European Journal of Political Theory
2016, Vol. 15(4) 382–403
! The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885116666032
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EJPT
Article
Producing Islamic
philosophy: The life and
afterlives of Ibn T
:
ufayl’s
H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
a¯n in global
history, 1882–1947
Murad Idris
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA
Abstract
In recent decades, the trope that classical Muslim thinkers anticipated or influenced
modern European thought has provided an easy endorsement of their contemporary
relevance. This article studies how Arab editors and intellectuals, from 1882 to 1947,
understood the twelfth-century Andalusian philosopher Ibn T
_
ufayl, and Arabo-Islamic
philosophy generally. This modern generation of Arab scholars also attached significance
to classical Arabic texts as precursors to modern European thought. They invited
readers to retrospectively identify with Ibn T
_
ufayl and his treatise, H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
a
¯
n.
Comparisons of Ibn T
_
ufayl to European thinkers, and re-presentations of H
_
ayy ibn
Yaqz
_
a
¯
n as the precedent or genesis of European thought, facilitated these editors’
global imaginaries, anti-colonial projects and political fantasies. This article tracks
these projects and fantasies through the afterlife of H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
a
¯
n from early printings
and generalist surveys to later editions and studies, as Ibn T
_
ufayl’s significance became
sutured into his imagined importance for Europe, and for going beyond Europe.
Keywords
Ibn Tufayl, H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
a¯n, reception history, editions, modern Arab thought, Islamic
philosophy, imperialism, anti-colonialism, Easternism, Orientalism
Editing falsafa, writing empire
In recent decades, the trope that classical Muslim thinkers anticipated or influenced
modern European thought has provided an easy endorsement of their relevance to
the global humanities. This trope has an important but neglected precedent: late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonised Arab scholars also attached
Corresponding author:
Murad Idris, University of Virginia, P.O. Box 400787, Charlottesville, VA 22903-1738, USA.
Email: [email protected]
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significance to classical Arabic texts and to their European translations as precur-
sors to modern European thought. One such text is the Andalusian philosopher Ibn
T
_
ufayl’s (d. 1185) allegory Ris
alat H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an, which narrates the life of H
_
ayy
ibn Yaqz
_
an (lit., ‘Living, son of Awakened’) on an island, how he attains know-
ledge of God and the universe, then fails to disseminate it. For these writers, Ibn
T
_
ufayl became the Arabo-Muslim herald of European modernity. Why did these
scholars identify with a twelfth-century text of falsafa (Hellenised Arabic/
Islamicate philosophy), and why did they keep repeating the claim that it influ-
enced European development?
This article studies how Ibn T
_
ufayl was selectively written into the canon of
Arabo-Islamic thought by Arab editors and intellectuals, from 1882 to 1947. With
a handful of exceptions (Elshakry, 2014; El Shamsy, 2016; Massad, 2007; Salama,
2011), the modern Arab reinvention of an ‘Arabo-Islamic intellectual tradition’
remains understudied terrain. Such thinkers creatively misappropriated what
they took as their past, constructing a classical tradition and its sources as civilisa-
tional documents. When they studied H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an, they navigated the terrain
of European empire and reflected on their colonial and post-colonial contexts.
They confronted Europeans’ access to the text since its 1671 Latin translation by
Edward Pococke, and the historical and geopolitical implications of its trans-
national itinerary.
H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an’s reception history in Europe formed the backdrop of its
reception by modern Arab scholars and their production of falsafa as their intel-
lectual past. This article, then, does not narrate ‘Islamic philosophy’, neither in the
relationship of the philosopher Ibn T
_
ufayl to other fal
asifa like the formatively
influential Ibn Sın
a (Avicenna; d. 1037) nor in its (real or exaggerated) impact on
European thinkers, so much as to show how Arab scholars produced this very
narrative for consumption by a (post-)colonial Arab audience. If Arab heritage
(tur
ath), comprising civilisational documents ‘said to have been passed down from
the Arabs of the past to the Arabs of the present’, is ‘in a sense a time traveller’
(Massad, 2007: 17; see also Gubara, 2012: 335), modern Arab scholars of the
classics were the technicians of the time machine. They invited readers to retro-
spectively identify with H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an, to displace cultural pride and anxiety
onto the text’s Andalusian matrix (Gutas, 1994; Hughes, 2003) and its reception in
Europe (Hasanali, 1995: 276–356; see also Conrad, 1996: 275–284). To adapt
George F Hourani’s (1956: 40) question about the allegory, ‘What is this book
primarily about?’ we might ask: What has been facilitated by making this book
about modern Europe, about an ‘Islamic philosophical heritage’, and about how
the colonised engendered or anticipated the coloniser’s modernity? What projects
and global imaginaries were served in such re-presentations of H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an?
I examine the social afterlives of Ibn T
_
ufayl’s H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an through para-
texts – that is titles, editorial notes, introductions and commentaries. I argue that
the authors of these paratexts insist upon H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an’s centrality to an
Arabo-Islamic tradition in an ambivalent, anxious fashion. According to these
paratexts, H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an is part of a heritage worthy of recovery; however,
they locate its value in transcending this identity, in its participation in or
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contribution to European ideas or liberal universalism. Ibn T
_
ufayl’s place in an
Arabo-Islamic tradition was thus sutured into his imagined importance for Europe.
With this ambivalence, Ibn T
_
ufayl emerges as an object of admiration and guid-
ance, through whom the colonised could claim ownership over their colonisers.
Modern editors often directed readers to find value in the text as Europe’s prede-
cessor, as prefiguring trends in modern European thought or as having enabled or
even caused them. Ibn T
_
ufayl was their ancestral avatar, European thinkers infer-
ior or derivative. Comparisons of Ibn T
_
ufayl to European thinkers facilitated two
fantasies against their colonisers: a fantasy of cultural superiority and a fantasy of
historical genesis. And yet, the paratexts’ perceived superiority, like their claims
about Ibn T
_
ufayl having come up with modern European ideas first, reinscribes the
political dominance of the coloniser, with their modernist liberal idioms and a
teleology of Eurocentric intellectual development.
However, the editors also imagine a different configuration of Arab and global
power. At brief moments where the paratexts exceed their disciplinary sensibilities
– recontextualising Ibn T
_
ufayl in terms of world-historical power rather than the
life of the author, or approaching H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an as object of contemporary
critique rather than of antiquarian interest or historical guidance – they go
beyond Europe. These moments lay bare how adopting a past can enable innov-
ation (Jenco, 2014), and how refusing the terms upon which the coloniser adopts
and reads the colonised’s ‘tradition’ facilitates imagining alternative futures and
anti-imperial geographies.
The next section briefly outlines discussions of Ibn T
_
ufayl’s influence and offers
a defence of paratexts as sources and sites of political theory. I then study the
reinvention of falsafa through H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an’s paratexts chronologically, from
how three early printings and a popular historical survey situated Ibn T
_
ufayl in
relation to Ibn Sın
a and Europe, to the comparisons, disciplinary conventions and
problems of authorial intent and contextualisation in later editions and studies.
The editors’ claims about Ibn T
_
ufayl’s importance for falsafa are pegged, on one
hand, to their increasing insistence upon his superiority, precedence or genesis of
Europe, and on the other hand, to the alternative worlds they imagine, beyond
Europe.
Ibn T
_
ufayl, whose past?
Texts by a number of fal
asifa were read in Latin Europe since the twelfth century; it
is well established that Aquinas, for example, adapted Latinised versions of Ibn
Sın
a’s and Ibn Rushd’s (Averroe
¨
s; d. 1198) metaphysics. H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an’s rich
history of European translations, editions and commentaries is comparatively
shorter. Its availability starting in seventeenth-century Europe is well documented
and has led to ‘interesting speculation’ (Toomer, 1996: 222) about whether it
‘influenced’ John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding and European
liberalism (Russell, 1994; Attar, 2007; Ben-Zaken, 2011). Some provocatively, if
tenuously, assert this ‘influence’ exists ‘without a doubt’ and that Locke’s theories
of toleration – and Spinoza’s – were actually formulated by Ibn T
_
ufayl, together
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with modern understandings of empiricism, human nature, the individual and
multiculturalism (Attar, 2007: 50–54). A related hypothesis holds that Daniel
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is inspired by H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an (see Pastor, 1930).
