated already in Muslim times – have tended to be motivated by cultural chauvinism on the Andalusians' part. In truth, during the reign of the Almoravids and the Almohads the two sides of the Gibraltar strait formed a single whole, a cultural sphere in which influences and people moved freely. Ibn Tufayl's life and career illustrate this new reality.

In 549/1154 Ibn Tufayl took a secretarial post in the administration of the governor of Ceuta and Tangier. From there he advanced to the royal seat in Marrakesh, where he eventually became the personal physician to Abu Ya'qub Yusuf, who was 'Abd al-Mu'min's son and successor to the throne. It is in this capacity that Ibn Tufayl forcefully came to shape the intellectual landscape of his age. The notion, popular for a while, that Ibn Tufayl would have been the Caliph's vizier in any formal sense of the word has been debunked (Conrad 1995): but the wider implication still stands that Ibn Tufayl had his Caliph's ear, and the Caliph his physician's counsel. The seventh-/thirteenth-century historian al-Marrakushi, on whom we depend for much of our knowledge of the Almohad era, tells of the Caliph that he so loved Ibn Tufayl that the two men spent days and nights in conversation (History, 172). The term "love" (hubb) is sufficiently strong to have been chosen deliberately. Even generations later, Ibn Tufayl was still known as Abu Ya'qub Yusuf's closest friend and confidante.

The apparent reason for Ibn Tufayl's bond with Abu Ya'qub Yusuf was the Caliph's own intellectual curiosity and the delight he took in erudite companionship. Reports have it that Abu Ya'qub Yusuf made a concerted effort to learn all he could from the sciences while his father still lived, when the young prince served as governor in Seville. That he was a capable interlocutor on intellectual matters is evidenced by anecdotes that describe how Abu Ya'qub Yusuf intervened in courtly discussion on matters ranging from scriptural interpretation to the hotly disputed issue of the eternity of the world (see chapter 6). Abu Ya'qub Yusuf is also supposed to have collated the Prophetic traditions related to holy war for the benefit of his troops (al-Marrakushi, History, 183). Certainly he generously sponsored the arts and sciences of his day, and in so doing he listened closely to the advice of Ibn Tufayl. The two decades that the Caliph and his doctor spent at the apex of power mark the cresting of Almohad cultural life in many ways, even if its most celebrated military successes came later under al-Mansur.

Ibn Tufayl's prominent placing among the Caliph's courtiers is on full display in one of the very few works from his pen to have survived alongside Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: a poem composed to lift the spirits, and likely swell the numbers, of the troops then defending the realm's northern frontiers in Spain. The context for Ibn Tufayl's propaganda piece against the Christians is not that the Almohads would have lived in fear of the latter invading Andalusia outright. Rather, the defense of the umma or Muslim community against any outside threats was a primary duty for the proclaimed Prince of Believers, one that put him in the company of the first four rightful Caliphs. Ibn Tufayl, in playing up this aspect of his Prince's activities, was doing his own part in painting the Almohad Caliphs as the legitimate protectors of all Andalusia. After the dissolute and weak petty kingdoms and the ineffectual Almoravids, the largely successful Andalusian campaigns of 'Abd al-Mu'min and his son, Ibn Tufayl's friend Abu Ya'qub Yusuf, were highlighted to signal a new and glorious period of Muslim rule in the West.

At the same time, Ibn Tufayl could not refrain from evoking the martial prowess for which the tribe of Qays was known in pre-Islamic Arabia. Nor could he resist implying – falsely – that Ibn Tumart and the Almohad royals shared these ethnic roots. The personal and the familial thus came to be conflated with the good of the realm.

SUFI, MUSICOLOGIST, MEDICAL AUTHOR

Although Hayy Ibn Yaqzan is the only complete treatise we have left from Ibn Tufayl, his literary output by all accounts was of respectable quantity, if unremarkable by the prolific standards of the day. Ibn Tufayl composed philosophical works on various aspects of the Aristotelian curriculum, which by then was the dominant paradigm for philosophical theorization in the Muslim West. None of these treatises have been preserved, though Ibn Tufayl's stance with regard to several controversial issues can be discerned from between the lines of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan. Ibn Tufayl is said to have taken an especial interest in the human soul, which stands to reason, both given the preoccupations of Hayy (see chapter 5) and when one considers some of the flashpoints over the preceding two centuries of philosophical debate.

On the other side, the fact that we do not hear of any interest in logic on Ibn Tufayl's part, nor do we see it evidenced in Hayy, signals an important difference from the other major Andalusian philosophers. Ibn Bajja and Ibn Rushd (the Latin Averroes, d. 595/1198), to pick one predecessor and one younger contemporary, wrote commentaries and technical manuals on logic as a way of underlining the importance of that discipline. Logic was supposed to provide the necessary technical underpinnings of any genuinely philosophical investigation. In line with a longstanding tradition that viewed philosophy as a kind of therapy for the soul, Ibn Tufayl seems to have focussed his attentions instead on those aspects of the philosophical tradition that provided a bridge with Muslim spirituality, namely psychology and cosmology.

This interest in the esoteric side of Islamic philosophy, for want of a better term, finds partial explanation in Ibn Tufayl's longstanding involvement in Sufism. In a valuable study, Vincent Cornell (in Conrad 1996) has pointed out Ibn Tufayl's prominent placing in the recorded chains of Sufi masters and disciples. We do not possess any written record of Ibn Tufayl's brand of Sufism beyond Hayy Ibn Yaqzan and a few snippets of poetry cited by al-Marrakushi, but Hayy itself bears ample testimony to the importance of Sufi vocabulary to Ibn Tufayl and his sensitivity to the controversies surrounding the early Sufi masters (see chapter 7).

Beyond Sufism, we are told that Ibn Tufayl late in life turned his attentions to the relationship between Greek philosophy and the divine law. This report may simply reflect a common biographical trope. Many Muslim thinkers are said to have become more pious in their twilight years, but this does not necessarily mean that this is what happened – merely that their admirers wished to present them in such a light. Still, the report about Ibn Tufayl is specific enough to give us pause, since it accords with a recognized preoccupation among Andalusian thinkers within this period. Ibn Rushd published a series of treatises on the relationship between claims made in religion and philosophy around 575/1179, and the theme is addressed in Hayy Ibn Yaqzan in ways both express and oblique (see chapter 8).

According to the biographers, Ibn Tufayl would furthermore have boasted that, had not music existed in Andalusia, he would have had to invent it himself. Does this mean that Ibn Tufayl considered himself an exquisite musician, or a theoretician of music or musicologist? The sources do not furnish us with further information, but a comparison both with his philosopher colleagues (al-Kindi, al-Farabi, and Ibn Sina all wrote on musical theory) and with Ibn Tufayl's engagement with medicine suggests the latter.

Ibn Tufayl, like many of his philosopher colleagues, worked on medical science rather than just medical practice. We have been left a mnemonic poem (urjuza) used to convey basic anatomical information; and Hayy Ibn Yaqzan testifies to an avid interest in the debate between medical professionals loyal to Galen and those philosophers who accepted the basic Aristotelian physiological and zoological scheme. As we shall see in chapter 5, some of the differences cut right to the heart of how one conceives of human life, and so resolving these tensions will have been of paramount importance to a scholar wearing both hats. As for Ibn Tufayl's career as a practicing physician, Lutz Richter-Bernburg (in Conrad 1996) is probably right. Had Ibn Tufayl not been proficient and well regarded in this occupation, he would hardly have been able to keep his job by the Caliphs' side.

SPONSOR

Historically speaking, most significant of all may have been Ibn Tufayl's sponsorship of a whole generation of scholars through endowments handed out by the Almohads. Ibn Tufayl's commendation of Ibn Rushd to Abu Ya'qub Yusuf is only the most spectacular instance of this. Ibn Rushd is said to have received a commission from Abu Ya'qub Yusuf to execute a series of summaries, paraphrases, and commentaries on Aristotle's works, but only after Ibn Tufayl excused himself from the task. The move demonstrates considerable perspicacity on Ibn Tufayl's part, as the task appears to have proved an exceptionally good fit for Ibn Rushd's temperament. Ibn Rushd's commentaries became authoritative for centuries of Latin and Hebrew scholars, to the point that Ibn Rushd is known to this day as "Averroes, the Commentator."

Through his mentorship, Ibn Tufayl also had a hand in one of the signal developments of twelfth-century Islamic science, the so-called Andalusian revolt against Ptolemaic astronomy (Sabra 1984). In medieval learning, the esteem enjoyed by the Alexandrian astronomer and astrologer Ptolemy (d. ca. 168 ce) equaled Galen's in medicine and Aristotle's in philosophy – the three are frequently mentioned in the same breath. It is easy to see why: the mathematical model Ptolemy put forward for the heavenly bodies' movements around the earth so closely accords with empirical observation that the naked eye will never discern any flaw in the system.

Still, Ptolemy's theory suffered from one crucial drawback, in that it did not accord with Aristotle and so was out of joint with the greater body of scientific literature available to medieval scholars. Besides this, Ptolemy's model, for all its mathematical sophistication, lacks a certain intuitive elegance. Ptolemy posits that in order to trace the motions that we see in the night sky, the celestial bodies have to perform small epicycles within their assigned regions in the heavens, as well as being eccentrically positioned within the system of spheres that was supposed to constitute the physical universe. There was no physical explanation for these anomalous motions, no reason why such eccentricities should be allowed to mar the geometric perfection of the universe; they were just brute facts, to be accepted as such. No wonder, therefore, that restless minds sought to find an alternative model that would preserve the physical system of the world as consisting of perfectly concentric spheres, with the planets affixed to their places.

The most famous effort to unseat Ptolemy in the middle ages was mounted by the Andalusian astronomer al-Bitruji (d. ca. 601/1204), known in the Latin West as Alpetragius. In his work On the Principles of Astronomy al-Bitruji developed an intricate, if ultimately flawed, explanation of how perfectly concentric spheres might produce all the motions that we observe in the skies. Al-Bitruji cites his teacher Ibn Tufayl as a predecessor and a mentor:

I have already informed you, my brothers, that Abu Bakr Ibn al-Tufayl, may God have mercy on him, used to tell us that he had discovered the form and principles for these motions differing from the principles that Ptolemy had assumed; that is, he did not assume eccentric or epicyclic spheres but nevertheless correctly (described) all these motions without recourse to falsehood. He promised to write a book about it, and his rank in scholarship is well known.

(Principles, Introduction, §18, tr. Goldstein)

Did Ibn Tufayl ever write such a book? It seems unlikely, given how al-Bitruji in the immediate follow-up says that he continued to ponder the matter on his own. Al-Bitruji adds that he had to scour the works of the ancients for hints as to how to go about the task, and that he was mostly frustrated in his efforts. There is, moreover, no mention at all of Ibn Tufayl in Ibn Rushd's equally anti-Ptolemaic commentaries on Aristotle's On the Heavens and Metaphysics. It appears, then, that it was a certain idea and outlook that Ibn Tufayl passed on to his pupils, rather than any precise doctrine or technical account.

The same goes for Ibn Tufayl's influence more in general. When he is spoken of in the histories and doxographies of the time, it is always in reverential terms, but it is noticeably difficult to pinpoint any specific area where he would have made a decisive or distinctive contribution. Indeed, neither al-Bitruji nor Ibn Rushd seems to have appreciated Ibn Tufayl's project of fusing Sufi spirituality with philosophical naturalism: Ibn Rushd's whole career may be viewed as a protracted reaction against such a speculative brand of philosophizing. The difference, though, at least underlines one of Ibn Tufayl's more admirable qualities. He appears to have been able to cultivate, and even genuinely to appreciate, high-grade scholarship of every kind, whether or not he found it personally agreeable.

The primary evidence for Ibn Tufayl's qualities as a thinker is to be found in the 150 pages of fleet-footed philosophical synthesis found in Hayy Ibn Yaqzan. It is to this work that we turn next.

HAYY

Ibn Tufayl's medical aide-mémoire is solid but unspectacular work (al-'Aziz 1984); the same goes for his military poem. It is in Hayy Ibn Yaqzan that Ibn Tufayl's unique contribution to Muslim thought is to be sought, and from Hayy that we must come to whatever understanding we can about the way he saw the world.

Fortunately, Hayy, for all its brevity, is rich not only in philosophical content but in the little flourishes and details that make for genuinely immersive reading. These details flesh out Hayy's fictional universe, and on occasion they illumine corners of the one Ibn Tufayl inhabited as well. The work, when read attentively, stands to reveal a good deal about what Ibn Tufayl saw when he looked at the world around him. In tracing the steps of its protagonist, Hayy, beyond the confines of bodily existence and sense-perception, the book also ascends to a captivating vision of reality as a whole, seen from a God's-eye point of view.

Hayy is also a useful document when it comes to determining how Ibn Tufayl wished to position himself against the prevailing intellectual trends of the day. This forms the primary objective of this chapter. We need to understand in broad terms what Ibn Tufayl wanted to do when he wrote Hayy, the audience at which the book was aimed, and the backdrop of mostly silent knowledge Ibn Tufayl shared with his original readership.

HAYY: A SYNOPSIS

A thumbnail sketch of Hayy is needed first to get us on the map. The front of this book includes a bullet-point summary and timeline for the formative events that shape the protagonist Hayy's life. To this we may add some color and a few simple observations. Every point raised here is worthy of deeper examination, and many of the subsequent chapters are devoted to just that task. For now, though, let us proceed.

(1) Ibn Tufayl prefaces his treatise with a learned introduction. He claims that the occasion for writing the book was a friend's request that he divulge the "secrets" of the Persian philosopher Ibn Sina's so-called Eastern wisdom (al-hikmat al-mashriqiyya). This request, Ibn Tufayl says, itself brought on untold – indeed, ineffable – ecstasies for our author. Ibn Tufayl then defends the very notion that such ecstasies can be gained through a contemplative practice against his countryman Ibn Bajja, who had presented a more intellectualist picture of the happiness which philosophy affords its practitioner. Sufi terminology regarding the "taste" (dhawq) of the divine enjoyed by the spiritual aspirant is invoked, as is the notion of intimacy or friendship with God (wilaya), signaling to the reader that Ibn Sina shared common cause with the Sufis (Hayy, 3–10). There follows an account of where each major Muslim philosopher stood on this central issue. Along the way, Ibn Tufayl cautions the reader that any verbal description he can give of the ultimate bliss will fall woefully short of its true nature. He also hints at the existence of an esoteric tradition of wisdom only available to the elect, circumspectly leaving unspecified how much Hayy divulges when it comes to this hidden knowledge.

(2) The exposition then takes an unexpected turn. Pointing out that one cannot scale the heights without first climbing the foothills, Ibn Tufayl says that he will lead the reader along the path he himself has taken. To this end, the fable of Hayy, Asal, and Salaman is spun. Ibn Tufayl explicitly acknowledges his debt to Ibn Sina in choosing these names for his three principal players – they come from two separate allegorical tales crafted by Ibn Sina (18–20; for translations of these Avicennan works, see Corbin 1960).

A single point is thus reinforced from all sides. Ibn Tufayl wishes to connect the mere mention of Ibn Sina's purported Eastern wisdom with the attainment of certain ecstatic visions; he insists that Ibn Sina's philosophy, when read aright, validates the existence of such visions (as against more earthbound interpreters of the Aristotelian tradition), even as it underscores their inexplicability; and the vehicle he chooses for demonstrating this alignment follows the established Avicennan practice of presenting philosophy in story-form, even if the ensuing narrative is one of Ibn Tufayl's own making. All is supposed to become clear once we consider the life of Hayy, the boy whose very name connotes "Living." It is through observing Hayy's life and cognitive ascent that we, the book's readers, are supposed to elevate our thinking up to the point where Ibn Tufayl's ecstatic perspectives readily become our own.

With these preliminaries out of the way, Ibn Tufayl begins with his main narrative.

(3) Ibn Tufayl gives two alternative explanations for how the boy Hayy arrives on his island. According to the first story, which resembles that of the baby Moses, Hayy floats on to the island in a basket as an infant as a result of strife in a king's court (the king is jealous of his sister's baby). According to the second account, the boy is born out of the very warmth of the sun, the depths of the earth, and the confluence of cosmic forces – an example of what the philosophers had labelled spontaneous generation, a contested phenomenon within the scientific tradition (Hayy, 20–33; Kruk 1990). Whatever Hayy's origin, Ibn Tufayl puts him in protection of a herd of gazelles. One doe effectively becomes Hayy's surrogate mother, with their relationship being described in noticeably affectionate terms. With the gazelles Hayy learns to walk, graze, and fend for himself; Hayy is also awakened to consider how he is both similar to and different from them (33–46).

(4) The eventual death of the doe – Hayy's adoptive mother – triggers a more general study of nature, one that meshes with a second cycle of practical advancement. In the everyday world, Hayy discovers fire, fashions shelter and weapons from sticks and stones, and domesticates several species of animal. In the theoretical sphere, he effectively learns to classify things by genera and species, proceeding from the many to the one and then back again (55–68). The exploration leads him to speculate on the nature of the heavens, which are seen to be altogether different from earthly existents, and to regard the whole physical universe as being dependent on a creative force standing outside of it. Hayy identifies this creative force both as the Prime Mover and the Necessary Being, just as Ibn Sina had done (80–88).

(5) The desire to contemplate the transcendent ground of all reality now consumes Hayy's mind. Hayy acknowledges that in order to be able to recognize the incorporeal aspect of reality, there must be something within his own constitution that matches the immaterial domain. With this comes the realization that Hayy's own being constitutes a microcosm of sorts, with ties to the mundane, celestial, and immaterial realms (104–106). Wishing to do justice to all three facets of his own being, but especially the highest and most transcendent part, Hayy devises an elaborate program of self-purification reminiscent of Sufi practices. This leads him first to a studied benevolence towards all (111–115); then, however, a different focus sets in. Hayy begins to shut out the world altogether and to delve deeply into the recesses of his soul. Here at last Hayy discovers that contemplative bliss to which Ibn Tufayl had alluded in his author's preface. It is here also that Ibn Tufayl the author re-enters the fray, issuing a stern reminder to the reader about the ineffability of the divine before proceeding further.

(6) In the throes of ecstasy, Hayy dies to himself, losing all sense of personal identity. He is only pulled away from the dangerous illusion of absolute monism, or the unity of all things, by God's grace (122–126). From here, Hayy's sights are drawn to an ecstatic vision of divine light descending and refracting. A procession of immaterial beings is described that culminates in a vision of a being bearing seventy thousand faces, each of which has seventy thousand mouths, each of which has seventy thousand tongues, every one of them singing God's praises (129). Remarks about the ultimate fate of human souls form the last part of Hayy's vision, after which the narrative settles into a bucolic finale. Having renounced the world and embraced the continuous contemplation of God as his purpose in life, Hayy at this point rests contentedly.

(7) The story, however, is not over. The scene shifts unexpectedly to a nearby island nation where two friends, Asal and Salaman, each explore the tenets of an unspecified revealed religious tradition in their own ways. Salaman hews closely to a communal observance of the divine law in the traditionally prescribed manner, whereas Asal prefers solitary contemplation. This leads Asal to Hayy's island, although the two remain unaware of one another for a time (136–138). Hayy then chances upon Asal and befriends him, learning in the process how to communicate in a human tongue. Comparing notes, both are astounded to learn that they share the same views on divinity and God's relationship to the created world. Hayy decides to go and explore the human world in the hopes of reforming revealed religion so that it may live up to the austere standards he has set for himself.

(8) Hayy's expedition to the island kingdom proves a disaster. Asal's friends, whom Hayy had regarded as his best hope for a receptive audience, will not listen to any of Hayy's exhortations. As soon as Hayy's interpretation of revelation advances beyond the most literal and banal level, they recoil. Hayy realizes that to lead commoners down this path is to risk their loss of faith, and so he gives up on his dream of religious reform (150–152). Hayy begs Salaman's pardon – the latter has since become the island's ruler – and enjoins him to guard the commoners' faith in its unreflective state. Hayy and Asal return to their desert island, living out the rest of their days in pursuit of an austere spirituality (153–155). Ibn Tufayl in his turn takes leave of the reader, intimating that while he has placed certain lessons behind a thin veil, any discerning reader will be able to pierce it with ease (155–156).

AN ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN

Such is the plot of Hayy in outline, described in linear terms. Further insight into the book may be gleaned from examining the book's main divisions. What strikes one immediately is how meticulously and deliberately Hayy is structured.

The text can be carved up in a number of different ways, but one obvious feature is that the preface and denouement – Ibn Tufayl's prefatory remarks and Hayy's misadventures in society – each take up roughly twenty pages, neatly bookending the main narrative on either side. From Hayy's birth, it takes about thirty-five pages for Hayy to assume control over his natural environment, and from this another thirty-five pages for his study of nature to be complete. Hayy's quest for ultimate perfection takes up thirty pages, following which Ibn Tufayl's description of the divine vision, inclusive of his warnings of the futility of attempting any such description, occupies a further fifteen. No one aspect of Hayy's progression is emphasized to the detriment of others; each section rests easily against the other.

Also noticeable is how in this linear progression, Hayy proceeds through each of the standard parts of the Aristotelian curriculum: natural philosophy, both in its general form and in its subdisciplines (cosmology, generation and corruption, biology); the intermediate sciences of psychology and mathematics, each of which lies between the material and the immaterial (Hayy pursues the latter chiefly through astronomy); metaphysics and theology; and finally ethics and politics, both of which are derived from the philosopher's understanding of the great chain of being. Only logic is conspicuously missing (see chapter 1 above).

Another way to divide up the text is from the outside in. Viewed in this way, the proportions are again impressively symmetrical. The preface and the epilogue, as before, represent the husk of the work; their proximate sections appear to mirror one another as well, inasmuch as the first thirteen pages of the main narrative dwell in the bowels of the earth (20–32), while the final thirteen linger in a vision of the transcendent domain (122–134). The low and the high are equivalent, moreover, in how they bookend Hayy's development. The first passage describes the primordial muck from which Hayy's individual consciousness emerges (27–30), while the final stretch paints an expansive picture of that oceanic awareness into which Hayy's sense of self finally melts (122–126). It can even be argued that the next two inner layers act as counterparts to one another. Hayy's initial existence as a practically oriented animal (34–55) contrasts with the new life he fashions for himself once he correctly identifies his participation in the higher strata of existence (104–120).

On such a picture, the core of the work is the long middle stretch where Hayy discovers and then maps out the principal structures of the universe and his own place within it (55–103). This sequence centers on two proofs for God's existence (82–88) and Hayy's subsequent revision of the whole way he views the physical world – now as a manifestation of divine craftsmanship, mercy, wisdom, and generosity (88–89). Hayy's supreme pacing is equally apparent on a micro level. The work divides neatly into near-even segments: in Léon Gauthier's Arabic text, two- and four-page units of narrative follow one another with unfailing regularity. This lends the narrative near-irresistible forward propulsion; things never stand still for long.

The purpose of Hayy's architectonic construction, of course, will not have been one of getting the reader to count the pages. Quite the opposite: Ibn Tufayl paced Hayy the way he did in order to carry the reader right along, to whisk him away on a journey, in short: to produce a page-turner. In this he succeeded quite spectacularly. Hayy is a breeze to read through, which, when it comes to classical Islamic philosophy, constitutes a minor miracle. Hayy Ibn Yaqzan occupies a unique position in all of Arabic literature due to its unusual blend of form and content, each seamlessly supporting the other (Bürgel 1992, 830–831).

HAYY'S THEME

Where is all this headed? What is the overall point that Ibn Tufayl wanted to make with Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, and what did he mean to accomplish by publishing the work? Let us begin from a single puzzling observation. Hayy's principal narrative describes Hayy's evolution from infant to perfect human being, but each of the framing devices that hem it in cast it in an unsettling light. The preface does so by hinting at a much wider tradition of knowledge, esoteric in character, with which Hayy's story stands in dialogue somehow, while the epilogue casts a sickly pall on a narrative that has been resolutely upbeat until that point.

With his prologue, does Ibn Tufayl wish to say that Hayy can only be understood if one constantly keeps in mind everything that previous philosophers, perhaps including he himself, have said and written in their more technical treatises? And with his epilogue, does Ibn Tufayl want to question the perfectibility of human society or the philosopher's or spiritual seeker's place in it? What is the "thin veil" alluded to by the author, and what is supposed to lie behind it? A critique of established religion, perhaps, or of philosophical teaching as traditionally conceived, or even of the very search for ultimate wisdom?

Two alternatives have traditionally been given when it comes to Hayy's purpose, each associated with the name of a famous Orientalist. On George Hourani's view, which was also that of Hayy's early modern interpreters, (a) Ibn Tufayl primarily wanted to affirm the innate human rational capacity for achieving a comprehensive vision of reality, including an understanding of the divine and an attendant moral perfection. For Léon Gauthier, by contrast, and perhaps already for the historian al-Marrakushi, (b) what is really at issue in the text is the relationship that philosophy bears to revealed religion – a highly sensitive topic during Ibn Tufayl's lifetime.

The first thing to say about the problem of Hayy's overall aims is that it need not detain us unduly or stop us from exploring the text as it stands. For premodern readers, determining a particular work's scope may have been an indispensable first step when it came to learning its (presumed) lessons, and the assumption of a single and unitary purpose may have been a key tool for understanding a work as a whole. But a book can be read as much for its parts as for the whole; Ibn Tufayl's casual asides and narrative detours can be just as fascinating to us as what he is ultimately driving at.

It is unfortunate that many of Hayy's most astute readers have never got past the initial question of Ibn Tufayl's goals and aims. Efforts to understand the book have all too often stalled at the first hurdle, whereas a fuller appreciation of everything that went into the pot when Ibn Tufayl wrote Hayy could, it seems to me, eventually yield a fuller understanding of its author's overall preoccupations. We need not prejudge the question of what Ibn Tufayl wants to say, that is, before we examine the many things he actually says.

POINTERS AND REMINDERS

To this we may add that any unintended discrepancies in Ibn Tufayl's authorship – the way in which he says one thing while silently intimating another, or promises something while failing to follow up on it – may prove as illuminating as the ways in which he remains in control of his narrative. Rather than hinting at some shadowy counter-narrative hidden within Hayy's crevices (a solution preferred by some of the "thin veil" enthusiasts) such failings in authorial consistency are tell-tale signs of the very human limitations faced by an author even of Ibn Tufayl's caliber in weaving together a single narrative that would take in all that he wants it to.

In point of fact, Hayy, by virtue of synthesizing insights from many disparate intellectual legacies, ends up pointing in multiple directions at once. The work evokes at turns teachings found in Aristotelian philosophy of nature, Galenic physiology, Ibn Sina's and al-Ghazali's metaphysics, Sufi descriptions of contemplative rapture, and Farabian as well as Almohad views of politics and organized religion. Tracing a throughline that would take in all of these would tax any commentator's capabilities; trying to force them all to serve a single cause would be next to impossible.

What is more, Ibn Tufayl seeds various hints throughout his text as to what his personal stance was with regard to some of the controversial issues of the day. These messages typically need to be teased out, since their significance is often played down rather than up. Their very subtlety indicates that they must originally have been intended for the consumption of a sophisticated audience of peers or near-peers – a select group indeed. From between the lines of Hayy one can read first of all that Ibn Tufayl, like his scholarly peers, was much vexed by how to adjudicate between the contested and partially conflicting legacies of the three thinkers whom Muslim enthusiasts of the Greek sciences (al-'ulum al-yunani) considered paragons of their respective fields of study: Aristotle for philosophy, Galen for medicine, and Ptolemy for astronomy. Ibn Tufayl's basic outlook accorded with the common Arabic practice of elevating Aristotelian philosophy above the other two strands. It was Aristotle who provided the master key to the sciences, and it was by looking to Aristotelian principles that any conflicts between the Greek sciences should be resolved.

Another, more proximate challenge was much closer to Ibn Tufayl's heart. Ibn Tufayl in his work had to square a theoretical explication and defense of Sufi asceticism and contemplation – of the sort mounted earlier by al-Ghazali – with the love of the natural world exhibited by the Arabic Aristotelian tradition. Ibn Tufayl, by all accounts, found both intellectual trends deeply attractive, and in principle such a commensuration should have been within reach. Al-Ghazali built his peculiar brand of philosophical theology on foundations laid down by Ibn Sina, after all, something that is especially evident in those treatises to which Ibn Tufayl had ready access (the Niche of Lights and the Beautiful Names). Ibn Sina himself portrayed the fruits of his philosophy in terms calculated to appeal to Sufi sympathizers in his late Pointers and Reminders, which again is a work explicitly referenced by Ibn Tufayl. Ibn Tufayl's further efforts in sidelining the more traditional religious sciences (see below) similarly found support in trends then working their way through the Almohad regime.

