SUMMARY
The treatise dramatically opens with the spontaneous birth of Hayy in an uninhabitated island, followed by a popular legend about his being thrown to this desolate place by the sister of a certain king, in order to keep her marriage with Yaqzan a secret. Unalloyed by social conventions. he is nourished there by a roe and taught by natural reason or common sense, which, though really very uncommon, equips him with inductive intellect to probe into the secret of things.
Unlike the lower animals, he becomes con¬scious of his being naked and unarmed with physical weapons of defence. He reflects over the situation and covers the lower parts of his body with leaves. arms himself with a stick, and thus comes to realize the superiority of his hands over the feet of animals. The death of the mother-roe leads him to the discovery of the animal soul which uses the body as an instrument, like the stick in his hands, shares light and warmth with fire, and thus bears resemblance to the heavenly bodies.
He then turns to the analysis of the phenomena of nature, compares the objects around him, and discriminates between them, and classifies them into minerals, plants, and animals. Observation shows him that body is a common factor in all the objects, but they belong to different classes because of the functions peculiar to them. This leads him to assume a specific form or soul for each class of objects.
But the soul being imperceptible, his dialectical ingenuity at last brings him to the idea of an ultimate, eternal, incorporeal, and necessary Being which is the efficient cause of the peculiar behaviour of bodies. This makes him conscious of his own immaterial essence; and acting upon a three-point code of ascetic discipline which will be explained later, he is finally absorbed in the unrestrained contemplation of the Ultimate Being.
At this stage, Asal, a contemplative and meditative soul, from the neigh¬bouring inhabited island appears on the scene in quest of attaining perfection in solitude. He informs Hayy, the child of nature, about the Qur'anic con¬ceptions of God, His angels, prophets, the Day of Judgment, etc., which he by his self-developed intellect immediately recognizes as truths. He, however, in the first instance, fails to see the wisdom implicit in the figurative languages of the Qur'an about God and the hereafter, and in the permission that it gives one to lead a worldly life - -a permission which is likely to turn one away from the truth.
Full of ambition and hope, he sets out in the company of Asal to the said inhabited island ruled by Salaman and begins to reform its convention-ridden people. He endeavours hard to enlighten the masses through pure concepts, but, in the end, finds these concepts far above their heads. He then realizes the wisdom of the Prophet in giving them sensuous forms instead of full light, returns to his lonely island, and is absorbed in contemplation.
SOURCES
Hayy Bin Yaqzan is a unique creation of Ibn Tufail's mystico¬-philosophical thought. Nevertheless, the idea of this romance is not entirely new. Ibn Sina (d. 428/1037), among his predecessors, had written a mystic allegory of the same title. But the comparison ends here. Ibn Sina's dramatized tale narrates how one day he, with a few companions, went out for a ramble in the vicinity of a town and chanced to meet an old man, Hayy bin Yaqzan, and requested him to be permitted to accompany him is his unending journeys. But the old man replied that that was not possible for Ibn Sina, because of his companions whom he could not leave.
In this allegory Ibn Sina himself represents the rational soul, the companions the various senses, and the old man, Hayy bin Yaqzan, the active intellect.13 “With Ibn Sina,” thus, “the character of Hai [Hayy] represents the Superhuman Spirit, but the hero of Ibn Tofail's romance seems to be the personification of the natural spirit of Mankind illuminated from above; and that Spirit must be in accordance with the Soul of Muhammed when rightly understood, whose utterances are to be interpreted allegorically.”14
Similarly, the names of Salaman and Asal, the other two characters of Ibn Tufail's romance, are not new in the philosophical literature. These, too, have been borrowed from Ibn Sina's tale of Salaman wa Absal, of which we know only through Tusi's paraphrase in his commentary on Isharat.
The story relates how Absal, the younger brother of Salaman, was obliged to proceed to war in order to avoid the immoral designs of the latter's wife, but was deserted by the army through her machinations and his wounded body was carried away by a gazelle to a place of safety. On returning home, he raised a strong army and regained the lost kingdom for Salaman, whose wife becoming desperate poisoned him to death.
The sorrow-stricken Salaman lost heart and became a hermit. A mystic trance, at last, revealed to him that his own wife was the cause of the catastrophe, and he killed her and all her accomplices.15 Salaman, in this tale, represents the rational soul, Absal the theoretical reason, and Salaman's wife, the passion-worshipping body.
