Ibn Tufayl is admired by those mystics and philosophers who like to learn from their predecessors and are not too prejudiced against ideas first expressed in Arabic. Historians of literature see him as the forerunner of Daniel Defoe, Rudyard Kipling, and all other novelists that wrote about an isolated human being.
Ibn Tufayl is Abentofail in Spanish, Abubacer in Latin, and more completely Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Abd al-Malik ibn Muhammad ibn Tufayl al-Qaisi al-Andalusi. He was born, not much before 1110, in Wadi-Ash, the present Guadix, a city of Andalusia that had been Acci in the older times of Romans, Carthaginians and Iberians. The physical environment probably has not changed much: that of a narrow, irrigated valley entrenched in a high plateau, now bare, then forested, on the north side of Sierra Nevada. The city, only about 30 miles from Granada, on opposite sides of rough mountains, was and is a service centre for the peasants and cattle breeders of the surrounding district, but Arabic was the cultural language and Islam the dominant religion when Ibn Tufayl was born. The political power was in the hands of fundamentalist Berbers from North Africa, the Morabitun (almoravids, ‘those of the fortified convent’), which around the middle of the 12th century were replaced by the Muwahhidun (almohads, ‘the unitarians’). Both despised the Andalusians as weak, effeminate, luxurious, and pleasure prone, but fell under the spell of their culture. The transition between the two powers was a period of turmoil and Guadix was an independent city in 1151–1152. The bishopric of Guadix considers itself the oldest in Spain, having been established more than six centuries before the arrival of Muslims, but its churches were closed and the Christians expelled because they were considered potential allies of the Christian kings to the North, who took Toledo before Ibn Tufayl was born and Saragossa and Lisbon during his lifetime. The Castilian king Alfonso VII went through the Guadix region to conquer Almería and held it for ten years with the help of Catalans and Genoese.
Ibn Tufayl had an excellent education and a brilliant career as a practising physician and secretary to the almohad governor of Granada, to one of the sons of the sultan, and finally, from about 1163, to the sultan himself, Abu Yaqub Yusuf. Ibn Tufayl was the sultan’s personal doctor until 1182, when he recommended Ibn Rushd (Averroes) for the job, and remained as vizier until his death in 1185 in Marrakech, the capital of the kingdom, shortly after the death of the sultan in 1184.
Ibn Tufayl was part of a brilliant crop of Muslim falasifa, rooted in the Greek philosophy that had been translated to Arabic in the Orient. They shared an admiration for Aristotle and had encyclopaedic interests that included the practice of medicine. A central problem for them, and for the Christian philosophers that followed them, was epistemology, how to acquire knowledge, which at that time implied the conciliation of reason and revelation, a dangerous task when heresy and even coldness to religion could be punished with death.
A philosophical novel
Only one of the books that Ibn Tufayl wrote on different subjects is available to us. Its contents are echoed in the texts of Ibn Rushd, and it is possible that the same applies to other ideas of Ibn Tufayl on astronomy and medicine. The extant book is a philosophical treatise disguised as a novel, Risala Hayy ibn Yaqzan fi asrar al-hikmat al-masriqiyya (The Story of Alive, Son of Awaken, on the Secrets of Oriental Wisdom). The first Latin translation, published in Oxford in 1671, changed the title to Philosophus Autodidactus, and this has served as a model for other translations into European languages.
This book is a stupendous surprise. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, the great Spanish historian of ideas, wrote: ‘No other work of the Arabic literature is so original and so curious. Even more: few conceptions of the human ingenuity are so synthetic and profound. It is, so to say, a psychological fantasy, a discourse on the method developed in a poetic form’. ‘One can hardly surpass the courage in thought and the speculative audacity shown by the author’. The idea that knowledge must be acquired through observation, experimentation, and thought was not new, but it had not been expressed as clearly and forcefully before.
The argument can be stated very simply: a baby is the only human inhabitant of an equatorial island. As he grows, he analyses his environment and develops knowledge by thinking about his observations and experiences. In this way he acquires, not only technology and natural sciences, but philosophy and theology as well. Therefore, knowledge does not need authority, be that the teaching of old philosophers or the revelation in holy books.
As if it were a modern scientific paper, an Introduction states Ibn Tufayl’s intent and describes and criticises pertinent previous publications in Arabic that were his sources. He mentions four forerunners, three of them Persian: Abu Nasr Muhammad al-Farabi (Alfarabi), who lived in the 10th century, and Abu Ali Ibn Sina (Avicenna, Avicena) and Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali (Algazel), of the 11th century. His only local source was Abu Bakr Ibn al-Sayg Ibn Bajjah (Avempace), who was born in Saragossa and lived in Granada and other neighbouring cities when Ibn Tufayl was a young man, but they never met.