At the same time, turning Hayy into nothing but a series of veiled allusions to intellectual debates conducted elsewhere would make of Hayy (and the act of reading the work) little more than an elaborate parlor game. Pulling at the various threads in this manner only makes the whole, highly skillful weave unravel. That would be an unfortunate end result, and in any case seems to be predicated on an implausible premise. Ibn Tufayl's authorial hand is much too sure and his voice too distinct for his work to be something rather less than the sum of its parts.

As a working hypothesis, we may assume that Ibn Tufayl's purpose in releasing Hayy to the public was largely what he said it was: namely, to bring the reader up to a point where she or he would readily accept the reality of the ineffable visions claimed both by Ibn Sina and by the Sufis. Ibn Tufayl even says that he considers this a worthy testament to leave behind (18). An ancillary goal would be to make the reader accept Ibn Tufayl's haughty claim that this "Eastern wisdom" is superior to the more down-to-earth variations on the Greek philosophical tradition purveyed by other reputable philosophers; another, to discredit the calumnies of the philosophical charlatans, mutafalsifa, of Ibn Tufayl's own day and age. (We will assess critically Ibn Tufayl's claims concerning Ibn Sina in chapter 7.) The narrative leading up to this point is needed because without an understanding of the mundane reality to be transcended, one cannot accurately position the transcendent reality either, or understand how far removed from everyday modes of conception it lies; while what comes after in Hayy's story – the disillusionment that follows Hayy's encounter with human society – must in some way stem from the fact that these recondite matters cannot be sufficiently appreciated by those who have not plumbed the depths of philosophical wisdom to the extent Hayy and the narrator have.

THE SPIRAL PATH

This, however, leaves us with another question. Why does Ibn Tufayl not get to the point right away? Or, to put the matter in narrative terms, why does Ibn Tufayl not let Hayy arrive at his designated goal much sooner?

Granted, there are relevant distinctions to be made between the mundane and the supernal, the circumscribed and the unbounded, the communicable and the incommunicable, and so on. Is it still not the case that Ibn Tufayl could have launched into a discussion of such matters directly and get his view across in a quarter of the space? What purpose do all the detours serve that have to do, for example, with the differences between plants and animals (59–60), the finite size of the universe (76–78), or the relative merits of different kinds of diets (110–113)? Modern readers may feel grateful to Ibn Tufayl for cramming so much knowledge into such a small space. But what purpose did he envision for such an account, compressed yet comprehensive, when what he had in mind was a sixth-/twelfth-century readership of educated Maghrebi Muslims?

The question that arises after one reads the whole of Hayy is not so much whether unaided reason can attain to an awareness of the highest principles (since by Ibn Tufayl's lights, plainly it can). Nor do we need to obsess over whether reason and revelation can be reconciled (short answer: yes, although it is complicated – see chapter 8). The question, rather, that arises out of considering Hayy's entire story is this: how does the self-taught philosopher's worldly striving relate to the gains he makes in achieving otherworldly bliss? Why, for the reader, is a preoccupation with the former presented as a necessary prelude to the latter? Or, to put it in terms Ibn Tufayl's contemporaries would have recognized: why is the best Sufi also a philosopher, and why is the best philosopher also a lover and investigator of all things physical, at least up to a point?

The short answer is that Ibn Tufayl believed that we must always begin from where we are. The very shape of Hayy's narrative confirms the Aristotelian principle that our explorations must always start from what is most evident to us. Only through painstaking effort do we graduate to what is more evident by nature, namely, the true principles and ultimate causes of things (Aristotle, Physics I.1). We shall have occasion to consider the implications of this conviction in more detail when we examine Hayy's developing modes of reasoning across the next several chapters. For now, let it simply be noted how the 100 pages – or thirty-five fictionalized years – that take us from Hayy's birth to his vision of the divine underline in unmistakable (because concrete) fashion the painstaking and time-consuming manner in which all great secrets are unearthed.

We may in fact visualize Hayy's story as a spiraling path that narrows as it rises higher. (The way up is at the same time the way in – Ibn Tufayl makes use of both spatial metaphors.) Along the way, Ibn Tufayl genuinely seeks to instruct a wide readership in what the universe looks like; also – and this is at least as important – he aims to educate his audience in how to look at that self-same universe. In many ways, the best way to characterize Hayy is as an initiatory tale (Hughes 2004). Through adopting the viewpoint of Hayy and his fresh, unjaundiced eyes, Ibn Tufayl wants us to see the world for what it really is. But he also wants to instill in each of us a desire to become Hayy. In aid of this, the didacticism of Ibn Tufayl's treatise is carefully and considerately couched in the language of discovery. The reader is allowed to be party to Hayy's findings as they arise.

AUTHORITY AND AUTHENTICATION

Ibn Tufayl also presents Hayy's many findings in a manner that is detail-oriented yet decidedly unfussy and non-argumentative. A few times, he practically apologizes for introducing technical philosophical terms, as for instance when he defines nature as form (65, and see chapter 4). In other instances, he deliberately holds off on any technicalities for as long as he can, seemingly in adherence to the principle that if the protagonist, Hayy, does not have access to a specialist vocabulary, then neither should the narrator or reader.

This choice of level of instruction is virtually unique among the classical Islamic philosophers, with whom even elementary textbooks trended towards establishing technical terminology at the earliest opportunity. (In some ways, we find more ready parallels to Hayy in twelfth-century Jewish and Christian works such as Bahya Ibn Paquda's Duties of the Heart and Bernardus of Silvestris' Cosmography.) It appears to have stemmed from a fundamental confidence on the author's part in the lay audience's ability to grasp the essentials of a theoretically sophisticated worldview without having to go through a great amount of technical detail. This reflects a similar proto-humanist optimism in early Almohad culture (see Kruk in Conrad 1996; Germann 2008).

Anti-authoritarianism also plays a role. In good Almohad fashion, Ibn Tufayl in his introduction warns against following teachers blindly (taqlidi, 18). In the book's epilogue, the submissiveness (taslim) of the masses is taken as an indication of a certain intellectual inferiority (153). The reader of Hayy, by contrast, is encouraged to begin from the beginning, so that she or he may gradually learn to swim in the sea in which Ibn Tufayl himself has become immersed. The metaphorical dimensions are important once more, heights being equivalent to depths in terms of their remoteness and forbidding nature. Ibn Tufayl promises the reader that in the fullness of time, the reader may even progress beyond the knowledge Ibn Tufayl himself possesses (18–20).

Yet there is something disingenuous about all this. For all that Ibn Tufayl insists on Hayy's exploits being wholly unburdened by existing scholarly traditions and writing in the disciplines (of philosophy, medicine, and Sufism), the net effect of Hayy's findings is the further normalization of these very disciplines as constituting the only rational approach to the world. This is to say that every time that Hayy, who is supposed to be both a blank slate and the perfectly rational human being, hits upon a particular way of perceiving things, that way of framing the question becomes the norm not only within Hayy's fictional universe, but for the reader as well. This must have been Ibn Tufayl's intent all along.

What Hayy suggests, slyly and quite subliminally, is that Aristotelian naturalism, the medical theory of vital spirits, the Neoplatonic view of the cosmos as a whole, and the Sufi understanding of sincere religious devotion (see chapters 4–7) all cohere into a greater whole, which at the same time is the only rational way of seeing the world. These are the views that every reasonable person will arrive at, provided only that that person, like Hayy, approaches the world with unoccluded eyes and zero conceptual baggage. The reader rendered sympathetic to these teachings through reading Hayy will then – so Ibn Tufayl must have hoped – recognize them and accept them when she or he encounters them again in a more scholarly context, cloaked in more technical garb. Perhaps she or he will even desire to delve further into this world of knowledge, thus piercing the "thin veil" set in place by Ibn Tufayl, now revealed to be more an enticing dare than a forbidding barrier. In this way, the book provides a gateway to an entire universe of learning, for contemporaries just as much as for modern readers.

HARMONY AND HIERARCHY

Through describing how Hayy absorbs and integrates the main parts of the medical, philosophical, and Sufi bodies of knowledge prevalent in twelfth-century Andalusia and Marrakesh, Hayy makes a strong claim about the overall coherence and harmony of all of them. At the same time, the book implicitly suggests a hierarchy and ordering for these disciplines – disciplines whose practitioners, lest we forget, often vied and competed with one another for followers, endorsements, and overall airs of prestige and intellectual authority. In light of this, it plainly matters whether Hayy presents the philosophical tradition in light of Sufism or vice versa; whether the physiology of Galen or Aristotle is followed when it comes to establishing the relative supremacy of the head and the heart; and so on. A few bird's-eye level observations will have to suffice for now.

In the story, Hayy begins from practical skills and progresses through the anatomical knowledge possessed by the medical authors to a more general consideration of the principles of nature. This is followed by a cosmically grounded theology and then a perfected personal program of purification, culminating in a personal witnessing (mushahada) of the divine presence. Now, Ibn Tufayl's sponsor, Abu Ya'qub Yusuf, is said to have begun his theoretical studies from medicine (al-Marrakushi, History, 170–171) and to have progressed from there to philosophy. Is it conceivable that Ibn Tufayl through his writing suggested that the Caliph should endorse the Sufi path next? Is that how things went for Ibn Tufayl himself? Or are those, at least, the terms on which he wanted his own life's trajectory to be perceived? At the time, a retreat into a private spirituality towards the end of one's life was seen as an eminently respectable thing to do.

It would be tempting to conclude that Sufism stands at the top of Ibn Tufayl's projected hierarchy of the disciplines. However, on closer inspection, the contents of Hayy's taste of the divine turn out to be nothing other than the outlines of Ibn Sina's cosmology (Hayy, 128–130). Similarly even at the summit of all understanding, where our powers of language and conceptualization reach their utmost limit, philosophical reasoning is still called in to regulate the way the visions of the saints are interpreted (see chapter 7). Both Ibn Sina and al-Ghazali had resorted to similar strategic moves. if they were mystics at all, theirs had been an intellectually constrained mysticism and so, it seems, was Ibn Tufayl's.

We may also pause to register which elements in Islamic intellectual culture are excluded entirely from the harmonious picture presented by Ibn Tufayl. Both established Islamic theology (kalam) and jurisprudence (fiqh) are missing from the main narrative; when they are hinted at in the book's epilogue, this is in pejorative terms (chapter 8). Ibn Tufayl's infrequent use of Qur'anic citations and Prophetic traditions is clearly meant to establish the Islamic credentials of Hayy's worldview, together with its author's. But Ibn Tufayl's actual use of Scripture, in the tradition of al-Ghazali, is impressionistic and freewheeling. The same goes for Ibn Tufayl's echoing of the sayings attributed to the Sufis and the Prophet in some of his more pious passages. All in all, the established religious sciences have no place in Hayy, and perhaps they would not in Ibn Tufayl's ideal version of human society either (chapter 8).

So what does Ibn Tufayl bring into Hayy's sights, in what order, and at what pace? Let us begin from the beginning once more.

ISLAND LIFE

What would it be like to grow up on an island without a human companion or teacher? How would the world appear in one's eyes? Where would one seek comfort and security, and where would one find oneself most challenged? What would the formative experiences of one's life be? Above all, would a human child developing under such circumstances simply become part of the animal kingdom, blending into their natural surroundings, or would a spark of humanity, however defined, inevitably shine through?

These are the questions that Ibn Tufayl's early modern readers in Europe saw Hayy as addressing. The same features of Ibn Tufayl's book – its superficial aspects, one might say – were also reproduced time and again in the many Hayy imitations written in Europe during the eighteenth century. This is only natural. While there are layers upon layers to Hayy, and while the following chapters make the case that a carefully considered cosmology underlies its presentation, there is a peculiar pleasure to reading Hayy simply as a rollicking adventure story, an imaginative thought experiment, and a parable of man's triumph over his surroundings. Equal parts Jungle Book and Robinson Crusoe, such a reading discloses many interesting and important facts about Ibn Tufayl and his life-world as well. It is not only in the ponderous and profound that a writer's character stands revealed. It is equally as much in the telling asides and inessential flourishes that we may catch a glimpse of the way he viewed the world.

Ibn Tufayl's writing is at its most playful in the passages that describe Hayy's childhood and youth, and in a sense it is at its most creative too. Throughout much of Hayy, Ibn Tufayl's prose has to serve dual purposes: besides carrying the narrative, it also acts as the vehicle through which a great deal of theory is conveyed. Once Hayy becomes a young adult, his voice has to become that of a budding philosopher. Correspondingly, a certain self-seriousness sets in. But in describing Hayy's day-to-day dealings, his youthful emotions, and his natural surroundings, Ibn Tufayl is free from the burden of philosophizing and able to utilize his authorial voice in other ways – to entertain as well as to educate, and above all to immerse us in Hayy's imaginary universe.

When Hayy covers himself up with eagle feathers and accidentally makes himself so fearsome that he scares off other animals (Hayy, 37–38); when he carries a fiery branch to his cave in order to keep it warm and lit night and day, then smells the savory aroma of the fish that he casts in the flames (48–49); and when much later in the story Hayy mistakes Asal's black woolen coat for a hide and expresses puzzlement at this new kind of animal he has never encountered before (139–140), no other purpose need be postulated for Ibn Tufayl's prose than the sheer joy of inventive storytelling. Other seemingly innocuous instances of Hayy's mundane observations, however, may be more pregnant with meaning.

THE ISLAND

What is the island like on which Hayy lives out his days? Ibn Tufayl in his author's guise gives us a few coordinates. The island has a mild and equitable climate; though isolated, it is not terribly far from the nearest land mass or from human civilization; most important for the wellbeing of the infant who is to grow up on it, the island hosts an abundance of flora and fauna, none of which, however, poses a threat to him (33).

Ibn Tufayl does not always bother to remain even within these modestly prescribed parameters. When it comes to describing how Hayy, now an adult, casts a benevolent eye towards all God's creatures, Ibn Tufayl says that one of Hayy's activities is to help smaller animals escape those that prey on them (115), just as he also helps untangle plants so that each can reach out to the sun unimpeded. So are there predatory animals on the island or not? The short answer is that Ibn Tufayl does not really care. Each statement serves a purpose in its immediate context: one explains how a human infant, who at the beginning is the most helpless of all, can survive on the island (35–36), while the other illustrates the ethical principle of respecting, protecting, and nurturing all life (see chapter 6). Similarly, when Ibn Tufayl lets slip that Hayy gets to thinking about the properties of ice (Hayy, 55, and see chapter 4), this is in the context of teaching about the various forms that water can take. It does not really matter that Hayy will never have encountered frozen water on his pleasantly warm island.

Beyond this, the island forms the stage and the setting for Hayy's development; it is never an object of interest in itself. We learn nothing of the island's shores, for instance, or its forest covering, or whether it has any mountains or hills.

THE PERFECT CLIMATE

One feature to which Ibn Tufayl devotes several pages of text is the latitude at which Hayy's island sits. Ibn Tufayl wants this to be south enough to be hugging the equator (20). This, however, poses a problem, inasmuch as the most authoritative sources in both philosophy and medicine – Aristotle and Ibn Sina, Hippocrates and Galen – had described the equatorial zone as fundamentally inimical to human life, perhaps to life in general, and certainly to civilized society. Ibn Tufayl faithfully reproduces the argument against life along the equator, saying that it represents the view of the common philosophers and the foremost medical authorities, before proceeding to refute it (20–24).

The line of reasoning that says that humans cannot thrive close to the equator goes back to a Hippocratic treatise called Airs, Water, and Places. In the treatise, which was also translated into Arabic, a theory of seven climates is sketched out, of which the middle one is deemed the most conducive to optimal human development, individually as well as collectively. Since it is the most perfectly balanced between the hot and the cold and the humid and the dry, the fourth climate allows for temperamentally balanced animals to emerge, including humans. This in turn leads to cultures that strike a favorable balance between the refined and the rough, the civilized and the spirited.

According to the Hippocratic view, which is not quite racialist but is certainly environmentally and culturally determinist, climate in the end is destiny. Those who live at cold latitudes cannot help but be irascible to a fault, freedom-loving but coarse in custom. The inhabitants of hot regions, by contrast, may naturally incline towards a sophisticated culture, but they will of necessity be sapped of the essential life-force that would lead them to assert their independence. As a result, southerners become lax in their private morality and easily subject to tyranny.

The theory of seven climates became an established part of the scientific outlook of the late antique and medieval period (Altmann 2005). Unsurprisingly, those who inhabited the fourth zone – roughly, present-day Spain, Italy, and Greece, along with portions of the Near East – endorsed the theory as confirming their own superiority over their neighbors to the north and south. Ibn Rushd's paraphrase of Aristotle's Meteorology, written concurrently with Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, is informative in this regard. In a passage that combines parochial pride with an underlying inferiority complex, Ibn Tufayl's protégé and fellow countryman avers that the fourth zone is the optimal climate, since it makes philosophers even out of uncouth Arabs. The statement underlines the need of Andalusian intellectuals working under the Almohad regime to play up their own cultural achievements, at same time acknowledging how the Arabs, who originally came from hotter climes, still carried the stigma of being intellectually inferior.

FROM CEYLON TO MALI

Ibn Tufayl endorses all the basics of the ancient climatological theory. A perfect balance between the primary qualities – hot, cold, moist, dry – is needed in order for human development to occur in an optimal way (Hayy, 99–104) and in determining this, the amount of heat in the atmosphere is of paramount importance. The only premise Ibn Tufayl contests is that the equator will necessarily be all that hot.

Ibn Tufayl's reasons have to do with how heat is generated by the celestial spheres that rotate around the earth. Appealing to demonstrative proofs furnished by the physical sciences (21), Ibn Tufayl argues that the only way the sun can cause heat in the sublunary world is through its luminosity. But even along the equator, he says, the sun is only directly overhead during the two equinoxes, while the rest of the time it tilts slightly to the north or south. Thus there is no compelling reason to think that the equatorial zone would be inhospitable to life.

This is an oddly technical argument to place right at the beginning of the treatise. Why press the point, especially since Ibn Tufayl acknowledges that he is going against majority opinion? Here an intriguing sliver of intellectual heritage rears its head. The story of Hayy's spontaneous generation on "an equatorial island, off the coast of India" finds a ready parallel in the Letters of the Brethren of Purity, a fourth-/tenth-century eclectic philosophical text of Iraqi provenance, where the reference is to Ceylon, or the Arabic Sarandib (de Callataÿ 2013). Ibn Tufayl never explicitly refers to the Brethren, probably because the Letters were held in low esteem both by al-Ghazali (Deliverer, 33) and by the more established Aristotelian tradition. His reliance on the Letters remains unsubstantiated otherwise. Still, even this minor echo indicates that Ibn Tufayl likely drew on more sources than he lets on. We know that the Letters were popular in Andalusia before the more orthodox Aristotelianism of al-Farabi and Ibn Sina took hold; Ibn Tufayl may still have relied on the Letters even as he presented himself as dispensing the fresh wisdom of Ibn Sina.

Ibn Tufayl may have had added empirical reasons for claiming the equatorial zone hospitable. The Almoravid empire, which preceded the Almohads, had established trade routes through Western Africa, extending down to Ghana and Mali. It is thanks to Almoravid activism that Malikite law is the predominant form of Shari'a taught in centers of learning such as Timbuktu even today. These trade links will have impressed upon the Muslim West how large and powerful kingdoms lay south of the Sahara, even in places where Greek climatological theorization did not allow for human civilizations to flourish.

THE TWICE-BORN CHILD

Ibn Tufayl's comments on climate are occasioned by the question of how the infant Hayy originally ended up on his island. Ibn Tufayl provides two alternatives, which he embeds in an Islamic context through references to Scripture. According to one account, Hayy is born spontaneously from a gaseous bubble emerging from the earth's clay, in which case we are witnessing an outflow of that divine spirit which according to the Qur'an is "one of God's charges" (Q. 17:85). An alternate story puts Hayy in an ark similar to the one that carried Moses (Q. 20:37–40, and see Exodus 2:1–10), only this time the baby flees from a fractious ruling family rather than landing in its care.

The intent of the scriptural allusions is clear. We are meant to perceive the hand of God in the way Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, "Living Son of Wakeful," awakens to the world around him. This is made all the more important by the fact that God practically disappears from view for the following fifty pages. But why account for a single phenomenon twice?

Ibn Tufayl maintains that not everybody will accept his strange account of spontaneous generation and that he has had to furnish a more mundane story in order to bring the rest of his readership to accept the presence of the infant on the island. This is surely true as far as it goes. When it comes to explaining how a child might be born, not from a mother and a father but out of the churning rotations of the very cosmos itself, things get very complicated very quickly. Ibn Tufayl does his level best to keep the exposition accessible, but with limited success. The reader is rapidly introduced to elemental forces and mixtures, to varying degrees of equilibrium between them – this is where the equitable climate comes in – and to some kind of otherworldly power that operates on all these (27–30). We ourselves will have to relegate discussion of Ibn Tufayl's theory to a later point (chapter 5), which is a sign of how out of place it is in its original context.

But the ark story poses its own set of problems. It is told with Ibn Tufayl's customary verve and attention to detail – a tyrant king rages; a box holding an infant floats precariously on the waters, then crashes to shore; a starving baby cries dejectedly amongst the reeds until a doe hears it and has pity on the boy – but it does not really gel with the main narrative. Ibn Tufayl himself does not appear all that invested in his hastily concocted tale of courtly intrigue. His initial description of Hayy's proximate kingdom does not match the one given later, in the book's epilogue.

There is a reason for the disconnect. The story about the king and his sister appeals to unique circumstances and chance happenings rather than any universal rule in to which its protagonist might tap, whereas Hayy's entire narrative is driven by naturalistic explanations being unearthed that account for why things are the way they are. Even the most peculiar events driving Hayy's development are typically resolved through Hayy discerning some universal rule that explains the particular occurrence. Hayy, in other words, is able to amass experience (tajriba) and to learn from it. The episode in the king's court, by contrast, stands virtually alone in that it teaches no discernible lesson. The story is merely an entertaining diversion, something that could conceivably have happened and might plausibly account for Hayy's presence on the island, but nothing more than that.

HISTORY OR DRAMA?

An underlying philosophical point bears noting, inasmuch as it tells us something about the kind of book Hayy wants to be. Aristotle's Poetics (chapter 9) puts across the curious thesis that fiction can sometimes be truer than the truths found in history books. This, Aristotle says, is because history merely chronicles things that happened one way, but might just as well have happened another (it concerns itself with contingent facts), whereas the dramatist, even when concocting an imaginary tale, thereby wishes to tell something about how things must be, always and forever. The tragedian's art therefore comes closer to that of the philosopher. In a properly fashioned play, individual events act as the catalyst to certain universal truths concerning human nature becoming manifest. "Pride comes before a fall" would be an example.

Arabic authors found it hard to understand the Poetics, in part because they lacked the live theatrical performances that informed Aristotle's original treatise. Jorge Luis Borges has a delightful short story on this called Averroes's Dream, set in twelfth-century Andalusia. In the story, Borges describes how Ibn Rushd effectively turned Aristotle's Poetics into a theory of allegorical expression: fictional entities stand in for real ones, mundane characters for higher truths, etc. This is not altogether wrong, even if it misses Aristotle's keen attention to the details of storytelling and to the emotional response drama is supposed to generate. (The Arabic philosophers additionally interpreted Aristotle's poetics in terms of his logic, but that is another story.)

The Arabic Aristotelian theory of poetics adds to our appreciation of Hayy as a piece of writing. It helps explain the book's unapologetic didacticism and the way its author presents a tidily sealed metaphysical and moral universe. In devising Hayy, Ibn Tufayl did not seek to craft a modern psychological novel; instead, Hayy's life is meant to demonstrate and illustrate the universal structures and features that shape and guide all our lives, including the laws that govern the cosmos. Through Hayy's activities we get to join in the task of uncovering these underlying regularities.

But how to match the narrative to the theory it is meant to convey? Ibn Tufayl has a plan for this, although it is not always perfectly realized.

SEEING WITH ONE'S OWN EYES

Ibn Tufayl's comments regarding the climate around the equator (20–24) and the subsequent account of Hayy's spontaneous generation (27–32) constitute an exception to how information is parceled out in Hayy. Ibn Tufayl generally takes care not to introduce anything more complex into his scheme than what the reader can absorb thanks to sharing in Hayy's earlier experiences. (Significantly, the offending section occurs before Ibn Tufayl can avail himself of the teaching device of Hayy's eyes and ears.)

In the main, Ibn Tufayl is content to let Hayy's eyes and ears guide us as we, and he, become acquainted with the boy's surroundings. The very first thing we learn about the world is how assiduously mothers care for their young – a surprisingly tender first lesson and one that is sketched out in detail, as the doe that takes pity on Hayy not only soothes the crying baby and offers him milk but also brings warmth and cooling as necessary, cradles the infant, and later introduces him to solid foods (33–34). Other early observations include the fact that animals communicate in various ways through the sounds that they make (34) and that they vie for mutual supremacy (35). From here, Hayy's lessons regarding animal and plant life, in particular, come thick and fast. Ibn Tufayl says that their study preoccupies Hayy for a significant spell between the ages of seven and twenty-one (46–47).

This aspect of the book draws on a long literary tradition dedicated to the wonders of nature; it contrasts with Andalusian poetry's proclivity towards celebrating cultivated gardens rather than wildlife (Jayyusi 1992). Bestiaries in the world of classical Muslim literature could be presented as meditations on God's providential care for all creatures. They could also be unapologetic entertainments, having no purpose other than providing amusement and some trivia to the reader. Ibn Tufayl's portrayals of animal anatomy and animal functions start out as the latter because Hayy, his protagonist, does not start from a worldview that would include a God. In keeping with both the theological and philosophical traditions in Islam, the affirmation of God's existence is a conclusion to be reached, not an immediate intuition from which we start. As wholly immaterial and unlike anything in the world, God rests behind a veil that must be pierced.

This, plus the fact Ibn Tufayl is resolved only to discuss matters that occur to Hayy, accounts for the near-total absence of any discernible pious sentiment from the early parts of the narrative. When Hayy is inspired to bury the corpse of his adoptive mother through observing one raven bury its companion (46), this plainly echoes the Qur'anic story of Cain and Abel (Q. 5:33–34); yet no religious motivation is ascribed to Hayy. Similarly when Hayy stands at the threshold of discovering a transcendent First Cause, Ibn Tufayl feels compelled to burst out in Qur'anic citations (73–74), but these come and go without the protagonist being any the wiser. Such knowing asides are at any rate kept to a minimum. For a professedly religious author, Ibn Tufayl is noticeably reluctant to editorialize in the early stages of the game.

BEGINNING FROM THE BEGINNING

Hayy's early education is, furthermore, remarkably hands-on. His discovery of the circulatory system through dissecting the dead doe's chest is only the most spectacular and detailed example of this (40–45). Later on, an actual vivisection allows Hayy to confirm that a kind of vital heat is what courses through an animal's body and maintains its life functions (49–51). Hayy also discovers the elemental properties of fire in the course of taming a flame and experimenting on what he can do with it. This includes roasting a beached fish, a successful experiment that leads Hayy to take up hunting and fishing, as well as an omnivorous diet (48–49).

All this is rather more revolutionary than it sounds. Our current didactic model emphasizes learning through trial and error, internally motivated processes of concept formation and theorization, and a continual interaction with our environment – precisely the techniques promoted by Ibn Tufayl through Hayy's example. We might consequently think, or like to think, that there is not much difference between learning something within a school system and discovering something for oneself.

However, the pedagogy in Ibn Tufayl's intellectual environment was markedly different. On the side of the traditional religious sciences ('ulum al-din) the emphasis was firmly on a mastery of a corpus of authoritative texts and interpretive traditions – the Qur'an, the sayings of the Prophet, the ever-expanding body of legal rulings. What may come as a surprise is that when it came to learning philosophy, attitudes were not much different. Here, too, a reliance on a long-since established curriculum prevailed, and with it the understanding that a budding thinker should be inducted to its language and established practices as early as possible. The general perception was that since the time of Aristotle, most of what there was to know in the world had been discovered. Knotty conceptual puzzles remained, of course, but they too were best treated in the context of scholarly commentary and a demonstrated mastery of the foregone philosophical tradition.

Not one of Ibn Tufayl's peers in either the religious or the rational sciences dared to begin from the beginning in quite the manner he did – from a supposed clean slate, from the most elementary observations, and with no reference to existing knowledge. Viewed in this light, the seventeenth-century Orientalist Edward Pococke's chosen Latin title for Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, philosophus autodidactus or "the self-taught philosopher," begins to look singularly appropriate.

This is not to say that Ibn Tufayl's model of continual learning would stand unsupported in his own context. Hayy shows the influence of al-Farabi, who put forward a theory of how human advancement ties in with the development of our ability to reason; and behind al-Farabi lurks the foundational work of Aristotle. For each of the two teachers, true knowledge is grounded in two more primitive forms of cognition, first experience, then art or skill (techne in Greek, sina'a in Arabic).

Ibn Tufayl portrays on a living, breathing individual canvas what to these philosophers was a theoretical possibility and a societal progression. He also embeds this progression in the very shape of his narrative, in effect telling by showing. The transposition constitutes one of Ibn Tufayl's more successful narrative conceits.