These theses of precedence, influence or ‘cross-cultural exchange’ have their own
precedent in the Nahd
_
a (the self-described ‘renaissance’ of the late nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century colonised Near East). Arab scholars in Cairo, Beirut and
Damascus, often with institutional links to their teachers and counterparts in
France, Germany and England, revisited the history of the sciences and humanities
in the Near East, translated European knowledge and studied medieval Arabic
texts, with an eye toward explaining or remedying their perceived inferiority rela-
tive to Europe. Numerous editions of Ibn T
_
ufayl’s text appeared during and after
this period.
1
The text’s European afterlife is thus fraught, not only because Andalusia had
been part of Muslim Spain. Reading Ibn T
_
ufayl’s impact on liberalism would seem
to write Arabo-Islamic thought back into European history, as Europe’s constitu-
tive but disavowed past. It might highlight how Islam has figured in the formation
of early modern European identities (Matar, 1998) or as Europe’s ‘Muslim
Question’ (Norton, 2013) or liberalism’s constitutive outside (Massad, 2015). But
to locate Ibn T
_
ufayl’s value as pre-history to modern European liberal thought, in
whether Europeans appreciated his ideas and whether his ideas can be read as
agreeing with them, pleads for his significance with Europe as zenith and standard.
Although Ibn T
_
ufayl’s concepts and arguments, if decontextualised, can mirror
modern European ideas (e.g. of individualist autonomy), to search for or transpose
(proto-)liberal understandings of individualism and autonomy onto H
_
ayy ibn
Yaqz
_
an privileges resonance with the dominant lexicon (Jenco, 2007) and
entrenches Europe as ‘absent model’ (Euben, 2006: 57–58).
I turn to paratexts to provide a genealogy of the reinvention of Ibn T
_
ufayl. The
study of commentaries – one kind of paratext – is common in related fields, like
Aristotle’s multilingual reception (Burnett, 1993), Greek thought in Arabic
(Gutas, 1998) or Confucian interpretation (Makeham, 2003). Although such
sources are peripheral in political theory, theorists are no strangers to them,
when studying an author’s editions and frontispieces (Baumgold, 2008;
Springborg, 1995) or transnational reception histories (Bayly, 2010; Botting and
Kronewitter, 2012).
Modern paratexts, as discursive and political artefacts, can show how historical
texts coded today as ‘non-European’ are entangled with problems of identity and
empire; texts exceed their original matrix, to inhabit other worlds and contexts.
Standing before and after the text, paratexts constellate its meanings and value, by
and for a specific audience. Like a preface, their ‘chief function [is] to ensure that
the text is read properly’ (Genette, 1997: 197): that is, they direct readers toward a
specific reading of the text. They train and discipline readers to produce the
‘proper’ reading, framing the text’s place in history and the present; their selective
emphasis, and what they exclude as ‘unlikely’ or ‘unthinkable’, can imply what it is
to read a text improperly. Their descriptions, telegraphic labels and presentation
can emblematise the ideological commitments that an editor may bring to the text.
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Here, paratexts offer a view into the afterlife of an Arabo-Islamic archive, its dis-
cursive and material production, how it was reconfigured and why some editors
studied Ibn T
_
ufayl.
2
In sum, by turning to paratexts as political artefacts, this article makes subsid-
iary interventions about sources. First, it troubles the way that comparative polit-
ical theory is usually defined in terms of cultural/civilisational foreignness; modern
Arab editors who claimed ‘Arabic’ or ‘Islamic’ thought as their tradition had to
convert H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an into their civilisational document while navigating its
disciplinary foreignness and transnational history. Second, paratexts index the
changing identities and traditions to which thinkers are retroactively made to
belong. Finally, against invocations of ‘cross-cultural’ analysis that take their
objects of study for granted and neglect asymmetry and power, modern paratexts
reflect the geopolitical concerns that guide the construction or reinventions of a
‘tradition’.
How falsafa became an ‘Arabo-Islamic tradition’ in the modern Near East is a
question of the production and consumption of today’s ‘non-Western traditions’.
3
Ibn T
_
ufayl and his reception history disrupt these designations (Western/non-
Western/Arabo-Islamic). Arab writers canonised him by acting as if he was their
past, and Europe’s past. These writers agreed that Ibn T
_
ufayl was germinal for—if
not the origin of—European thought. Their remarkable claim is akin to a thesis
that Jenco (2014) examines, about ‘Chinese origins of Western knowledge’. Posing
native origins for putatively foreign pasts and knowledges, she argues, can make
these bodies of thought constitutively transformative; they might discipline our
thought, reconstitute existing practices and inspire, incense or chasten. Early twen-
tieth-century Arabic readings of Ibn T
_
ufayl, as a Western-Islamic past, parallel the
China-origins thesis and its potential. They also show how origins theses operate
differently in contexts marked by power inequalities and colonialism. The Ibn
T
_
ufayl-origins thesis reinscribed the contours of European empire and disciplined
Arab readers into awe at the monumental.
4
The paratexts’ critical political work
lay elsewhere: they carved out space for bracketing Europe, for mapping alternate
geographies and for counterintuitively refusing this past.
Ibn Sı¯na
¯
and/or Europe (1882–1927)
Ibn T
_
ufayl begins H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an in response to a request for the essence of Ibn
Sın
a’s ‘Eastern’/’Oriental’ philosophy – the reason that it was sometimes called The
Secrets of Eastern Wisdom. Ibn T
_
ufayl declares that he will present this philosophy,
and after a critical survey of philosophical opinions about revelation and know-
ledge of God, he offers an allegory about H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an, Abs
al and Sal
am
an,
characters whose names he draws from two of Ibn Sın
a’s allegories.
H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an, Ibn T
_
ufayl says (1936: 20–30), was either spontaneously
generated (alluding to Adam) or was left in an ark by his mother (like Moses).
The two origins converge: on an uninhabited island, a gazelle finds H
_
ayy as an
infant and raises him (26). Upon her death, he dissects her in order to remove the
cause of her immobility. While probing her heart, H
_
ayy determines that her soul
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departed (38–45), initiating his contemplation of existence and God (47–118). He
learns to scorn corporeality and its passions, until he becomes capable of beholding
God by the age of 50. Fearing for his soul if he should die whilst not in this state,
H
_
ayy makes every effort to elongate that rapturous ecstasy (119–135). A devout
esotericist named Abs
al lived on a nearby island and was a friend of its leader, the
devout exotericist Sal
am
an. One day, Abs
al leaves his island in pursuit of seclusion,
but is shipwrecked on the island where H
_
ayy, who had never met another human,
was living. Abs
al teaches H
_
ayy language, and H
_
ayy imparts philosophical wisdom
to Abs
al. They find that Abs
al’s religion is a lesser image of the pure truth that
H
_
ayy had discovered through contemplation (136–147). The two visit Abs
al’s
island, in order to educate its inhabitants. Once there, the people flock to H
_
ayy,
but he thinks they misuse the tools of logic; as he incessantly preaches at them, their
initial awe toward H
_
ayy turns into bitterness that they conceal on account of
H
_
ayy’s foreignness and their friendship with Abs
al (147–152). H
_
ayy becomes con-
vinced that the majority of people are like irrational animals. He apologises for all
he said, affirms the islanders’ teachings and returns with Abs
al to his island; the two
worship together, until they die (153–155).
The paratexts of three early, Cairene printings of this treatise, from March 1882,
June 1882 and 1909, are fairly sparse, but they emphasise Ibn T
_
ufayl’s opening
sentences about Ibn Sın
a. Each printing was based on the one immediately prior.
