The Islamic world · c. 1105–1185
Ibn Ṭufayl
Andalusian court physician and philosophical novelist
In his novel, a child raised alone on an island reaches by reason and contemplation the same truths that religion teaches in symbols.
Life and thought
Ibn Ṭufayl was born around 1105 near Guadix, in al-Andalus, and served the Almohad rulers as secretary and then as court physician to the caliph Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf in Marrakesh. He was the patron who introduced the young Ibn Rushd to the caliph, who asked for clear explanations of Aristotle. He died in Marrakesh in 1185.
His one surviving work, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān (“Alive, son of Awake”), is a philosophical novel. A child grows up alone on an island, raised by a gazelle. When she dies he dissects her to find what has left her body, and step by step, by observation and reasoning, he discovers the order of nature, the existence of a Creator, and finally mystical union with God. When he meets people from a nearby island, he finds that their religion teaches the same truths in images, and that most of them cannot bear the truth unveiled. The book was translated into Latin in 1671 and read by Locke’s generation.