EXPERIENCE AND ART

At the onset of the first book of Aristotle's Metaphysics (I.1), which for premodern thinkers doubled as a kind of potted history of human intellectual endeavor, Aristotle posits that the first and most rudimentary type of knowledge is experience – the Greek empeiria or the Arabic tajriba. In a word, experience is a matter of registering what occurs repeatedly and with reliability. It is an ability that even the higher animals possess, given that they can learn from what happens when trying this or that. (Hayy exploits this feature of animal psychology when he domesticates hawks, chickens, and even wild horses and asses.) Al-Farabi in his Book of Letters (sections 114–115) associates this with the memory imprints left by sensory images, which is a psychic function Hayy registers in himself already as a small child (34–35).

This explains why any knowledge gained through experience is limited to recognizing a similar situation and acting accordingly. A typical sequence of mental acts might go:

"this liquid substance is golden" [perception]

"previous golden substances have proved repulsive" [memory of bile, urine]

→ aversion to golden liquid [learned reaction]

The problem with such associative learning, as Ibn Sina points out in his treatise on the soul, is that it is unable on its own to dislodge habitual likes or dislikes, even when it would be advantageous to do so – overcoming one's aversion to anything golden in order to consume honey, for instance. Experience is also unable to make the kinds of leaps of logic that would enable the transfer of knowledge across different domains. Since animal cognition in general is limited to the immediate, the sensual, and the particular, even higher animals are ultimately unable to rise above what they sense and feel in the moment, and as a consequence they never stray from their prescribed path of searching for food, drink, mate, or shelter (Hayy, 98).

By contrast, artful or skilled judgment no longer states merely "this goes with that," but "this belongs to that." In other words, art attempts the leap from a contingent association to a necessary one. Put another way, art aspires to universalizability, because it inquires into causes. The difference is of momentous consequence, given that according to Aristotle, to know something truly is precisely to know why something is the way that it is. Key here is the ability to draw inferences – ones, moreover, that improve in accuracy over time, as the principle behind the individual occurrence comes into focus.

Aristotle's favored examples come from medicine. Understanding that a fever is best treated with an agent that cools the body, then identifying what the cooling property of a particular medicine plant is, allows one to seek out alternatives when a particular remedy is not available, or to reconceive of the whole healing process when there is a difference in ailments or bodily constitutions. But this is precisely where a more sophisticated matrix of interrelations is needed that will weigh different kinds of concerns against each other and strike the right balance between them. A phlegmatic person with a fever, for instance, must be treated with something that cools but does not slow down the metabolism. Here art and a working knowledge of causes will prove superior to mere brute experience, even if the former inevitably depends on the latter (for Andalusian meditations on the topic see Forcada 2011).

Young Hayy's actions neatly illustrate the distinctively human ability to improve on one's practice based on technical knowledge and a skillful engagement with the world. Noticing that other animals have protective coats while he alone stands naked and defenseless, Hayy first grabs some leaves with which to cover up, then quickly improves on the concept by appropriating the tail end and wings of an actual, conveniently dead eagle (36–37). Later on, Hayy further perfects this art by manufacturing clothes and shoes from hide, hemp, and animal hair (53). Hayy's inspiration for making threads, Ibn Tufayl says, comes from an earlier experiment of weaving together a belt from tall grass (36): here, a simple principle is transposed into another environment where it can find application. Watching swallows nest, Hayy gets the idea of building a storehouse of his own, complete with a door made out of sticks (53).

What enables all this are Hayy's two hands – the human being's primary tool for getting ahead in the world. All other animals possess some complement of hooves, claws, horns, hair, fur, and similar features that allow them to excel at the precise kind of life they lead. Hayy feels inferior and helpless at first compared to them, being neither especially fast nor particularly strong (35–36). Then, however, Hayy realizes that his hands allow him to mimic each of these functions and even to surpass them: the hands in effect are a tool made for any and every purpose, analogous to how human reason is capable of stretching out in all directions (54).

The universal utility of human hands is highlighted at the beginning of Galen's treatise On the Usefulness of Parts. Ibn Tufayl pays homage to the same work when he details the utility of the body's limbs, organs, and faculties (Hayy, 51–52) and when he describes the latter as instruments (alat) directed by the vital heat or spirit that courses through us. The most spectacular instance of Hayy's explorations, of course, is his early dissection of the doe's chest. This act alone lends a wealth of information about the heart's cavities and functions and is later supplemented by a vivisection. But Hayy does not stop there:

In his soul there stirred an appetite for studying the other parts of animals, their organization, positioning, number, and the way in which each relies on the others; also how the vital heat reaches them all so that they become alive through it, how it endures the length of time that it does, where it comes from, and why its hotness does not dissipate.

(Hayy, 50)

Ibn Tufayl thus presents Hayy as a budding authority in anatomy and bodily functions, to the point of stating that with the completion of Hayy's study of animals, he reaches the level of the "greatest physicians" (tabi'iyyun, 51). This is certainly a remarkable commendation, given the extensive body of medical knowledge accumulated by Ibn Tufayl's day and age.

THE LIMITS OF SKILL

At the same time, Ibn Tufayl, through the specific way he portrays Hayy's evolution, slyly and quite subtly plays down the scientific ambitions of the physicians. Medical researchers, if we are to believe the philosophers who often stood in direct competition with them for sponsorship and prestige, were only ever interested in what works – never in knowledge for its own sake. The same goes for other trained professionals and artisans.

Ibn Tufayl portrays Hayy's youthful activities and explorations in precisely these terms. Plant species such as palm (36), hemp (53), and beech (54) are first identified in accordance with how they meet Hayy's needs and expectations. The properties of each that draw his attention are limited to those that lend themselves most readily to exploitation and use. The same goes for Hayy's understanding of animals.

According to the Aristotelian classification of the sciences, which Ibn Tufayl takes over from al-Farabi, art is equivalent to know-how. It is an instrumental or productive type for understanding, always pursued in the name of some extraneous purpose. Such interests are often nested in a hierarchical manner. Hayy, for instance, learns how to make saddles and bridles in order to go horse-back riding; he figures out how to tame horses in order to chase down hard-to-catch animals (54–55); and he chases down animals so that he might eat their cooked flesh, which is both delicious and nutritious (49).

On such a picture, sensory pleasure and material survival begin to look like primary goods in themselves, things for the sake of which every other action is undertaken. This may well be true inasmuch as we are a species of animal like any other (95, 97–98). Philosophers, however, claimed that human beings are cut out for another life as well – unsurprisingly, a philosophical one. It is true that of necessity, our attentions at first are directed towards securing the means of sustenance and worldly wellbeing. But once we no longer need to worry about simple survival, a different focus can emerge. We can then seek out knowledge solely for the sake of knowing. Such is humanity's innate drive and desire, as evidenced by the fact that we take delight even in the workings of our senses (Aristotle, Metaphysics, I.1). In a very real sense, the disinterested yet passionate pursuit of knowledge as an end to itself represents the ultimate in human perfection. This, however, means relinquishing the pernicious notion that all learning should have an extraneous purpose or immediate material application.

Aristotle, for his part, asserts that philosophy first arose in circumstances where people had the opportunity to think at leisure. Initially, this was the province of priests and noblemen, who were spared the struggle of securing a livelihood (Metaphysics, I.2). The observation remains astute, albeit that Aristotle's presentation is elitist. In the Politics (incidentally, the only Aristotelian treatise not translated into Arabic), Aristotle denies labourers and merchants the chance of rising to a more exalted life. To his mind, nobody so consumed by workaday concerns could ever be expected to take a truly reflective stance towards their lives as a whole. This, of course, is highly problematic, yet a similar belief appears to have been accepted by Ibn Tufayl. Such thoughts come easily to the elites of any era.

Hayy achieves in years what Aristotle and al-Farabi thought it takes whole societies centuries to attain. In step with technological mastery, Hayy's wonderment ('ajab) grows over the many things he encounters. A tipping point, Ibn Tufayl tells us, is reached when Hayy no longer needs to worry about his material wellbeing. From here, all mundane worries recede to the background, never again to return to prominence in the narrative. Hayy's attentions turn from the useful, yet contingent, properties of things to necessary and essential ones.

Figure 1 Hayy surveys his domain, illustration from the Dutch translation of 1701.

The shift in narrative simultaneously symbolizes a shift in disciplinary preferences. Historically, the Muslim philosophers rarely saw fit to refer to mundane matters in their theoretical treatises or to make any significant concessions to the expertise of those they considered purveyors of a lesser – because more interest-driven – form of knowledge. Medical expertise, however, is not so easily banished from the scene, as we shall discover in chapter 5.

NATURE

Upon reaching the age of 21, Hayy begins to view the world differently from the way he had before (Hayy, 55). The youth's engagement with the world up until then has largely been practical; through effort and inventiveness, he has gained mastery over his environment and in the process learned a great deal about matters such as animal anatomy. Now the time has come for a more detached form of study.

Over the course of twenty pages, which corresponds to seven years in narrative terms, Hayy reaches a comprehensive understanding of the physical world he inhabits – its overall shape, constituent parts, and structuring principles. This is an impressive achievement by any measure, but there is more. Hayy turns his attentions next to the distant heavens that circumscribe the known world. In a feat of imaginative reasoning for which Ibn Tufayl lauds his protagonist, Hayy concludes that the heavens must be finite in size and perfectly spherical in shape (77–79). From here, Hayy proceeds to affirm that the physical world in its entirety – which is to say, everything that his senses can ever access – must ceaselessly depend on some immaterial cause that grants it both existence and coherence.

Hayy thus catapults himself in seven or so years from an earth-bound and materially oriented existence to a perch from which to take in the whole universe, top to bottom. The latter experience even proves existentially transformative (see chapter 6). But what is the route Hayy takes to arrive at his destination, and what are the lessons Ibn Tufayl wishes to convey along the way? This forms the subject of the next two chapters.

TAKING IN THE WORLD

The first thing to notice is the pace at which Ibn Tufayl doles out information. This is at once extremely compressed, when compared with the works of Ibn Tufayl's philosophical peers, and reasonably leisurely and drawn out if the comparison is with works in kalam, that is, Muslim speculative theology.

To address the latter comparison first, we would do well to disabuse ourselves of the notion that Ibn Tufayl would be guiding his readers through the world only in order to get at God. If Ibn Tufayl's text were so religiously driven, he could have availed himself of a number of kalam arguments that purported to prove God's existence straight away, without ever getting into the elaborate physics and metaphysics of the philosophers.

An instructive comparison in this regard is found in a copycat work written approximately a century after Hayy by one Ibn al-Nafis, a famous medical author and dilettante theologian, perhaps in Cairo. In Fadil Ibn Natiq, the boy Fadil – whose name translates as "the Virtuous," thus upping the ante on Ibn Tufayl's "Living" – advances directly from an examination of the usefulness of the various parts of animals (the subject of our previous chapter) to a proof of God based on the contingency of everything in the world. This is perfectly in keeping with both the Galenic medical tradition and the religious literature whose tonalities Ibn al-Nafis deliberately echoes (Meyerhof and Schacht 1968).

Ibn Tufayl, by contrast, chooses to linger on the inhabitants and structuring principles of the created world at length. He also employs a peculiar push-pull narrative technique: Hayy's investigations stretch out from common and concrete experiences to more and more abstract considerations, then back again to a discussion about animals and what animates them, then up again to the cosmic level, then down again for a third and final time to the world of generation and corruption where ordinary, concrete existents are born, live for a spell, then pass away into nonexistence. The effect resembles nothing so much as the modern-day cinematic conceit of zooming out until one beholds the whole of planet Earth, then zooming in again until one reaches ground level. What could motivate this telescopic style of writing? I would suggest that three factors are at play.

First and most importantly, Ibn Tufayl, through detailing Hayy's independent and unfettered examination of the natural world, aims to legitimize the vocabulary of Aristotelian physics and metaphysics as the only reasonable way of conceptualizing the structure of the universe. The way Hayy grows to see the world is just the way the world is, or so Ibn Tufayl would have the reader believe. The point is demonstrated at least as much through showing as it is through telling. Instead of providing arguments for the views he wishes to advance, Ibn Tufayl effectively invites the reader to join in Hayy's experiences. Although Ibn Tufayl evokes a mere handful of principles, he succeeds in bringing a great many phenomena under their aegis, thus demonstrating the explanatory potential of the Aristotelian conceptual scheme. By returning to certain themes over and over again, as Ibn Tufayl does, and by switching perspectives while retaining a single mode of analysis, the text reinforces its principal points through sheer force of repetition. After reading Hayy, the reader will naturally feel inclined to perceive the world on Ibn Tufayl's terms.

STRUCTURE AND SCAFFOLDING

Second, in the same way as Hayy begins from observations that are concrete and mundane, so also we must begin from where we are, from the level of the everyday and the particular. As the twentieth-century philosopher J. L. Austin once remarked, the objects of our ordinary consciousness and language tend towards medium-sized dry goods: chairs, cats, and lumps of charcoal, the kinds of things we perceive and handle every day of our lives.

Ibn Tufayl accentuates the same principle through the medium of narrative. By having Hayy first engage in animal husbandry and hut building, he provides a needed counterpoint to the heady realms of abstraction in which the budding philosopher soon becomes immersed. By having Hayy return again and again to the everyday realm – even if this is with a transformed consciousness of it – Ibn Tufayl shows how at the end of the day, the theoretical constructs Hayy unearths, no matter how abstract or abstruse, succeed in throwing new light on our ordinary experience.

The trained Aristotelian philosopher would in fact regard this as being a key feature in any robust scientific theory. In both the Physics and On the Heavens, Aristotle rails against those whose speculative tendencies would lead them to abandon all common sense and what their senses readily confirm. Similarly, in the thicket of examining what "being" is really supposed to be – one of the most difficult questions ever dreamed up by philosophers, not to say the strangest – Aristotle steps back and makes the eminently sensible observation that even if people disagree vehemently about what characterizes primary being (or "substance"), surely they can, and should, agree on what things count as beings. Everybody agrees that horses exist; that spruces and beeches do; and that there is such a thing as fire (Metaphysics, VIII.1; similarly On the Soul, II.1). Such natural entities therefore provide a kind of bottom line for any investigation into reality: if they are not real, then it is hard to say what is.

Similar to this, Ibn Tufayl's point – again made through showing rather than telling – is that natural entities such as the elements, plants, and animals are the kinds of things that any thinking person has to contend with, no matter where they are coming from in their investigations or where they end up. Any theoretical model worthy of consideration is one that "saves the appearances," to evoke a technical term used by both Plato and Aristotle. It pays due respect to the way we customarily speak of such matters and think about them, and tries to account for this practice.

Ibn Tufayl thus underhandedly removes from contention a rival conception of physical reality promoted by the Muslim theologians, who had posited that everything is ultimately analysable to imperceptibly small and featureless atoms. Without ever explicitly coming out against this kind of reductionist materialism (as the kalam theological view would probably be classified in today's philosophical terms), Ibn Tufayl can point to what he would consider its ultimate futility. Through again and again bringing the discussion back to Aristotelian substances – concrete life-sized existents – Ibn Tufayl shows that this is where life is led and where any speculative theory has to prove its mettle.

SUSPENDED BETWEEN WORLDS

Third, establishing the intricacy of the structures that support created reality – its scaffolding, if you will – is important because Ibn Tufayl himself eventually introduces a worldview in which everything except for God enjoys only a shadowy and starkly derivative existence (133–134). This vision of the ultimate grounds of reality, which Ibn Tufayl characterizes in terms borrowed from the Sufis, is explored in detail in chapter 7.

Ibn Tufayl astutely sets down a counterweight early on. If the world is shown to have an elaborate and complex structure, then its reality cannot be done away with at a stroke, nor can the importance of the thinking person's engagement with it be gainsaid. Ibn Tufayl's Sufi otherworldliness, such as it is, comes wrapped in a sophisticated view of the cosmic order, in which everything has a place and certain foundational principles find reflection over and over again at multiple levels of reality. By having Hayy learn the essentials of the philosophical analysis of the world at an early stage, Ibn Tufayl ensures that sight of it is not lost even when the ecstasies of the other world require lift-off from the present one.

Besides this, Ibn Tufayl's explanation of how divinity radically transcends all embodiment builds on the precise terms in which corporeality is conceived. Several models of physical reality could conceivably do the job: the atomism of the theologians had been seized by prominent Sufi authors such as al-Kalabadhi (d. ca. 380/990) and al-Qushayri (d. 465/1072) as a tool for presenting the God–world relationship, with particular theological and spiritual outcomes. In dwelling on the philosophical model for explaining physical reality, Ibn Tufayl leaves the reader in no doubt as to its superiority in producing not only a better physics, but ultimately a more accurate and pious theology as well. Above all, this means explicating reality in terms of matter and form as well as potentiality and actuality.

NATURES AND POWERS

Aristotle's prime candidates for substance, which is to say true being, are the elements, animals, and plants, precisely those kinds of things to which Ibn Tufayl draws our attention as well. These are all labeled "natural bodies." But what makes a body natural? In the second book of Aristotle's Physics, nature (the Greek phusis) is defined as an inner principle of motion and rest, while a thing is dubbed natural if it has such an internal source for at least some of the motions it undergoes. (A wheelbarrow is an example of the opposite, a non-natural body, which is to say an artefact: it is set in motion and brought to rest by something outside of itself. In addition, a wheelbarrow only exists on account of human skill and for the sake of human ends, meaning that its very existence is derivative.)

Hayy's introduction to the natural world accordingly unfolds in wholly Aristotelian terms:

Hayy considered all bodies in the world of generation and corruption: the animals according to their different species, and plants as well; rocks and types of soil; water, steam, snow, ice, and hail; smoke, flame, and embers. He saw that these had many characteristics, diverse actions, and similar as well as opposing motions. In proceeding further along in his investigation, Hayy saw that these things shared some attributes while they diverged in other respects. Insofar as they shared in some common feature they were one, while insofar as they differed they were many and distinct.

(55–56)

To intimate, as Ibn Tufayl does here, that we group things together due to observing them behave similarly under similar circumstances seems obvious in a way. We do come to identify those objects that sink by the name of "heavy" and those that send off heat by the name of "hot," etc. Framing Hayy's investigations in this manner will certainly have ingratiated Ibn Tufayl with early modern European readers. But Ibn Tufayl, along with his Andalusian compatriots Ibn Bajja and Ibn Rushd, also subscribed to the much stronger thesis according to which being is to be equated with activity and each type of being with a range of activities peculiar to it. The notion is that each type of being has some characteristic activity that belongs to it and it alone, and that engagement in this activity actually makes a thing what it is.

The flipside of this thesis, which has roots in Aristotle, is that something that has all the material characteristics of an eyeball, yet is incapable of seeing or never sees, is called an eye in name only. Neither a blinded eye, nor an eyeball that is detached from its socket, to say nothing of the painted eye, really counts as an eye, because what truly makes an eye an eye is its functionality, which is to say, its capacity for seeing (compare Aristotle, Parts of Animals, I.1 and Metaphysics, VII.17 with Hayy, 94). In this way, beings are identified through their capacities or powers (Greek dunamis/Arabic quwwa), the potentialities they possess for becoming something or carrying out some action.

Ibn Tufayl makes full use of this explanatory framework. In Hayy's initial scientific forays, an animal's organs are distinguished according to the functions they serve (56), as are the characteristics that allow us to say that something is living rather than inanimate (59). The distinctions between even the simplest types of bodies – the four elements, earth, water, air, and fire – boil down to differences between the simplest kinds of motions, namely, whether something rises up or descends (62–63). As a rule, Hayy avers, "every single thing in the world of generation and corruption has something specific to it that accounts for just the kinds of motions it has and for its sensible qualities. This thing is the form that every single thing has, or what those engaged in theorization call 'nature.' " (65)

Ibn Tufayl deliberately underlines how the term "nature" (tabi'a) is used in a technical sense by the philosophers. Probably this is because in theological circles, talk of natures had become controversial. Most theologians rejected outright the notion that created beings could have autonomous powers. Convinced that everything must, rather, be directly effected by God and remain subject to God's unfettered omnipotence, the theologians accordingly denied the existence of "natures," in opposition to what they perceived to be the medical and philosophical traditions' exceedingly secular analyses. By passing off as intuitively obvious Hayy's practice of classifying things according to what they do, Ibn Tufayl lays down his principal argument for why one should continue to ascribe powers and potentialities to worldly entities and utilize terms such as "form" and "nature" as a shorthand for these. This defense of a dynamic philosophical worldview is all the more important because, as we shall see in the next chapter, Ibn Tufayl in some ways ends up appropriating rather more from Islamic religious authors – theologians and Sufis – than he lets on initially.

FORMS AND UNIVERSALS

To say, as Ibn Tufayl does, that things are one insofar as they share in some common feature is to subscribe to metaphysical realism concerning universals – those very features that things have in common. On Ibn Tufayl's view, when we point to some observed commonality, we not only identify a way in which we conceive of things and speak about them; we manage to tack on to some aspect of how things actually are.

Hayy from the very beginning treats different plants and animals as representatives of so many natural kinds. Early on and seemingly intuitively, Hayy comes to see that each type of creature is multiply instantiated, with each gazelle, for instance, possessing the same shape (shakl) and form (sura) as the others. Hayy furthermore considers it implausible that he alone would be the sole representative of humanity (47). Humanity, this is to say, is the proximate species (naw') to which Hayy belongs, and the associated linguistic item – kind-term – is something that in principle should be "predicable of the many," as the Aristotelian characterization of the universal goes.

On the flipside, each form or species when considered in itself "is not many in reality" (57) according to Ibn Tufayl: it only becomes so through being instantiated in multiple bodies. This claim, strange on the face of it, becomes understandable in light of Ibn Sina's celebrated, not to say cerebral, notion of "quiddity" (mahiyya), which translates roughly as the "what-ness" of a thing. When we think of a universal, we typically see it either as instantiated across worldly particulars, in which case it becomes many in number, or as synthesized and abstracted from particulars by the mind, in which case each universal looks to be one. However, Ibn Sina contends that a quiddity when considered in its own right is neither one nor many. The essence of what it is to be a horse is just that, horse-ness, the essence of what it is to be a human simply humanity. Whether anybody thinks of horses – and even whether horses exist – is immaterial in this sense (Healing: Metaphysics, V.1).

Ibn Sina's notion of quiddity provides him, and Ibn Tufayl, with the glue that binds together mind and external reality. Quiddity, instantiated as substantial form, is what lends an individual existent structure and coherence, what secures the identity of a thing insofar as it allows us to say what exactly it is – an eye, a horse, a house. In Ibn Tufayl's words, "every body depends on form, seeing as it cannot subsist except through form, nor can its true reality be affirmed without it" (Hayy, 86). At the same time, the common natures that lend the world structure and coherence are also the ones that our mind picks up and arranges into intelligible patterns. This informs Ibn Tufayl's portrayal of Hayy's scientific advancement. In mapping out the structure of the world all about him, Hayy is not engaged in a quantitative exercise of figuring out mathematical laws or geometric proportions, the way an early modern scientist would, or even an astronomer contemporary of Ibn Tufayl's. The aim, rather, is for our power of reason to become isomorphic with how things are: the very forms of things should become impressed upon our souls (see chapter 7). But how can we stop this from degenerating into an endless stream of individual observations?

SYNTHESIS AND ANALYSIS

Let us return to our text passage. Hayy is portrayed here as drawing distinctions and observing commonalities. These are two sides of the same coin; both activities form part of the art of classification. According to both Plato and Aristotle, this elementary scientific activity lay at the heart of all theorization and therefore was constitutive of the very search for wisdom. Late antique philosophers impressed the centrality of this theme on their Arabic readers. Ibn Tufayl, accordingly, describes Hayy as setting out on a path that had led his illustrious predecessors in centers of learning such as Alexandria, Athens, and Antioch to amass an impressive body of knowledge, purveyed and discussed across lengthy tomes in disciplines such as biology and medicine.

What unfolds in the text is an extended train of thought in which Hayy combines more and more species under ever more inclusive, because more generic, descriptive rubrics (56–60). In the end, an infinitely varied physical reality can be treated uniformly, as if it were a single thing. All bodies are alike insofar as they are bodies, that is, insofar as they are extended three-dimensionally (60–61). This grand act of synthesis is then reversed. Hayy begins to ponder once more the differences between all the beings he has encountered and summed up in his mind. He observes that even the most primitive bodies – the four elements, earth, water, air, fire – are already specified according to their relative heaviness and lightness (61–64). From considering the elements, Hayy goes on to register once more the variation not only between the various animal and plant species, but also the qualitative leaps that separate inanimate from animate nature and plants from animal life.

Hayy's advancement from the many to the one, then back again from the one to the many, is an illustration of the philosophical method of synthesis and analysis. Since Plato, philosophers had been fascinated with the great success Greek mathematicians had enjoyed in applying analysis and synthesis to solving problems and presenting proofs. As befitted the universal ambition of the philosophers, various attempts were made to transpose the mathematical method on to the general study of being.

What Ibn Tufayl sketches is one variation on this – what is known as Porphyry's tree, so named after the third-century ce philosopher famous for the contribution he made to the way medieval philosophers, Arabic as well as Latin, understood the relation between logical ascriptions (the relationships holding between statements) and metaphysical claims (the way things are). In Porphyry's imagined tree, a broader or more generic kind-term – "embodied substance," say – is divided or "analysed" into the different species that exist under it, "animate body" and "inanimate body." The former again divides into "plant" and "animal," with the various species then flowing from each according to what scientific discovery tells about their specific differences. One may even place individual substances at the tips of the branches: thus "human" divides into "Plato" and "Socrates" or, as the example was renamed in the Arabic, Zayd, 'Amr, and so on.

Porphyry's tree captures the driving force behind the Aristotelian scientific outlook. For Aristotle, to know the essences of things is the very essence of knowledge. In such a context, knowing what is common to several types of being allows for compressibility, while identifying the distinctive aspect of each type of being (in Porphyry's terms, this is the "differentia" – khassa in the Arabic) is what renders such generic knowledge useful in bringing it down to the level of actually existent beings, which, after all, are always members of some fully determinate species. For example, if one has determined what goes into being an animal, then the definition of a bird as a "flying animal" only requires an investigation of flying for an understanding of aviary life to be reached, while understanding "rationality" is enough to make sense of the claim that the human being is a rational animal (see Aristotle, Parts of Animals, I.1). In the idealized scientific observer's mind-map, all concepts are nestled perfectly within one another, so that when one looks at a swallow, the layered definitions of everything from "swallow" to "substance" and all points in between immediately present themselves to the mind.

In presenting Hayy's findings, Ibn Tufayl follows closely the model provided by Porphyry. Hayy's application of the synthetic method – mentally combining species in order to get at the more generic natural kind that unites them – is idiosyncratic only insofar as he initially stops at the level of bodily substance. This, Ibn Tufayl tells us, is because Hayy, in the early stages of his philosophical development, has not yet realized that any other type of substance might exist. Let us now examine what it means for a body to be a body, in the terms laid down by Ibn Tufayl.

MATTER

In observing the differences between the elements, Hayy comes to realize that the general formula for expressing the distinctive mode of being of each species is "corporeality plus some other, additional thing" (64). This is a non-technical way of introducing the Aristotelian binary of matter (madda or hayula, from the Greek hule) and form. But it also sets up a puzzle. Is body itself, or pure corporeality (jismaniyya), then matter in its denuded form? Conversely, is matter just body when the latter is stripped of all of its defining characteristics, starting with the primitive qualities of heaviness and lightness, heat and coldness, dryness and moisture?

Hayy notices an immediate problem with this suggestion, in that he cannot directly affirm the existence of such a thing. A colorless, odorless, shapeless body does not readily present itself to the senses (70), nor can he lay his hands on one (72). But perhaps this need not be a problem, since not all scientific theories find ready confirmation in our sensory experience. (Nobody has ever seen atoms, either.) A more principled take is therefore in order. Likening matter to clay, Hayy determines that it can never exist in actuality except in a specific configuration, extended in length, width, and depth (70–71). This corresponds to Aristotle's intuition that there is a difference between saying "clay" and "this clay," where the latter always denotes spatiotemporal specification and embodiment. (Aristotle's preferred examples for malleable stuffs were wax and bronze.)

From here we arrive at the notion that unadorned three-dimensional body might constitute the most primitive kind of substance. Otherwise featureless bodies would then truly count as self-standing beings, their only forms being their shapes. Prime matter, meanwhile, which precedes all embodiment, would be pure potentiality, with not a hint of actuality about it, and would thus resemble sheer nonexistence ('adam: see Hayy, 101). Aspects of such a view had been debated earlier by Ibn Sina, who evidently took inspiration from the late antique Aristotelian commentator, John Philoponus, in developing the notion. Hayy appears on the brink of accepting such a theory, yet he pulls back at the last minute, feeling vertiginous and estranged by the uncanny concept of "body as such" (jism 'ala l-itlaq).