One would have to jump several hundred years in the history of Literature to match the beginning of the novel, a discussion about how Hayy found himself alone in the island. Can babies be generated spontaneously? Or was he the clandestine son of a princess? After this, the story follows the well-trodden path represented, for example, in the myth of the foundation of Rome. The baby is nursed by a gazelle that had just lost its newborn and grows into an able man in total isolation from humans and human culture. The question is what can he develop all by himself?
Science and technology
The book then turns into a treatise that recapitulates in a single man the history of science and technology up to about the then contemporary state of the art. Teachers will notice immediately how difficult it is to present linearly a network of discoveries, but this was not a major concern for the author and the branches of science were at the time not so intricately interdependent as they are now.
The main research method is observation and reasoning. Hayy applies two forms of reasoning. One is abstract reasoning, probably of the kind that I use to complete a su doku puzzle and to solve an algebraic equation. The other is analogical thinking, like seeing an atom as a solar system in miniature, as a first approximation to be tested. Many natural scientists develop their hypotheses as visual analogies, even when the subject is unrelated to vision. Analogy, like any sort of extrapolation, is obviously very dangerous, and a modern reader of the book will easily convince himself that even a very intelligent mind can reason itself to error. Hayy does not double check his conclusions. Ibn Tufayl is very far from Rudolf Carnap and the evolutionary view that conclusions become increasingly trustworthy as evidence accumulates in their favour and doubts weaken. Redundancy is asymptotic to certainty.
The order of the research is unexpected. Ibn Tufayl seems to have been well versed in dissections and Hayy begins by dissecting the corpse of the gazelle that nursed him, and then other animals. He concludes that the principle of life resides in the heart, whence it vivifies all the sensorial and motor organs, and leaves the body upon death. This conclusion may not convince a modern car driver, who knows that a car may break down without losing any component, just by malfunction of an essential one.
Hayy intervenes in the surrounding nature for practical purposes. Some of his discoveries are based on the imitation of animals and plants; others originate in serendipity. Controls are not mentioned, but they must exist in the form of failures to achieve the desired objectives. Hayy develops by himself at least rough versions of such technical developments as fashioning tools, clothing, housing, and weapons, kindling fire, cooking food, and domesticating animals. A serious difficulty is that no single island contains the wild antecedents of all domesticated animals, from hens to horses and hawks, and all useful plants, from alpha grass to hemp and apple trees. If the difficulty was known to the author, he may not want to impose this limitation on a book that does not pretend to be realistic.
The novel does not address the controversy on whether knowledge precedes and induces practical applications or follows and depends on them, but for Hayy the more speculative science comes after the practical applications, and is intellectually independent from them.
The trail of knowledge proceeds from the particular to the general, from concretion to abstraction, from accident to substance. In this way, he puts together many individual animals to arrive at the concept of animal species; the procedure is essentially that of modern quantitative taxonomy, based on the recognition of groups of individuals that are more similar to each other than to individuals of other groups. He does not mention reproductive barriers as a criterion for the definition of species, although they had been well known to cattle breeders for thousands of years. The same procedure is applied to plants and generalized to group all the species of animals and those of plants into the respective larger entities that our books call the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom.
Then he notices that plants and animals share two basic properties, nutrition and growth, allowing the recognition of the unity of life. Even the properties that seem most characteristic of animals, sensitivity, perception, and movement, are present in the plants to a limited extent. He mentions particularly the orientation of some flowers towards the light, now called phototropism.
Living and non-living objects have in common ‘corporality’, occupying a place in tri-dimensional space. They can change temperature, form, colour, and other properties. Their appearance can be transformed to such extent as the conversion of a solid into ash, flame and smoke by burning. These observations lead to the concept of a group of a higher order that includes all objects, independently of their particular properties. They all have a tendency to move, either upwards or downwards. He cannot say much about the nature of all objects. Corporality is accounted for relatively well by modern physics and chemistry, but gravity, a weak force acting at a distance between all kinds of objects, is still a deep mystery. We know, however, the difference that explains the tendency of stones to move down, and that of air in the water or smoke in the air to move up.