They share the same title, identifying the text as Ibn T
_
ufayl’s extraction of the
essence of Ibn Sın
a’s philosophy; they present as matter-of-fact Ibn T
_
ufayl’s claim
that he reveals the secrets of Ibn Sın
a’s ‘Eastern’ philosophy – a contentious claim
at best (Gutas, 1994: 230–234; Idris, 2011). These printings’ paratexts imply that
Ibn T
_
ufayl should be read because he invokes Ibn Sın
a. They blur the boundaries
between the two philosophers, reading Ibn T
_
ufayl as Ibn Sın
a (as Ibn T
_
ufayl
requests).
An editorial note in the two 1882 printings informs readers of Ibn Sın
a’s text by
the same title: ‘Ibn Khallik
an [d. 1282] mentioned in his biography of Ibn Sın
a that
this treatise [his H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an] is among his works, and perhaps it is in Persian,
and its copyist translated it’ (1882a: 60; 1882b: 41). The March printing repeats that
the text contains the ideas of Ibn Sın
a; the June printing praises the treatise’s
eloquence and wonders. The 1909 printing combines its predecessors’ inclinations.
In a postscript, it informs (1909: 78) the reader that what they will have just read is
innovative, strange, useful, critical and brilliant. Its title page guides the ‘interested’
reader to Ibn Sın
a’s biography (rather than Ibn T
_
ufayl’s) in classical sources; Ibn
Sın
a’s life stands in for Ibn T
_
ufayl’s, while the modern reader of Ibn T
_
ufayl, it
suggests, is or should be interested in Ibn Sın
a. The three printings situate Ibn
T
_
ufayl in a history of Arabo-Islamic knowledge-production. They single out his
brilliance and associate his name with a famous thinker, in the manner Ibn T
_
ufayl’s
introduction invites. Their shared insistence on the text’s excellence encourages
antiquarian admiration and esteem, not only toward H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an, but
toward the tradition that these brief notes enact for the modern reader.
Unlike later editions, these printings make no reference to Europe. The medieval
Arabic philosophical tradition, however, was often constructed in ambivalent
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relation to Europe and modern Arabs. While readers are implored to feel wonder,
it is under the shadow of Europe. In 1905, the journal al-Muqt
_
ataf presented Ibn
T
_
ufayl in an offhand reference as one of the very select few ‘Arab philosophers’. As
Marwa Elshakry (2014) demonstrates, this modernist journal was an organ of
knowledge-production and social commentary through which Arab intellectuals
navigated European sciences, Islamic knowledges and modern Arab identity. In
the final forum section of the June 1905 issue, a letter from Athan
asiy
us Kalıla, a
deacon in Damascus and future metropolitan, asked (1905: 491) about ‘The
Philosophers of the Arabs and the Westerners [al-Ifranj]’: ‘Who among them are
the most famous authors, Arabs especially, and Westerners more generally?’ The
journal’s response is striking in its brevity and definitive tone. It only lists seven
Arab philosophers: ‘The most famous Arab philosophers from the Mashriq are al-
Kindı, al-F
ar
abı, Ibn Sın
a and al-Ghaz
alı; and from the Maghrib, they are Ibn
B
ajja, Ibn T
_
ufayl and Ibn Rushd. As for the Westerners’, it asserts, ‘well, their
philosophers are innumerable’. The response names 17 European thinkers, includ-
ing Hamilton, Hobbes, Hume, Locke, Descartes, Mill and James, whom, it says,
are only ‘among the most famous’ (491). It is silent about any disjunctures between
the Arab fal
asifa’s projects and those of al-Ifranj, let alone about less ‘famous’
fal
asifa, what fame metonymises, who assesses it and the civilisational anxieties and
aspirations staged by the comparison.
The response draws upon Orientalist premises about a stagnant Orient as
opposed to a developing, dynamic Europe. The lists’ comparative lengths and
distinct time periods are blatant. European and American philosophers are more
than double the number of Arabs. Arab philosophy is quarantined to the medieval,
while al-Ifranj stretch into the present. This is a basic Orientalist story emblema-
tised by Ernest Renan (1823–1892): intellectual history ‘in Islam’ dies with Ibn
Rushd (d. 1198). It is a story in which the important Muslim philosophers are
those who were read by or influenced European philosophy, and who were then
said to have paved the way for Europe. The death of philosophy in Islam, in this
story, is inextricably linked to Orientalist fantasies about an ‘Islam’ hostile to
reason, in which such thinkers had to fight against the tide, seek the patronage
of the powerful and conceal their teachings, either to protect themselves or to
protect the Muslim masses from philosophical truths that would result in disorder.
Ibn T
_
ufayl is narrated in this tradition-as-list, which was never just a list.
Al-Muqt
_
ataf’s seven philosophers reappear with five more in Muh
_
ammad Lut
_
f ı
Jum6a’s (1886–1953) 300-page popular survey of falsafa, The History of Islam’s
Philosophers in the Mashriq and the Maghrib (1927).
5
Jum6a was an Egyptian liberal
political commentator, anti-imperial activist, lawyer, writer and translator (al-
T
_
am
awı, 1993). Alongside his literary works (see Selim, 2013), he translated
Machiavelli’s The Prince, excerpts about Napoleon, three Egyptian, Persian and
Japanese texts as Eastern Wisdom (or Oriental Wisdom) and Plato’s Symposium;
and he wrote books about European economic history, Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia
(see Erlich, 2002) and early Islam.
Islam’s Philosophers devotes a chapter to each of the 12 thinkers. Its discussion
of Ibn T
_
ufayl and ‘Islam’s philosophers’ combines the two earlier impulses: the
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production of an awe-inspiring canon and an Orientalist valuation of Ibn T
_
ufayl
and falsafa through Europe. In a third and otherwise curtailed moment, which I
return to in the conclusion, Jum6a imaginatively opens up an alternate vision of
East-centric world history, intellectual production and geopolitics that brackets
Europe and moves beyond Europe-and-Islam. This moment partially resembles
his political tract, H
_
ay
at al-sharq (Life of the East/Orient) (Jum6a, 1932), which
calls for Eastern nations’ unity against Western imperialism (379) while fore-
grounding shared Eastern interests and culture (especially but not exclusively the
‘Islamic East’); the book analyses inter-Eastern relations, imperial expansion and
colonisers’ tactics, including the ‘instrumental’ and ‘weaponised’ resurrection of
peoples’ ancient identities and customs to divide and conquer (246).
Jum6a’s Ibn T
_
ufayl was a metaphysician who, in the modernist language of the
individual and society, probed the idea of the individual as ‘a blank slate’. He
shows how ‘a person cut off and removed from the affairs of life, untainted by
its effects’, and who ‘knows nothing about life and developed his mind in absolute
isolation on his own’, came to understand the ‘secrets of nature’ and ‘solved the
most difficult theological questions’ (Jum6a, 1927: 98). Ibn T
_
ufayl, he explains (107),
actually created H
_
ayy ‘in his own image and in the image of the philosophers who
preceded him’. Jum6a’s summary of the allegory (107–111) emphasises H
_
ayy’s sci-
entific discoveries, his use of tools and animals and his attainment of knowledge of
God; Jum6a excises H
_
ayy’s meeting with Abs
al, his journey to the islanders and his
condemnation of the masses. Its value is its contribution to science, theology and a
better understanding of philosophers.
If early editions treated Ibn T
_
ufayl as an intellectual dependent of Ibn Sın
a,
Jum6a’s Ibn T
_
ufayl surpassed all others. It is evident, Jum6a claims (105), that Ibn
T
_
ufayl charted an autonomous project or system (khut
_
t
_
aq
a8ima bi-dh
atih
a) inde-
pendent of the thought of everyone else (mustaqilla 6an afk
ar al-jamı6). Ibn T
_
ufayl’s
uniqueness and genius are complemented by being
the first Islamic philosopher to pour his philosophy into a story, and to make his
story’s protagonist an isolated individual who creates himself and his thoughts by
interacting with nature and with creatures that are lesser than him in rank – inani-
mates, plants, and animals – until he reaches the point of understanding and union.