According to Ibn Tufayl, Hayy's retreat is due to such exalted metaphysical vistas proving too much at this point in his development (72). This is certainly understandable. As a child, the author of this book suffered from a recurring nightmare in which an invisible demon challenged him to a game of mentally fencing off ever-increasing portions of empty space, and the existential dread associated with the challenge still lingers. But the notion that otherwise featureless, yet occupied, place or space might hold the key to defining substance, as tempting as it may have been in some respects, was also profoundly un-Aristotelian, as was forcefully argued by Ibn Tufayl's countryman and contemporary Ibn Rushd (Hyman 1965). Among other reasons, this is because pure extension, even if circumscribed three-dimensionally, lacks one crucial characteristic of natural bodies: it does not really do anything, nor does it readily suffer the actions of others (except perhaps those of a demon or a god). Consequently, there is not much we can do with the concept, either, except to entertain it as a sort of dead-end thought-experiment. It is therefore natural that Ibn Tufayl should see fit to return to the four elements, whose characteristic motions and capacities are exhaustively charted in the Aristotelian literature and whose workings the philosophers thought they could detect even in empirical reality.

THE ELEMENTS

Hayy makes note early on of the interchange of the elements: water turns to mist, mist back into water, and flammable material to smoke and ashes. Even smoke can consolidate when it hits the roof of an enclosed space, to the point of leaving a darkened mark in its wake (Hayy, 60). After having established the conceptual toolkit of matter, form, and intrinsic powers, Hayy is now in a position to theorize about what takes place during these exchanges.

If the presence of a substantial form – water being water, an eye being an eye – cashes out as an entity performing in ways characteristic of that type of being, then with the evaporation of heavy water into light steam, say, or the condensation of humid air into rainfall, a transformation must have taken place in real terms: one form has been exchanged for another. Something has ceased to exist, while another substance has taken its place (72–73). Seeing that a thing cannot will itself into existence from nonexistence and how a thing's nature will not lend itself to self-destruction, Hayy concludes that coming-to-be and passing-away must be traceable to some cause lying outside the thing itself (73–74). Ibn Tufayl hints at the notion of properly transcendent, i.e. extracosmic forces at work here; but because no full explanation is given, we, too, must put off discussion of this theme until later.

In a nod to Aristotle's elemental theory in On Coming-to-be and Passing-away (II.2–4), Hayy next notes that each of the four elements is characterized by two out of four primary qualities (69, and see Fig. 2). Hayy then affirms that the elements extinguish one another and are generated one out of the other, "either in whole or in part" (74–75): water when evaporating into hot air loses its coldness, but retains some of its moisture. This makes fire and water (as well as as earth and air) into true contradictories, ones that can scarcely turn into one another directly, since they do not share in a single elemental quality.

Figure 2

As a corollary, everything that is composed out of the elements must similarly be subject to change and ultimately to generation and corruption. Not a single thing in Hayy's surroundings escapes ultimate dissolution, which is to say, the loss of its substantial form. Hayy later determines that a more stable physical equilibrium (isti'dal), that is, a more even admixture of the elements, can contribute to a longer life (101–103, and see chapter 5). Even so, the principle holds that "of all the things on the face of the earth, nothing retains its form" (99–100). This means that Hayy in his search for something more permanent must cast his eyes upwards.

THE HEAVENLY SPHERES

Here, on turning twenty-eight, Hayy reaches another turning-point: his attentions are drawn toward the starry skies. Hayy first determines that the heavenly bodies, whatever else they may be, are bodies too, since they are extended. After entertaining the thought that the heavens might be of infinite size, Hayy concludes that an infinite body is an altogether "vacuous notion, something that cannot exist, the meaning of which cannot be conceived" (75). Hayy's arguments in favor of this conclusion largely come from the physical treatises of al-Kindi and Ibn Sina and revolve around the paradoxes involved in trying to commensurate infinite quantities with finite ones (75–77). Ibn Tufayl's high praise for Hayy's ingenuity at this precise juncture may reflect the way the mathematical sciences were regarded as an intermediate science in Arabic learned circles, where mathematical abstraction was supposed to point the way from a physical understanding of the world to a more elevated take on being as a whole. The pages constitute the only sequence in which Hayy engages in mathematical reasoning of any sort.

A protracted period of observing the heavens leads Hayy to postulate that the heavens are perfectly spherical in shape and that the visible heavenly bodies – the planets and the stars – are embedded within solid spherical shells (77–80). These shells are concentric and contiguous with one another, revolving around the earth in the manner of a giant clockwork mechanism. Hayy even has time to observe the retrograde motions of the planets, which had caused such a headache for the astronomers of his day, and he supposedly makes great strides in the science of astronomy (79–80). Though Ibn Tufayl begs off entering into details, from his biography we may surmise that Hayy is taken to fulfill Ibn Tufayl's promise of an Aristotelian, as opposed to Ptolemaic, picture of the heavenly rotations (see chapter 1). The impression is reinforced by Hayy's later affirmation that "the heavenly bodies, as wholly simple and pure, are far removed from corruption" (100). For this to be true, the heavens have to be made out of something other than the four mundane elements, something like Aristotle's aether, which for Aristotle underwrites both the heavens' indestructibility and their characteristic motions, all of which are perfectly circular (On the Heavens, I.2). Indeed, Hayy affirms that the stuff of the heavens has no opposite (103).

At the center of this grand procession, the earth stands perfectly motionless. We perceive the sun, the moon, the planets, and the stars revolving around us, because that is what they do. The earth's central location does not, however, make it the universe's most valued part. To the contrary, in Ibn Tufayl's memorable simile, if the universe is akin to a single living being, then the sublunary world resembles its bowels, with the world's churning processes of coming-to-be and passing-away equalling the juices and acids sloshing about a beast's belly (80). Ibn Tufayl's contemporary and countryman Ibn Rushd makes a similar point, adding a Qur'anic proof-text to the effect that "the creation of the heavens and the earth is greater than the creation of humanity" (Q. 40:57; cited in Incoherence of the Incoherence III, 190).

Minimally, these remarks should serve to remind us that the geocentrism which characterized premodern cosmology did not necessarily translate into a vainglorious belief that our position in the physical universe would somehow guarantee our supremacy. Ibn Tufayl even goes so far as to deny that the higher cosmic principles would exist in order to serve or benefit mundane entities, including humans (Hayy, 133). If humans are afforded a special rank within the cosmic order, it is for other reasons. The answer is to be sought in the special power of reason, which allows the human being to transcend the material realm altogether. But for this notion to emerge with clarity, we first need to compare humans with other lifeforms.

SOUL

What is life? What is soul? These are the questions to which Hayy turns in his investigations more often than any other. From the death of the gazelle that had adopted Hayy to his own elevation to the transcendent realm and subsequent wait for death, the relation that the body bears to the soul, and the relation that humanity bears to other creatures that are alive, consistently preoccupy both Ibn Tufayl and the self-taught philosopher whose exploits he chronicles (Kukkonen 2011).

The centrality of soul to Hayy's concerns is readily understood once one considers the different directions in which Ibn Tufayl felt himself pulled by dint of his occupation. Ibn Tufayl, when considering how to present the soul, had to balance contending claims made by medical professionals, philosophical theorists, theologians, and Sufis: and while the pronouncements issuing from these authorities overlapped to some extent, the parties by no means always shared an agenda. Attempts at mediation had been made by previous thinkers, but none had effected an entirely satisfactory synthesis (Ibn Sina and al-Ghazali, two seminal influences on Ibn Tufayl, arguably came the closest). We consequently find Ibn Tufayl nodding this way and that when recounting Hayy's efforts to uncover the secret of life. What is important for our purposes is that in explicating his understanding of soul, Ibn Tufayl simultaneously touches on the way that all earthly substances are in contact with a supernatural source.

LIVING NATURE

We may begin from a general observation that follows directly from last chapter's discussion of nature. For Ibn Tufayl, as for all Aristotelian philosophers, soul is a concept that applies to all living beings already by definition. If soul is the first order of actuality in any natural body that potentially has life (Aristotle, On the Soul, II.1), then not only are animals ensouled but plants are, too. Nonetheless, because the lives led by plants and animals differ from one another in important ways, the term "soul" cannot be used in exactly the same manner when the subject is a tree as when it is a bird (to say nothing of humans). This leads Hayy to coin terms such as the "animal soul" and the "vegetative soul," in accordance with existing Aristotelian vocabulary (Hayy, 65–69).

Ibn Tufayl, moreover, has Hayy analyse the structure and basic functions of the plant and animal souls in accordance with what the Aristotelian tradition had taught. The characteristic activities of plants are nutrition, growth, and reproduction (59–60, 67, 98). Animals are additionally capable of sensing and of moving in the direction of that which they desire and away from that which they shun (58). All this means that on the one hand, the philosophical analysis of the different life-functions and their execution is somewhat modular – in Hayy's words, he can see that as an animal he has "diverse parts, different powers, and varying objectives" (107) – while on the other, it is the organism as a whole whose life is served by all these activities, and consequently the living being itself that is the ultimate referent of all these actions.

The surface impression left by Hayy Ibn Yaqzan is that Ibn Tufayl views the soul in hylomorphic terms (from the Greek words hule and morphe, meaning matter and form, respectively), similar to what we find with his overall theory of nature. All living beings are compounds of matter and form, where the matter (the parts, limbs, organs, etc.) is understood in terms of the form (the overall life that the organism leads) and vice versa; the two are inseparable and mutually define each other. Such was Aristotle's view. However, upon closer study, Ibn Tufayl's presentation of animal and human psychology is shown to be considerably more peculiar than this, so that one may question how Aristotelian the resulting picture is in the end.

VITAL HEAT

Ibn Tufayl's exposition is striking first of all for how much attention it showers on the notion of spirit (ruh). The term itself has a long and storied history. It appears already in the Hebrew Bible as a term for the life breathed by God into the human being, and this is the principal connotation the term has in the Qur'an as well. Still, while some Sufi authors might indeed "ask about the spirit that is one of God's charges," as the Qur'an puts it (Q. 17:85), no frontline Muslim theologian in the classical period had made a serious effort to integrate the Qur'anic concept of spirit, or for that matter soul (nafs), with their own theoretical analyses of reality. (A rare, and chronologically late, exception is found in al-Ghazali, in whose Revival of the Religious Sciences "spirit" appears alongside "heart," "soul,", and "intellect" as another term used for the human being's non-corporeal aspect.)

For all that Ibn Tufayl was sympathetic to the Sufi cause, and for all that he professed to stand in al-Ghazali's intellectual lineage, his own use of "spirit" at first glance looks almost banally down-to-earth. Ibn Tufayl does intimate early on that the spirit which descends upon Hayy issues from the divine domain (Hayy, 28). Nevertheless, he soon reverts to discussing the spirit as if it were some material principle inhabiting the body – a kind of psychic quicksilver that courses through animals as well as humans, and perhaps plants as well (59–60). More than anything, Hayy's actual findings resemble Greek medical anthropology. In the latter, spirit (Gr. pneuma) refers to something fully material in constitution, albeit material of a specific sort. The spirit as an executive force is what enables an organism's many functions to be coordinated through its limbs and organs. It thus becomes equated with what Aristotle refers to as vital heat in his biological works.

Vital heat is what Hayy stands on the verge of discovering when he first excavates the dead gazelle's chest and discovers the heart. At the time, Hayy ends up disappointed, the life-carrying stuff ostensibly having departed and proving unrecoverable (43–45). However, Hayy's later experimentation with fire leads him to put two and two together when he observes both that (a) animals radiate heat while alive and that (b) his own breast feels quite warm to him (49). Perhaps the left chamber of the heart houses some fiery – because warm – substance that will account for life? Hayy decides to puts his hypothesis to the test:

He grappled with a wild beast, tied it up with rope, and proceeded to cut it in the manner he had earlier cut the gazelle, until he reached the heart. He aimed first at the left side and cut it open: thus he saw this chamber filled with hot gas, resembling white vapor. He inserted his finger and found it to be burning hot there. The animal, meanwhile, died immediately.

(50)

The vivisection is described with such conviction and verve that it is easy to forget that it could never have happened as described. (If Ibn Tufayl ever cut up animals, he is not likely to have encountered a white vapor.) Ibn Tufayl is not here recasting something that he himself witnessed as an experimental biologist; he is relating what tradition had told him must be the case. This is useful to keep in mind whenever Ibn Tufayl's supposed empiricist credentials are brought up. Far from having verified with his own senses everything he teaches, Ibn Tufayl is perfectly content to build on and convey established explanations and patterns of thinking. Dominique Urvoy (1991, 46–54), in a survey of Andalusian philosophy, has called this "scholastic medicine," which is an apt description.

In the course of his studies, Hayy gets to confirm the existence both of the circulatory system and of the nerves. The latter were unknown to Aristotle but much discussed by Galen, being a late antique addition to medical knowledge. In Hayy's estimation, the nerves provide the means for the distribution of the animal spirit: the nerve pathways lead up to the brain, from which they carry out the commands which the brain itself receives from the heart (52). In this way, Ibn Tufayl splits the difference between Aristotle's teaching, which had emphasized the heart as the true seat of all psychic activity, and the Galenic tradition, which had long since made it clear that the brain plays a vital role in enabling an organism to carry out its functions. The heart, however, retains its fundamental supremacy for Ibn Tufayl, both as regards the genesis of life (30–32) and in steering the spirit (43–44). In a thought experiment, Hayy even estimates that he could conceivably live without his head, but never without his heart (40–41). Principled philosophical reflection thus trumps empirical medicine, for Ibn Tufayl as for al-Farabi and Ibn Sina before him (see Richter-Bernburg in Conrad 1996).

THE VEHICLE OF THE SOUL

In time, Hayy comes to believe that the spirit rather than the body is properly worthy of his attentions and affections, since "from this thing issue all these actions, not from the lifeless body. The whole body is merely a tool for the spirit, as it were, similar to the stick with which Hayy kept the wild beasts at bay" (45). This notion – that the body in its entirety is nothing more than an inert tool, almost like an animated corpse or a puppet whose limbs and parts are moved and ordered about by some other thing external to it – is so un-Aristotelian that most of Ibn Tufayl's modern readers seem to have missed it altogether. While Aristotle does once liken the soul to the steersman of a ship (On the Soul, II.1), while he does talk about individual body parts as being organs and instruments (see Hayy, 51, 52, 60), and while there had been Platonically inclined commentators who had wanted to read these remarks as pointing towards a basic separation of body from soul, the Arabic Aristotelians – including Ibn Tufayl's master, Ibn Sina – had nevertheless tended to affirm that it is the whole body that is living. Ibn Tufayl, by contrast, seems to want to say that it is the spirit that is essentially alive and ensouled so that once the spirit dissipates, life terminates.

Ibn Tufayl's conception of the spirit as the vehicle of soul resembles nothing so much as late antique Platonism. The "Neoplatonists," as they are often called, heavily influenced the Arabic reception of Aristotle and were committed body–soul dualists. In contrast to Aristotle, they believed that soul must be something fundamentally different from (and more exalted than) the body and thus separate from it. In answering how the soul could then interact with the body, the Platonists pointed to the specific intermediary of a more refined or "spiritual" type of matter. The pneuma of the medical authors and the Stoic philosophical school, originally quite materialist in intent, thus became yoked to a dualist conception of life and soul (Finamore 1985).

Such ideas were given a boost by a pseudo-Aristotelian treatise called On the Spirit, also translated into Arabic, in which vital heat is described as the soul's primary instrument in directing the body (Bos and Ferwerda 2008). Further speculation had linked the spirit to the stuff out of which the stars are made. Hayy draws this comparison as well (99, and cf. 48–49). In some more esoteric strands of Greek and Arabic speculation, the soul's ascent to a higher world would pass through the heavens. We find this notion in one of al-Kindi's works on the soul (Adamson and Pormann 2012, 116), and in one sense Hayy's whole journey assumes a similar trajectory (see chapter 6). Still, it is noticeable that Ibn Tufayl gives a wholly naturalistic explanation of Hayy's kinship with the heavens. His constitution is likened to the star-stuff on account of its stability, not because the two types of body would be actually identical.

Ibn Tufayl accordingly still subscribes to a kind of hylomorphism. It is merely that his focus is on how the spirit itself constitutes a compound of matter and form, with the rest of the body relegated to the status of a secondary instrument. Ibn Tufayl's take on how this living compound (of spiritual matter and spiritual form) comes into existence furthermore ties in with the way he sees natural and supernatural forces converging on every act of coming-to-be.

THE SPIRIT WHICH IS GOD'S

All this is highlighted in the scene-setting preamble in which Hayy is born spontaneously out of the earth's bowels, "without a mother or father" as Ibn Tufayl puts it.

According to Ibn Tufayl, everything begins with the earth's clay. The optimal climate ascribed to Hayy's equatorial island (see chapter 3) allows for the development of an ideal admixture of the four primary qualities of hot, cold, dry, and moist. Such a "maximal state of equilibrium" (27) forms the material basis for the emergence of a particularly exalted form of life. The more even the balance between the primary qualities in a body, the more complex modes of existence become feasible, Hayy later theorizes, and this goes hand in hand with a firmer purchase on life, since a more stable equilibrium is less liable to be threatened by opposing qualities eroding and eventually overwhelming it. (This accords with Arabic medical theory, which likewise placed great emphasis on a balance between the humors as the key to longevity.) In Aristotelian terms, different passive potentialities – capacities for becoming something or other – ride on different material constitutions.

However, being suited for life does not yet entail possessing it. Ibn Tufayl steadfastly maintains that a thing's material constitution itself does not yield its form: the form is something added to the corporeal, and as such it is something imparted from the outside. Aristotle had pressed the same point by saying that any passive potential for a specific form, residing as it does in a material subject (Gr. hypokeimenon, Ar. mawdu'), depends for its realization on something that already actually possesses the requisite form or feature. Aristotle's intention in emphasizing the priority of the actual had been wholly naturalistic. For Aristotle, a hot thing imparts heat to whatever is apt to be heated, and analogously, a parent organism imbues suitably disposed matter with a form identical to its own – as Aristotle puts it, one human being always begets another (Physics, II.7; Metaphysics, XII.3).

Ibn Tufayl, by contrast, takes his cues from Ibn Sina, whose aims in advancing this argument were considerably more otherworldly. Ibn Sina says that the emergence of form requires the agency of something transcending the whole system of bodies, an immaterial "Giver of Forms," as he calls it. Similar to this, Ibn Tufayl affirms through Hayy's investigations that not a single form, whether living or inert, comes to be or is sustained in existence without the outflow, or emanation (fayd), of a divine power and agency (86). The language of emanation was appropriated from pseudo-Aristotelian works such as the Theology of Aristotle – in reality, adaptations of Greek Neoplatonic treatises. When Ibn Tufayl talks about divine craftsmanship (Arabic san'a: Hayy, 88–90), he is alluding to the same phenomenon.

Ibn Tufayl sets up an extended analogy to illustrate the idea. The starting point is to compare the outflow of energy from the divine to the sun's life- and light-granting properties. Recounting how some bodies reflect the sun's rays not at all, some more than others, while some – in the manner of the perfectly polished mirror – do so to such an extent that they themselves can catch or even light a fire, Ibn Tufayl initiates a point-by-point comparison with the way the divine spirit, which is the true principle of life and is discharged from the incorporeal plane, attaches to physical entities.

Similarly with the spirit that is one of God's charges: it, too, emanates eternally onto all existents. Among them are some that show no traces of it because of a lack of fitness: these are the inert things that have no life in them... some of them do manifest its effects: these are the different species of plants, each in accordance with how suited they are... some of them, namely the different species of animals, show the spirit's workings exceedingly manifestly... Out of all the animals, the one that surpasses all others in the reception of the spirit is the one that appropriates the spirit and is informed according to its form. Such is the human being in particular. There is a pointer to this in the words of God, "God created Adam according to his form."

(Hayy, 28–29)

Conceiving of divine activity in terms of life and light was a long established trope in Neoplatonism. It also gels neatly with aspects of Muslim spirituality. Finding inspiration in the famous Light Verse of the Qur'an (Q. 24:35), Sufi theorists had delved into the idea that creation could be described in terms of God's divine light illuminating the dark void of non-being. The Neoplatonic and Sufi traditions converge in al-Ghazali's Niche of Lights and his treatise on God's Beautiful Names, both treatises known to Ibn Tufayl (Hayy, 17).

In the cited passage, Ibn Tufayl maintains at once that (a) the flow of the spirit from on high is everywhere and always the same, and that (b) the human body nevertheless provides the perfect vehicle for it, better than any other on earth. We shall have occasion to return to both these contentious claims. For now, notice how the account of Hayy's spontaneous generation carries subtle but unmistakable religious overtones. Without explicitly evoking scriptural accounts of Adam's creation or bringing God on to the stage as an anthropomorphic character, Ibn Tufayl can portray the emergence of life in fully Qur'anic terms, with spirit being breathed into a clump of clay.

The silent implication is that Hayy's mother is the very matter from which he is shaped, while his true father lies beyond the heavens. Perhaps Ibn Tufayl was squeamish about life's messy origins in sexual relations, as Fedwa Malti-Douglas has suggested (in Conrad 1996). The facts of animal reproduction are certainly very nearly absent from Hayy Ibn Yaqzan's account of the natural world, and Ibn Tufayl exhibits his fellow Sufis' disdain for gross carnal desire (Hayy, 98 and 106). All this stands in stark contrast to the spiritual passion which the Sufis, and Ibn Tufayl, consider entirely appropriate when it comes to loving God. Yet when it comes to Hayy's birth, the principal take-home message is not that the saints and holy men should be born out of a special divine intervention, but that the divine is present in every instance of coming-to-be, even the most mundane.

DIFFUSION AND SUFFUSION

Looking at Hayy's birth from this angle throws light on Ibn Tufayl's reasons for opening his narrative the way that he does. Contrary to appearances, Ibn Tufayl does not mean to imply that there would be something especially miraculous about the birth of his protagonist: to the contrary, his conviction is that every instance of genesis is equally remarkable. Through removing from the picture the distracting features surrounding earthly forms of parentage (these, in both Ibn Sina's and Ibn Tufayl's opinion, reduce to preparing matter into a constellation suitable for the reception of form), Ibn Tufayl is able to draw the reader's attention to what he believes is the truly salient fact about coming-to-be in general, namely, that it everywhere and in every instance requires the divine imprinting of form on to matter.

At a later time, Ibn Tufayl points out that even the exchange of the elements constitutes a kind of manifestation of spirit, only weaker and more tenuous (101). This is only logical: if the elements already count as enformed substances, then it is natural to inquire where their forms come from. Ibn Tufayl's answer, consistent with his declared principles, is that if "a body's aptitude and fitness for some motions over others is tantamount to its form" (74), then the elements, too, acquire their forms from outside the cosmic system, and this qualifies as a kind of life (although perhaps the characterization should be understood metaphorically in this context).

What Ibn Tufayl puts on the table – for the first time whilst describing Hayy's birth, then in a second pass when Hayy discovers the presence of a transcendent force in every instance of coming-to-be – accords with Ibn Sina's understanding of emanation. On the picture developed by Ibn Sina, what happens in emanation is that the elemental qualities first mix, which results in globs of matter becoming differentiated one from another and becoming suited for the reception of different kinds of forms. As soon as the preparation is complete, the appropriate kind of form descends from on high, automatically and without fail – an actuality to match the passive potential shown by the material (Kukkonen 2014). Ibn Tufayl shows himself to be an attentive reader of Ibn Sina, condensing the latter's difficult and diffuse teachings into a compelling account that even a philosophical novice can appreciate.

Distinctive of Ibn Tufayl is his emphasis on the dispersal of powers in the outflow of emanation. The divine manifests not only in the generation of beings, but in each and every instance where a created being uses its God-given powers. This accords with the general Andalusian emphasis on capacities as the core of being (see chapter 4 above). But it just so happens that the passage in which Ibn Tufayl forcibly underlines the omnipresence of divine power is simultaneously one of only a handful in which he breaks out in his own voice – and where he cites religious literature as well.

Ibn Tufayl quotes a saying attributed to Muhammad beloved by the Sufis, according to which God is the hearing by which the believer hears and the sight by which he sees. He also recounts an account in the Qur'an of the famed battle of Badr, where according to Scripture, "It was not you who destroyed them but God; it was not you who cast [the spear], but God who cast it" (Q. 8:17). Ibn Tufayl even intimates that this is the correct way to understand the theological notion of divine omnipotence. Hayy reproduces a kalam phrase, claiming that "for every generated thing, there has to be something else to generate it" (73). On the picture presented by Ibn Tufayl, divine actions thus suffuse the whole of reality at all times.

PLURALITY AND UNITY

With the basics of the spirit's descent thus described, let us investigate how it gets divided across the many distinct lifeforms. First of all, similar to earlier Andalusian philosophers such as Solomon Ibn Gabirol and Ibn Bajja, Ibn Tufayl contends that the more exalted beings represent a concatenation of matter plus a multiplicity of forms, one laid out on top of another. As David Ibn Shoshan, a fifteenth-century Jewish reader of Ibn Tufayl puts it, the descent of the living spirit, which occurs in one act of emanation, is the principal act of creation for any living being; it is then followed by the emanation of whatever forms are needed to account for a particular hylomorphic body assuming the shape that it does (Langermann 2007).

The idea of a plurality of forms converging on a single being is clearly spelled out in a lengthy passage in which Hayy classifies existents according to the complexity of their composition.

All earthen bodies – soil, rock, minerals, plants, animals, and other bodies that are heavy – comprise a single group (jumla wahida). They share in a single form from which there issues a falling motion (as long as there is no impediment to the descent)... plants and animals form a subset of this group, since their sharing in the previous group is supplemented by another form, from which issue nutrition and growth... these two activities are common to plants and animals: they must therefore issue from a form shared by the two, for which the expression "the vegetative soul" has been coined. A portion of this subset, the animals, while sharing with the latter the first and the second form, possesses a third, additional form, from which issue sense-perception as well as motion from place to place.

(Hayy, 66–68; see Di Giovanni 2011)

Each form represents a set of characteristic actions, with such capabilities stacked one on top of another so that, for instance, animals do everything that plants do (feeding, growing, reproducing) while simultaneously being capable of more (sensing and moving). The accumulation of characteristics is simultaneously a way of ranking existents, the more complex entities standing higher in the "great chain of being," as Arthur O. Lovejoy's famous study describes it (Lovejoy 1936).

Hayy's application of the method of synthesis (see chapter 4) reveals another, complementary aspect of the argument, one that emphasizes unity over plurality. Hayy considers first the differences between individuals of a given type of animal and determines that these are as it were nothing when weighed against the things that all horses, say (or gazelles, or asses) have in common. Based on this, "he judges that the spirit that belongs to all these is a single thing, with nothing to render it distinct except for its division into many hearts" (57). As the first application of an extended metaphor used to describe the division and combination of species, Ibn Tufayl likens the spirit of a species to a body of water divided between various vessels: should it be gathered into a single container, it would thereby become one thing. "Plurality only occurs to it according to a certain viewpoint," Hayy avers, which is a roundabout way of saying that individuation only occurs through material embodiment. The form itself is truly common to all instances of "horse" or "gazelle" (see chapter 4 above).

Next, Hayy combines all the different animal species together and concludes that the animal spirit, taken as a whole, is one as well. It is as if water were cooler in one vessel, warmer in another (58). This, too, we can readily appreciate: all animals move, though horses are more adroit than slugs. But Hayy's feats of synthesis do not end there. After noting that all plants share in nutrition and growth,

Hayy joined together next the genera of animals and plants in his soul, since he saw them both as growing and consuming nutrition – this notwithstanding the fact that animals possess something additional to plants by virtue of the excellence of sensation, perception, and motion. Perhaps, though, something akin to the latter can be evidenced in plants, for instance, flowers turn their countenance towards the sun, while their roots move in the direction of sustenance, etc. Through this deliberation, it became evident to him that plants and animals constitute a single thing on account of both sharing in one single thing. In one of them it is more complete and perfect (atamm wa-akmal), while in the other it is somehow impeded. It is as with water, which, though one, is divided in two, with one part flowing, while the other is frozen.

(Hayy, 59)

Firstly, the passage confirms by means of an example that the passage from plant to animal is not sudden; some plants exhibit animal-like behavior. This reinforces the notion that all life exists along a continuum of capacity and actualization, a "great chain of being," this time understood in the sense of completeness and continuity rather than hierarchy.

The continuum of life is also emphasized by Ibn Tufayl in another startling way. Instead of saying that the animal is a plant with some features added on, the way Aristotle's doctrine is standardly presented, Ibn Tufayl maintains that the plant is an animal with some functions denied to it – a frozen river, a stunted growth, or a thwarted purpose. Ibn Tufayl's bold idea is that if the divine spirit had its way, every living being would be a perfect and complete creature. It is just that the weaker material constitution of some beings leads to them being less fitted or suited (i'tidad, isti'dad) for the reception of some divine gifts. This fits with Ibn Tufayl's and Ibn Sina's shared conviction that divine generosity works maximally and in a sense indiscriminately, similar to the sun's light and warmth extending in all directions equally and with full force. At the same time, Ibn Tufayl portrays matter and body as forces opposed to God and the divine purpose in a way that is both a departure from Aristotle (who was not a creationist) and quite un-Islamic; another Platonic facet.

