IBN TUFAYL, ABü BAKR MUHAMMAD

(Latin, Abubacer )

(b. Guadix, Spain, before 1110; d. Marrakesh, Morocco, 1185)

medicine, philosophy.

Ibn Tufayl was a Spanish Muslim who received a broad education in the religion of Islam and the Arabic secular sciences. His professional career was that of a physician, first at Granada, Ceuta, and Tangier, and later (1163–1182) as court physician to the Almohad sultan of Morocco and Andalusia. He introduced Ibn Rushd to the sultan (ca. 1169) and commissioned him to write his commentaries on the works of Aristotle.

Ibn Tufayl is best known for his philosophical book Hayy ibn Yaqz?n (“The Living, Son of the Wakeful”). After a valuable introduction surveying the rise of philosophy in western Islam, the author presents Neoplatonic philosophy in the form of a myth. Hayy is a boy born on a desert island and reared by a doe. As he grows up he teaches himself, entirely by his own observation and reasoning, some practical arts and the rudiments of the empirical sciences. In his adult life he proceeds by reasoning and intuition to an understanding of metaphysics and theology and to an ascetic practice, all of which culminate in mystical visions by his intellect of God, the Necessary Being and Cause of the world. In later experiences he converses with a devout Muslim, and they agree that there is no difference in doctrine between Hayy’s philosophy and the revealed religion of Islam, but that it is useless to teach philosophy to most people, for whom only the simplest practice of Islam is helpful.

The main aims of the myth appear to be to show (1) that the Neoplatonic philosophy is that which a rational man, undistracted by social interests or prejudices, will naturally arrive at, and (2) that the practice implied in this philosophy leads to the supreme happiness for man, which is the mystical state of the soul. In details Ibn Tufayl generally follows Ibn S?n?, but there are some differences. For example, Ibn Tufayl thinks it unproved that the world is eternal rather than created in time, and holds that intelligibles are abstracted by the human intellect, not presented to it by an external Active Intellect.

Hayy ibn Yaqzän has always been widely read in Arabic, and appeared in several European translations from 1671 onward; it probably influenced Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1717).

Another work by Ibn Tufayl, Rajaz taw?l f?lit al-tibb (“Long Poem in Rajaz Meter onMedical Science”), was discovered recently in manuscript at Rabat. He is also known to have influenced his pupil al-Bitr? j? to abandon the Ptolemaic astronomy of eccentrics and epicycles in favor of a more Aristotelian system, but no astronomical writings by the master have survived.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Texts of Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqz?n include the French ed. and trans. of L. Gautheir (2nd ed., Beirut, 1936); that of Ahmad Am?n (Cairo, 1952); a partial English trans. by G. N. Atiyeh, in R. Lerner and M. Mahdi, Medieval Political Philosophy (Chicago, 1963), 134 – 162, and an English trans., intro., and notes by L. Goodman, Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqz?n (New York, 1971).

For studies of Ibn Tufayl and his work, see M. Cruz Hernandez, Historia de la filosofia Hispano-musulmana, I (Madrid, 1957), ch. 11; L. Gauthier, Ibn Thofa?l, sa vie, ses oeuvres (Paris, 1909); A.-M. Goichon, “Hayy b. Yakz?n,” and B. Carra de Vaux, “Ibn Tufayl,” both in Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed. (Leiden, 1960 – ), III: G. F. Hourani, “The Principal Subject of Ibn Tufayl’s Havy b. Yaqz?n,” in Journal of Near Eastern Studies. 15 (1956), 40 – 46: A. Pastor, The Idea of Robinson Crusoe (Watford, 1930); T. Sarnelli, “Primauté de Cordoue dans la médecine arabe d’Occident,” in Actas del Primer Congreso de Estudios Arabes y Islamicos (Madrid, 1964), 441 – 451, describing the medical poem; and S. S. Hawi, Islamic Naturalism and Mysticism, a Philosophic Study of Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqz?n (Leiden, 1974).

George F. Hourani