He makes specific proposals, taken from Aristotle, about the vegetative soul that confers nutrition and growth to all living beings and the sensitive soul responsible for the specific capabilities of animals. Although these proposals seem abstract and remote at first sight, they can be reconciled to a certain extent with modern biology, and particularly with DNA, the bearer of ‘genetic information’. For Ibn Tufayl, a soul, be it vegetative or sensitive, is an object that occupies space, and its activity is to confer ‘form’ to the amorphous substances that go into the composition of its bearer. DNA is also an object, with defined shape and composition, and the carrier of the information needed for plants and animals to acquire their form during development and establish their capabilities throughout life. It is noteworthy that we derive ‘genetic information’ from the word used by Aristotle and his followers, μoρϕη (‘morphe’) in Greek and ‘forma’ in Latin. The souls, be they the concepts of Ibn Tufayl or modern genetic information, have something in common, for general properties, and something distinctive for each species. Of course nobody could have guessed that each animal or plant is a large population of coordinated living beings, the cells, each with its own ‘soul’.
When confronted with a problem that can be studied in several subjects, Hayy chooses the simplest. Thus, he gives particular attention to water, which he considers the simplest of the four elements. The changes admitted by a certain amount of water, not only in shape, but its conversion to a solid or a vapour, help Ibn Tufayl clarify the concepts of matter and form. The recommendation to concentrate on what now is called ‘a simple model system’ has been particularly useful when viruses were taken up in the 20th century for the study of reproduction and inheritance. The generation of animals, however, does not attract the attention of Hayy, although it had been a major theme of Aristotle as a zoologist and was a central subject for Averroes, who even wrote a treatise on fecundation and semen.
Hayy is said to be very intelligent, and the text contains many instances of brilliant argumentation, which however are not always faultless. He reasons, from good observations, that the Universe must be spherical. I do not know the shape of the Universe, but I know that he did not know either. He concludes that infinite bodies do not exist from an argument on whether an infinite set can be larger or smaller than other infinite sets. I admire that he tried this difficult problem, which had to wait another seven centuries for a solution.
Philosophy and mysticism
About half way through life, and through the book, Hayy redirects his interests from the sensible world, which can be apprehended with the senses and reason, to the ‘intelligible world’. Hayy rediscovers the arguments of Aristotle about the Creator and the Prime Mover to arrive at Him Whose Existence is His Essence. Hayy declares himself in possession of an immaterial and eternal soul that allows him to apprehend the Supreme Being, and this makes him superior to animals and plants, but finds himself inferior in quality to the celestial bodies, who apprehend the Supreme Being without having a corruptible, animal body.
Hayy’s decision to emulate the celestial bodies as much as he could makes him an ascetic in the way to mysticism. He cannot give up food completely, because he upholds the principle of self-conservation, but he eats as little as possible, only when he feels weak, and following rules that make him a precursor of ecological ethics: he chooses food having in mind the preservation of animals and plants, and particularly of the rarest ones. He imitates the circular movements of the celestial bodies in the sky by running around his hut or around the island and by turning around himself until he faints. Then he decides to renounce as much as possible of his own body and his senses, and to concentrate on thinking only of the Supreme Being, without eating, moving, or opening his eyes for days on end.
By a long and strenuous effort, Hayy finally arrives at self-effacement in the joy and happiness of the ecstatic vision of the Supreme Being. Ibn Tufayl becomes wordless, and feels forced to use inadequate analogies. The experience is so rewarding that Hayy devotes himself to achieving mystic ecstasies as often and as long as he can.
The process is thus completed. Every step is plausible. We do not have any reason to doubt Hayy’s honesty, that is, Ibn Tufayl’s. Mystics of many different cultures, countries, periods of history, and religious affiliations have described their experiences in similar ways. I know a very capable and successful scientist who devotes a large part of his time to mystic experiences.
The reader is, of course, free to judge some of the arguments faulty and their conclusions unwarranted. Even accepting that mystic ecstasies constitute real experiences, the reader may attribute them to aberrant brain function and not to union with God.
Religion
When Hayy is 50 years old, Asal, a deeply religious man from a neighbouring island, retires as a hermit to Hayy’s island. Their meeting is a momentous experience. Asal teaches Hayy to speak. When they confront their knowledge, it turns out that Hayy has arrived at the same truths that are learned from revelation, but Hayy is more advanced than Asal as a mystic.
With the help of a ship that has gone astray, they go to the inhabited island to preach, but with very little success, and they turn back to their life as hermits when they convince themselves that most people are not interested in knowledge or in transcendence. These are unnecessary to practice a religion that has the useful function of providing cohesion to society.