THE HUMAN DISTINCTION

Following this line of thought, we arrive at the notion that the human being is the perfect animal and the paradigmatic living being. We have seen an allusion to this in the passage where Hayy's birth was described as an undiluted descent of the spirit (Hayy, 28–29). The same conviction shows in Ibn Tufayl's choice of name for his protagonist – Hayy, "he who lives." Because al-Hayy, or "the Living," is simultaneously one of God's beautiful names, we have good reason to attach especial significance to the saying according to which Adam, or the archetypal human being, was created according to his form. The human being, according to Ibn Tufayl, manifests life like no other earthly creature.

What might the special capacity granted to humans be? The major Greek and Arabic philosophers had pointed to the ability to reason as humanity's distinguishing mark of excellence. Humans alone among animals are able to draw inferences, grasp true universals, and choose from alternatives according to their best judgment. Ibn Tufayl surely shared in many of these basic evaluations – he certainly affirms that animals by contrast live only for the moment, by their instincts – yet Hayy's take on the issue is somewhat different. Again, Hayy's very name provides a clue. As the son of one who is supremely conscious or awake (ibn Yaqzan), Hayy's birth inheritance as well as ours is to develop our awareness as well, and in so doing become truly alive. This is a matter of extrasensory perception rather than inference, as Ibn Tufayl's preface to Hayy already makes clear (4–9) and as we shall see in more detail over the next several chapters. But one of the oddities resulting from this view is that the very thing that makes human beings come supremely alive, according to Ibn Tufayl, is the one thing no other earthly creature possesses, and one that takes us beyond the confines of the present life.

THE SCIENCE OF THE SOUL

In sketching out the metaphysical underpinnings of what is supposed to be an Aristotelian psychology of functional parts and capacities, Ibn Tufayl avails himself of both the medical and the Platonist traditions. The first of these inclines towards materialist explanations of the life functions, the second points in a more idealist direction, and the tensions between the two are never entirely resolved. What is more, Ibn Tufayl drapes Hayy's findings in Qur'anic dressing in order to confer scriptural legitimacy on this peculiar hybrid. We may pause here to consider the overall effect of Ibn Tufayl's running together scientific and religious psychology in this manner (or "pneumatology," if you prefer).

The first thing to notice is how the practice lends Ibn Tufayl's and Hayy's pursuits a spiritual air. In studying how the spirit moves, we have firmly entered the realm of contemplating God's handiwork in the world. A discovery of the spiritual world ('alam ruhani) drives the study of the soul, just as the study of the soul leads to an ever-deepening appreciation of the way the world of the spirit pervades the natural reality all about us, and of how human beings ultimately are destined for another world entirely (see Hayy, 64–65). It is no surprise, then, that Hayy's contempt for the body ramps up each time he reflects on the spirit's otherworldly origin (45, 65, 92, 106).

At the same time, Ibn Tufayl's habit of running together Scripture and philosophy effectively legitimizes a naturalistic reading of an entire religious tradition. This goes against no less an authority than al-Ghazali, who had stressed that the afore-mentioned Qur'anic verse about the spirit (Q. 17:85) was intended as a caution against anyone probing too deeply into the mystery of how God creates and sustains life. Ibn Tufayl's whole program of study has a de-mystifying effect. In linking the life breathed into the human being by God (Q. 15:29) both with a range of natural processes and with the metaphysical scaffolding that supports all reality, Ibn Tufayl quietly encourages us to place statements derived from revealed religion in a scientific context to see what kind of sense can be made of them. There can hardly be any doubt that he himself believes, and also wants his readers to accept, that philosophy and physical science afford deeper insight not only into the actual fabric of the world, but into the meaning of religious statements as well. This motif will crop up with increasing frequency over the next chapters, as we ascend through the ranks of being towards divinity itself.

THREE DUTIES

Hayy's story pivots on his realization that a transcendent agent is responsible for the existence of everything in the cosmos. Before this conceptual leap is made, Hayy's thirst for knowledge is portrayed in terms of a natural drive peculiar to the human observer – irresistible and innate, yet at the same time indiscriminate and somehow inchoate. Driven by a kind of intellectual appetite (shahwa: Hayy, 50), Hayy simply absorbs information from every direction without ever pausing to wonder how or why this happens. as a consequence, the reader, too, is left in the dark when it comes to such matters.

Once Hayy acknowledges God's role in bringing each and every thing into being, his explorations assume a more purposeful character. Hayy now seeks to draw closer to the source of all being: and even if along the way he continues to make valuable observations about the cosmic order and his own place within it, such observations all now serve this higher goal. In line with late antique portrayals of philosophy as a way of life, Ibn Tufayl posits that the practice of philosophy leads up to spiritual perfection. The result is a theoretically grounded ethics in which Hayy's overall vision of reality dictates the terms on which he engages with the world.

FINITUDE AND TRANSCENDENCE

Hayy's recognition of a transcendent and immaterial First Cause proceeds through an extended meditation on the eternity of the world. The ensuing discussion is unusually philosophically involved by Hayy's standards – there are actual arguments advanced for and against – and atypically inconclusive to boot.

Figure 3 Hayy reaches beyond the starry skies, illustration from the Dutch translation of 1701.

On the one side, Ibn Tufayl places kalam proofs for the world's creation. Some of these are adapted from the works of the late antique Christian commentator John Philoponus, known in Arabic learning as Yahya al-Nahwi or "John the Grammarian." They start from the Aristotelian concept of infinity (see Physics, III.4–8). The central conceit is that an actual infinite quantity carries impossible consequences, so that if the physical size of the cosmos is finite (as Hayy has already determined to his satisfaction) then its age must be finite as well. Philoponus's argument is quite clever in that it turns Aristotle – who was a staunch eternalist, but also a finitist when it came to mathematical quantity – against himself. Ibn Tufayl additionally evokes an argument developed independently by the theologians, replete with language familiar to readers of kalam works. Because nothing in the world is free of temporally generated features, and because whatever is composed of generated things must itself be generated, the world as a composite entity must have a beginning in time (81).

On the other side, Hayy realizes that the notion of the world beginning brings with it serious problems as well (81–82). For one thing, it implies that there was a time when the world was not: but because the concept of time cannot be separated from that of the world – really, from the concept of motion, since the two are intrinsically related on the Aristotelian view – time cannot lapse without there being something that it measures. A beginning to the world would also imply that somehow a change had come about. But because nothing comes from nothing, one would then have to ask what it is that brought about the change, which sets up an infinite regress. These arguments in favor of infinite time and motion are lifted from Aristotle's Physics (VIII.1). Ibn Tufayl's brief treatment of the issue of the eternity of the world effectively samples centuries' worth of philosophical debate (Davidson 1987).

After pondering the question "for some years," as Ibn Tufayl says, Hayy declares in exhaustion that the matter may be irresolvable through rational means (Hayy, 82). Ibn Tufayl may not be as non-committal as he would have us believe: Hayy, after all, affirms the heavens' material indestructibility elsewhere (chapter 4), and beginnings and endings were on the strength of Aristotle's reasoning believed to mirror one another, so that nothing that is unending could have a beginning either (On the Heavens, I.12). This would make the world eternal after all, a conclusion that finds additional support in Hayy's later ecstatic visions where the physical world as a whole is described as being the everlasting counterpart and beneficiary of a higher, immaterial plane of reality (133–134). Given that Aristotle, al-Farabi, and Ibn Sina were all committed eternalists, it stands to reason that Ibn Tufayl would have been one, too, even if as an author he does not allow his protagonist to arrive at this conclusion.

Why would he not? In the first place, there is a question of whether belief in an eternal world might run counter to Sunni orthodoxy. Al-Ghazali had famously proclaimed that the profession of the world's eternity amounted to unbelief (kufr) and hidden apostasy (zandaqa), both of which meant that any legal protection for one's life was forfeit. But there is another reason, clearly spelled out in Hayy's train of thought. What matters is that ultimately, "the consequences of the two beliefs are one and the same" (Hayy, 82). An incorporeal agent must be postulated to account for the physical world being what it is, no matter what one thinks about its age. The hypothesis that the world came to be, once upon a time, immediately connotes an Agent (fa'il) both powerful and all-knowing (82–83). An eternal world, meanwhile, is perpetually in motion, said motion only being capable of being sustained by an infinite force, which in turn cannot be housed in a finite body but must instead issue from an incorporeal source (83–85; the argument is taken from Aristotle, Physics, VIII.10). Hayy, once he realizes this, is

no longer troubled by doubts regarding the eternity or coming-to-be of the world. Either way, he was satisfied of the existence of an incorporeal Agent, one that neither was in contact with bodies nor separated from them, neither entering them nor external to them.

(86)

The crucial points to recognize are that (a) the physical world is not all there is, while (b) the incorporeal aspect of reality is such that conventional notions of proximity and remoteness, interiority and exteriority do not apply to it. The divine is at once everywhere and nowhere. It is inaccessible to the senses and the imagination, yet the human being can reach out to it on the basis of a few simple facts concerning the world.

This is Almohad creed through and through: all Ibn Tufayl wants to do is clear the space for both the paths available for reaching the desired conclusion – the eternalist and the creationist – to appear viable. Whether one finds Philoponus's, al-Kindi's, and the theologians' creationism more persuasive or Aristotle's, al-Farabi's, and Ibn Sina's eternalism, all will readily find a home under Ibn Tumart's banner of an utterly ineffable and immaterial deity.

The need to persuade the reader of the virtues of this irenic approach is the likely reason for placing one of the treatise's most controversial passages at its very center. If at this point the reader has grown to trust the narrator and protagonist, then she or he can be expected to follow Hayy also when it comes to dispelling this particular point of tension.

TWO WORLDS

In the next chapter we will consider the implications that God's incorporeality has for Ibn Tufayl's theology and his cognitive theory – Ibn Tufayl's take on how we come to know God. For now, let it simply be noted that the principal lesson Hayy draws is that an utterly incorporeal Maker (al-Sani'), Mover, or Agent must possess every mode of perfection and lack every defect and privation. Above all, this is a matter of God being "a pure existent, necessary of existence through His essence" (mawjud mahd, wajib al-wujud bi-dhati-hi: Hayy, 89). The formula is derived from Ibn Sina, who in his metaphysical works had developed a whole theology of necessary being that proved enormously influential throughout the Islamic world.

Ibn Tufayl takes necessity of existence to connote primarily that nonexistence of any sort is inconceivable when it comes to divinity. Indeed, the divine is to be conceived in terms of an overflowing existential fullness from which all other things derive their being. But there is a further corollary which Ibn Tufayl uses to introduce a moralizing strand to his tale, one with roots in Greek philosophy since Plato's and Aristotle's day. If incorporeal being is necessary being, then it is also eternal: and if being is to be preferred to nonbeing, then any passing acquaintance with such an immortal aspect of reality should spark in us a desire to assimilate to it and to attain whatever share in immortality is available to us. Philosophy, then, insofar as it puts us in touch with the eternal and divine, naturally shades into a desire to become godlike.

Hayy reaches this momentous turning-point on reaching thirty-five (Hayy, 90). With a deepening understanding of just how radically the divine transcends the corporeal world, Hayy finds his thoughts steadily drawn from the created to the creator, from the artefact to the artisan. Hayy's consuming desire (shawq), as that of any good Sufi, is now solely for God. Ibn Tufayl even acknowledges that the pull of the other world interferes with Hayy's earlier study of mundane things, his heart becoming detached from the sensory world (al-'alam al-mahsus) at the same time that it latches on to the intelligible (al-ma'qul).

Such an understanding of two worlds is standard to all forms of Platonism; it also found its way into many late antique and Islamic representations of Aristotelianism. The reasoning in brief goes that if the only recognized constituents of any actual being are matter and form, and if materiality denotes corporeality, then immaterial existence can only mean form of some sort. To the Platonists, this denoted a domain of pure and separate Ideas, while pious Aristotelian philosophers preferred to conceive of the immaterial domain in terms of a constellation of disembodied intellects. The latter is what Ibn Tufayl advocates, in line with Aristotle and the Arabic Aristotelians (127–130); but what is remarkable is how sharply Ibn Tufayl draws the line between the sensory and the intelligible universes. For Ibn Tufayl, the sensory world cannot really teach us anything about the intelligible (see chapter 7).

There is an ethical and existential dimension to this. For Ibn Tufayl, a continued preoccupation with worldly matters – workaday perceptions and the mere satisfaction of one's baser appetites – signals a fatal attachment to the inexorable rhythms of decay and death that characterize all corporeal life. In line with Muslim moralists throughout Islamic intellectual history as well as their late antique predecessors, Ibn Tufayl contends that if one wishes for nothing beyond this world, then nothing, at the end of the day, is all that one is liable to get. With the dissolution of the body, one's hopes for a deeper and more lasting form of happiness inevitably fade (Hayy, 97–98). Echoing a line of reasoning that goes back to one of the very first ethical works by a Muslim philosopher, al-Kindi's treatise On Dispelling Sorrows, Hayy reasons that one should fix one's sights instead on those joys and delights that are lasting and that cannot be taken away (Hayy, 95–96; see Adamson and Pormann 2012, 245–266). An engagement with the immortal and immaterial domain, then, is eminently desirable. But what reason do we have to think that such a conjunction (ittisal) would be within reach?

Ibn Tufayl claims that we have metaphysical reasons for optimism. Hayy determines that he can only have become aware of the Necessary Existent if he himself possesses some sort of foothold in the supernal world. Hayy's own essence (dhat) must be akin to the Necessary Existent somehow, and this means that he should by rights privilege the development of that aspect of his being. This is a duty imposed upon him already by his unique position in the chain of being:

Hayy had surveyed the ranks of animals without, however, encountering anything that would suggest to him an awareness (shi'r) of the Necessary Existent. However, from his own essence there proceeded the knowledge that he was indeed aware of Him and, based on this, Hayy determined that he was a well-balanced animal and a spirit resembling the heavenly bodies. It dawned on him that compared to the other animal species he belonged to one that was special and that he had been created for a purpose different from theirs, called to a great task no other animal species could fulfill.

(104)

OUGHT FROM IS

The first thing to notice about Hayy's reasoning is that it goes against an injunction invoked in modern European philosophy against arguing from the way things are to the way they should be. The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) gave the injunction the attractive formulation "no ought from is," and those guilty of trespassing the barrier were habitually accused of falling prey to the so-called naturalistic fallacy.

For Ibn Tufayl, however, as for all medieval Aristotelians (Arabic and Latin), no such fallacy exists. In the first place, the metaphysics of potentiality and actuality virtually dictates that all creatures be judged by how they manifest and develop their innate potential. The realization of those capacities specific to each type of being is what allows them fully to become what they are, and as such is surely to be promoted.

In the second instance, a naturalist ethics could also be predicated on a religious or spiritual outlook. On the Neoplatonic approach to the cosmos favored by Ibn Tufayl, the whole universe is the constant recipient of divine munificence (jud, 89). individually as well as collectively, everything continually depends on the outpouring of the creative energies of the Necessary Existent. From here it is but a short step to eyeing everything in creation with reverence and awe, as a manifestation of divine power and knowledge.

When Hayy saw that all beings were of His making, he came to view them in a way different than before. It was as an expression of its Maker's power that he saw each thing now, marveling at His wonderful craftsmanship, the elegance of His plan, and the ingenuity of His knowledge. In the least of things, to say nothing of the greatest, Hayy found marks of wisdom and divine creativity that exhausted his powers of admiration and confirmed his belief that all of this could issue only from a Cause of consummate perfection, one that was indeed beyond perfection: "Not an atom's weight escapes Him either in heaven or on earth."

(Hayy, 88; see Q. 10:62 and 34:3)

Hayy moves to observe God's purpose in giving each animal species a distinct set of tools, powers, and parts, which together make up its overall disposition or nature. The term used is khulq, which Ibn Tufayl surely chose because of its proximity to khalq or "creation" (89). This accords with a long line of literature celebrating the inexhaustible wisdom of God's works, though notice how in Hayy, such teleological or aim-oriented speculation is not meant to prove God's existence. Instead, a prior acknowledgment of God's existence is what allows Hayy to make fresh sense of what he sees around him. In such a context, it is not much of a leap for Hayy to conclude that he, too, should strive to become what he most fully is – to realize his essence as a creature capable of contemplating the Necessary Existent.

THREE LIVES

More surprising, perhaps, is that Hayy does not decide straightaway that he is only an immaterial essence. Ibn Tufayl, after all, clearly implies that this immaterial essence is Hayy's true self (the ambiguity of the corresponding Arabic term dhat – it can be taken to mean both "self" and "essence" – was fully exploited by philosophers with essentialist views regarding human destiny). Nor does Ibn Tufayl posit, as al-Ghazali had done, that a person's only choice is to embrace either the angel or the beast within, two natures that are associated with the intellectual and sensory realms respectively. Instead of opting for such a dualist conception, Hayy determines that he bears a resemblance to three kinds of being – the animals, the heavenly spheres, and the Necessary Existent – and that he correspondingly has ties to three different tiers of reality – the transitory and material, the perpetual and ethereal, and the altogether eternal and immaterial. As a consequence,

It appeared to Hayy that the actions he was required to perform had three kinds of goals. (1) There were those actions by which he would come to resemble the unreasoning animals; (2) those by which he would come to resemble the heavenly bodies; and (3) those by which he would come to resemble the Necessary Existent. The first imitation was required of Hayy insofar as he had a benighted body possessed of diverse parts, different powers, and varying objectives; the second insofar as he was possessed of the animal spirit that resided in his heart, which formed the starting point and principle (mubdi') for the rest of his body and its attendant powers; while the third imitation was required of him insofar as he was he (huwa huwa), that is, insofar as he was an essence by which he was acquainted with the Necessary Existent.

(106–107)

Hayy's findings accord with the tripartite division of substance made by Aristotle at the start of Metaphysics, Book Lambda (lam in the Arabic), a work that was read by Arabic philosophers for the insights it contained regarding God's relationship to the cosmos. Aristotle, too, divides substances into bodies that come to be then pass away (sublunary existents), bodies that exist eternally (the heavenly spheres), and the wholly immaterial substances for which nonexistence is strictly inconceivable (God and other intelligible beings). Ibn Tufayl now intimates that all three realms converge in human existence: the human being truly is a microcosm or a "small world," with ties to all three realms. This, along with Ibn Tufayl's optimistic stance regarding the essential goodness of all of God's creation, probably accounts for his insistence that all three aspects of human existence, since they are ineradicable and God-given, need to be perfected.

THE CONSERVATION PRINCIPLE

Despite such claims towards a balanced presentation, Hayy's animalistic side clearly receives bottom billing. The body that Hayy shares with the other animals is characterized as something dull and dark and its demands for nutrition and sexual gratification as a regrettable and lowly imposition, liable to drag the soul down into the mire of generation and corruption (106). Although Hayy acknowledges that the Creator will not have granted him a body for nothing, he resolves only to give it as much as is needed to sustain the vital spirit (109).

Above all this means a strictly regulated diet. Hayy eats only as much as is needed to stave off hunger (112–113), sometimes going without food for days (120). Hayy's ascetic regimen ultimately leaves him withered and emaciated – a fact that Ibn Tufayl records with grim satisfaction, since it puts Hayy on an even footing with the more austere Sufi masters (135). As a further indication of Hayy's growing disdain for embodied life, he no longer attends to the upkeep of his dwelling (113). Hayy's cave is now merely a shelter for the purposes of quiet meditation, nothing more, and a bare stone floor will suffice (119).

The reasons for Hayy's austerity become clearer from a late passage where Hayy, who has already perfected his practice, tries some of the food offered by his newfound friend Asal in an attempt to please him. As soon as the food passes his lips, Hayy recognizes his mistake: the food's delicious taste makes him realize he should never have overstepped his self-imposed limits (142–143). It is the pleasure associated with eating that is the problem, as Ibn Tufayl agrees with al-Ghazali's proffered estimation that one can never truly serve two masters. The more one takes pleasure in this world, the less one is able to cleave to a life of contemplation. Ibn Tufayl thus proves himself equally censorious of sensual pleasures as had been most Sufis and philosophers before him, showing that there are limits to his ability to appreciate all aspects of God's creation as good and valuable in their own right.

Hayy's deliberations regarding his diet also reveal a more appetizing aspect to Ibn Tufayl's evaluation of the natural world. Hayy notes, first of all, that since everything in nature is God's creation, eating anything at all will inevitably cut off some living thing from attaining its attendant perfection and thwart its intended purpose in life. It would therefore be better not to eat at all, were it not for the fact that Hayy's own death would be an even greater affront to God's purposes (110–111).

Distinguishing next between three basic sources of food – animals, still growing greens, and fruits and nuts that are the carriers of new life – Hayy establishes a hierarchy of harm in order to minimize the negative impact the philosopher has on the lives of others. The flesh of fruits is the first thing he can eat, as long as he scatters the seeds and pips where they can grow into fresh vegetation. If more nutrition is needed, then nuts that are plentiful or carefully pruned parts of growing plants become allowable (uprooting should be avoided). Animal meat and eggs are strictly a last resort, presumably because animals constitute a higher form of life, and again Hayy must take care not to hunt a single species to extinction (111–112).

Was Ibn Tufayl thinking in environmentalist terms? Not in any modern sense of the word. His concern for the preservation of species is not motivated by any active sense of the biosphere coming under threat through reduced diversity. Hayy's prescribed aim is to minimize his own resistance to God's sovereign agency, which seeks to maximize the good of all things (111). What animates Hayy's care for the conservation of species is a certain brand of creation care, to use modern theological terminology, even if this is spelled out in Aristotelian terms of potentiality seeking actualization.

For all this, Ibn Tufayl's exposition does make one valuable point with exceeding clarity: nature has not been created for our exploitation alone; instead, every living creature possesses a dignity and worth all its own due to having its own naturally given aims to pursue. Some precedents to Ibn Tufayl's remarkably humane outlook existed in earlier Islamic philosophy. The famous fourth-/tenth-century physician-philosopher Abu Bakr al-Razi (d. 313/925) advocated the ethical treatment of animals and a vegetarian diet in his treatise on The Philosophical Way of Life, while the Brethren of Purity in their Letters devoted a whole treatise to animal complaints of human cruelty, injustice, and arrogance (see McGinnis and Reisman 2007, 39–41; Goodman and McGregor 2009). What is remarkable about these voices is how they go beyond what was standard already in late antiquity – the sentiment that cruelty towards animals was unbecoming and antithetical to human virtue – and advocate that animal lives are inherently valuable. Hayy's extension of the same principle to plants and even seeds is merely a radicalization of the same logic.

KINSHIP WITH THE HEAVENS

Ibn Tufayl's contention that Hayy resembles the heavenly bodies breaks down into three distinct components. (1) As we have seen in the previous chapter, the heavens' superior bodily constitution resembles his own even temperament; (2) the way they steer and stir the sublunary world resembles the way Hayy's own animal spirit is responsible for the functioning and coordination of his various body parts and organs; finally, (3) the true essences of the heavens must be of the same immaterial kind as Hayy's higher self, albeit that this last feature cannot be verified directly through sense-perception but must instead be affirmed "intuitively" (hads-an: Hayy, 99).

The background to this picture is Ibn Sina's conception of each of the heavenly spheres constituting a triad of body, soul, and intellect. However, if in the case of Hayy's similitude with animals what had to be established was that Hayy could transcend their brute and appetite-driven existence, in the case of the heavens Hayy has to rise up to their level of perfection. The relation is one of imitation (tashabbuh). This leads Hayy first of all to model his care of the body on the example set by the luminous, pure, and untarnished heavenly spheres. Hayy makes sure to clean himself by frequent ablutions, to take exquisite care of his clothes, and even to try on fragrant oils in an attempt to beautify himself (114, 115–116).

In addition to this, Hayy took it upon himself to move in a circle. Sometimes he would circle the island in different ways, going around its shoreline and probing its inlets; sometimes he would circle around his own house or some rock a set number of times, either at a walking pace or at a jog; at other times, he would simply spin around himself until he became dizzy.

Such a spinning motion, since it serves to block out the external senses, also helps Hayy to meditate on the Necessary Existent. The practice is reminiscent of Sufi whirling, though Ibn Tufayl's book predates the formation of the famous Mevlevi order of whirling Dervishes.

Hayy's second form of imitation has to do with the heavens' providential administration of sublunary events. The spheres, Ibn Tufayl points out, are ultimately responsible for preparing matter for the reception of all the various forms and spirits (113–114): through their circular motions, the different spheres push and pull the different elements, condensing and rarefying them, leading to different admixtures becoming receptive to different kinds of transcendent influences. This theory, which drew on Aristotle's treatise On Coming-to-be and Passing-away (II.9–10) but resonated with popular ideas about astrology as well, came to occupy a central position in the works of the Arabic Aristotelians. On the model of the famous Greek commentator on Aristotle, Alexander of Aphrodisias, the Muslim philosophers used the theory to explain how divine providence operates not on an individual level, but through maintaining the cosmic order as a whole and above all through preserving the species. Without the preordained harmony built into the celestial clockworks the material conditions would not exist whereby horse always begets horse and man, man, as Aristotle had said. It is the inexorable and steady progression of the heavens that allows for order also in the sublunary realm, rather than abject chaos.

This, incidentally, is also why Hayy's sole reference to an individually directed divine providence rings false. When towards the end of the story, Hayy and Asal resolve to exit the island and join civilization, Ibn Tufayl piously intones that a ship conveniently approaches their shore "by God's command," and that God also sends a favorable wind that whisks the two off to their destination in the briefest possible time (148–149). But this seems improbable. Why would God personally take a hand in any of this, if all that comes to pass in the sublunary world requires the exact convergence of a complicated system of celestial mechanics, one whose principal purpose is the perpetuation of the various natural kinds? There were, it is true, astrologically inclined Aristotelians who taught that individual providential events were administered by God through the heavenly rotations. But Ibn Tufayl's narrative does nothing to encourage such an interpretation, and in any case, one can hardly regard Hayy's and Asal's passage to civilization as providential, as we shall see in chapter 8.

It is in imitation of the heavens' providential care for things beneath them that Hayy undertakes a strikingly compassionate program of helping all living creatures in need. Not only does Hayy rescue animals entrapped, endangered, or simply famished or parched; he even sees to the needs of plants on his island, watering them and disentangling them one from the other where possible, so that all may receive the invigorating warmth of the sun (114–115). The last example discloses the general rule behind Hayy's many activities. The aim in each instance is to help each creature actualize its full potential, the way God and the heavenly spheres do. One may quibble about the specifics of his method: in rescuing some animal attacked by a predator, Hayy may be lengthening the lifespan and protecting the potentialities of the prey, but is he not thwarting the activities and consequent perfection of the predator? But one cannot gainsay the benevolent intent behind these activities, which Hayy learns to execute to perfection.

LEAVING THE WORLD BEHIND

All this must come to an end, however, when Hayy considers in earnest the implications of his third way of imitating the heavens, that of their contemplation of the Necessary Existent, which segues into his own imitation of the divine. Since this practice requires a completely single-minded devotion, and since any attention paid to the outside world can only detract from the task, any remaining interest in the physical world must now be renounced. As a consequence, Hayy's compassion and solicitude for sublunary creatures must likewise subside. All his motions come to a halt (119–121).

Many modern readers will find this conclusion disappointing (Brague 1997). That Ibn Tufayl does not, and that he makes no apologies for Hayy's conduct, tells us something important about the differences between (most) premodern and (most) modern ethics. Premodern virtue ethics were an ethics of personal excellence: because of the attendant perfectionist undercurrent, premodern ethicists would not have felt the need to emphasize everywhere the necessary other-directedness of high-minded behavior. If one is developing one's peculiar and superior form of spiritual perfection in a way that is unique to the cosmos, as Hayy does, then that is the best thing one can do. As Ibn Tufayl sees it, neither God nor any reasonable human would begrudge Hayy leaving alone the entangled plants on his island, when his focus is to develop a contemplative practice instead.

This does not mean that Hayy's personal conduct would all of a sudden become cruel or unethical, or his appearance unkempt or disheveled (although apparently he does let his hair grow out, as per Asal's eye-witness account: Hayy, 141). What it does mean is that Hayy no longer shows any concern for such lowly matters. Hayy's attentions and actions now turn inwards, which at the same time is the remaining path upwards. It is time for us finally to address Hayy's, Hayy's, and Ibn Tufayl's vision of the divine.