Notwithstanding the similarity of names and the episode of the gazelle, the basic theme of both the treatises is intrinsically different. With Ibn Sina the main object is to show how personal afflictions (he himself was a prisoner in the dungeon of a fortress while writing the allegory) invoke divine grace and cause the purification of the soul but the object of Ibn Tufail is nothing less than to dramatize the development of theoretical reason from the gross sense-perception to the beatific vision of God.16
By far the most marked, deep, and saturating influence, which seems to have coloured the basic structure of Ibn Tufail's romance, is that of Ibn Bajjah, his arch-rationalist predecessor. His lonely, metaphysically minded Hayy is only an extreme form of the “solitary man” of Ibn Bajjah's Tadbir al-Mutawahhid. Nevertheless, in spite of his recognition of the necessity of solitude for the improvement of theoretical reason, Ibn Tufail feels rather unhappy over Ibn Bajjah's one-sided emphasis on the role of reason in arriving at the ultimate truth. Somewhat sympathetically he complains of the “incompleteness” of Ibn Bajjah's Tadbir al-Mutawahhid.17
It is to the desire of removing this incom¬pleteness that Ibn Tufail's Hayy Bin Yaqzan owes its origin. And it is the influence of Ghazali (d. 505/1111) and perhaps also of Suhrawardi Maqtul, his Persian contemporary that made him supplement reason with ecstasy in its flight to the celestial world.
Of Hayy's birth in an uninhabited island, Ibn Tufail relates two versions. The scientific version of his spontaneous birth, he owes entirely to Ibn Sina.18 The legendary version is traced by Gracia Gomez (“Comparative Study of Ibn Tufail and Baltazar Gracian,” Madrid, 1926) to Dhu al-Qarnain wa Qissat al-Sanam w-al-Malak we Bintuhu, a Greek tale translated into Arabic by Hunain ibn Ishaq.
The tale narrates how, under royal displeasure, the daughter of a king threw away her natural daughter from the son of her father's vizier, in the sea, the surging waves of which landed her in an uninhabited island where she was nourished by a roe. She grew up into a beautiful damsel; later, Alexander the Great chanced to meet her in the island of Oreon.19
That the life of Hayy resembles that of the damsel in its initial stages, there can be no doubt, but the resemblance ends there. Besides, the aforesaid Greek tale does not seem to be the only source of this legend. Badi' al-Zaman Foruzanfar has lately traced the threads of the fable to the Persian tale of Musa-o Dara-o Nimrud.20
The romantic frame of Hayy Bin Yaqzan is by no means original. It is of Alexandrian origin; it may have even a Persian strain. Nevertheless, it is Ibn Tufail who changes a simple tale into a romance of a unique philosophical significance. It is the philosophical acumen rather than the poetic imagination that marks the treatise with novelty and makes it to be “one of the most original books of the Middle Ages.”21
OBJECT OF THE TREATISE
As al-Marrakushi, the historian, has said, Hayy Bin Yaqzan is a treatise which aims at giving a scientific explanation of the be¬ginning of human life on earth.22 As a prelude to the story of Hayy Bin Yaqzan, it is related that the moderate climate of the uninhabited island, coupled with a fair proportion of the elements, led to the spontaneous birth of the first man, who found the stick a successful weapon in the struggle for existence, and thereby got the conviction of his own superiority over other animals. But actually this beginning is meant merely to provide a background for showing the development of inductive intellect, independently of any social influence whatsoever.
Contradicting al-Marrakushi's position, but in complete agreement with de Boer, Dr. Muhammad Ghallab23 rightly contends that the treatise essen¬tially aims at showing that the individual man left to himself is able, with the resources of nature alone and without any help from society, to advance to and reach the ultimate truth, provided he has the necessary aptitude for doing so.
The truth of the Qur'an and the Hadith is open to pure intellectual apprehension, but it has to be guarded against the illiterate masses whose business it is not to think but to believe and obey. In fact, this view is an echo of Ibn Bajjah's position, which later came to be regarded as the proper official attitude under the Muwahhids.
Muhammad Yunus Farangi Mahalli24 points to a still higher aim implicit in the treatise. Religion is as much essential for a progressive society as are philosophy and mysticism - a thesis which is brilliantly exemplified by the co-operation of the three dramatic characters: Hayy, the philosopher; Asal, the mystic; and Salaman, the theologian. The underlying aim is not only to show that philosophy is at one with religion properly understood, but that both the exoteric and the esoteric aspects of religion and philosophy are expressions of the same eternal truth revealed to individuals according to their intellectual capabilities.