The two cultures
It is now commonplace to speak of the three cultures that are supposed to have lived and co-operated in a friendly way in medieval Spain. I see very little evidence for this concept. There were no triads of languages, social groups, or political entities. As for religions, most of the inhabitants of the world, now and then, would see Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as a closely-related succession of Bookbelievers, each revelation adding relatively little to a previous one. The Old Testament of Bookbelievers.1 contains about 64% of the total revealed texts of the three religions; the New Testament of Bookbelievers.2 contributes 20% and the Quran of Bookbelievers.3 only 16%. Statistics on adhesion have always been very poor, but Bookbelievers.1 had always a small market share, and now they represent less than 1% of all Bookbelievers, with the others constituting blocks of comparable size. The real alternative is between Non-bookbelievers and Bookdoubters, and Ibn Tufayl provides some interesting glimpses on their situation at the time.
Ibn Tufayl tells us that ‘the few, isolated men who look for truth on the sole strength of reason do communicate but through allegories, because Islam and the law prohibit this study and warn against it’. This statement puts in doubt his strong and repeated acceptance of religion, which would otherwise seem sincere. The book, although rich in pious expressions and crowned by the agreement of reason and revelation, caused Ibn Tufayl serious difficulties, which would have sunk other men of less character and weaker connections. What if his own thought, or that of someone else, would arrive at a contradiction with religious truth? Ibn Tufayl avoids this question, but strongly recommends independent thinking by telling the reader to ‘find out for yourself what I have found out, so that you do not have to tie your knowledge to mine’.
The prologue to the book contains strong quotations from previous philosophers. He says that for Al Farabi human happiness is to be found only in this life and this world, that everything that is said beyond this is dotage and old wives’ tales, and that prophecy is a natural product of imagination, and therefore inferior to philosophy. Ibn Tufayl declares immediately that these opinions are erroneous and socially perverse, because they place good and bad people in the same level, as both would become nothing. This reminds me of reading in my youth in the Spain of Franco expressions such as ‘scoundrels claim that religion is the opium of the people’ from writers who tried to make this forbidden concept pass censorship. Ibn Tufayl states that to understand philosophers one must be very awake and attentive to the slightest allusion.
Ibn Tufayl finds that Al Ghazali contradicts himself from one book to another, but then quotes from him that there are three kinds of opinion: the one given to accommodate to vulgar beliefs; the answer to a question that asks for counsel; and finally the one kept for oneself and given only to people with whom one agrees. Even Hayy places survival before his other activities. Al Ghazali fosters independent thinking when he writes: ‘Even if my words would have no other virtue than to instill doubt in your inherited convictions, it would be enough; because he who does not doubt, does not look; he who does not look, does not see; and he who does not see, remains in blindness and perplexity’. The same idea is fostered even more clearly by Ibn Tufayl.
The Renaissance that was fostered by Ibn Tufayl and his fellow philosophers failed everywhere. In Toledo the Inquisition was active until 1834. It is interesting to compare The Story of Hayy ibn Yaqzan with El Criticón, by Baltasar Gracián. Both begin with a man that has grown up alone in a remote island. But Gracián did not trust him to learn by himself: a storm lands a cultivated man on the island. He teaches the wild one all that there is to know, including religion, and accompanies him in a witty and pessimistic tour of the civilized world. It is unlikely that Gracián knew about the precedent by Ibn Tufayl, which had not been published in any language when El Criticón appeared in the 17th Century.
There were two cultures in the times of the medieval ‘falasifa’, as in ours. The main question was not whether one is a Bookbeliever.1, .2, or .3, and now .4, as well, but whether one is free to guide oneself by reason alone and how much Bookdoubters and Non-bookbelievers had to dissimulate in order to thrive, or just survive.
A final note
The transliteration of Arabic names is chaotic. I have used the form that appears more often in a simple Google search, although this implies mixing Latinized forms with various kinds of alphabetic transcriptions.
Ibn Tufayl is quoted here through the Spanish translation of Ángel González Palencia, first published in Madrid in 1934, republished several times, and available on the Internet. I am indebted to published commentaries, most notably by Miguel Cruz Hernández and Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo.
Enrique Cerdá-Olmedo, born in Guadix (Andalusia, Spain), holds a Spanish doctorate of Engineering and a PhD in Biology from Stanford University and was a Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at the California Institute of Technology and a Humboldt-Stipendiat at Universität Göttingen. He founded the Genetics Department at Universidad de Sevilla, in Seville, Spain. His research has dealt mostly with fundamental and applied aspects of bacterial and fungal biology, with special attention to genetics, sensory responses, and secondary metabolism. He is a member of the Spanish Real Academia de Ingeniería, the Real Academia Sevillana de Ciencias and the European Molecular Biology Organization.