This fantasy story is to be considered in truth a kind of intellectual/rational beatitude
[t
_
ub
a 6aqliyya] that many European [Ifranj] writers and thinkers imitated and the
footsteps of which they followed. (Jum6a, 1927: 105)
While Jum6a does not say who these European thinkers are or how they mimicked
Ibn T
_
ufayl, he turns (106) to Robinson Crusoe to demonstrate Ibn T
_
ufayl’s origin-
ality. The latter story’s ‘child is the person most similar to Robinson Crusoe’,
though apparently ‘Islamic and Andalusian’; he is to be further ‘distinguished
from that solitary sailor in that he was created in isolation, did not know any
human, never met another person, and had no exposure to any material or practical
aspects of life’. Jum6a continues, in an allusion to Darwinism, that Ibn T
_
ufayl first
articulated the principle of ‘a struggle for survival between humans and animals’.
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Islam’s Philosophers establishes the value of each thinker independently and
reinforces the impression of a conversation among them. But for Jum6a, Ibn
T
_
ufayl’s importance for the present is mediated by Europe, through the history
of its alleged copies, its differences from popular texts like Robinson Crusoe and its
alleged anticipation of scientific principles current in the twentieth century. The
book’s introduction is haunted by Europe from the start; Jum6a begins by address-
ing the dead Islamic philosophers, calling them forth into the present: ‘Come for-
ward, wise gentlemen!’ He invites them out of the ‘cave of the past’ and a ‘world of
silence and quiet’ to the present, to strike the Arab masses with the foreignness of
their own past:
The majority of the people of this age have not had the honor of knowing who you
are, and your names, titles, and ancestry shall fall on their ears like a new, foreign
thing, and they shall argue over the truth of your existence and the value of your
thought. They shall deny that your opinions were yours, opinions through which you
brightened the dark nights of your ages, in their conceptions, transformations, edu-
cation, and liberation. Some will pass by you, surprised at who these ancient philoso-
phers are, who lived, contemplated, and explained the universe, who diagnosed events
before Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Spencer, Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte, and
Renan. (Jum6a, 1927: iii)
6
These thinkers prefigure European philosophers – and made them possible:
It will not occur to the minds of these surprised readers that were it not for you, O
dear philosophers! from al-Kindı to Ibn Rushd, it would not have been possible for
any modern European philosopher to appear in the world of existence; and that it was
you who preserved that divine flame that Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle birthed in the
caves of the distant past, you who added fire to the flame until you passed it on,
brightly lit and ablaze, to Europe’s modern philosophers, and you were to that holy
flame gracious caretakers. (Jum6a, 1927: iv)
Jum6a, like al-Muqt
_
ataf’s response to the reader, implicitly denies the existence
of philosophy after Ibn Rushd ‘in Islam’. The role Jum6a attributes to the
fal
asifa, as ‘caretakers’ or ‘guardians’ of Greek philosophy until it becomes
European, relegates centuries of non-European thought to the status of a transit
stop. Like al-Muqt
_
ataf, he writes Arabic and Islam into the history of Europe,
but as a pre-history and middleman, a temporary location whose value is
measured by its contribution to Europe; here, European philosophy and history
is the sole site of validation. The presumption that the ‘flame’ of philosophy
can be held by one group at a time is central to this discourse. By imagining
a flame that was passed on, philosophy in Europe signals the end and
impossibility of philosophy elsewhere. It homogenises ‘modern European philoso-
phers’, treating Europe as a singular whole, just as it does with Arabo-Islamic
philosophy, reducing the thinkers to a single shared project completed in modern
Europe.
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But Jum6a troubles the Renanian thesis in three ways. First, he presents ‘al-
Kindı-to-Ibn-Rushd’ as the forgotten past of his Arab readers’ present, not only
of European philosophy. The philosophers cannot be ‘alien’ or ‘foreign’ per se to
modern ordinary Arabs, whose surprise he imagines. Jum6a transforms the histor-
ical difference of an (alien or unknown) past into a problem of cultural alienation
or the present’s amnesia about its own past. He claims these thinkers for contem-
porary Arab Muslims, as Islam’s philosophers.
Second, Jum6a constructs an idyllic setting out of Ibn T
_
ufayl’s Andalusian con-
text: the philosophers of that age – Ibn B
ajja, Ibn T
_
ufayl, Ibn Rushd and Ibn
Khald
un – were driven by a thirst for knowledge against various difficulties. The
demise of the Muslim state in Andalusia was the demise of Muslim philosophy as a
whole; philosophy did not reappear in any of Islam’s kingdoms until the Nahd
_
a.
Thus, in Jum6a’s Islam, philosophy grew with religion; when religious faith wea-
kened, so did the intellectual inquiry that faith had produced. ‘Islam’, he proclaims
unlike all other religions, had nourished philosophy, strengthening and supporting it.
Mr. Renan in some of his writings makes this remarkable observation, namely the
decline of philosophy in Europe whenever religion’s power increased, and the revival
[inti6
ash] of philosophy after that following the overturn [tadahwur] of religious con-
victions in Europe. (Jum6a, 1927: xvi)
In fact, Jum6a argues (1927: xvi–xvii), it was European philosophy that did not ‘see
the light of day’ until the seventeenth century and only after the battle between
science and religion in Christian Europe. Jum6a marks out the parochialism of
Renan and ‘secular’ European discourses on religion, in order to claim a different
Islamic exceptionalism, to dismiss Renan’s thesis about the Near East and to sur-
pass what he calls the stagnation of European philosophy after Nietzsche,
Schopenhauer and Bergson. Five years later, he would further argue (1932: 369)
that Renan and other Orientalists function, ‘when necessary, as tools of European
imperialism’: their Orientalism is ‘a weapon for fighting the East and Islam’.
Third, Jum6a’s construction of the globe also breaks with the Renanian narra-
tive. He offers a version of his Easternism. Islam’s Philosophers writes a bond of
solidarity and resonance between the Eastern hemisphere’s two corners. He con-
trasts the Islamic renaissance of the ninth and tenth centuries with Europe’s ‘ignor-
ance and barbarism [al-jahl wa-l-wah
_
shiyya]’ during ‘The Dark Ages’ (in English),
to think beyond Europe:
The renaissance of Islam, however, was not confined to those nations that had
embraced this religion, but was all-encompassing of the entire East. It is as though
the awakening shook the corners of this part of the globe, and so it arose from the
slumber that numerous generations had experienced. It began to shake off the dust of
previous generations’ indolence. The Persians, Turks, Mongols, and Indians rose up,
and even the people of China and of Japan, for they rushed toward humanistic reform
during the 6Abb
asid era [750–1258 AD] or shortly thereafter.
7
The movement of Islam
was like the tremors of an earthquake, going through particular areas and moving
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within bounded arenas. Historians of the Chinese humanities continue to mention the
renaissance of their master poets during the ninth- and tenth-centuries AD, during the
reign of their emperor the ‘‘Son of Heaven,’’ Tang. The Japanese busied themselves
during that age as well, with reforming the Japanese language and with organizing the
social arts, and artistic genius appeared among them; some of them were poets,
humanists, painters, and sculptors. (Jum6a, 1927: xiii)
Jum6a concludes, ‘In this way, it did not cease to be the case that the two Easts, the
Near and the Far, were influenced by the renaissance movements that appeared in
either, each having an echo in the other’. He implies an alternative future based on
this other past of Islamic philosophy: ‘And what was true for the ninth century
AD, is also true for the renaissance of the nineteenth century in the two Easts, Near
and Far’ (1927: xiii).
Jum6a’s radically East-centric frame of world history is not entirely
ungrounded in the text; the allegory itself is set on an island Ibn T
_
ufayl imagines
(1936: 20) not in the Mashriq or Maghrib, but off the coast of India. Jum6a pushes
this geography further. He brackets Europe, imagining a future in which the
coloniser is peripheral for intellectual movements. His Easternist contemporaries
championed pan-Islamism and/or pan-Arabism, but he expands ‘the East’
to include China, Japan and the Asian continent. Jum6a’s vision carves out
space for deimperial pan-Asian world histories and practices – akin to but broader
than what Chen (2010) studies as ‘Asia as Method’. By imagining the East as
an interconnected world and a frame already beyond Europe, Jum6a takes the
geography of Orientalism’s the Orient and turns it back against Europe. Islam’s
philosophers become the reservoir of a forgotten past that bypasses Europe,
extends to the Far East and calls forth new renaissances without and against
European empire.