GOD

Ibn Tufayl prefaces the story of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan with a promise that the narrative will shed light on Ibn Sina's vaunted "Eastern wisdom." The preface announces that the core of this wisdom will consist of a vision of the divine that wholly transcends the merely verbal and the inferential – that of which we can speak and that towards which we can reason. Ibn Tufayl claims that an intimate knowledge (ma'rifa) of God differs qualitatively from every other way of knowing Him: a peculiar joy correspondingly attaches to it, and those who would censor the friends of God for their claims to knowing God in such an intimate manner simply do not know what they are talking about.

With Hayy reaching the "level of Arrival" (darjat al-wusul: 144), the time has finally come to assess these claims. How, when, and where is access to the divine possible on Ibn Tufayl's terms? Is the event described as contact or conjunction (ittisal) or as full-blown mystic union (ittihad)? What happens to the lover of God in the kind of intimate experience Ibn Tufayl envisions? What does the aspirant see, hear, or taste? And what does Ibn Tufayl ultimately wish to say through his description of Hayy's experience about the divine domain?

Even a cursory investigation will reveal that Ibn Tufayl in writing on mystical experience is in close dialogue with Ibn Sina, al-Ghazali, and his own predecessor within Andalusian philosophical circles, Ibn Bajja. But Hayy's text resonates with echoes of Sufi controversies as well. Overall, Hayy's immersion in the godhead constitutes the climax towards which Ibn Tufayl's philosophical novel builds.

UNVEILING THE MYSTERIES

First, a word of caution. "Mysticism" is a much-misused term, and "mystical experience" a hopelessly vague and imprecise category under which modern Westerners have grouped all kinds of disparate phenomena. In so doing, enthusiasts and detractors of mysticism alike have often muddied what they have sought to elucidate. The application of the blanket term "mysticism" has tended to obscure from sight and erase the very real differences that exist between the various ascetic and contemplative practices of the many religious traditions at different points during their history.

Today, the majority of academics reject the notion of a single mystical drive that would manifest itself in different ways. It seems more helpful to speak about mysticisms, in the plural, and to ponder what individual historical authors and authorities have sought to accomplish in their own society through controlling and channeling access to a purportedly hidden, esoteric, or interior dimension of an established religious tradition (the Arabic term batin, which is evoked several times by Ibn Tufayl, is multivalent enough to accommodate all these meanings).

Hayy's mysteries, to be specific, amount to a kind of theosophy, from the Greek for "wisdom concerning God." Ibn Tufayl offers an elaborate account of the divine that may, so we are led to understand, prove unconventional and challenging in some ways. Yet at the same time this esoteric wisdom is supposed to uncover the genuine heart of the religious tradition whose depths it plumbs. What separates this type of authorship from theology pure and simple is the special warrant that personal experience is said to possess in verifying the claims made by the theosophist and a corresponding emphasis on the ineffable character of the findings.

Notice how this type of spirituality, predicated as it is on the dispensation of hidden and perhaps forbidden knowledge, sets up a particular kind of hierarchy. Those who claim to have imbibed deep from the well of mysteries often caution their adepts about how startling those things are that they are about to read or hear, or point to the recipients' constitutional weaknesses as potential impediments when it comes to appreciating the subtleties of the points being made. At the same time, the very imagery of secrets being passed on lends the proceedings an agreeably conspiratorial air. It evokes a circle of insiders that is set against a vast sea of outsiders and implies that the adept is, after all, to be counted among those in the know.

All these rhetorical techniques feature prominently in Ibn Tufayl's narrative, both in the author's preface and in Ibn Tufayl's actual description of Hayy's divine vision. Their use allows Ibn Tufayl to position himself as an authority, while at the same time providing advance cover against all manner of objections.

FROM ASCETICISM TO MYSTICISM

Another way of looking at the question is to say that some of the mystical religious traditions focus more on the spiritual states of the religious aspirant her- or himself, and on specific techniques of the self by which one may assess one's own actions and motivations and train oneself in pursuit of spiritual perfection – call this the ascetic pole of mysticism – while others have more readily progressed to learned speculation about the structure and dynamics of the godhead, the final goal of all spiritual aspiration. The latter we may call the contemplative pole of mysticism, and there is no question but that Ibn Tufayl belongs in this tradition. (Another way of describing the two poles would be to contrast the moral with the cognitive side of mysticism, although obviously the two complement one another.)

Although the previous chapter has indicated that Hayy adopts a full program of ascetic self-mortification in the Sufi vein, the mere fact that these exercises are only described in cursory fashion indicates that Ibn Tufayl's real interests lie elsewhere. It is telling, I think, that Ibn Tufayl says comparatively little about the lower soul or self (the nafs often denounced by Sufi authors), while weighing in often and heavily on issues surrounding the more exalted human self or essence (dhat) that is tethered to the divine. This is a precise reversal of the procedures advocated and adopted by al-Ghazali in the Revival of the Religious Sciences.

Ibn Tufayl's efforts in fleshing out a philosophical mysticism or mystical philosophy in fact belong to a distinct phase in the evolution of Islamic spirituality, one where the notion of an intimate acquaintance (ma'rifa) of God and a close friendship (wilaya) with Him had already assumed center stage and where Ibn Sina's powerful vision of the cosmos and the God-world relationship had begun to exert an influence over the imagination of the more theoretically oriented Sufi sympathizers, al-Ghazali among them. At the same time, there was as yet no established and predominant way of reading Ibn Sina in a Sufi register; nor had the Sufi brotherhoods, then in a formative state, yet superseded the individual lineages of master and disciple. All this meant that Ibn Tufayl in talking up his personal brand of philosophical mysticism was entering a heavily contested field.

While we may find ourselves impressed by the sweep of Ibn Tufayl's vision, and while we may take notice of how Hayy's personal path replicates the move "from asceticism to mysticism" (as one recent study of early Sufism has characterized the broader historical development within Islam; Melchert 1996), we should not generalize from Ibn Tufayl's highly idiosyncratic statements to any grander picture of Sufi theosophy. Ibn Tufayl's projected brotherhood of philosophical Sufis, evoked in Hayy's preface and postscript, may well have constituted a party of one. Those very facets of Ibn Tufayl's brand of mysticism that have most appealed to modern audiences – its philosophical tone, its non-denominational character, and Hayy's individualism in forging his own path – will have made his project appear very strange and quite possibly suspect in the eyes of many of his contemporaries. It is perhaps no wonder that despite Ibn Tufayl's prominence in the Maghrebi network of Sufi masters and disciples, we do not know of his teachings having any impact at all in the lives of Sufi communities.

TASTING THE TRUTH

Ibn Tufayl's single most repeated point is that what Hayy experiences and what Ibn Sina's "Eastern wisdom" delivers is a form of God-consciousness that is not mere knowledge about God ('ilm) – a creedal statement or a philosophical proof, say – but a knowledge of God, i.e. understanding (ma'rifa) in the sense of a genuine acquaintance with the object. To know God in this sense is akin to knowing someone personally: in some ways, it hews closer to raw sense-perception than to rational belief formation, which is why the Sufis had likened such an act of understanding to tasting (dhawq). But this is also what makes it so difficult, even impossible, to convey the essence of what happens. Translating the experience into another modality will only serve to render one's testimony false (10–11).

Should you desire an analogy by which the difference between this kind of perception and others would be made clear to you, imagine the state of a boy deprived of eyesight, but otherwise possessed of an innate excellence and intuitive power, firm recollection and masterful discernment. Through the use of his other powers of perception, such a boy would develop an acquaintance with what there is in his native town in terms of human individuals, along with the majority of its animal species and objects, its streets and pathways, buildings and public spaces. Eventually he would be able to walk its streets without a guide, being immediately familiar with everything he comes across. Colors, however, he would know solely by way of nominal explication and ostensive definition.

(Hayy, 7–8)

Here we have someone who is missing a crucial modality of perception when it comes to the outside world, but who is nonetheless able to navigate the world successfully and who in this sense may not feel as though he is missing out on anything. The youth may, after all, even know a thing or two (or three, or a thousand) about colors, although in a certain sense he has never known colors.

After attaining this level, suppose that the boy's eyesight were to open up and vision dawn on him. The boy would then walk through the entire town, stroll all around, yet he would not come across anything that would differ from what he had believed before, nor would a single thing contradict his beliefs. The colors would correspond to how they had been depicted to him. Two momentous things would nonetheless occur to him, one following upon the other: an increase in clarity and brightness, and a tremendous delight.

(Hayy, 8)

Notice how on this telling, the dawning of eyesight both does and does not disclose a new class of objects. On the one hand there can be no doubt but that the phenomenal reality of color – its true nature (haqiqa), as Ibn Tufayl would say in imitation of al-Ghazali – has enriched the boy's field of perception. On the other hand, everything remains as it was before. Even the explanations and depictions that the boy had possessed before concerning color continue to make sense: as verbal descriptions go, they may have been as good as any – perhaps a scientific account, perhaps an analogy drawn from the other senses.

Experiential knowledge of God similarly accesses the very same reality that can also be spoken of in terms of creedal statements and philosophical arguments. The latter materials may even succeed in saying something vital about the subject, the same way science can successfully explain color: Hayy's/Ibn Tufayl's/Ibn Sina's characterization of God as the essentially Necessary Existent certainly qualifies. Ibn Tufayl's point, though, is that the difference between knowing-that ('ilm, science) and knowing (as one does a person, ma'rifa) is not quantitative but qualitative. No amount of argument and inference will of itself produce the requisite experience of God; only the opening up of a distinct perceptual modality will. This stress on the direct perceptual nature of true supernal cognition probably accounts for the vehemence with which Ibn Tufayl disparages logic and mathematics in his preface to Hayy. Ibn Tufayl goes so far as to say that a mastery of the two yields no benefit and that their study could not bring the previous Andalusian thinkers any closer to real perfection (Hayy, 12). The implication is that Ibn Bajja and his ilk, who had denied the Sufis' ability to taste the divine directly (see Governance of the Solitary, 55–56), were themselves entangled in practices that would never advance them one step in approaching God.

THEOLOGICAL PRECEPTS

For all that Ibn Tufayl lauds the special and irreducible character of the Sufi taste of the divine, he also avails himself of several precepts drawn from rational theology and philosophy in order to draw in advance the boundaries within which Hayy's mystical cognitions must fall. This is done on the principle that direct acquaintance can never contradict what has been firmly established by reason (Hayy, 5). The practice marks Ibn Tufayl out as a "sober" Sufi keen to regulate the claims made by those in the throes of ecstasy. In fact, right at the beginning of Hayy, Ibn Tufayl anonymously censures the early Sufis al-Bistami (d. 261/875) and al-Hallaj (d. 309/922), effectively excusing their ecstatic proclamations as genuinely divinely inspired, although their erroneous and heterodox nature shows the two to have been grievously ill-informed.

In line with established Islamic practice, Ibn Tufayl frames his own theological questioning in terms of what can be affirmed and denied of God – the divine attributes, positive and negative. As regards the things that must be denied of God (tanzih), Ibn Tufayl's line of argument is simple. One must first deny that God would be embodied in any way, from which it then follows that there can be absolutely no multiplicity in God either (matter being a prerequisite of divisibility). Ibn Tufayl's simple bifurcation of God from what is not God along the lines of incorporeality vs. corporeality recalls kalam theology and Almohadism more than it does Arabic philosophy. The latter, after all, had allowed for other immaterial beings, such as the heavenly movers and immaterial souls.

Ibn Tufayl's approach to God's positive attributes (sifat al-ijab/sifat al-ithbat) is more fluid, with designations appearing and disappearing according to need and circumstance. In a summary that directly precedes the description of Hayy's mystical vision, it is said at once that the positive attributes include items such as God's "knowledge, power, and wisdom," but also that these are all reducible to the real nature of God's essence (haqiqa dhati-hi), given that God's incorporeality precludes any multiplicity in the godhead. Let us take these claims in turn.

To say that God is knowledgeable, powerful, and wise seems to include a redundancy – one who is wise must surely be knowledgeable and vice versa. Could this be merely a slip on Ibn Tufayl's part? Considering how central divine overflow is to Hayy's positive conception of divinity otherwise (Hayy, 88–90), perhaps he meant to evoke the traditional triad of divine attributes instead: knowledge, power, plus goodness or generosity (jud). Then again, al-Ghazali's presentation of the attributes in the Revival of the Religious Sciences had postulated that all the attributes ultimately reduce to divine knowledge and power. So Ibn Tufayl could be consciously mimicking al-Ghazali. At any rate, a longer list also presents itself: "He is existence, perfection, and completeness; He is goodness, beauty, power, and knowledge; He is He, and 'everything perishes except His face' " (Q. 28:88).

The last phrase evoked by Ibn Tufayl – "He is He" – is meant to establish the strict unity as well as uniqueness of God. God does not, properly speaking, fall under any kind term, since in that case both God and other members of that kind would share in some universal that would consequently stand between them and – so to speak – above them. This means that whatever perfection is ascribed to God cannot be thought of as defining God in the sense of encompassing Him and thereby delimiting His mode of being. To the contrary, God is infinite, which explains in part why all efforts to comprehend Him fall short (Hayy, 11).

In a punchy formulation borrowed from the pseudonymous Theology of Aristotle, Ibn Tufayl puts it that God is both "the ultimate in perfection and beyond perfection" (88). The former feature explains how creatures aspire to know Him (every kind of perfection is ascribable to Him, only infinitely more so), while the latter points to the way in which God's essence stands independent of any rationally defined form of excellence and thus escapes our understanding altogether. The dual formulation follows late antique Platonist precedent, even as it allows for a hierarchical ranking of the divine attributes on the model of Ibn Sina. As the perfect Being, God is the ultimate final cause for every form of actuality (every other being strives to emulate God's perfection, which simultaneously naturally accounts for the love – 'ishq – everything feels for God), while as the infinite power beyond all comprehension – as something "beyond perfection" – God is responsible for there being something rather than nothing in the first place. The former feature is explicable in terms of God's knowledge; the latter is tied to God's singular power of effecting existence and as such remains inexplicable (Wisnovsky 2003).

LIKE KNOWING LIKE

God is incorporeal, therefore God is dissimilar to anything in the world; God is known by the human being, therefore God is similar to the human being. Ibn Tufayl presents the two inferences in quick succession just past the halfway mark in the Hayy narrative, and they pose a conundrum insofar as they appear to point in opposite directions. Is the solution, then, to say that the human being does not belong in the world, despite the common-sense understanding of the world as the binary opposite of God in this kind of context – the world as "everything other than God and His attributes," as the concept was defined in kalam handbooks?

This is precisely the conclusion Ibn Tufayl draws, decisively and without hesitation (and one should not downplay the radicalism of what is being proposed here). Hayy knows the Necessary Existent, i.e. God, not only because part of him belongs to another world than this one – that in itself is a thesis that many Sufis and Platonists would accept – but also because there must be some relevant sense in which his essence shares a common nature with the divine. (The argument rests on the principle of "like knowing like" that is found in the psychological works of both Plato and Aristotle.) We have already brushed up against the ethical consequences of this finding in chapter 6. If there is some divine spark in the human being, then it must be privileged above everything else in our attentions and our actions. Now is the time to explore the metaphysical and epistemological implications of the thesis.

A first and relatively innocuous conclusion reached by Hayy is that unlike the senses, which all operate through a bodily organ, whatever is capable of intuiting the Necessary Existent must itself be incorporeal and indivisible (90–92). From this, the imperishable nature of the true human self or essence follows (92–93), with the added consequence that any lasting joy and real happiness (sa'ada) for such an entity can issue only from an uninterrupted contemplation of the object most worthy of its attentions – the Necessary Existent and whatever pertains to it (93–97).

Here, however, a problem rears its head. On the Aristotelian model of cognitive psychology taught, for example, by al-Farabi and Ibn Sina, ordinary cognition operates by abstraction (tajrid). Each of the soul's perceptual faculties extracts forms from matter, picking up on the common characteristics of things while discarding the particular. The process gradually leads up to the level of reason, or the intellect (the Greek nous or Arabic 'aql), where the human being works actively in order to win a correct understanding of the formal structure of the universe (the specifics of the process are convoluted and need not detain us here; see Davidson 1992). This, of course, corresponds with the picture of scientific activity painted in chapter 4.

But what if the object of cognition is not a worldly particular at all, so that its form cannot be extracted from anything? Or if the object of cognition in this instance does not have a form in the standard sense at all – no essence that it would share with other beings, actually or potentially? Another model besides abstraction is then needed to account for the way the spiritual aspirant comes to know God and the way God knows Himself (Hayy, 126–127; see Kukkonen 2009). It is for this reason that Ibn Tufayl twice warns that divine cognition can only be called a faculty or power of the soul metaphorically (majaz-an: Hayy, 5, 9).

ANNIHILATION AND RESTORATION

For Ibn Tufayl, both the absolute self-identity and the absolute incorporeality of the Necessary Existent point towards the same inescapable conclusion. The mode of being of the divine essence, when considered in itself, must cash out as full and unimpeded self-awareness, a perfect existential and epistemic transparency in which the divine knows itself in a singular act of cognition, one in which there is no distinction between the knower, the known thing, and the act of knowing (Hayy, 118; see Aristotle, Metaphysics, XII.9).

Ibn Tufayl draws from this the peculiar conclusion that insofar as a genuine cognition of the divine is achieved by another being, that being gets absorbed into the divine consciousness as well. This for Ibn Tufayl provides the metaphysical explanation for the phenomenon known to the Sufis as annihilation (fana'). It is not so much that the spiritual aspirant would aim at self-mortification specifically, or even that God in His mercy would grant the believer oblivion and immersion into the godhead as a special dispensation. Rather, the very rules governing immaterial cognition dictate that the fuller one's understanding is of the divine order of things, and the closer one's acquaintance with it, the more one's consciousness becomes not only immersed but submerged within it.

In a sense, all this reflects the wider evolution of the philosophical theory of intellection in Arabic Aristotelianism, and in sixth-/twelfth-century Andalusia especially (again, a complicated topic). If, as the philosophical theory has it, the highest type of cognition takes immaterial reality as its object, then there seems to be no principled way of differentiating between the external and internal versions of what is grasped. Consequently, the intellect – the locus of reasoning – simply becomes the things it thinks about. The logical endpoint seems to be the loss of all individuality in precisely the kind of high-grade thinking that is supposed to be the special province of the philosopher and the crowning glory of humankind (the coincidence of the two is no coincidence). Ibn Rushd in particular, who was no friend of the Sufis but who read his Aristotle carefully, became notorious for arriving at the conclusion that there can be no individuality in any act of true intellectual cognition.

These are all remarkably subtle questions, highly technical in addition to being potentially explosive in their implications, and Ibn Tufayl duly warns his reader not to get tangled in them. Hayy, for his part, after an initial flash flood of the divine and a resulting moment of disorientation – a "death of the self" (122, 127) – regains enough of his composure to recognize how his first impressions had become warped by the concepts he had carried over from the world of the senses to the intelligible domain. In truth, to say that he would be one with the Necessary Existent is as false as saying that he is distinct and different from Him. Both statements are true, and neither of them is.

This, of course, is not so much a solution as a feint. To say that the concepts of unity and plurality, whole and part, or conjunction and union do not really apply to the supernal realm is to give up on making sense of what the mystics put forward as the glorious culmination of their explorations. Ibn Tufayl may exhort his reader, "listen with the ears of your heart and observe with the eyes of your intellect" (122). But if all this means is that the recipient must embrace the paradox, discard every criterion by which the truth value of statements had previously been judged, and nod sagely, "yes, I see," then this seems no better than the meek subservience which Ibn Tufayl had denounced previously (18–20).

Ibn Tufayl does seed one important hint in the middle of his admonitions that may provide a clue as to what he is after. Ibn Tufayl points out that already when considering the unity and multiplicity of the physical world, Hayy had proved unable to decide between the two viewpoints and instead was required to develop a kind of stereoscopic view regarding the matter. The world in truth is both one and many (125–126). In a similar fashion, the whole of reality – the corporeal and incorporeal put together – will appear simultaneously one and an infinite manifold, seen from God's point of view. This is most readily understood in terms of the general nested view of reality offered by philosophical theory (compare the theory of kinds in chapter 4): effects are already in a sense contained in their causes, only waiting for the actualizing power of the first Agent to set the chain of causation in motion. Thus when one has a clear perception of the Necessary Existent, the rest of the cosmic sequence will take on the appearance of an equally necessary and inevitable outflow.

FACES AND NAMES

With his individual consciousness restored and continued existence in God assured (baqa', another basic Sufi concept), Hayy can readily appreciate the splendor of the cosmic vision that unfolds. In what follows in the narrative, Ibn Tufayl basically encodes Ibn Sina's cosmological scheme (Metaphysics, IX.1–5) for a lay audience, in a way that is simultaneously oblique and enticing. Ibn Tufayl describes how from the First Cause there emanates a series of immaterial intellects, each one a fraction weaker than the next, each one except for the first attached to one of the heavenly bodies. The celestial clockwork is thus constructed from the outside in, as it were, and with immaterial principles always providing the grounds for the emergence of material entities (Hayy, 127–129). The metaphor of the polished mirror is evoked to explain how the divine light is refracted across numerous entities while always remaining one and identical to itself.

The last one in the series of intellects is too weak to produce an entity like itself. Consequently, its activity splinters into seventy thousand shards or "faces": each face, furthermore, has seventy thousand mouths, and within each mouth seventy thousand tongues all sing God's praises. The vision is quite awesome in the original sense of the word, monstrous as well as alluring. Hayy even recognizes himself in this heavenly choir, with the proviso that individuality is a shaky concept when applied to supernal being (129–130).

Hayy also identifies less fortunate disembodied entities, akin to tarnished and rusty mirrors, their faces turned away from the divine countenance. These are the essences of those humans who forsake God for the sake of the corporeal world: hellfire awaits them as their reward. A third class of human, one that presumably has done no wrong but has not learned to love God either, is described as distended to the point of unravelling, a wraithlike shadowy presence (131–132). Hayy's vision closes with a meditation on how everything in the physical world eternally depends on its immaterial source and counterpart for its continued existence (133–134).

THE "EASTERN WISDOM"

Where in all of this is Ibn Sina, and where is his "Eastern wisdom"? The answer is at once "everywhere" and "nowhere." For although it is indeed in the context of describing mystical experience that Ibn Tufayl relies most explicitly on Ibn Sina, we can say with certainty that his materials come exclusively from the latter's garden-variety Aristotelian works, with nothing to indicate that Ibn Tufayl had access to any more esoteric text than what we possess.

To review the evidence: the preface to Hayy Ibn Yaqzan lifts a whole page's worth of text verbatim from the fourth and final part of Ibn Sina's Pointers and Reminders. This is done simply to drive home the point that the ultimate end of philosophy can be discussed in the same terms as the ecstasies of the Sufis. Hayy's vision of the cosmic hierarchy derives from Ibn Sina's Metaphysics; and Ibn Tufayl's ideas on the rewards and punishments of the afterlife closely follow Ibn Sina's comments in his psychological works. All of this is certainly controversial enough – indeed, later Islamic philosophy is explicable largely as a series of responses to Ibn Sina's achievement in systematizing and reshaping the Aristotelian tradition and the challenges he poses for previously held orthodoxies both in theology and philosophy. But Hayy Ibn Yaqzan does not add to the mix any radical doctrines that we would not have known about otherwise.

On closer inspection, Ibn Tufayl's entire claim about having access to Ibn Sina's Easterners shows itself to be an optical illusion accomplished with smoke and mirrors. By quoting out of context Ibn Sina's preface to his encyclopedia The Healing, Ibn Tufayl purports to reveal that Ibn Sina saved some of his more recondite truths for an audience of adepts (Hayy, 14–15). However, all that Ibn Sina really wanted to say was that while the Healing was still built on the model of Aristotelian scholarship where one considers all avenues of interpretation and everywhere builds on Aristotle's example, in The Easterners Ibn Sina presented the results of his own investigations bluntly and without excessive scholarly elaboration (Gutas 1994; Gutas 2000).

In fairness, when read closely, Ibn Tufayl practically admits that he had to piece together his picture of Ibn Sina's "Eastern wisdom" from whatever evidence was available to him. This included not only Ibn Sina's works but al-Ghazali's as well, whom Ibn Tufayl read quite astutely as being essentially a follower of Ibn Sina. He also acknowledges the amount of personal effort that had gone into welding this creative philosophical synthesis (Hayy, 18).

SENSATION AND INTELLECTION

One of the signature motifs in Ibn Tufayl's purported "Eastern wisdom" in fact comes not from Ibn Sina, but from a creative misreading of him pioneered by al-Ghazali. This is the decision to shift the principal objective of intellection from a discernment of the connective tissue between things – the way things relate to one another, or "discovering the middle term of a syllogism" in the technical language of the Aristotelians – to a direct acquaintance with immaterial objects. Al-Ghazali had made this move in order to promote the religious seeker's detached contemplation of the divine names and attributes (Kukkonen 2012). Ibn Tufayl now uses the same technique to argue for the perfect philosopher's direct access to the supernal world.

This, however, has the effect of driving a wedge between Hayy's earlier activities and his later ones. When Ibn Tufayl says that "sensible things in their totality are mere veils. They block one from witnessing" (Hayy, 108, and see 99), he is appealing to an older and more Platonic way of depicting intellectual cognition than the abstractive model preferred by the Arabic Aristotelians. In the school of the first Arabic philosopher, al-Kindi, it was thought that sensation and intellection have nothing to do with each other, which meant that one needed to be given up on in order for the other to blossom. And of course the Sufis had long advocated a retreat from the senses as well. But then how to afford a positive role to all the ruminations on nature and on physical reality that Hayy had undergone before? In Ibn Sina's genuine thought, the pleasure of intellection derived as much from the philosopher's ability to see the syllogistic ordering of all forms of being, from the highest all thy way to the lowest: a philosopher gains delight by perceiving all of Porphyry's tree simultaneously, root to branch (see chapter 4). But Ibn Tufayl does not really leave such an option open for Hayy, who must shut off his senses entirely and thereby leave behind all concern for sense-objects.

ARRIVAL

From the most diffuse corporeal phenomena – the particular actions of particular animals – Ibn Tufayl has directed us in stages first to the ways in which these are grounded in elemental changes, then to higher and higher degrees of unity. In Hayy's ultimate vision of the divine, the hidden unity of all things stands disclosed as all differences melt away into nothingness.

Hayy's deepening love of God is met by a more and more intimate acquaintance with Him. He is alone, but by no means lonely; he waits for death poised and content, seeing it as a welcome release from the shackles of materiality (135). This would be a supremely comforting place to end the story, and yet Ibn Tufayl does not. Why?

RELIGION

For a narrative to break with its basic premise is always jarring – doubly so if the break occurs in the final stretch. Hayy's whole lifestory has been predicated on the fact that his existence is a solitary one: every one of his many triumphs has been amplified by the fact that they have all been accomplished solely thanks to his own resourcefulness and fortitude. Ibn Tufayl has had Hayy grow up on his island, take possession of his surroundings, and exercise his reason up to a point where his knowledge of the natural world matches the best science and philosophy of the day. Moreover, he has had Hayy arrive at a state of contemplative bliss that evokes the highest achievements of the Sufis, and an ascetic practice that shows how he is second to none when it comes to practical piety. Nowhere in any of this has Hayy relied on the assistance or instruction of others.

Why, then, disturb Hayy's peace by having him cross paths with city life – at the ripe age of fifty, no less? More to the point, why have the encounter end up so profoundly dispiriting? These are all authorial choices on Ibn Tufayl's part, a fact that can readily be verified by comparing Hayy with its many European knockoffs. Some of these works leave their solitary man alone on his island, while others present a more satisfying integration with human society. Ibn Tufayl, therefore, must have felt the need not to grant Hayy a straightforwardly happy ending. There are lessons to be learned in Hayy's dealings with other people and with the civilized world.

RELIGION AND SOCIETY

In the first instance, notice how Ibn Tufayl portrays human community and civilization almost exclusively in terms of organized religion. The first and most salient fact that Ibn Tufayl conveys about the people inhabiting Hayy's neighboring island is that they adhere to "one of the sound religions" (milla min al-milal al-sahiha), established by "one of the ancient prophets" (136). Ibn Tufayl never specifies the religion, but when its tenets include belief not only in God but in "his angels, holy books, messengers, the Last Day, paradise, and hellfire" (144) and when the religion's outward practices are described as "ritual prayer, the alms tax, fasting, and pilgrimage" (145), it is hard to read this as anything other than a description of Islam or some very close analogue. (Within the Islamic tradition of discussing the history of religions, a hitherto unknown religion near-identical to Islam could be slotted in with relative ease, since it was believed that every people had been sent a true prophet. But of course, Ibn Tufayl's account is meant to be fictitious.)