Philosophically speaking, the treatise is a brilliant exposition of Ibn Tufail's theory of knowledge, which seeks to harmonize Aristotle with the Neo-¬Platonists on the one hand, and al-Ghazali with Ibn Bajjah on the other. Al-Ghazali was dogmatically critical of Aristotelian rationalism, but Ibn Bajjah was Aristotelian through and through. Ibn Tufail, following the middle course, bridged the gulf between the two.
As a rationalist he sides with Ibn Bajjah against al-Ghazali and qualifies mysticism with rationalism; as a mystic he sides with al-Ghazali against Ibn Bajjah and qualifies rationalism with mysticism. Ecstasy is the highest form of knowledge, but the path leading to such knowledge is paved with the improvement of reason, followed by the purification of the soul through ascetic practices.
The methods of al-Ghazali and Ibn Tufail are both partially the same, but, unlike the former, the latter's ecstasy is marked by a Neo-Platonic strain. Al-Ghazali, true to his theologico-mystical position, takes ecstasy as the means to see God, but to Ibn Tufail, the philosopher, the beatific vision reveals the active intellect and the Neo-Platonic chain of causes reaching down to the elements and back to itself.
Of Ibn Tufail's works only Hayy Bin Yaqzan is extant today. It is a short philosophical romance, but so great has been its influence on the succeeding generations in the West that it has come to be recognized as “one of the most remarkable books of the Middle Ages.”40 In spirit, says Leon Gauthier, it resembles Arabian Nights; in method it is both philosophical and mystical.41
It combines pleasure with truth by calling imagination and intuition to the help of reason, and it is this peculiar appeal that has made it an embodiment of imperishable lustre and eternal freshness, and has caused its numerous editions and translations into Hebrew, Latin, English, Dutch, French, Spanish, German, and Russian.42 Even today, the world's interest in it has not ceased. Ahmad Amin's recent critical Arabic edition (1371/1952), followed by its translations into Persian and Urdu within the same decade, go far enough to prove that it has no less a hold over the modem world than it had over the medieval world.43
The treatise caught the attention of the Quakers,44 and George Kieth, finding in it a support for “enthusiastic notions”45 of the Society of Friends, translated it into English in 1085/1674. So tremendous and alarming was its influence or what Simon Ockley calls “bad use,” that he was obliged to devote a thirty-six-page appendix to his English version of the booklet (1120/1708), in order to refute Ibn Tufail's thesis that the individual man, left to his a priori inner light, can arrive at the ultimate truth.46
A Spanish writer, Gracian Baltasar's indebtedness to Ibn Tufail occupied the world's attention during the first four decades of the present century. According to L. Gauthier, the early life of Andrenio, the hero of Gracian Baltasar's El Criticon (Saragossa, 1062/1651), is a “manifest” and “undeniable imitation” of Hayy's legendary version of birth.47 But G. Gomez, the Spanish critic, claims that the El Criticon is nearer to the Greek tale of Dhu al-Qarnain wa Qissat al-Sanam w-al-Malak wa Bintuhu, referred to earlier, than to the Hayy Bin Yaqzan.48
D. K. Petrof, the Russian Orientalist, too holds that Gracian Baltasar is an exception to Ibn Tufail's influence.49 But L. Gauthier, in his latest version of the treatise (Beirut, 1355/1936), contradicts the position of Gomez and Petrof, and concludes that Gracian Baltasar is indebted to the Greek Qissat al-Sanam indirectly through the Hayy Bin Yaqzan of Ibn Tufail.50
The influence of the romantic frame of the treatise is also visible in Menedez Pelyo, Pou,51 Saif Bin dhi Yazan, and Tarzan.52 Even the Robinson Crusoe (1132/1719) of Daniel Defoe is no exception to its pervading influence, as proved by A. R. Pastor in his Idea of Robinson Crusoe.53
Of Ibn Tufail's pupils Abu Ishaq al-Bitruji and Abu al-Walid ibn Rushd stand far above the rest. He maintained his leadership in the sphere of astron¬omy through al-Bitruji54 whose theory of “spiral motion” (harkat laulabi) marks the “culmination of the Muslim anti-Ptolemic movement.”55 In philoso¬phy and medicine he dominated the scene in the person of Ibn Rushd,56 whose rationalism “ran like wild fire in the schools of Europe” and ruled their minds for no less than three centuries.
Jumat, 04 Oktober 2024