His Life of the East (1932), however, displaces this vision with a different
Easternism. Jum6a bemoans Japan’s indifference (373–375) and China’s cunning,
hostility and opportunism (375–376) toward Muslims. He takes inspiration from
European deference to Japan’s newfound power, calling for an ‘Eastern league of
nations’ to unite, against European imperialism, and aim at equality with the West
(379). The logics of Realpolitik and inter-governmental relations curtail the image
of Easternist renaissances and cultural reverberations.
Tardiness and/or precedence (1931–1933)
The inter-Eastern comparisons and affiliations that Jum6a invites fall out of the
other afterlives of H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an. Later editions and studies extend ambivalence
about the text’s status for Arabic and for Europe; the basic comparisons remained,
as with Jum6a’s discussion of Robinson Crusoe, to Europe. The Orientalist scholar
Le
´
on Gauthier published his first and second editions of H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an in
1900 and 1936, and a study in 1909. Between Gauthier’s editions, a scholarly
Arab edition appeared in Damascus, and articles on Ibn T
_
ufayl in the leading
humanistic journals. The next decade saw one of the first Arabic book-length
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scholarly studies devoted to Ibn T
_
ufayl. Anxieties about European empire and
knowledge-production frame these works, as we see below.
In 1931, the Beirut-based journal al-Machriq, run by philologist and theologian
Louis Cheikho (1859–1927) out of the Universite
´
Saint-Joseph in Beirut, ran a
three-part article on Ibn T
_
ufayl. Two years later, the recently established Cairo
literary review al-Ris
ala published a short commentary. The two articles mediate
the allegory’s significance by reference to Robinson Crusoe. The first, by Ferdinand
Tawtal [Taoutel] al-Yas
u6ı (1887–1977), begins (1931: 42–43) with Europe:
‘Europeans [al-Ifranj] have exerted a lot of effort on the story of H
_
ayy ibn
Yaqz
_
an, beating us in searching for that author and publishing him, translating
him into their various languages, and explaining him’. H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an,he
explains, is the best synopsis of Islam’s philosophers and their treatment of faith
versus reason and religion versus philosophy, but Europeans, not Arabs, study it.
Tawtal notes Pococke’s and Gauthier’s editions, as well as Latin, Dutch, German,
English, Spanish and French translations and printings. The most recent European
edition of this ‘entertaining book’ that has been ‘lauded by Europeans’, he
announces, is by AS Fulton, and is part of a ‘beautiful collection’.
Fulton’s 1929 edition revises Simon Ockley’s (1708/1711) translation. In his
introduction, this Keeper of Oriental Books and Manuscripts at the British
Museum is openly hostile toward Arabs and Islam. Arabic philosophy, he contends
(1929: 18), ‘means, of course, nothing indigenous to Arabia, but little more than
Greek philosophy in an Arab dress’. Even so, ‘men of Arab blood’ neither made
nor put on these garments, having ‘had very little to do with the production of
these translations’ or with intellectual production in Islam – which only came down
to the (impossible) task of harmonising the Qur8
an and Greek philosophy by
explaining away the Qur8
an’s ‘lurid eschatology’, ‘anthropomorphic crudities’
and ‘hearty outbursts’ (19–20, 28). Fulton’s overwrought dismissal comes with
flourish: ‘The holy water of Zemzem had too much ‘‘body’’ in it to please the
palates of these Muslim philosophers who had drunk deep at the more sublimated
springs of pagan thought’ (27–28). Tropes about Islamic hostility to philosophy
explain the story: in Fulton’s creative reading (32), Ibn T
_
ufayl and H
_
ayy (as his
autobiographical avatar) were in a precarious position, each only being saved from
the Oriental masses’ ‘herd instinct for heresy hunting’ by the protection of a strong
ruler and by the ‘Oriental sense of hospitality’ innate to H
_
ayy’s islanders and Ibn
T
_
ufayl’s neighbors. Fulton’s Ibn T
_
ufayl wrote under the threat of Oriental ignor-
ance, Islamic persecution and ‘ruthless theology’ (7).
Tawtal recasts (1931: 43) Fulton’s dismissal of ‘Greek philosophy in Arab dress’
as a ‘detailed introduction’ to Ibn T
_
ufayl’s life and ‘summary of the history of
Arabic philosophy’. Whether he agreed with Fulton’s assessment or sought to
neutralise it with generosity, European scholarship imposes itself as an always
more advanced standard to be imitated.
Tawtal frames the difference between Arab silence and European interest in the
text as a race, in which, given European interest, the text ought to be canonical
in Arab intellectual history. His article, he hopes, might pave the way for an edition
in the Near East. In the last three centuries, Europeans ‘have fallen madly in love
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with the story of H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an’, reading, internalising and imitating it
(1931: 42). This privilege, he writes, is evident when juxtaposing H
_
ayy to ‘similar’
works,
like the story of Robinson Crusoe; the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the
origins of man in isolation from social life, and the development of intellectual life
through gradual discoveries about the conditions of the universe; and Descartes’
claims about the sequence of demonstration and deducing conclusions out of prem-
ises. (Tawtal, 1931: 42–43)
One must conclude that the European authors ‘looked through Ibn T
_
ufayl’s
book, either in its Arabic form or in one of its translations, and took him as
their guide’.
But Tawtal ushers Ibn T
_
ufayl into his present through theological disagreements
with his doctrines, presenting (1931: 192–195) four criticisms. Most importantly, he
then offers a fifth criticism, noting Ibn T
_
ufayl’s consistent elitism and obscurant-
ism, especially apparent in his introduction and in passages about spiritual life.
When Tawtal takes Ibn T
_
ufayl to task because these discussions are ‘as though he
withholds [alt. ‘‘begrudges’’] the capacity for understanding it [spiritual life] from
the majority of readers [ka-anna-hu yad
_
annu bi-fahmih
a 6al
a 6
ammat al-qurr
a8]’,
Tawtal sides against Ibn T
_
ufayl with an engaged readership, and perhaps against
H
_
ayy with the allegory’s islanders (whom Jum6a ignores and whom Fulton
describes as hospitality-wired heresy-hunters). Such moments of critique bring
the past into the present not as a monumental canon to be admired or followed,
but as a set of political claims and dispositions to be accepted or overcome. At this
moment, Tawtal refuses the anti-egalitarian text because of its implications about
the people, for the present.
8
Like Jum6a’s vanishing alternative geography, Tawtal’s critique is curtailed. He
drops his critical engagement to laud Ibn T
_
ufayl’s importance, returning to
Europe. He concludes (1931: 195) by reaffirming ‘what Europeans say’: Ibn
T
_
ufayl’s is the best summary of Arabic philosophy and is at the forefront of
Arabic stories.
Declarations about the text’s significance for Europe and Robinson Crusoe
appeared two years later in al-Ris
ala. The Tartus-based author, Ah
_
mad al-
Mah
_
m
ud, implores (1933: 16–19) readers to mention Ibn T
_
ufayl whenever
Robinson Crusoe comes up, calling it his right by ‘virtue of precedence [fad
_
l al-
asbaqiyya]’. Al-Mah
_
m
ud borrows (18–19) sentences from Tawtal’s article, extract-
ing Tawtal’s summary of his four theological criticisms (192) and duplicating his
concluding sentence (195) that Europeans are right to value the text. But if Tawtal
affirmed Ibn T
_
ufayl’s influence on European philosophy and fiction as the clearest
indication of his importance, al-Mah
_
m
ud presents Ibn T
_
ufayl as more important
because he accomplished equivalent literary feats before ‘Defoe and his ilk among
European storytellers’. While for Tawtal Ibn T
_
ufayl’s obscurities indicated
unacceptable condescension, al-Mah
_
m
ud praises Ibn T
_
ufayl’s accessible, easy,
beautiful and attractive text, for it can only be described as important for
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Islamic philosophy – a return to the monumental and an erasure of Tawtal’s egali-
tarian critique.
Consolations and/or aspirations (1935–1947)
Ibn T
_
ufayl’s significance was mediated by claims about his relationship to
European texts like Robinson Crusoe. These comparisons animate the first Arab-
produced scholarly edition of H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an, prepared by Jamıl S
_
alıb
a (1902–
1976) and K
amil 6Ayy
ad (1901–1986) in 1935, and they also frame 6Umar Farr
ukh’s
(1906–1987) monograph a decade later.
9
When these renowned scholars quibbled
over approach and authorial context, this was, as we’ll see, also a disagreement
about the status, history and future of the Near East.
S
_
alıb
a was a Syrian scholar of Arabic historical and philosophical inquiry. He was
trainedinParis,wroteextensively on Ibn Sın
a, education, the history of Arab thought
and science, and French thought and produced a two-volume Arabic-English-
French-Latin Philosophical Lexicon. His writings reflect his concern with the
Arab contribution to ‘world civilisation’ and its place in Arab self-understandings.
His co-editor, 6Ayy
ad, wrote on Ibn Khald
un, the history of philosophy, the lives of
Orientalists, Japan and social and political issues. He was born in Libya, emigrated
during the 1911 Italian invasion, studied in Berlin, then resided in Damascus.
S
_
alıb
a and 6Ayy
ad cast Ibn T
_
ufayl as a singular contributor to humanity. They
refuse (1935: xxv–xxvi; xvi, xxiv, xxx–xxxii) the two usual comparisons, one being
to Ibn Sın
a. If early printings fuse Ibn Sın
a and Ibn T
_
ufayl, S
_
alıb
a and 6Ayy
ad
distinguish them to draw connections with other thinkers and to move Ibn T
_
ufayl
outside Ibn Sın
a’s shadow. The other comparison they refuse is to Robinson Crusoe,
because rather than being linked generically, thematically or historically, H
_
ayy ibn
Yaqz
_
an is superior. ‘We must also mention’, they conclude their introduction,
the difference between the character of H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an and the famous character of
Robinson Crusoe, for many previous writers have pointed to the great similarity
between the two characters and have wanted to find a relationship of borrowing or
imitation of the latter from the former. (Ibn T
_
ufayl, 1935: xxxii)
They enumerate (xxxii–xxxiii) the differences, translating H
_
ayy in the language of
individualist modernism and highlighting his autonomy, independence, lifelong
autodidacticism and higher understanding of the cosmos. While the two above-
mentioned articles consider H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an important either because it ‘influ-
enced’ or ‘preceded’ European classics, S
_
alıb
a and 6Ayy
ad conclude that Ibn
T
_
ufayl’s allegory is the most philosophically superior story. They assess the text’s
virtues by the standards of modernist intellectual history and literary criticism –
realism, precision, practicality, accessibility and organisation:
Just as Ibn T
_
ufayl’s story surpasses [tamt
az] de Foe’s [sic] story from a philosophical
angle, it also surpasses other stories of Eastern philosophy in its proximity to truth
and reality and natural description, its precise details about practical life, and never
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mind its elegant style, ease of expression, and that it is well-organized (Ibn T
_
ufayl,
1935: xxxiii).
Ibn T
_
ufayl’s superiority signals an Arab contribution to humanity: ‘With these
virtues, it is to be considered without a doubt at the forefront of Arab literary
works that deserve immortality in the history of human thought’. This monumen-
talisation appears against the two comparisons through which H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an
had been made visible: Ibn Sın
a and Robinson Crusoe.
When Robinson Crusoe reappears in the final chapter of Farr
ukh’s (1946a) short
monograph on Ibn T
_
ufayl, Defoe is only the sixth European writer whom Farr
ukh
claims was influenced by Ibn T
_
ufayl. This was one of Farr
ukh’s many books on
historical Arab thinkers (e.g. Ibn al-Muqaffa6, al-F
ar
abı, Ibn Sın
a, Ibn B
ajja, the
Ikhw
an al-S
_
af
a 8, Ibn H
_
azm and Ibn Khald
un), with others on contemporary pol-
itics, histories of Arab thought, pre-Islamic literature and Greek philosophy.
Farr
ukh grew up in Beirut, studied at the American University of Beirut, then in
Germany; he wrote this book while in Beirut, years before moving to Damascus.
Unlike S
_
alıb
a and 6Ayy
ad, who use contrasts to demonstrate originality and
superiority, Farr
ukh highlights similarity because he thinks it implies influence.
Like Jum6a, and like S
_
alıb
a and 6Ayy
ad, he establishes (40–41) Ibn T
_
ufayl’s inde-
pendence in an Arabo-Islamic tradition by distinguishing him from Ibn Sın
a and
from the philosophers Ibn al-6Arabı and H
_
unayn ibn Ish
_
aq. All similarities between
their texts, he writes, end with their characters’ shared names. But for Europe,
Farr
ukh writes (97), ‘The influence of Ris
alat H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an appears promin-
ently in the story of Robinson Crusoe’, and scholars agree that the former is
‘‘a philosophical type of Robinson’s story’’. Defoe had not passed away [lam yutawaffa]
until the story of H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an was copied into Latin, English, Dutch, German, and
had spread greatly. It is unthinkable [fa-l
ayu6qal] that Defoe wrote a book that is similar
to H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an to this degree without having known about it (Farr
ukh, 1946a: 97).
Farr
ukh adduces (94–98) other traces of H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an in Europe, as early as
Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, to editions, translations and stories seem-
ingly based on it. He singles out Spinoza and Rousseau as two ‘T
_
ufaylian’ philoso-
phers. The origin of Spinoza’s secularism, he writes (96–97), is Islamic philosophy:
Spinoza is closer than Descartes to ‘Jewish-Islamic philosophy – a philosophy which
is actually Islamic at its foundation. It would appear that the revolution in Spinoza’s
soul was due to the influence of Ibn T
_
ufayl in the first degree’. Some scholars
speculated that Spinoza translated Ibn T
_
ufayl into Dutch, which makes it ‘unsur-
prising that Spinoza would say that the Holy Book itself must be made to submit to
reason, or to see him respond harshly to those who tried to make reason subordinate
in rank to religious tradition’. Meanwhile, Rousseau’s Emile asserts that man is good
by nature and called for a return to nature, away from the chains of society – ‘just as
Ibn T
_
ufayl did, six centuries prior’.
Farr
ukh treats Ibn T
_
ufayl as the progenitor of European philosophy. While
S
_
alıb
a and 6Ayy
ad’s bibliography only lists various European editions, studies
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and translations, Farr
ukh’s final chapter – ‘Ibn T
_
ufayl’s Standing and His
Influence in the East and West’ – gives a comprehensive narrative, beginning
with Pococke (92). Here, the colonised intellectual claims antecedence and power
over the colonisers’ intellectual production, as their haunting past: ‘Islamic phil-
osophy’, he writes (91–92), ‘controlled the European mind’ for ‘a few hundred
years without interruption’. Ibn T
_
ufayl alone guided European thought, which
demonstrates Islamic philosophy’s relevance for ‘human thought’.
Whether by emphasising Ibn T
_
ufayl’s superiority or germinal status over
Europe, these Arab editors and commentators elevate Ibn T
_
ufayl by reference to
Europe. Farr
ukh (92) agrees with S
_
alıb
a and 6Ayy
ad that the treatise ‘left a huge
influence on the history of human thought’, which makes Ibn T
_
ufayl ‘one of the
great philosophers of the Middle Ages’. But while the three scholars extolled the
history of falsafa, their disagreement about methods and what counts as Ibn
T
_
ufayl’s context indicates a deeper disagreement about anatomies of power.
