Image from a set of four quadrilles written for piano by Richard Michael Levey and published in Dublin in the 1800s. — Irish Traditional Music Archive
How does one describe Hayy ibn Yaqzn — literally, Living, Son of Awake? This Arabic work of fiction whose renderings, paraphrases, shadows, and footprints are found in Hebrew, Latin, English, German, French, Spanish, and elsewhere, is in the generic sense a piece of fiction no doubt. But what kind of fiction? It has been described as a “novel,” “fable,” “edifying tale,” “allegory,” “parable,” and often “philosophical romance.” Then, following the Latin Hayy tradition, it is also called a pioneering work in “autodidacticism,”— a word that combines two Greek words autós (“self”) and didactikos (“teaching”), thus meaning “teaching oneself without the guidance/mediation of an external teacher.”
Nor is the substantive question straightforward: Is the Hayy a work of rational philosophy? Or is it a Sufi discourse in which philosophy functions merely as a ladder to reach mystical heights? In other words, is the author seeking ‘ilm, discursive knowledge, or is he rather a wayfarer traversing his path towards the station of ma‘rifa, what may be described as gnosis. Then, a related question: Is his fundamental inspiration Greek philosophy, in particular Aristotle and Plato in whose thoughts he is often drenched? Or does this inspiration ultimately happen to be the indigenous Islamic intellectual and spiritual ethos, given his running citations and frequent implicit references to the Quranic text, among other Islamic scriptural sources? Indeed, these complicating issues make the work ironically a richer historical and literary phenomenon, opening up many new vistas that bring before us dazzling sights and serve as a curative to many impairing ideological narratives, narratives that have hardened over the centuries.
Yes, over the centuries — for the Hayy was written some 900 years ago in the early 12th century in Andalus, Muslim Spain. Its author, the philosopher and theologian Ab Bakr Ibn Tufayl (Latinised, Abubacer Aben Tofail) was a vizier of the Almohad (al-Muwahhidn) ruler Ab Ya‘qb Ysuf whom he served also as a physician. This polymath author of the Hayy who died in 1185 was a great supporter of his younger contemporary, Ibn Rushd, the redoubtable philosopher held to be the greatest Aristotelian in the whole history of philosophy. What is most intriguing, it was Ibn Tufayl who had urged Ibn Rushd to work on Aristotle, to purify this Greek giant from the obscurities of his commentators, and internally harmonise his thought. Given Ibn Rushd’s decisive impact on European philosophy, only this act is enough to give Ibn Tufayl a high place in world culture — but there is much more, as we shall see.
On the cross-cultural vicissitudes of an Arabic work of fiction
Hayy ibn Yaqzn is the name of the protagonist in Ibn Tufayl’s tale. This human was born in an uninhibited island in the Indian Ocean, so goes the story, without human begetters. But it is important to note here that his birth is explained not in transcendental-symbolic terms, but strictly in naturalistic-physical terms, in terms that may legitimately be described as “scientific.” This was the case of spontaneous generation that comes to pass through the mixing of natural elements and confluence of natural forces — the underlying element being the mud of the shore. Then comes the part of the story that has travelled through both time and space and is familiar to us from the Jungle Book genre: Hayy is suckled and reared by a gazelle. So a feral human being grows up.
Now the main thrust of the tale is what is called autodidacticism — learning without an external teacher, self-propelled learning, learning without other than one’s own rational powers. Through the exercise of reason alone, then, Hayy discovers the real facts of the world, finding out the actual workings of the cosmos and arriving at philosophical truths; and indeed by the sole means of his inborn intelligence he acquires biological knowledge, ethical knowledge and, ultimately, knowledge of God, the “Necessarily Existent Being.” Again, we may well characterise Hayy’s mode of inquiry as embodying a “scientific method” by means of which he carries out all his discoveries of the physical world’s operations and of virtuous social conduct. How interesting: since he grew up in the wild among animals, and his moral sense remained pristine without any family or communal biases, he also develops an ecological sensitivity, caring about all creatures around him and not arrogating to himself a position higher than that of any other being in the natural environment. Hayy here stands as a leader of our contemporary environmental concerns.
The use of reason here takes many forms of manifestations — sometimes Hayy makes logical deductions from self-evident premises in an Aristotelian vein; sometimes he makes “inductive” generalisations; here we see him contemplating in the style of Plato and the Sufis; there we find him making systematic observations. When his mother gazelle dies, he dissects her body and proceeds precisely like a biologist to discover the centrality of the heart for life, pondering over the organ’s anatomy and physiology, its structure, its location, its function, its chambers and ventricles, and its firm protection by the rib cage. Hayy’s ascent on the steps of cognizance manifests a paradigm case of self-tutelage, autodidacticism that is, a process that leads him finally to “the Cause of all things,” “the Maker,” and then he declares more in the Sufi mode than the rationalistic:
Hayy ibn Yaqzān’s historical impact in world intellectual culture was massive; in fact, mind-boggling. We hear its chimes all over Europe — in pure philosophy, in science proper, and in educational doctrines, not to speak of literature and that liberating genre of fiction that is part of world literary canon. It was in 1671 that Edward Pococke the Younger translated the Hayy into Latin from an Aleppo manuscript copied in 1303 that is now held in the famous Bodleian collection at Oxford University. Pococke called it Philosophus Autodidactus. And then, it feels like a continuous spring shower.
He is being, perfection and wholeness. He is goodness, beauty, power, and knowledge. He is He [huwa huwa]. All things perish except His face. (Quran, 28:88).
Note the Sufi cry “He is He!” The story moves on: when Hayy is a fully mature man, he experiences his first human encounter. A man called Asal visits his island. Who is this stranger? He came from another island, but one that sustained a human population. After some initial struggle to make Asal overcome his phobia of the unknown fellow man, a struggle during which Hayy even uses brute force to subdue the evading stranger, the two become friends. Asal then teaches Hayy his human language, and they are now able to converse.
They compare notes — notes about their cosmological ideas, their ethical principles, their notion of upright life, and of course about God. Lo! Hayy finds that they are identical; what Asal had learnt through the guidance and instruction from an external teacher, from some kind of an apostle, was no different from the body of knowledge and understanding that Hayy had gained by himself through exerting his own innate faculties of reason. And here Ibn Tufayl makes that resounding declaration that constitutes a core doctrine of Islamic philosophy — that reason and revelation lead to identical truths. The two have cognitive equivalence. What religion teaches by means of parables and stories, so the argument goes, and what philosophy yields through the exercise of reason — these two are substantively the same. Indeed, Muslim philosophers recognise a higher status for prophets on account of their direct, instant knowledge of the truth, given that they are “gifted ones.”
Curious now as he is, Hayy visits Asal’s island, but this turns out to be a disappointing journey indeed. This is so because he finds people there given to worldly pleasures, amassing wealth, and governed by lust. The two friends withdraw from the world and spend the rest of their lives in solitude, contemplating eternal truths, unencumbered by all that perishes — unconcerned with this realm of generation and corruption.