The impression of the island kingdom's religion being an Islam analogue is further bolstered by the fact that adherence to it is portrayed in terms of obeying a law (shari'a). Its prophet is also described as being trustworthy, an epithet usually reserved in Muslim apologetics for God's messenger Muhammad. Nothing further is said about the organizational structure of this religious community or the everyday life it leads. We learn nothing about how the divine law is interpreted and enforced, or whether there are preachers or theologians operating in the community, or whether any religious orders exist that would strive for a higher level of piety. Arguing from an author's silence on a topic is always a tricky business. Nonetheless, I think we can say minimally that Ibn Tufayl preferred not to tackle directly the issues surrounding these traditional religious hierarchies. Obliquely, he has quite a lot to say, little of it complimentary.

Ibn Tufayl does right at the start put on the table one provocative thesis. According to him, the way religion represents "true existents" – which in this context can only mean the highest, incorporeal echelons of reality – is through likenesses or analogues derived from sense-perception, the depictions of which the soul then accepts and affirms. Ibn Tufayl likens this mode of presentation to the way an orator addresses the masses (136).

The notion of religion as a tapestry of affective (as well as effective) imagery, a persuasive and alluring representation of truths too exalted to be captured through earthly means, seems innocent at first. Who among those sympathetic to religion would not admit that it aspires to the unattainable and therefore must resort to symbols and signs?

However, the statement carries a different connotation for someone schooled in the notion that philosophy does attain to the true nature of things, including as intimate an acquaintance with the divine as is possible for the human being. On such a view, religion in providing "likenesses" (amthal) only constitutes the second-best option for reaching the truth, the more proper method being scientific and philosophical inquiry for those who qualify. Within an Arabic context, this explosive suggestion was first put forward by al-Farabi in his many works on philosophy, religion, and society (see Lahoud 2005, 91–109). Through Hayy's story, Ibn Tufayl weighs its implications.

The likening of religious utterances to a rhetorical performance is similarly innocent on the surface of it, yet potentially incendiary. In the context of the Aristotelian division of the arts and sciences, rhetoric is classified as a productive skill, which means that it is essentially instrumental in nature. A public speaker's primary goal is to mold the beliefs and emotions of the audience in order to reach a favorable outcome (declaring either peace or war, or guilt or innocence, for example). Applied to religion, this would amount to saying that religious statements are chosen not so much for their truthfulness as for their ability to steer society in a desirable direction. Ibn Tufayl records a particularly outrageous claim made by al-Farabi in this vein. The latter, in a now lost commentary on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, is supposed to have said that any claims about reward or punishment in the afterlife are merely old wives' tales (Hayy, 14). Ibn Tufayl heavily censures al-Farabi for propagating such a view, pointing out that its widescale adoption would make humanity despair. The view leads to ultimate moral relativism inasmuch as "it makes nothingness the ultimate destiny of us all," to borrow Lenn Goodman's particularly lovely translation of the passage.

Ibn Tufayl's own formulation, however, only serves to arouse in the discerning reader the suspicion that he in fact agrees with al-Farabi when it comes to the substance of the argument. Ibn Tufayl, after all, nowhere says that the offending judgment is incorrect. His stated worry is merely that its public pronouncement has ill effects. Belief in a Day of Judgment is societally and morally beneficial, therefore it should not be jeopardized – this seems to be what Ibn Tufayl is after. But then al-Farabi would say the same thing. Does Ibn Tufayl's view conform to al-Farabi's?

ASAL AND SALAMAN

In the same way Hayy gets to exemplify a community of philosophers and scientists, so also religious practice becomes personified in two friends, Asal and Salaman, who grow up together on an island not far from Hayy's.

We are told that Asal and Salaman are of excellent character and high moral standing. Both scrupulously perform all the external rites prescribed in their religion and, in an additional show of piety, both are said to guard vigilantly over their souls and to struggle against the passions (muhasibat al-nafs wa-mujahidat al-hawa: Hayy, 137). These formulations would have been recognized by anyone conversant with Sufi lore. In effect, Ibn Tufayl confirms for his readers that both men are serious about their religion and interested in its devotional aspects.

Where the two friends part ways is in their approach to revelation. Asal and Salaman are said to ponder the expressions found in divine law. The term used for their mutual deliberations, fiqh, is one standardly used for Islamic jurisprudence, though what appears to vex them are subjects more traditionally associated with kalam theology – the attributes of God, the nature of the resurrection, etc. Since in real life many scholars were practitioners of both law and theology, perhaps we are meant to infer that Asal and Salaman are both of these things as well.

Salaman is said to prefer the apparent meaning (zahir) of these statements and to shy away from speculative interpretation (ta'wil). For him, ordered human society and an unquestioning approach to religious observance are the best guarantors against the whisperings (wasawis: Q. 114:5), groundless suppositions, and goadings of Satan.

Asal, by contrast, eagerly seeks the "hidden, spiritual meanings" in revelation, and it is said that he finds such exploration easier when removed from society. Such an act of voluntary seclusion ('uzla), again conceived along Sufi lines, is what initially brings Asal to Hayy's island. Upon arrival, Asal is said to contemplate God's beautiful names and exalted attributes, trusting to God to provide his daily sustenance (138). All this is in keeping with time-honored forms of Muslim spirituality – Asal could practically be reading from al-Ghazali's Revival at this point – as is Asal's practice of ritualized prayers, recitations, invocations, and lamentations (140).

These weeping prostrations are the first proper impression made by Asal on Hayy, who gets to observe Asal's religious practice secretly from afar. It is noteworthy that although Hayy is said not to understand a word spoken by Asal, he still recognizes the shapes (ashkal) of their sounds as being something quite different from those made by animals. This is pattern recognition at work once more. More revealing is the fact that Hayy can tell merely from observing Asal's outward countenance how the latter must "belong to those essences possessed of an intimate knowledge of the Truth" (141). Ibn Tufayl, then, concurs with the Muslim belief that the devotional practices prescribed in the divine Law possess a peculiar beauty and dignity, especially when performed with heart and sincerity. Their outward aspects perfectly reflect their inner significance.

In what follows, the importance of human language is underlined and its origins described with surprising warmth and humor. Hayy first chases after Asal and pins him down, frightening the would-be spiritual aspirant profoundly. Hayy and Asal then establish a line of communication, first by elementary gestures signaling trust and goodwill, then by sharing food and a mutual interest in one another. Finally, Asal teaches Hayy how to speak. This happens first by pointing at things and naming them. Little by little, Hayy then learns more complex locutions, until the two are in a position to exchange views (141–143). This model of teaching and learning a language goes back to al-Farabi's Book of Letters (sec. 116; see Bashier 2011, 80–81).

LANGUAGE AND REALITY

The notion that common nouns ("grass," "toes," "food") constitute the core of human language makes sense insofar as one subscribes to an essentialist worldview – and we have already seen that both Hayy and Ibn Tufayl do so. Within an Aristotelian framework, philosophy of language and ontology (one's theory of being and beings) coincide, inasmuch as under optimal circumstances the meanings assigned to expressions correspond with the common natures shared by the rational soul and the outward thing. This of course presupposes an appropriately calibrated conceptual framework; but under ordinary circumstances, this will rarely pose a problem, since our common experiences bring about a similar matrix of observed similarities and differences (see chapter 4).

Figure 4 Hayy spots Asal, illustration from the Dutch translation of 1701.

But what happens when Hayy and Asal attempt to share what they each hold dearest to their hearts, namely their spiritual convictions? For Asal, the effect is profound: the objects of intellection and the pronouncements of revelation (al-ma'qul wa al-manqul) line up perfectly once Hayy has explained to him the details of his divine vision. This is because Asal now sees all the central propositions to which the divine law demands assent – God, angels, books, messengers, the last day, paradise, hell – as so many similes of the higher truths whose real nature Hayy has witnessed in his ascetic and contemplative practice, and because Asal now possesses tools for their allegorical interpretation (ta'wil).

The interpretation of the divine law no longer poses a problem for Asal, we learn, because he now sees it for what it is, as a lesser representation and conduit for a higher truth (Hayy, 144). This is to say that Asal is brought around to al-Farabi's view regarding the nature of religious expressions, even as his own heart is opened to a deeper understanding of the higher truths and his intellect correspondingly set alight. Asal's heart is furthermore filled with admiration for Hayy, whom he comes to regard as a holy man and a spiritual master whom Asal feels honored to serve (145).

Hayy is left considerably less impressed by what he learns about Asal's religion. He merely notes with cool satisfaction that the tenets of this faith do not diverge to any substantial degree from what Hayy has established independently. The directionality of the argument is clear: Hayy already knows what the truth is, with unassailable certitude and conviction, so that the only remaining question is whether he can also bring himself to accept the claims made in religion.

Hayy finds that he can, but only on the understanding that these are symbolic representations of the true philosophical conception of reality and its supreme First Cause. The practical ordinances of religion are deemed acceptable because they lead the soul in what Hayy considers to be a rationally acceptable direction. Even the trustworthiness (sidq) of God's Messenger is affirmed based on the fact that what he has proclaimed accords with the truth (Hayy, 145–146). This last bit may agree with al-Ghazali's exhortation to judge the person by the truthfulness of what he says, rather than the truth by who pronounces it. Yet al-Ghazali can scarcely have intended for such skeptical and rationalist criteria to be applied to the way one identifies a prophet.

MODELING PERFECTION

The lopsided character of Hayy's and Asal's initial encounter raises a serious question. What does Hayy get out of his dealings with Asal? Presumably the sequence as a whole has been crafted with a purpose in mind. There is a moral to the story, and it needs to be something positive, especially in light of Hayy's coming travails.

The key to understanding Asal's role in Hayy's continuing development lies in the former's adoring attitude towards the latter. Some commentators have sounded a note of disapprobation when it comes to the unequal nature of Hayy's and Asal's friendship. The former seems to be perpetually on the giving end of things, while the latter can only receive. Suppose, however, that for Ibn Tufayl this is part of the point. Ibn Tufayl's understanding of friendship may be more closely modeled on what is meant by Sufi aspirants being friends of God than on, say, Aristotelian philia as a respectful and loving relationship between equals (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VIII–IX). To think of Asal as the disciple to Hayy's Sufi master certainly makes a great deal of sense. It is the role that Asal assumes when the two return to Hayy's island at the very end of the narrative: Asal is only ever allowed to aspire to the proximity of Hayy's spiritual vistas, never actually to arrive at them (154–155).

To understand what is in this kind of relationship for Hayy it is – curious as this may seem – helpful to consider Ibn Sina's celestial cosmology, along with Hayy's threefold imitation of the spheres as described in chapter 6 (Kukkonen 2008). Where once Hayy had emulated the providential circumambulations of the heavenly spheres – their concrete agency in service of God's purposes – his subsequent preference for an ultimate intellectual perfection had left Hayy strangely ineffectual when it comes to the material world. Now, a new possibility opens up. Instead of aiming to be an efficient or moving cause in making things happen in the world, the way the celestial souls do, Hayy can become a final cause – an aim or goal (for others), or an object of imitation, the way the heavenly intellects are. Ibn Sina in his Metaphysics had posited that each of the separate intellects, attached as it is to one of the heavenly spheres, moves the latter as an object of desire, which is to say a final or teleological cause ("that for the sake of which"). The celestial souls, or the proximate moving causes of the heavenly bodies, look upwards to their unmoved movers for guidance, while the unmoved movers themselves are allowed to recline in splendid impassiveness (Metaphysics, IX.4–5).

In similar fashion, Hayy can, and perhaps should, be content with inspiring ever better conduct and a constantly deepening comprehension of the divine realities in his disciple Asal. Simply by virtue of being who he is, Hayy can make the world a better place – not just through occupying a distinct place in the created hierarchy, as he does in any case, but also by lifting other beings upwards by the functional equivalent of a gravitational pull. It is a hopeful vision, if somewhat pat in its practical dimensions. The notion seems too convenient by half that the philosopher can do the most good simply by being who he is, so that the rest of the world begins to revolve around him. (In fact, in modern terms, one would probably classify this as a form of narcissistic fantasy.) In any case, Hayy's ambitions are not so easily satisfied, which contributes to his eventual downfall.

RE-ENTERING THE CAVE

In broad terms, Hayy's ascension through the orders of reality and his subsequent descent follows a philosophical precedent going back to Plato's Republic, with its famous allegory of the cave (see Conrad in Conrad 1996). According to Plato, a theoretical consideration of the world's underpinnings spills naturally into the realm of ethics and even politics. The fully self-actualized person within the Platonic tradition, one to whom the secrets of the universe have been disclosed, will naturally seek to pass on to others the supernatural gifts she or he has received. The person touched by the divine is, as it were, a chalice overflowing with its bounty, or a vessel through which the Good-itself – the ultimate source of reality for the committed Platonist – works its way towards the maximal advancement of all creatures (see O'Meara 2003).

This, it appears, is Hayy's motivation in entering society as well. He acts out of a sincere, if naive, wish to pass on the goods he has been given, hoping simply to convey and explain the truth as he has come to know it (147–148). The problem is that, again true to Neoplatonic principles, an agent's attempts at effecting the good will in every case be tempered by the level to which the beneficiary proves receptive to such a benign influence. In a manner similar to how varying admixtures of the elements are capable of receiving from the transcendent Agent spirits and forms of varying levels of distinction, people of a different temperament also are capable of receiving the truth to different degrees. Asal for his part warns Hayy not to expect too much, for he has seen how misguided and obstinate people can be. Hayy, however, who has yet to be disappointed by other people's fundamental weaknesses, finds such warnings hard to comprehend (148). This will cost him dearly once he and Asal set sail for civilization.

In a sense, it seems as though Hayy really should know better from the start, since Ibn Tufayl is surprisingly forthright in putting in Hayy's mouth a criticism that naturally arises in the context of any perfectionist ethics. Why are the practical prescriptions of the world's religions, and of societies in general, typically so desperately unambitious? It appears in Hayy's eyes as though the goal of all of the ordinances of religion on Asal's island aim merely at managing a fundamentally venal and unruly population, not on genuinely improving their character, let alone steering them in the direction of a genuine love of God and the transcendent (Hayy, 146–147).

Ibn Tufayl's criticism of the public face of Islam is barely veiled on this point. When Hayy derides the excessive attention paid to minute details of property law in Asal's society, noting how this gives the impression that possessions in fact matter most of all to the general populace and the professionals whom they consult, this echoes al-Ghazali's complaint in the Revival of the Religious Sciences that the whole point of religious conduct has been lost on the jurisprudents, who seem to have made it their principal task merely to create more work for themselves by raising doubts and complications at every turn. (This part of al-Ghazali's critique was echoed in Almohad criticisms of the Almoravid era.) The same goes for Ibn Tufayl's characterization of the dialectical theology of the mutakallimun. The art of disputation is only mentioned once and then disparagingly, as something that serves to harden the heart, consistent with how al-Ghazali had characterized the spiritual calcification of the scholars of the age (151).

HUMAN WEAKNESS

Hayy is initially presented as a true utopian on the model of what Plato has to say in the third book of the Republic. Similar to how physicians would not be needed in a society where people actively sought the good, if all people sought the truth in earnest, there would be no need for laws, nor would the concept of property hold any sway, since no-one would place any value on worldly possessions (Hayy, 147).

Yet it is precisely in this regard that Hayy ends up disappointed. The vast majority of people simply do not desire to know the truth, let alone the Truth. Most people's hearts are hardened to the point where only a strict adherence to the letter of the law will keep society from devolving into a war of all against all. The law's deeper meaning has no way of reaching the souls of the benighted masses.

They have made their passions into their god and desire into the object of their worship: they destroy each other to collect the trash of this world, "distracted by greed 'til they go to their graves" (Q. 102:1–2). Preaching is no help, fine words have no effect on them. Arguing only makes them more pig-headed. Wisdom, they have no means of reaching; they were allotted no share of it. They are engulfed in ignorance. Their hearts are corroded by their possessions. God has sealed their hearts and shrouded their eyes and ears. "Theirs will be an awesome punishment" (Q. 2:6–7).

(Hayy, 151, tr. Goodman, modified)

More disheartening still is the fact that even the small group of spiritual aspirants to whom Asal introduces Hayy proves incapable of understanding his teachings. These devotees may smile outwardly and pay their respects to the man whom Asal assures them is someone to be revered and heeded. Inwardly, they grow more and more resentful of Hayy, due to a basic inability to grasp what he means. Even these sincere seekers of truth cannot help but "wish to understand God according to the methods of men," which unfortunately dooms their every attempt to understand God according to His real nature (150–151). With such a limited grasp of the conceptual categories needed for addressing the notion of God, it is in fact safer for such people to cleave to a literalist interpretation of Scripture. Hayy is thus left with Asal alone for genuinely like-minded company (153–154).

All this represents a victory of sorts for Salaman, who has in the meantime become the island's ruler and guardian of the faith (149–150). Hayy in his parting address effectively concedes defeat. He enjoins Salaman and his companions to adhere to the plain meaning of Scripture and its many commandments and prohibitions, along with an admonition to discourage innovation (bid'a) of any sort. This means a simple submission (taslim) to the religious tradition. The linguistic affinity between submissiveness and Islam cannot have escaped Ibn Tufayl's contemporary readers. Literalist Islam may only be the second-best option, but it is the best that most people can ever have.

MORALITY AND SCRIPTURE

Ibn Tufayl nowhere makes explicit whether the fundamental differences he attributes to people's cognitive and moral capacities are due to nature or nurture. Presumably both have a role to play, although the way the whole issue of revelation is set up seems to contain an implicit answer. It is precisely because most people really cannot be expected to do any better that even the rightful Prophet's religion sets its sights so low. If everybody could attain to the level of genuine virtue through instruction and law-abidingness, then much more would be demanded of people. As it is, it is enough that people lead even moderately decent lives, though they must of necessity remain heedless of the higher and more transcendent realities that underpin their very existence.

The background theory operative here is one that Arabic philosophers took over from Plato's Republic. According to Plato, humans are possessed of a tripartite soul: they are driven not only by their power of reason, but equally as much by their appetites and their desire for recognition and honor. Each of these traits is naturally dominant in a significant subclass of humanity: and because dominance by non-rational urges is a permanent condition for all too many people (never mind for the moment whether this unfortunate condition is inborn or inculcated), the appropriate steps for the enlightened ruler to take involve the management and regulation of these sub-rational responses through whatever means are most effective. This is what allows for the maximal amount of happiness and stability, after all, for those unable to share in the joys of philosophizing.

It is to address this need that al-Farabi grafted the late antique understanding of rhetoric and poetics as sub-rational persuasive arts on to a Platonic picture of what political rule is meant to accomplish. Audaciously, al-Farabi introduced religion into the picture as well. Because most people simply are not cut out for following – let alone forging – Aristotelian demonstrative syllogisms to their logical conclusions, and because their intemperate souls will naturally shun the sometimes uncomfortable (and nearly always abstract and austere) truths reached by the philosophers, divine providence has provided the philosophically illiterate masses another means of reaching that measure of happiness which is genuinely available to them. This is where prophecy comes in. A special class of philosopher-king will have the supererogatory gift of being able to re-present hard-won philosophical truths in the shape of evocative images and to distil complex deliberations regarding the virtues into a simple and effective set of precepts (see also Ibn Sina, Metaphysics, X.2–5).

In retrospect, Hayy's great tragedy is that he is only a philosopher and not a prophet. Though his power of reason may be unmatched, Hayy does not possess the additional ability to empathize with common folk or to find the words that would speak to their (admittedly unrefined) souls. He cannot therefore translate his own wisdom into something that might benefit others; in fact, he himself has no place in the city. Perhaps this is a matter of inexperience, perhaps a lack of natural endowment. Either way, Hayy's real failure is that he is too high-minded to engage with the rest of humanity in the ruthlessly pragmatic terms the circumstances would require.

Ibn Bajja had starkly portrayed what would become Hayy's predicament, saying that philosophers cannot readily find a place in an imperfect society where the majority do not live a life of reason. The philosopher in this environment is like the weed transplanted into foreign soil, unable to flourish. Ibn Bājja further equates the philosophers with those whom the Sufis label "strangers": even if they have to remain within their worldly setting for the time being, they have found different heights that already constitute their true homelands (Governance of the Solitary, 41–43). Ibn Tufayl makes this estrangement literal through having Hayy retreat from society and return to his island (Asal's adoration and imitation of him hardly constitutes an imposition).

MORTALITY AND REVELATION

If this sounds like a harsh conclusion to reach when it comes to the philosopher, consider the implications for those who can never attain to philosophy. Without reaching an understanding of the real nature of things, what hope do they have of winning an escape from the confines of this sensible world the way Hayy does?

Ibn Tufayl states explicitly that for the majority of people, the sole benefit of the divine law lies in administering their affairs in "this world" (al-dunya). This, of course, is because they only obey its statutes for the sake of worldly gain. We should therefore take quite literally his denouncing of the wicked, whether law-abiding or not (for simply fulfilling the minimal letter of the law by no means guarantees that one's intentions would be sincere), who are "no better than brute animals" (153). Religion may impose a welcome bridle on such people, keeping their baser impulses in check and preventing them from acting too destructively in their lives, but at the end of the day their fate will be either nothingness or an eternal punishment, depending on whether they are merely oblivious of God or whether through their attachment to worldly pleasure they actively repudiate Him (131–132).

Asal's companions and others like them, by contrast – those who seek the truth behind revelation but are unable to grasp it – will reach "salvation of a kind" in Hayy's and Ibn Tufayl's estimation. They may not be able to grasp the true meaning of God's incorporeality and the reality of His attributes, and because of this they may never attain to His proximity the way the Sufis and philosophers do, but their sincere desire for the Truth will allow at least a dim recognition of something remotely like it, and with this a modest place at God's right hand.

Ibn Tufayl may assure the reader that religion is not to blame for any of this. Hayy affirms that there is nothing to add or take away from the letter of the law: every true religion not only provides a sensible approximation of the truths attained by the intellectual seeker, but the optimal presentation of it for non-philosophers. But then this leads to an odd conclusion. Philosophers, in their capacity as philosophers, can never engage directly with religion, or even deficient religious practice, despite their superior vantage point to the meaning of revelation. The best they can hope for is that sometime, somewhere, someone of the likes of Asal will come along and find their intellectual fires kindled by what they can glimpse of philosophy.

Here, in the end, we come to the notion of the "thin veil" behind which Ibn Tufayl, in his own postscript to Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, says he has placed certain important truths (155–156). One may reasonably suspect that the veil has something to do with the questions regarding religion's relation to philosophy. Notice, however, how its mention functions as a dare or an invitation rather than a stop sign. Hayy is not a technical philosophical treatise (Ibn Tufayl wrote those as well): it does, however, offer the reader glimpses of a life of philosophy, as Ibn Tufayl conceives it, for those with "heart or ears to listen and to hear" (20). Ibn Tufayl's parting words are likely to be utterly sincere:

Of my brothers reading this discourse, I ask that they show forgiveness insofar as this book elucidates some things too broadly and affirms others too easily. I would not have gone about the task in such a manner, were it not for the fact that I had ascended to heights beyond the reach of eyesight: but I still desired to ignite a passion in others to start on the path.

(156)

After reading Hayy, the reader for whom the book's message resonates is that much better equipped to follow the demonstrative path of philosophy and then to ascend to that which lies beyond demonstration altogether – to access the full breadth of the Arabic Aristotelian tradition and to see how it culminates in the Sufi way, just as Ibn Sina had indicated in his Pointers and Reminders. The invitation is clear and attractively phrased. But did anybody listen?

AFTERLIFE

Ibn Tufayl's influence in his own day and age proved limited, his legacy shaped mainly by those younger thinkers whose careers he advanced and who went on to achieve greater fame in their respective fields – al-Bitruji for astronomy, Ibn Rushd for Aristotelian commentary. Even these writers became better known once they crossed the divide from Muslim to Christian Spain. "Alpetragius" and "Averroes" became respected authorities in Latin learning in a way that was never true for the Arabic-speaking world. The same goes for Ibn Tufayl himself. When he finally became a household name in twentieth-century Muslim circles – and he did – this was because Ibn Tufayl and Hayy had gained a central position within Western representations of Muslim thought. Modern Muslims, this is to say, re-discovered Ibn Tufayl as an icon of Islamic rationalism thanks to the way Westerners came to write about Islamic philosophy. The story is well worth considering for what it tells about Western attitudes towards Muslim intellectuals and Islamic intellectualism.

ARABIC MARGINS

Ibn Tufayl's initial failure to make much of an impression was due mainly to the remoteness of Andalusia and Marrakesh from traditional centers of Muslim learning and the sharp decline of the Almohad empire in the seventh/thirteenth century. If Ibn Tufayl had moved to the Islamic East the way, say, his countryman and fellow mystic Muhyi al-Din Ibn 'Arabi (561/1165–638/1240) did, then his unique blend of Ibn Sinan, medical, and Sufi influences could conceivably have found a larger and more receptive audience. All of these elements were, after all, swirling around in new and exciting constellations in the intellectual climate of the time.

Then again, as we have seen, Ibn Tufayl's project was clearly tailored to fit early Almohad culture and may not have traveled all that well. Ibn Tufayl's seeming lack of regard for the study of logic, his perception of the endpoint of philosophy as lying in a disengagement from the world, and his acceptance of al-Farabi's characterization of revealed religion as a pale imitation of philosophy, all would have worked against him in a post-Ghazalian intellectual environment in which thinkers sympathetic to Aristotle and Ibn Sina were striving hard for intellectual and religious respectability.

Add to this the accident of history that the very tool with which Ibn Tufayl chose to market himself to a contemporary Maghrebi readership – his appeal to Ibn Sina's lost Eastern wisdom as the esoteric core of philosophical knowledge, which effectively cashed out as reading Ibn Sina in light of al-Ghazali and vice versa – was one from which more conservative and cautious authors were shying away, and one may question whether Ibn Tufayl ever stood a chance of becoming a central figure in later Islamic philosophy. For all his fame, al-Ghazali remained a deeply controversial figure in Muslim intellectual circles for centuries. The absorption of Ibn Sina's philosophy into the wider fabric of Muslim learning ended up occurring through the great theological manuals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. And while writers such as Salman Bashier (2011) have sought to connect Ibn Tufayl with the strand of Muslim thought known as Illuminationist (ishraqi) philosophy, there is no real reason to think that he would have had an influence on later theosophists such as Ibn al-'Arabi or al-Suhrawardi (d. 587/1191).

As it is, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan survives in a respectable if unspectacular number of manuscripts, most of them originating in the Muslim West (see Conrad 1996, 268–271). Ibn Tufayl is mentioned here and there in post-classical Muslim accounts of philosophy, though no-one seems to have engaged seriously with his work. The famed historian Ibn Khaldun (d. 808/1406), for instance, mentions both Ibn Tufayl and Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, but appears to have derived his knowledge from second-hand sources and to have garbled the information rather badly.

Ibn al-Nafis's competing account has already been mentioned (chapter 4) and is surely significant, inasmuch as it shows that somebody at least took Ibn Tufayl's masterwork seriously enough to mount a refutation. Ibn al-Nafis's story, Fadil Ibn Natiq ("Virtuous, Son of Rational"), is essentially a kalam response to the rationalist credo espoused by Ibn Tufayl. The protagonist of Ibn al-Nafis's story, the boy Fadil, after establishing God's existence in the kalam manner, comes to realize that he cannot know God's will for him except through revelation and prophecy. Reason may thus give birth to virtue, but only through recognizing its own limitations. The message is diametrically opposed to what Ibn Tufayl wanted to say with Hayy. Still, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Ibn al-Nafis may in his own way have paid Ibn Tufayl a high compliment. No other author in the Arabic tradition engaged with his thought as deeply (Fancy 2009).

HEBREW ECHOES

Hayy Ibn Yaqzan first found its way outside Muslim circles when Jewish thinkers adopted Arabic Aristotelianism as a model for philosophical study. This shift, which took place over the course of the sixth/twelfth century in the Muslim West, only had Ibn Sina as a minor component (the Jewish philosophers generally gravitated towards al-Farabi and Ibn Rushd). Consequently, Ibn Tufayl, who presented himself as a champion of Ibn Sina, initially could not find much of a foothold. One spectacular counterexample has been uncovered by Ryan Szpiech (2010). In the apologetics of Abner of Burgos (ca. 1270–1347), who after converting to Christianity became known as Alfonso of Valladolid, Ibn Sina citations lifted from Hayy are combined with Ibn Tufayl's own characterization of Hayy's divine vision in order to arrive at a presentation of Ibn Sina's "Eastern wisdom" that serves Alfonso's particular purposes.

The first known translation of Hayy was into Hebrew and was probably executed by somebody in the circle of the Jewish philosopher Moses Narboni (d. 1349), since it received a commentary from the latter. It is through Narboni's Jewish readers that Ibn Tufayl and Hayy Ibn Yaqzan subsequently came to the attention of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (d. 1494), the renowned Renaissance philosopher and author of an Oration on the Dignity of Man (see Ben-Zaken 2010, 42–100). Pico positioned himself as a champion of the entire classical Greek philosophical legacy, one in which Plato and Aristotle stood as one and in whose explication Muslim thinkers, too, had played a part. Opposing some humanists, Pico took a positive view, e.g. of Ibn Sina's and Ibn Rushd's works. It is in this context that one should place Pico's translation of the Hebrew Hayy into Latin. Pico will have seen in Hayy an affirmation of the pious aims and unsullied monotheist instincts of Muslim thought, at the same time that Ibn Tufayl's Neoplatonically tinged Aristotelianism appealed to him philosophically and the theme of the all-wise autodidact personally. In light of Pico's fame, it seems a shame that his Renaissance translation of Hayy passed unnoticed. In fairness, Pico does not appear to have made use of it himself.

