veiled4allah: mystical philosophy on a desert island, the fascinating journey of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan

The article, Betwixt the Conceptual and the Affective: Hayy Ibn Yaqzan Revisited by Ahmed El-Sayed, a doctoral student in philosophy, looks at Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, a novel by the Andalusian Muslim philosopher ibn Tufayl (d. 1184 C.E.).

The article is written in academese, which makes it hard for the layperson to understand at times, but it does set out the philosophical issues addressed in this novel as well as the mystical conclusions ibn Tufayl reached:

Ibn Tufayl emphatically asserts that reason and rational inquiry are never sufficient as a proper ground for what, as he intimates, could be described as the fully actualized experience of and most irreducible mode of comportment towards God. In the process of knowing, the knowing subject is still fully aware of himself as he identifies, appropriates and constructs the objects of experience. Riding himself of his ego was Hayy’s way to achieve communion with God; the stage at which all turbulences of conscious subjectivity settle down and one becomes but a mirror wherein the divine can manifest Himself. Substantially then, Ibn Tufayl supports the view that calls for a return to the primordial unity with the world. On the way to redeeming this unity, reason plays an important role as it dialectically proceeds from one thesis to the other. Once reason hits its limits at the question of God—the thing which is, in its own right, quite Kantian—affective experience should be allowed to give itself as the province where meaning in its authenticity and full concretion unfolds.

The Guardian has an excellent review of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan and its historical context. It also discusses the influence of this work on Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe. What's that you say?

An Oxford don brought a manuscript of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan back to England in 1653 and produced an English translation called "The Self-Taught Philosopher" in 1671. The book was popular with the European philsophers John Locke, Benedict Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibnitz. There are strong similarities between "The Self-Taught Philosopher" and Robinson Crusoe.


Ibn Tufayl's work is actually based on an earlier work by the Persian philosopher ibn Sina (Avicenna, d. 1037 C.E.). Ibn Sina wrote the original Hayy Ibn Yaqzan as part of a three-volume "visionary cycle" or narrative, most of which has unfortunately been lost.

In An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines, Seyyed Hossein Nasr discusses ibn Sina's work:

These narratives are the records of the intellectual visions of the author described in a symbolic language which itself constitutes an integral aspect of the visions and which is not simply an allegory more or less made up by the author. In these narratives Ibn Sina has a vision of the universe as a vast "cosmos of symbols" thorugh which the initiate seeking Divine Knowledge, or gnosis, must travel... ...The journey of the gnostic begins in the Hayy Ibn Yaqzan where he is initiated into the world of pure forms... In the Risalat at-tair [Treatise of the Bird] the adept, accepting to undertake this journey, awakens from his slumber of daily life... The Salaman wa Absal [Salaman and Absal] describes the last part of the journey of the adept in which the soul of the traveler is transformed into the angelic state.

Doctrines at 265-266.

Nasr goes on to describe these three works in more detail in the following pages.

It appears that ibn Sina originally wrote a very mystical narrative, which served as the inspiration for ibn Tufayl's novel, but they are quite different stories. Ibn Tufayl kept the philosophical and mystical explorations that ibn Sina had introduced. However, Defoe apparently just liked the plot and left out all the religious parts.

Farhang Jahanpour, in an article about the transmission of Sufi texts to the West, discusses Hayy Ibn Yaqzan at some length:

Although this version of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan was a translation of the sole remaining work of Ibn Tufayl, Ibn Tufayl's version was based on a work of the same name by the great Persian mystic and philosopher, Abu 'Ali Sina (Avicenna). Ibn Tufayl, a native of Andalusia who flourished in the twelfth century, was a religious skeptic and was critical of institutional religion based on revelation. In Hayy Ibn Yaqzan he maintained that religious dogmas were merely symbols of the truth which could be discovered independently, as was done by Hayy Ibn Yaqzan. Avicenna's version is more mystical in nature and shows how an individual, through intuition and contemplation of nature can, unaided by formal education, discover the spiritual nature of the world and find communion with God... ...Of course, unlike Robinson Crusoe, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan is a great mystical work. The idea underlying the story is to show how the human mind or spirit can, through its own intuition and its own efforts, attain to die knowledge of the spiritual world and find its rest in God. It describes the gradual awakening of the soul from its groping in the dark to the most dazzling light of certainty. However, apart from the form, there are some similarities between the character development of Robinson Crusoe and the spiritual development of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan. Thus, it is interesting to note that the first English novel was inspired by a Sufi book.

You can read a modern English translation of ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan online (large PDF file).