S
_
alıb
a and 6Ayy
ad situate (xxvi) H
_
ayy in a lineage of thinkers who contemplate
‘natural development’ and ‘social order’. While Farr
ukh also deploys (1946a: 77–
78) the language of ‘the individual and society’ (following De Boer, 1903: 182–183),
as had Jum6a (1927: 98), they approach (1935: xxvii) Ibn T
_
ufayl’s allegory as a
theory of the natural development of the individual and the unadulterated/pure
(al-ins
an al-mah
_
d
_
) human being ‘stripped of social influences [mujarrad 6an ta8thır
al-ijtim
a 6]’. He is a blank slate: an everyman, not a prophet-philosopher super-
human. Sal
am
an’s island becomes the ideal type of ‘a human association with
traditions and inherited habits’, a sociological experiment for ‘the relationship of
the individual to a society’. The literary and philosophical purpose of H
_
ayy, they
explain (xiii), is that he reached his level of knowledge ‘without having been taught
the sciences by anyone, for he was educated in a natural way [tarabb
a tarbiyatan
t
_
abı6iyyatan]’.
S
_
alıb
a and 6Ayy
ad read Ibn T
_
ufayl through modernist liberalism. Like Fulton,
they use Ibn T
_
ufayl’s own life as an allegory for the relationship of religion and
philosophy, turning H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an into Ibn T
_
ufayl’s autobiography. They reas-
sure (1935: v) the reader that because of Ibn T
_
ufayl’s close friendship with the
Almohad caliph Ab
uYa6q
ub, he was well treated by the ruler – who ‘loved him as
much as he did because he enjoyed [listening to] Ibn T
_
ufayl’s philosophical tales in
his hours of rest’, they imagine. They call both principled philosophers:
Perhaps the union of these two men is the best indication of the union between
wisdom and sharı6a: the king represents sharı6a while Ibn T
_
ufayl represents wisdom,
and each one of the two had felt that the other completed him (Ibn T
_
ufayl, 1935: v).
S
_
alıb
a and 6Ayy
ad use these very same terms to describe H
_
ayy’s relationship to
Abs
al; both indicate the harmony of religion and philosophy. The direct corres-
pondence among author, character and concept reappears in their simplification:
H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an’s failure in his attempt [to convert islanders] indicates the inability
of the masses to comprehend the objectives of philosophy, and H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an’s
Idris 397
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agreement with Abs
al indicates that philosophy is in agreement with religion. As for
Abs
al’s disagreement with Sal
am
an, it is akin to the disagreement between esotericists
and exotericists. (Ibn T
_
ufayl, 1935: xvi)
The two editors erase H
_
ayy’s (super)natural superiority, making the allegory safe
and applicable to the ordinary. They erase his elite status and abnormality:
it is unlikely [min al-mustab6ad] that Ibn T
_
ufayl intended from the first half of the story
to say that a single, isolated individual can attain what H
_
ayy attained without the aid
of a group; indeed, his aim was to represent human development without needing
divine revelation. (Ibn T
_
ufayl, 1935: xxxi–xxxii)
With this normalisation of H
_
ayy, S
_
alıb
a and 6Ayy
ad bracket the people whom Ibn
T
_
ufayl actually constructs as normal and ordinary, the islanders (Idris, 2011). When
they consider H
_
ayy and Abs
al’s journey to Sal
am
an’s island, S
_
alıb
a and 6Ayy
ad
adapt the Renanian fantasy of Islam’s threatened philosophers veiling their cri-
tiques of religion:
As for the second half of the story, in which Ibn T
_
ufayl describes H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an’s
journey to the nearby island and his residence among its inhabitants, it is nothing but
a means of concealed social critique [wasıla li-l-naqd al-ijtim
a6ı min t
_
araf khafiyy]. Ibn
T
_
ufayl wanted by this to dissect the social conditions of his age [tashrıh
_
ah
_
w
al 6as
_
ri-hi
al-ijtim
a6iyya], and to expose the corruption of regimes [bay
an fas
ad al-anz
_
ima],
the decay of morals [inh
_
it
_
at
_
al-akhl
aq], and the disappearance of religious principles
[tafassukh al-6aq
a8id al-dıniyya]. (Ibn T
_
ufayl, 1935: xxxii)
In their creative reading, it is perhaps S
_
alıb
a and 6Ayy
ad who veil their critiques.
Ibn T
_
ufayl does not refer to regime corruption, moral decay or the withdrawal of
religion; he consistently casts (1936: 136–137, 149–152) the islanders as pious,
honest and the best among ordinary people, ultimately limited by nature and
rank. In this curtailed moment, S
_
alıb
a and 6Ayy
ad bring Ibn T
_
ufayl to their
Near Eastern present, transposing the problems of the modern (post-)colonial
state and corrupt regimes onto his context. On the one hand, if the problems are
shared with Ibn T
_
ufayl’s age, then – with Renan – they are perennial and immut-
able. On the other hand, the editors harness this ‘classical’ text, out of which they
level a critique, against the present.
They rely on European scholarship, Farr
ukh mocks S
_
alıb
aand6Ayy
ad, but poorly.
‘Although the field of philosophy is far from comedy’, he writes (1946a: 8), ‘let me
amuse you with the following observation’: the two editors wrote the Orientalist
Friedrich U
¨
berweg’s name as ‘Fredrich Ulerueg’, having, Farr
ukh surmises, misheard
it or misread it in a footnote, so it is uncertain that they laid eyes on the books they
list.
10
Arab scholarship, he complains, has not progressed and its authors behave like
they are from a previous century (8–9). The backdrop of this frustration is that
Farr
ukh (6) was unable to obtain Gauthier’s (1909) study (but consulted Gauthier’s
1936 edition). He describes (6–8) how his scholarship suffers because of the miserable
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condition of Beirut’s libraries for philosophy. Given these constraints, he declares – in
accord with S
_
alıb
aand6Ayy
ad’s mode of inquiry, against their momentary critique –
‘Our efforts today must be confined and must come together toward analyzing the
opinions of Islam’s philosophers in the first place. As for our own philosophical pro-
duction, it must be deferred’.
If S
_
alıb
a and 6Ayy
ad only momentarily critique the present, Farr
ukh concurs
that one must study the past prior to making present advances, because historical
knowledge recasts the present.
11
When he considers (5) the ‘truthful image’ of Ibn
T
_
ufayl’s context, it is ‘an age full of political and social anarchy [fawd
_
a]’.
Nonetheless, he continues, philosophy rose to majesty, unburdened and uninflu-
enced by its surroundings; neither ignorant masses nor religious opposition could
stop it. Farr
ukh implies that since philosophy rises above context, it is panacea for
his present, with its own political and social turmoil. Europe had overcome its
turmoil through falsafa – and Arabs might too.
While S
_
alıb
a and 6Ayy
ad recontextualise H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an in terms of Ibn
T
_
ufayl’s biography, Farr
ukh’s unconventionally broad context for a text fore-
grounds global politics. He paints (1946a: 13–27) a weak Maghrib, with small,
unstable states, then discusses the Crusades, France, England, the Papal struggles,
the Norman conquest of Sicily and the Byzantine Empire. Farr
ukh does not say
why he situates Ibn T
_
ufayl in these contexts. Perhaps the expanded, multiple con-
texts mirror Ibn T
_
ufayl’s reception in these regions while anticipating colonialism
in the Near East by these powers. He indirectly invites readers to understand Ibn
T
_
ufayl in world-historical terms that shape the geopolitics of his present. Indeed,
his anti-colonial treatise, Nah
_
wa al-ta6
awun al-6Arabı or Toward Arab Cooperation
(Farr
ukh, 1946b), likewise reframes (8–10) Arab history within a perennial world-
historical battle between West and East, Europe and Afro-Asia. While European
colonisers revive Phoenician, Pharaonic and other ancient identities, using local
movements to divide and conquer (21–22), Farr
ukh appeals (10–30) to the com-
monalities among Arabs, from intellectual history to the imagined geological fili-
ation of the Sahara’s dunes crawling to the coasts of Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria.
Like S
_
alib
a and 6Ayy
ad, he diagnoses the present through Ibn T
_
ufayl’s place in
history, as a forgotten past that had created Europe; both studies read Ibn T
_
ufayl’s
context through their own, either transposing the present to critique it or demon-
strating its geographic and historical entanglements with European power, then as
now. But S
_
alıb
a’s March 1947 review of Farr
ukh’s book refuses its recontextualisa-
tion in favour of disciplinary conventions that divorce past from present, Europe
from Islam.
12
S
_
alıb
a reciprocates (156–158) Farr
ukh’s negative tone: the ‘primary
deficiency is Farr
ukh’s hastiness in making unqualified proclamations, and his non-
adherence to the historical method’. He proclaims with scandalised disciplinary
authority, ‘intellectual historians are satisfied... with the immediate causes and
events that impacted the man’s philosophy. But talking about events that have no
relationship to him, they would consider irrelevant to the topic’. Farr
ukh’s discus-
sions of ‘England, France, the Normans in Sicily, the Byzantine Empire’, and others
contribute nothing, he argues, to understanding Ibn T
_
ufayl. This disagreement
about context was not merely methodological (authorial intent vs. global/world
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history).
13
It was about why one studies the past, whose past it is, and its relation-
ships to the present and an imagined future: either philosophy in spite of and against
global empires and political disorder, or critiques of (perennial) corruption.
Thinking past the text
Jum6a, Tawtal, S
_
alıb
a, 6Ayy
ad and Farr
ukh navigated how Europeans studied or
borrowed from Ibn T
_
ufayl. Progress, they imagined, required citing European
empire, reciting a text celebrated by European translators, scholars and storytellers.
They imagined a past that might surpass Orientalists and lead to future knowledge,
power and unity. The histories in these paratexts, and the histories H
_
ayy ibn
Yaqz
_
an was made to narrate, are about the Arabo-Islamic philosopher who
made Europe possible, through whom the Near East might surpass the coloniser
it imagines it engendered. To extend Jenco’s (2014) insights about the China-ori-
gins thesis to a different political context, falsafa was posed as the past of Arabs and
Europeans, or an Arabo-Islamic past that Europe had appropriated, but dis-
avowed. But what some Arab scholars found ‘unthinkable’ and ‘unlikely’ – that
Ibn T
_
ufayl was not the ‘source’ of various European texts and modernity
(Farr
ukh), that H
_
ayy ibn Yaqz
_
an was not of practical use for or about the every-
man (S
_
alıb
a/6Ayy
ad) – are, of course, both thinkable and likely. These denials
turned to a past, as their own, to find comfort and inspiration. In their narrative,
European empires that would dominate the Near East imitated Ibn T
_
ufayl’s text.
The colonised intellectuals read Ibn T
_
ufayl to catch up with what they thought he,
their past, had made possible for others, as their past as well. This was a monu-
mental narrative for replicating greatness, dissatisfied with its weakness.
Arab scholars refashioned this ‘Arabo-Islamic’ tradition as their own past.
When they adopted falsafa as their own past, their unequal power relative to
Europe underwrote their study. Indeed, the adoption of a past as one’s own is
not outside power. When Orientalists took Ibn T
_
ufayl as their past or ascribed him
to stagnant Arabo-Islamic tradition, it was partly an expression of power. When
Arab scholars of Ibn T
_
ufayl imagined continuity between their past and their col-
onisers’ past, they found promise beyond their subjection. When coloniser and
colonised imagined sharing a past in Ibn T
_
ufayl, this may have unsettled and
transformed both, but the asymmetry in power remained and reinscribed the con-
tents and contours of Orientalist and liberal fantasies.
On the other hand, each paratext pushes beyond Europe and beyond disciplined
awe: Jum6a’s geography turns East, Tawtal’s criticism of Ibn T
_
ufayl demands
equality, S
_
alıb
a and 6Ayy
ad’s regard present-day corrupt states, colonies and
metropoles and Farr
ukh’s recontextualisation re-reads knowledge through
world-historical power politics. These moments, although curtailed, bring the alle-
gory into the authors’ presents, against these presents. As interpretive techniques
rather than principles, these moments are not exhausted by these scholars’ ideo-
logical and disciplinary programs. They invite political theorists to approach these
sources and histories for critiques of the present and its normative ideals, for their
reimaginings of its formations and entanglements, with and beyond Europe.
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At these curtailed moments, the past is a problem of power in the present – and a
source of anti-disciplinary inspiration.
Acknowledgements
For comments, challenges and suggestions, I am grateful to TH Barrett, Fahad Bishara,
Willy Deringer, John Dunn, Angela Giordani, Wael Hallaq, Nick Harris, Humeira Iqtidar,
Uday Mehta, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Jennifer Rubenstein, Elias Saba, Sanjay Seth, Suman
Seth, Rebecca Woods, participants at the ‘New Histories of Political Thought’ conference
held at the London School of Economics and the journal’s anonymous reviewers. I am
especially indebted to Leigh Jenco for helpful comments on multiple drafts. I am also
grateful to the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University for helping
me acquire rare editions of this text.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.
Notes
1. For a bibliography of editions and studies, see Conrad (1996: 271–275).
2. I do not mean that Ibn T
_
ufayl should not be studied (he should be) or that theorists working
on non-European thought have an added burden of contextualism (they do not). Such texts
can be approached textually (e.g. Idris, 2011). I am aware that demands for context are often
weaponised against theorists who study non-European thought. Indeed, what I mean is that
why we read certain texts and on what terms is a political question about the presence of the
past. Modern Arab editors of falsafa, like theorists today, attempted to make these historical
texts ‘relevant’ to their past and colonial present; their writings are nodes and sites of political
theory, not only sources for intellectual history.
3. See Humeira Iqtidar in this special issue.
4. I adapt the language of monumental, antiquarian and critical history from Nietzsche
(1980).
5. These additional thinkers are Ibn Khald
un, the Ikhw
an al-S
_
af
a 8, Ibn al-Haytham, Ibn al-
6Arabı and Ibn Miskawayh.
6. The preface to Jum6a (1927) is paginated with abjad numerals (where Arabic letters rep-
resent numbers) in sequential value. To avoid confusion, I’ve translated abjad into the
corresponding roman numerals. This is also the case for the pagination of the editors’
front matter and introduction to Ibn T
_
ufayl (1935), the first printing of S
_
alıb
a and
6Ayyad’s scholarly edition.
7. The 6Abb
asid dynasty established a Muslim caliphate. It is often understood as a ‘golden
age’ of literature, science and the arts, with an emphasis on the eighth to tenth centuries.
8. This should be distinguished from previous Anglophone editions, which disagreed with Ibn
T
_
ufayl because of his text’s ostensibly Arab or Muslim identity or agreed in spite of
its ‘Mahometanism’ (Ashwell, 1686: xviii–xii; Keith, 1674: i–iv; Ockley, 1708: viii–ix,
168–188).
Idris 401
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9. S
_
alıb
a and 6Ayy
ad used a Damascus manuscript as their edition’s new authority.
I consulted the first (1935), second (1939), and fifth printings (1962). Later printings
included typographical and bibliographic corrections and updates. They list (1935:
xxxvii) Jum6a (1927) as one of two Arabic sources, but not in later printings (1939:
12; 1962: 6).
10. S
_
alib
a/6Ayy
ad’s error (1935: xxxviii; 1939: 12) was partly corrected in later printings:
‘Frederich Uberweg’ (1962: 7).
11. But Farr
ukh nonetheless reads (6) Ibn T
_
ufayl’s absence from classical Arabic histories
as grave ‘mistakes’.
12. S
_
alıb
a complains (156–158) that Farr
ukh had not taken account of Gauthier and Ası
´
n
Palacios (which Farr
ukh says), and his general claims are ‘not too different’ from well-
established historical facts.
13. Farr
ukh’s second printing (1959) excised this world-historical introduction, and the
criticism of S
_
alıb
a/6Ayyad’s misspelling (1946a: 5–11, 13–27).
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