EARLY MODERN SUCCESS

When it comes to the revival of Ibn Tufayl's fortunes, it is impossible to overstate the importance of two seventeenth-century English Orientalists: the Edward Pocockes, father and son (see Russell 1993; Daiber 1994). The elder Pococke, besides being instrumental in stoking early modern scientific interest in all things "Arabick," had already prepared an unpublished English translation in 1659 or thereabouts (Nahas 1985). In 1671, the younger Pococke then published an edition of the original Arabic text and a Latin translation under the title Philosophus autodidactus.

This first printing proved immediately popular and precipitated a period of public enthusiasm for Hayy that has never been surpassed. Several vernacular translations followed the publication of the Arabic–Latin bilingual edition, including English translations dating to 1674, 1686, and 1708. The Latin rendition itself remained popular – Latin still being the common language of learning throughout Europe – and with it, the Arabic original spread widely as well. An indication of just how quickly Hayy captured the imagination of the English-speaking world is the mention of "Abubeker" in the introduction to Cotton Mather's 1721 textbook for New England Puritans, The Christian Philosopher. Mather contends that Ibn Tufayl's text testifies to the ability of natural reason everywhere to affirm the existence of a single God and of a universal Creator. In Mather's mind, Hayy stands as the quintessential "noble savage" so often evoked in the period, even as Mather replaces all of Ibn Tufayl's intricate Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism with Newtonian science and seventeenth-century natural theology and experimentalism (Quiggle, Jr. 2008).

Simon Ockley's 1708 English translation of Hayy, which carried the attractive title The Improvement of Human Reason, was the first to be made directly from the Arabic. It is still reprinted today, thanks in part to the beautiful Dutch engravings which were printed alongside an elegant if imprecise English text. These drawings were originally prepared for a vernacular translation of Pococke's Latin which by 1701 had gone into a second printing. The Dutch version may have originated in Baruch Spinoza's (1632–1677) circle of friends, marking the second time a Jewish philosopher proved instrumental in introducing Ibn Tufayl to Christian audiences. All in all, the Dutch showed a particular fascination with Ibn Tufayl's work, one that continues to this day with Remke Kruk's impeccable scholarship.

Hayy's popularity also inspired a host of imitators. A mid-eighteenth-century Dutch adaptation called De Walchersche Robinson hews surprisingly close to Hayy despite the title's reference to the even more popular Robinson Crusoe (Kruk 2011, 93–95). An anonymous English novel dating probably to 1761, meanwhile, recounts the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Don Antonio de Trezzanio in a way that clearly echoes Hayy, yet adopts equally as much from Robinson Crusoe (Kruk 1987).

THE "ROBINSON" QUESTION

This prompts a question. What in the end is the relation of Ibn Tufayl's philosophical narrative to Daniel Defoe's famous novel, first published in 1719? The surface similarities are certainly suggestive, so much so that breezy references abound to Defoe being inspired by or even depending on Hayy.

We should tread carefully, however. For one thing, the idea of a lone nautical survivor thriving in exotic circumstances was known to early modern audiences both through fiction and through real-life accounts. The ideal of natural reason conquering the universe through contemplation and experimentation also found support from both sides of the emerging rationalist–empiricist divide in early modern European philosophy.

Textually, there is additionally the question of Baltasar Gracián's (1601–1658) El Criticón, a lengthy Spanish treatise first published in 1651, which exhibits themes closer to Hayy than what we find in Robinson Crusoe but which nonetheless stands independent of it. Scholars have proposed that both Hayy and Criticón might rely on a shared literary archetype, perhaps even a Greek folktale that is loosely tied with the cycle of narratives surrounding Alexander the Great. What if anything in this tradition of texts inspired Defoe would then become an open question.

However that may be, the case regarding Defoe is more interesting than first appears. In addition to writing one action-packed sequel to Robinson, Defoe also released a series of Serious Reflections under Robinson Crusoe's name (1720). The latter work culminates with a Vision of the Angelick World, inviting a direct comparison with Hayy's climax. Moreover, Defoe/Crusoe avows that since "the first in intention is the last in execution" (a saying attributed to Aristotle), his fable receives its justification from the moral it contains, not the other way around. This, as we have seen from chapter 3, is certainly a position Ibn Tufayl would accept. Far from being mere entertainments, both Robinson Crusoe and Hayy Ibn Yaqzan are supposed to be viewed in light of the philosophical and spiritual lessons they contain.

However, Defoe's lessons are very different from Ibn Tufayl's. For one thing, Defoe/Crusoe explicitly censures the ideal of solitude as a deluded "monkishness." He pours scorn on "Papists" and "Muscovites" – Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians – whose practices are more in the vein of Hayy. All these pre-modern forms of spirituality idealized asceticism and hermitage: Defoe, by contrast, champions a supposedly sober and distinctively Protestant morality that finds purpose in community and occasions for spiritual struggle in the midst of everyday business. (This, of course, echoes Salaman more than Hayy.) In a further echo of Hayy, worship of the sun is said to be among the more acceptable inklings of true religion that reason can reach on its own (Serious Reflections, 144), which carries the converse implication that the grace of revelation is needed for the workings of the supernatural within the natural to be perceived with clarity. As we have seen, Ibn Tufayl regards the latter as a conclusion that reason reaches independently.

In a final example that highlights the discrepancies between Defoe's vision of the world and Ibn Tufayl's, Defoe proudly maintains that all of creation has been given to humankind as an inheritance and possession. For humanity's sake, "the Peace of the Creation is preserv'd, the Climates made habitable, the Creatures subjected and made nourishing, all vegetative Life made medicinal" (208). While "the specifick Distinctions of Providence" are left to the "Formalities of the Schoolmen" (208), the clear thinker can with a good conscience regard his surroundings as a resource to be exploited and a canvas on which human will can be projected.

Ibn Tufayl's attitudes, we have seen, are the very opposite of this. He describes Hayy as paying close attention to the way in which God has given each creature the means by which to lead a happy and fulfilled life (Hayy, 88–90), and from this the conclusion naturally follows that each creature has been created for its own sake, not for ours (110–111). Consequently, we should seek to disturb plant and animal life as little as we can, promote the good of all creatures, and – most pregnant of all – refrain in general from regarding any form of life as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself (see chapter 6).

What is more, Defoe/Crusoe has some singularly unkind things to say about the non-Christian peoples of the world, and about Muslims especially. In a show of sadness, "Robinson" counts off all the countries on three continents which he has visited and concludes that its countless people, even those:

furnish'd with the Powers of Reason, and Gifts of Nature, and many Ways, if not every Way, as capable of the Reception of sublime things, as we are, are yet abandon'd to the grossest Ignorance and Depravity; and that not in Religion only, but even in all the desirable Parts of Humane Knowledge, and especially Science and acquir'd Knowledge.

(Serious Reflections, 126–127)

The Moors are singled out for their "Cruelty of Disposition, which was anciently in their Nature" (131). They are a "dreadful people," "the worst of all the Nations of the World... among whom Nature appears stripp'd of all the additional Glories, which it derives from Religion." Devoid of virtue, the Muslims or Moors plainly cannot have science either.

Setting aside the ignorance, xenophobia, and cultural chauvinism on display here, all this sounds rather like a man protesting too much. It seems distinctly possible that between the publication of Robinson Crusoe and the composition of the Serious Reflections, some discerning reader had brought up the many similarities between Hayy and Robinson. But rather than acknowledge an authorial debt – one that may, after all, have been relatively minor – Defoe chose to double down and devote his energies to a show of erudition and spiritual seriousness.

When juxtaposed with Hayy, Serious Reflections reads like a strained effort to show how the underpinnings of Robinson are nothing like what a despicable "Moor" like "Abubecer" would concoct. Instead, Robinson is supposed to rest throughout on a worldview befitting of a sober yet modernizing Restoration Protestant. This may all be perfectly true; but the unmistakable way that Ibn Tufayl haunts the Serious Reflections and Angelick Vision shows how the fate of Robinson Crusoe came to be intertwined with Hayy and its many imitations in the eighteenth century.

ORIENTALIST IDEAS

The reason Ibn Tufayl came to dominate more scholarly thinking on Arabic philosophy was simple enough. For two hundred years, Hayy was the only treatise out of this vast intellectual tradition that was readily available in print, either in Arabic or in a vernacular translation, either in Europe or in the Islamic world. Medieval Latin translations of Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd still circulated, of course, typically in Renaissance printings: and references to "Avicenna" and "Averroes" could be lifted from the works of the Christian schoolmen and examined, sometimes in ways that were quite ingenious. But when it came to constructing an overall narrative of what the trajectory of Arabic or Islamic philosophy was, European scholars and Orientalists especially had to turn to Ibn Tufayl's treatise.

The results are telling. First of all, the concerns and preoccupations of sixth-/twelfth-century Andalusian philosophers became amplified in Western histories in a way that was out of all proportion to actual historical trends. With the preponderance of evidence coming from Ibn Bajja, Ibn Tufayl, and Ibn Rushd, Western historians of philosophy commonly assumed that Andalusia was where the philosophical excitement must have been in the Islamic sixth/twelfth century. And because of the somewhat dysfunctional relations between the three thinkers, and the way their influence was channeled in the direction of Jewish and Christian rather than Muslim culture, the narrative came to be one of Islamic philosophy passing into the West, then declining post-Averroes. Based on Ibn Tufayl's presentation of al-Farabi and echoes of a similar view in Ibn Rushd's works, it was thought that strained relations between religious orthodoxy and philosophy consumed the public mind post-Ghazali, and that Ibn Tufayl's and Ibn Rushd's failed efforts to defuse these tensions resulted in an atrophying of public support for philosophy. That this narrative completely disregards Ibn Sina's startling triumph throughout eastern Islamic intellectual circles from the seventh/thirteenth century onwards went unnoticed for a long time.

Second, Ibn Tufayl's preface, which linked the chimera that is Ibn Sina's "Eastern wisdom" to a supposedly irrational or supra-rational form of mysticism and a wholesale rejection of the Aristotelian tradition, gave rise to a severe distortion of what awareness there was of Ibn Sina's influence on subsequent Islamic thought. In light of a tendentious reading of Hayy, later Islamic philosophy could be dismissed as noble Illuminationist spirituality at best, vacuous and irrationalist esotericism at worst. Some enthusiasts of theosophical or esotericist interpretations of the Western philosophical tradition (for instance, the famous Orientalist Henry Corbin and the perennialist Muslim philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr) additionally took Ibn Tufayl's proclamations to testify to a genuine esoteric side to Ibn Sina's authorship and to the existence of a mystical Ibn Sina in addition or even in contradistinction to the philosophical one. This conception of the history of Arabic/Islamic philosophy, too, rests on ignoring the actual history of Islamic philosophy post-Ibn Sina, the vast majority of which continued along resolutely rigorous, technical, and indeed Aristotelian lines well into the modern era.

Third and finally, Hayy's peculiar characteristics as a piece of writing could be invoked in an attempt to elevate Ibn Tufayl to a uniquely prominent place within the history of Islamic philosophy. It is through such efforts that we have depictions of Ibn Tufayl "the environmentalist," Ibn Tufayl "the empiricist," Ibn Tufayl "the Enlightenment Muslim," Ibn Tufayl "the educational philosopher," and so on.

As will have become clear to the reader of this book, I believe that such exercises are more a hindrance than a help in understanding Ibn Tufayl's authorship and his truly distinctive features as a philosopher. Anachronistic projections and far-fetched attempts at making Ibn Tufayl into a precursor to this or that fashionable notion will never get us very far (Kruk 2011). It is only through situating Ibn Tufayl in his own intellectual context, and a painstaking analysis of all the facets of Hayy, that a rounded picture will emerge of Ibn Tufayl's qualities as a thinker.

BACK TO IBN TUFAYL

This book has argued for a different reading of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan than has perhaps been prevalent throughout the modern period. Hayy, the protagonist of Ibn Tufayl's philosophical novel, is often celebrated for his ingenuity and the way he arrives at his worldview through independent verification, and a tendency has existed to extend these qualities to Ibn Tufayl the author as well. Yet I have tried to show that to the historian's eye, the whole of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan reads more like one very particular assessment of the great cultural and scholarly ferment underway in the Muslim West during the early Almohad era.

On this view, Ibn Tufayl's singular achievement lay in the bold and confident way he indicated that a grand intellectual synthesis could be achieved that would incorporate the insights of the medical professionals, the Aristotelian philosophers, and the Sufis (to name a few). Ibn Tufayl's authorial power is equally evident in the way he sidelines and marginalizes those aspects of Islamic culture of which he thinks none too highly (chief among them Islamic law and theology but also, for example, Arabic letters and astrology).

These bold strokes, and the way they proved inspirational to thousands upon thousands of readers over the course of the centuries, have cemented Ibn Tufayl's status as a genuine "maker of the Muslim world." Yet Ibn Tufayl was unquestionably made by the Muslim world as well; he was a product of a particular place and time. Hayy Ibn Yaqzan can be read with either viewpoint in mind, either looking forward or looking back. Either way, the work still deserves to be read. I can therefore do no better in the end than direct the reader towards Hayy Ibn Yaqzan.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aristotle's works are referred to by the standard English titles, followed by book and chapter number. In addition, I have used the following printings of historical works:

Primary sources

al-Biṭrūjī, Abū Isḥāq Nūr al-Dīn. On the Principles of Astronomy, ed. and tr. Bernard R. Goldstein, 2 vols. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1971 [Principles]

Defoe, Daniel. Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, with His Vision of the Angelick World. London, W. Taylor, 1720

al-Fārābī, Abū Naṣr. Kitāb al-ḥurūf, ed. Muhsin Mahdi. Beirut, Dār al-mashriq, 1969 [Book of Letters]

al-Ghazālī, Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad. al-Maqṣad al-asnā fī sharḥ ma'ānī asmā' Allāh al-ḥusnā, ed. F. Shehadi. Beirut, Dār al-mashriq, 1971 [Beautiful Names]

al-Ghazālī, Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad.al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl, ed. J. Salība and K. 'Ayyād. Beirut: Commission libanaise pour la traduction des chefs-d'œuvre, 2nd ed. 1969 [Deliverer]

Ibn Bājja, Ibn Sā'igh. Tadbīr al-mutawaḥḥid, in Rasā'il Ibn Bājja al-ilāhiyya, ed. M. Fakhry. Beirut, Dār al-nahār li al-nashr, 1968 [Governance of the Solitary]

Ibn Rushd, Abū al-Walīd [Averroes]. Tahāfut al-tahāfut, ed. M. Bouyges. Beirut, Imprimerie Catholique, 1930 [Incoherence]

Ibn Sīnā, Abū 'Alī [Avicenna]. al-Ishārāt wa al-tanbīhāt, ed. J. Forget. Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1892 [Pointers]

Ibn Sīnā, Abū 'Alī [Avicenna]. The Metaphysics of the Healing, ed. and tr. Michael E. Marmura. Provo, Brigham Young University Press, 2005

Ibn Ṭufayl, Abū Bakr. Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān, ed. and French tr. R. Gauthier. 2nd ed. Beirut, Imprimerie Catholique, 1936 [Hayy]

al-Marrākushī, 'Abd al-Wāḥid. The History of the Almohades, or Mu'jib fī talkhīṣ akhbar al-Maghrib, ed. R. P. A. Dozy. Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1847 [History]

English translations

Full translations of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan include the following:

Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan. A Philosophical Tale, tr. Lenn Evan Goodman. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2009 [reprint of the 1972 translation]

* A particularly readable translation, with Gauthier's page numbers indicated.

Two Andalusian Philosophers, tr. Jim Colville. London, Kegan Paul, 1999

* Also includes a translation of Ibn Rushd's Decisive Treatise.

The Improvement of Human Reason, Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan, tr. Simon Ockley. Hildesheim, Georg Olms Verlag, 1983 [reprint of the 1708 translation]

Partial translations are included in the following anthologies of Arabic philosophy: Jon McGinnis and David C. Reisman, Classical Arabic Philosophy (Indianapolis, Hackett, 2007) and Muhammad Ali Khalidi, Medieval Islamic Philosophical Writings (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Scholarly literature

The best place to begin with the scholarship on Ibn Tufayl is a 1996 collected volume of articles edited by Lawrence I. Conrad and entitled The World of Ibn Ṭufayl. Chapters in this book are referred to by the individual author's name followed by "in Conrad 1996": thus "Malti-Douglas in Conrad 1996," "Kruk in Conrad 1996," and even "Conrad in Conrad 1996." Many articles in the collection have gone unmentioned, but that is not meant as an indictment. In addition, I have referred to the following scholarly works in this book:

Adamson, Peter and Peter Pormann. The Philosophical Works of al-Kindī. Karachi, Oxford University Press, 2012

Altmann, Alexander. "The Treasure Trove: Judah Halevi's Theory of Climates," Aleph 5 (2005), pp. 215–246

al-'Aziz, M. 'A. "Al-urjuza al-tibbiyya li-Abi Bakr Ibn Tufayl," Da'wat al-haqq 239 (1984), pp. 58–64

Bashier, Salman. The Story of Islamic Philosophy: Ibn Ṭufayl, Ibn al-'Arabī, and Others on the Limit between Naturalism and Traditionalism. Albany, State University of New York Press, 2011

Ben-Zaken, Avner. Reading Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān: A Cross-Cultural Reading of Autodidacticism. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010

Bos, A. P. and Rein Ferwerda. Aristotle, On the Life-Bearing Spirit (De spiritu). A Discussion with Plato and his Predecessors on Pneuma as the Instrumental Body of the Soul. Leiden, E. J. Brill, 2008

Brague, Rémi. "Cosmological Mysticism: The Imitation of the Heavenly Bodies in Ibn Tufayl's Hayy ibn Yaqzan," Graduate Faculty Philosophical Journal 19.2–20.1 (1997), pp. 91–102

Bürgel, J. Christoph. "Ibn Ṭufayl and his Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān: A Turning Point in Arabic Philosophical Writing," in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. S. K. Jayyusi, 2 vols. Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1992, pp. 830–846

de Callataÿ, Godefroid. "Did the Ikhwān al-Ṣafā' Inspire Ibn Ṭufayl to his Ḥayy Ibn Yaqdhān?" Ishraq. Islamic philosophy yearbook 4 (2013), pp. 82–89

Conrad, Lawrence I. "An Andalusian Physician at the Court of the Muwaḥids: Some Notes on the Public Career of Ibn Ṭufayl," Al-Qantara 16.1 (1995), pp. 3–13

Conrad, Lawrence I., ed. The World of Ibn Ṭufayl. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān. Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1996

Corbin, Henry. Avicenna and the Visionary Recital. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960

Cornell, Vincent I. "Understanding is the Mother of Ability: Responsibility and Action in the Doctrine of Ibn Tūmart," Studia Islamica 66 (1987), pp. 71–103

Cressier, Patrice et al., eds. Los Almohades: Problemas y Perspectivas, 2 vols. Madrid, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2005

Daiber, Hans. "The Reception of Islamic Philosophy at Oxford in the 17th Century: The Pococks' (Father and Son) Contribution to the Understanding of Islamic Philosophy in Europe," in The Introduction of Arabic Philosophy into Europe, eds. Charles E. Butterworth and B. A. Kesel. Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1994, pp. 65–82

Davidson, Herbert Alan. Proofs for Eternity, Creation and the Existence of God in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Philosophy. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987

Davidson, Herbert Alan. Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992

Di Giovanni, Matteo. "Motifs of Andalusian Philosophy in the Pre-Almohad Age," Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 22 (2011), pp. 207–234

Fancy, Nahyan. "The Virtuous Son of the Rational: A Traditionalist's Response to the Falāsifa," in Avicenna and His Legacy: A Golden Age of Science and Philosophy. Turnhout, Brepols, 2009, pp. 219–247

Finamore, John. Iamblichus and the Theory of the Vehicle of the Soul. Chico, Scholars Press, 1985

Fletcher, Madeleine. "The Almohad Tawhīd: Theology Which Relies on Logic," Numen 38.1 (1991), pp. 110–127

Forcada, Miquel. "Ibn Bājja on Medicine and Medical Experience," Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 11.1 (2011), pp. 111–148

Fromherz, Allen J. The Almohads. The Rise of an Islamic Empire London, I. B. Tauris, 2010

Gauthier, Léon. Ibn Thofaïl: sa vie, ses oeuvres. Paris, Ernest Leroux, 1909

Germann, Nadja. "Philosophizing without Philosophy? On the Concept of Philosophy in Ibn Ṭufayl's 'Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān'," Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie médiévales 75.2 (2008), pp. 271–301

Gill, Christopher et al., eds. Galen and the World of Knowledge. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009

Goodman, Lenn E. and Richard McGregor. The Case of the Animals vs. Man before the King of the Jinn. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009

Griffel, Frank. "Ibn Tumart's Rational Proof for God's Existence and Unity and His Connection to the Nizamiyya Madrasa in Baghdad," in Cressier et al., Los Almohades, 2005, pp. 753–813

Gutas, Dimitri. "Ibn Ṭufayl on Ibn Sīnā's Eastern Philosophy," Oriens 34 (1994), pp. 222–241

Gutas, Dimitri. "Avicenna's Eastern ("Oriental") Philosophy: Nature, Contents, Transmission," Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 10 (2000), pp. 159–180

Hourani, George F. "The Principal Subject of Ibn Ṭufayl's Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān," Journal of Near Eastern Studies 15.1 (1956), pp. 40–46

Hughes, Aaron W. The Texture of the Divine. Imagination in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Thought Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2004

Hyman, Arthur. "Aristotle's First Matter and Avicenna's and Averroes' Corporeal Form," in Harry A. Wolfson Jubilee Volume. Jerusalem, Magnes Press, 1965, English Section (Volume One), pp. 385–406

Jayyusi, Salma Khadra. "Nature Poetry in al-Andalus and the Rise of Ibn Khafāja," in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, 1992, pp. 367–397

Kruk, Remke. "An 18th-Century Descendant of Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān and Robinson Crusoe: Don Antonio de Trezzanio," Arabica 34.3 (1987), pp. 357–365

Kruk, Remke. "A Frothy Bubble: Spontaneous Generation in the Medieval Islamic Tradition," Journal of Semitic Studies 35.3 (1990), pp. 265–282

Kruk, Remke. "The Vital Roots of European Enlightenment: Ibn Tufayl's Influence on Modern Western Thought, by Samar Attar," Middle Eastern Literatures: incorporating Edebiyat 14.1 (2011), pp. 91–95 (book review)

Kukkonen, Taneli. "No Man Is an Island: Nature and Neo-Platonic Ethics in Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān," Journal of the History of Philosophy 46.2 (2008), pp. 187–204

Kukkonen, Taneli. "Ibn Ṭufayl and the Wisdom of the East: On Apprehending the Divine," in Late Antique Epistemology. Other Ways to Truth, eds. Panayiota Vassilopoulou and Stephen R. L. Clark. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 87–102

Kukkonen, Taneli. "Heart, Spirit, Form, Substance: Ibn Ṭufayl's Psychology," in In the Age of Averroes: Arabic Philosophy in the 6th/12th Century, ed. P. Adamson. London, The Warburg Institute 2011, pp. 185–204

Kukkonen, Taneli. "Receptive to Reality: Al-Ghazālī on the Structure of the Soul," The Muslim World 102.3–4 (2012), pp. 541–561

Kukkonen, Taneli. "Potentiality in Classical Arabic Thought," in Handbook of Potentiality, eds. K. Engelhard and M. Quante. Dordrecht, Springer, 2014

Lahoud, Nelly. Political Thought in Islam: A Study in Intellectual Boundaries. Abingdon and New York, RoutledgeCurzon, 2005

Langermann, Y. Tzvi. "David Ibn Shoshan on Spirit and Soul," European Journal of Semitic Studies 1.1 (2007), pp. 63–86

Le Tourneau, Roger. The Almohad Movement in North Africa in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1969

Lovejoy, Arthur A. The Great Chain of Being. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1936

McGinnis, Jon and David C. Reisman. Classical Arabic Philosophy. An Anthology of Sources. Indianapolis, Hackett, 2007

Melchert, Christopher. "The Transition from Asceticism to Mysticism at the Middle of the Ninth Century C.E.," Studia Islamica 83 (1996), pp. 51–70

Meyerhof, Max and Joseph Schacht. The Theologus Autodidactus of Ibn al-Nafīs. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1968

Nahas, Michael. "A Translation of Hayy B. Yaqẓān by the Elder Edward Pococke," Journal of Arabic Literature 16 (1985), pp. 88–90

O'Meara, Dominic. Platonopolis. Platonic Political Philosophy in Late Antiquity. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003

Pormann, Peter E. and Savage-Smith, Emilie. Medieval Islamic Medicine. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2007

Quiggle, Jr., Doyle R. "Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqdan in New England: A Spanish-Islamic Tale in Cotton Mather's Christian Philosopher?", The Arizona Quarterly 64.2 (2008), pp. 1–32

Russell, Gül A., ed. The 'Arabick' Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England. Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1993

Sabra, Abdelhamid Ibrahim. "The Andalusian Revolt against Ptolemaic Astronomy: Averroes and al-Bitrūjī," in Transformation and Tradition in the Sciences, ed. E. Mendelsohn. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp. 133–153

Szpiech, Ryan. "In Search of Ibn Sīnā's 'Oriental Philosophy' in Medieval Castile," Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 20.2 (2010), pp. 185–206

Urvoy, Dominique. Ibn Rushd. London and New York, Routledge, 1991

Wisnovsky, Robert. Avicenna's Metaphysics in Context. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2003

Audio-visual accompaniments

There is an educational Arabic animated cartoon for children that finds inspiration in the more superficial aspects of the Hayy narrative. English-language searches should start from the title "Hay, the Gazelle Child." Audiences wishing for a highly fanciful yet undeniably evocative and moving portrayal of the Almohad intellectual scene – complete with copious amounts of swashbuckling, romance, courtly intrigue, and musical numbers – should seek out Youssef Chahine's al-Maṣīr or Le Destin, a Franco-Egyptian co-production, which stars Ibn Rushd but does not mention Ibn Tufayl. Finally, Peter Adamson's podcast "History of Philosophy without Any Gaps" includes many excellent entries on Arabic philosophers.
INDEX

'Abd al-Mu'min

Abner (Alfonso) of Burgos

Abu Ya'qub Yusuf

abstraction

actuality (also actualization, activity, fi'l)

afterlife

Almohads

Almoravids

anatomy

annihilation (fana')

Aristotle

art (also skill, sina'a)

astronomy

atomism

balance (also equilibrium, isti'dal)

Bistami, al-

Bitruji, al-

bliss

celestial spheres (see heavens)>

classification

climate

conjunction (ittisal)

conservationism

Cotton Mather

creation

cycles of learning

Defoe, Daniel

demonstrative arguments

dialectic

diet

disputation

Eastern wisdom, Ibn Sina's

elements, four

emanation (also outflow, fayd)

environmentalism

essence (also quiddity, mahiyya)

eternity

ethics

experience (tajriba)

faith (see religion)

Farabi, al-

form

Galen

Ghazali, al-

Hallaj, al-

heavens (see celestial spheres)

Ibn al-'Arabi

Ibn al-Nafis>

Ibn Bajja

Ibn Rushd (Averroes)

Ibn Sina (Avicenna)>

Ibn Tumart

imitation

infinity

intellect (see reason)

Islam

Kalabadhi, al-

kalam (see theology)

Kindi, al-

law, Islamic

life-functions (also faculties)

logic

Mansur, al- (Caliph Abu Yusuf Ya'qub)

matter (see also prime matter)

medicine

metaphysics

mixture

music

mystical experience (see bliss)

Narboni, Moses

nature, of things

nature, study of

Necessary Existent

Neoplatonism (see Platonism)

Philoponus, John

Pico, Giovanni della Mirandola

Plato

Platonism (see Neoplatonism)

plurality of forms

Poetics, Aristotle's

Porphyry

potentiality (also capacity, quwwa; see life-functions)

prime matter

prophecy

Ptolemy

Qur'an (citations)

Qusharyri, al-

reason, human ability to (see intellect)

receptivity (see emanation)

religion (see faith)

revelation

rhetoric, art of

Robinson Crusoe

scientific explanation

soul

Spinoza, Baruch

spirit, divine

spirit, vital

substance

Sufis

taste (dhawq)

theologians (mutakallimun)

theology (see kalam)

Theology of Aristotle

three-dimensionality

vital heat (see spirit, vital)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaBook