Abubakr Bin Ṭufayl's Ḥayy Bin Yaqzān and Its Reception in Early Modern

Home , Desert island, Philosophical fiction

Abubakr bin Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy bin Yaqzān and its Reception

in Early Modern England

Muhammad I.U. Sid-Ahmad Ismail

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements of the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy submitted to the Graduate Department of English

University of Toronto

Abubakr bin Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy bin Yaqzān and its Reception in Early Modern England

Muhammad I.U. Sid-Ahmad Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto 2014

Abstract

This study of Abubakr bin Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy bin Yaqzān and its reception in early modern England aims to determine the extent and nature of John Milton’s, John Locke’s and Daniel Defoe’s engagement of Ḥayy. I begin with historical research that offers the interpretative contexts upon which my comparative analyses rely. The dissertation begins with a study of seventeenth-century England where Ḥayy was received and twelfth-century Morocco where it was written, correcting misunderstandings in recent studies of the meaning and role of Ḥayy. In Chapter Two, I argue that Milton’s representation of Adam’s awakening in Book VIII of Milton’s Paradise Lost may have been influenced by Ḥayy. I further suggest considering whether Milton had access to other medieval Islamic sources, particularly Islamic stories of ascent. The shared elements suggest considering these stories part of a common cycle. As for John Locke, my analysis corrects earlier suggestions that his Essay Concerning Humane Understanding and Ḥayy are in agreement. I show that Locke in fact disagreed with the claims made in Ḥayy. In Book II of his Essay, Locke closely examines the arguments made in Ḥayy in order to point to epistemological errors. Finally, Chapter Four discusses the importance of Daniel Defoe’s reliance on Ḥayy in conceiving the relationship between Friday and Crusoe in the Crusoe trilogy. Defoe mimics the Ḥayy-Āsāl relationship in Ḥayy to develop the religious or spiritual aspects of Crusoe’s character, whose religiosity is in some ways complicit with the

colonial project. However, the development of Crusoe’s character through his relationship with Friday allows Defoe to reveal the violence of colonial practice and to critique the moral and political philosophies that underpinned colonialism. The comparative analyses of Milton’s, Locke’s and Defoe’s engagement of Ḥayy rely on viewing these texts as mediating between different historical worlds. The three English writers found Ḥayy attractive because it offered new ways of imagining and thinking. They imitated some of Ḥayy’s major aspects but responded in original ways to their own contemporaneous English world. I conclude by suggesting further research on the extent of seventeenth-century English knowledge of medieval North African history.

iii

Acknowledgements

Work for this dissertation benefited from a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship; a University of Toronto Fellowship; and a joint Humber College and Ontario Public Service Employees Union Doctoral Completion Scholarship. The idea for the dissertation was born with Prof. Mary Nyquist’s suggestion of a book by Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain. I had taken an early modern colonialism course with Prof. Nyquist at the master’s level in 2002. It is at this time that I wrote and revised essays on Defoe’s Crusoe trilogy and Ibn Tufayl’s Ḥayy, which appear here as Chapter Four. The dissertation would have not taken shape were it not for the serious consideration and feedback offered by Prof. Nyquist, whose role extended well beyond academic supervision, especially at times of personal and family crises during which I had to suspend work on the dissertation for lengthy periods of time. No one could have found better support in these difficult times. Prof. Paul Stevens, with whom I took a graduate course on early modern nationalism, corrected certain misunderstandings I had of Milton. Through his feedback and the activities he engaged us in – the graduate colloquium and the Canada Milton Seminar – Prof. Stevens has been a major influence. Informal chats with Prof. Stevens were the most valuable in boosting morale when confidence was tested. I also took a graduate course with Prof. Suzanne Akbari, whose work had originally attracted me to the University of Toronto’s Department of English. Prof. Akbari is the first person I met when I arrived in Toronto to seek advice on graduate studies and course selection. Her encouragement and insightful comments on Ḥayy helped me appreciate allusions in Ḥayy within an Islamic context and possible ways an early modern English audience would have read Ḥayy. Prof. Daniel White, with whom I audited a course on Romantic Orientalism, offered a research assistantship at the British Library in 2003, where I also did preliminary research locating the manuscripts of Ḥayy’s translations at the British Library. I also thank Prof. Edward Chamberlain for his kindness, support and encouragement. Many people, professors, librarians, friends, family and colleagues, have offered valuable support and encouragement. I thank all. My parents, Uthman Sid-Ahmad Ismail and Amna Hassan M. Ibrahim, taught me to respect and continuously seek knowledge. They passed away in March and August 2011.

I dedicate this dissertation first and foremost to them; to my siblings Omaima and Ahmad Sid-Ahmad; to my colleague Stella Eyles; to my friends Walaa and Ehab Mohamed; and to my son, Ibrahim Yahya Sid-Ahmad.

Table of Contents Abstract ii Introduction 1 Literary Critics: Methodology Early Modern England and Ḥayy bin Yaqzān Arabic Studies and Ḥayy bin Yaqzān in England Chapters of the Dissertation Chapter 1: Abubakr bin Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy bin Yaqzān 51 Al-Ma’mūn’s Rational Religion and Baghdad’s Resistance Ibn Tūmart and Ghazālī The World of Ḥayy bin Yaqzān The Ḥayy Narrative Chapter 2: Milton’s Adam and Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy: Some Parallels 94 Milton and the Arabic Interest Adam’s Story: Parallels with Ḥayy bin Yaqzān Vision, Ascent and Angelic Companion Ḥayy, Adam, and Ashwell’s Theologia Ruris Chapter 3: Some Notes Concerning Locke’s Indian Philosopher in The Essay Concerning Humane Understanding 128 Locke’s Essay: Simple and Complex Ideas vs. Substance Ḥayy bin Yaqzān: Accidents & Substance/Essence The Poor Indian Philosopher Chapter 4: Self-Composition and Appropriation: Crusoe, Friday and Ḥayy bin Yaqzān 152 Spiritual and Colonial Self-Composition The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe The Farther Adventures Serious Reflections Conclusion 193

Works Consulted 202

Introduction

This study reveals connections between a twelfth-century, Arabic, North African mystical-philosophical tale and three seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English works. The English works are John Milton’s Paradise Lost, John Locke’s Essay

Concerning Humane Understanding, and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe trilogy. The dissertation argues that the early modern, iconic English writers imitated the twelfth- century Arabic tale, Abubakr bin Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy bin Yaqzān. Yet Ḥayy bin Yaqzān also challenged these English writers. Both imitation and challenge can be attributed to the similarities and differences between the Arabic, Islamic milieu of eleventh- and twelfth- century North Africa and the Protestant, Christian milieu of early modern England.

While comparable religious and philosophical ideas can be found in twelfth-century

North Africa and seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England, the emergence of colonial thinking in seventeenth-century England created a unique context for the reception of the earlier text. The challenge posed by Ḥayy bin Yaqzān spurred original responses by our three writers.

Ḥayy bin Yaqzān is about the acquisition of divine knowledge by the main character, Ḥayy. The narrative begins with two different births. One is spontaneous generation from the earth – described in scientific terms – on an uninhabited island. The other is the issue of a secret marriage between a princess and a courtier. When the princess bears the child, Ḥayy, she places him in a small container, which she trusts to the seas, praying that God will protect him. Ḥayy arrives at an uninhabited island, where he is suckled by a gazelle. When he is seven years old, Ḥayy begins his inquiry. Through the observation of natural phenomena, his dissection of animals, and his reasoned, logical

steps, which are described in detail, Ḥayy concludes that behind creation is a divine agent, God. Once he reaches this conclusion, without the aid of revealed religion, Ḥayy abandons his rational inquiry, as he believes his reason, based as it is on the senses, cannot offer any more satisfactory information on the divine. He embarks instead on meditative exercises that culminate in divine visions. Towards the end of the narrative, two characters are introduced: the pious Salamān and Āsāl, who live in an adjacent city- island state unknown to Ḥayy. Āsāl is troubled by his inability to interpret symbolical passages in his religious law, presented as part of a revealed religion, which could be a reference to Christianity, Judaism or a faith propagated by one of the many prophets mentioned in the Quran and the Bible. Āsāl sails to Ḥayy’s uninhabited island to seek, in solitude, divine guidance on the passages’ meaning. Ḥayy and Āsāl meet and inquire of each other’s condition: while Āsāl recognizes in Ḥayy’s visions the interpretation of difficult verses in the law, Ḥayy accepts Āsāl ’s religion and converts. They decide to take their message to the city-island state, now governed by Salamān.

Though they are well received by Salamān and his subjects, Āsāl and Ḥayy realize that civil society’s concerns are not otherworldly and its members are thus unfit to receive higher truths. Ḥayy suggests that city life prevents city folk from the proper knowledge of God: Ḥayy concludes that though their reliance on scripture is sufficient for their salvation, city dwellers’ concern with the accumulation of wealth prevents them from understanding symbolic passages in their religious law or holy book. Ḥayy compares their worldly concerns with his own earlier inquiry through rational thinking and logic, which, though enabling him to deduce the existence of God, left him without direct mystical knowledge. Ḥayy and Āsāl take leave of Salamān and return to the

uninhabited island, where they spend the remainder of their lives in meditative exercises and visions.

Abubakr Ibn Ṭufayl, author of this medieval, mystical-philosophical narrative treatise, Ḥayy bin Yaqzān, was born at the turn of the twelfth century in a small town close to Granada, in Muslim Spain, which had become an important point of contact between Latin Christendom and Arabic-Islamic culture since the eighth century. For some five centuries, Muslim Spain or al-Andalus mirrored the cultural advancements of

Abbāsid Baghdad, the centre of medieval civilization after 750, until it was surpassed by

Cairo, the new Abbāsid capital until 1517. The Mongols captured Baghdad in 1258, but the Abbāsid caliphate endured, as successors were immediately declared in Cairo with the Abbāsid caliphate surviving there under the Mamluks, who ruled both Egypt and

Syria, until the Ottomans arrived in 1515-1517.1 Muslim Spain attracted many students from other parts of Europe, who cooperated with mainly Arabic-speaking Jews and

Christians to translate what they thought were the treasures hidden in Arabic texts. In these they discovered ancient Greek knowledge, transferred to Spain from Baghdad

(Gabrieli 851-852); al-Andalus also mirrored Baghdad’s splendour and confidence

(Menocal 81-88). The Latin-speaking students knew that the Arabs also contributed to this knowledge, which made the treasure more valuable. While Europe had access to these Arabic sources through travel to Muslim Spain in the medieval period, the Arabic manuscripts themselves physically travelled to Europe – along with the language and people (Matar Turks, Moors and Englishmen, 3-7, 20-42; Britain and Barbary, 11-32) – in the early modern period.

1 See Osman S.A. Ismail al-Bili, introduction, Imam Jalal-al-Din Abd al-Rahman al-Suyūṭī’s The Perfect Guide to the Sciences of the Quran, translated by Hamid Algar, Michael Schub, and Ayman Abdel Haleem, and reviewed by al-Bili (Reading: Garnet Publishing, 2011).

One of the manuscripts that travelled to Europe in the early modern period was

Ḥayy bin Yaqzān. Ḥayy was so popular in England that a Latin translation and several

English translations appeared between 1671 and 1708, not to mention news circulating around mid-seventeenth century about Ḥayy’s plot and themes prior to its translation and subsequent reprints, abridged versions and adaptations.2 Almost immediately after

Edward Pococke, professor of Arabic at Oxford, supervised the translation of Ḥayy – by his son, also named Edward – from Arabic into Latin in 1671, at least four more English translations appeared, three from Pococke the younger’s Latin and one directly from the

Arabic. These first translators were the Quaker George Keith, who completed his version in 1674, the Anglican George Ashwell in 1686, an anonymous translator in 1696, and the

Arabist Simon Ockley in 1708 (Hassan, Ḥayy bin Yaqzān 4-11; Kruk 364-366; Ben-

Zaken 9-10; Kugler 41-47). Ḥayy was indeed popular in early modern England.

Literary Critics: Methodology

Modern studies of Ḥayy’s reception in early modern England traditionally focus on its relationship to Daniel Defoe’s The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The most notable of the critical works to do so are perhaps Antonio Pastor’s The Idea of Robinson Crusoe

(1930) and Nawal Muhammad Hassan’s Ḥayy Ibn Yaqzān and Robinson Crusoe (1980).

Renewed interest in Ḥayy and its reception has been awakened by recent research on early modern English contact with Arabic, especially G.A. Russell’s (ed.) The ‘Arabick’

Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England (1994); G.J.

Toomer’s Eastern Wisdome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth-Century

England (1996); Nabil Matar’s three works, Islam in Britain, 1558-1685 (1998), Turks,

2 See Nawal Hassan, “A Study in Eighteenth-Century Plagiarism,” Islamic Quarterly 27 (1983): 30-48.

Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (1999), and Britain and Barbary, 1589-

1689 (2005); and most recently Eid Abdallah Dahiyat’s Once Upon the Orient Wave:

Milton and the Arab Muslim World (2012)3 and Humberto Garcia’s Islam and the

English Enlightenment 1670-1840 (2012). The result of this research is a welcome revival of interest in Ḥayy and its relationship with European culture, England’s in particular. This recent research has encouraged a general shift in approach. In contrast to earlier works on Ḥayy and its reception in England, one notes in recent studies a shift in methodology from a detailed analysis of the Ḥayy-Crusoe relationship, the flagship of

English engagement of Ḥayy,4 to a historical and cultural survey, as is apparent in the most recent titles: Samar Attar’s The Vital Roots of European Thought: Ibn Ṭufayl’s

Influence on Modern Western Thought (2010); Avner Ben-Zaken’s Reading ‘Ḥayy Ibn-

Yaqzān’: A Cross-Cultural Study of Autodidacticism (2011); Muhmud Barud’s The

Shipwrecked Sailor in Arabic and Western Literature: Ibn Ṭufayl and His Influence on

European Writers (2012); and Emily Kugler’s Sway of the Ottoman Empire on English

Identity in the Long Eighteenth Century (2012).5 Recent research on early modern

English interest in and contact with Arabic expands the scope of inquiry into Ḥayy’s reception in seventeenth- and early-eighteenth century England. More information about

3 An earlier version of Eid Abdullah Dahiyat’s Once Upon An Orient Wave appeared under the title, John Milton and Arabic-Islamic Culture (Shukayr, 1987). 4 Nawal Hassan reviews discussions of the Crusoe-Ḥayy relationship by John Colin Dunlop, De Boer, Henry Corbin, E. Baker, Leon Gauthier, Diana Spencer, Arthur Secord, and Umar Farrukh amongst many others in Ḥayy Ibn Yaqzān and Robinson Crusoe (Baghdad: Al Rashid House for Publication, Iraqi Ministry of Culture and Information, 1980) 32-35. Though Defoe’s Adventures has traditionally been associated with Ḥayy, there are studies of Ḥayy’s relationship with other important works. Russell discusses Ḥayy’s role in giving John Locke the idea of his Essay Concerning Humane Understanding and Ḥayy in “The Impact of Philosophus Autodidactus: Pocockes, John Locke and the Society of Friends,” The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England (Leiden: Brill, 1994). Rudolph Altrochi speculates on Ḥayy’s influence on Dante in his “Dante and Tuphail,” Ithaca 15:3 (Sep., 1938): 125-128. 5 One should also mention Matthew Reilly’s article, “‘No eye has seen, or ear heard’: Arabic Sources for Quaker Subjectivity in Unca Eliza Winkfield’s The Female American,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 44:2 (Winter 2011): 261-283.

the relevant interpretative contexts – Morocco’s religious and political environment during the Almohad rule and England’s intellectual and religious debates in the age of discovery, the seventeenth century in particular – enables critics and historians to re- examine Ḥayy’s reception in early modern England. The success of recent studies hinges on their ability to place Ḥayy in its own philosophic, religious and political contexts, which is what I do in Chapter One. Ḥayy’s philosophic and religious contexts or intellectual lineage has been recently illuminated by Salman Bashier in his excellent work, The Story of Islamic Philosophy, Ibn Ṭufayl, Ibn al-Arabi, and Others on the Limit

Between Naturalism and Traditionalism (2011). As for Ḥayy’s political context, it is the specific form of rational religion officially endorsed by the medieval Almohad dynasty of

North Africa, a rational religion on which Ḥayy comments.6 The second context is the religious and philosophic concerns that informed the seventeenth- and early-eighteenth century English reception of Ḥayy. Starting my study with a discussion of these contexts enables me to look closely at specific instances of early modern English engagement of

Ḥayy by Milton, Locke and Defoe. In other words, textual analysis complements and illustrates the discussion of the historical, intellectual and cultural reception of Ḥayy in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England.

In addition to an emphasis on the specific contexts of Ḥayy’s reception, recent interest uses common threads – for example, shipwreck and autodidacticism, as Barud and Ben-Zaken’s titles respectively show – to connect the historical worlds of Ḥayy, medieval Europe, and early modern England. One important study from the earlier period, Maximillian Novak’s “Robinson Crusoe’s Fear and the Search for Natural Man”

(238-245), attempts to combine historical contextualization and textual analysis. Novak

6 This is the subject of Chapter One.

locates an important theme, fear, but Novak uses fear resulting from solitude in the natural state to untie the link between Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Ḥayy and hence brings to an end two generations of critics’ discussion of the Crusoe-Ḥayy relationship.

That discussion was fortunately reopened by Hassan in her Ḥayy Ibn Yaqzān and

Robinson Crusoe. Although I also analyse the Crusoe-Ḥayy relationship, it is useful to begin with Novak because his article permits me to locate my methodology in relation to recent trends in Ḥayy studies.

Novak speaks about Crusoe’s fear in the solitude of nature. I agree with Novak’s identification of solitude, albeit a negotiated solitude, as an important motif in the island episode of The Adventures and his reflections on moral and political philosophy on the topic of states of nature as an underlying interpretative context. However, I disagree with his argument. Novak’s argument is based on a search for influence: he argues that Ḥayy did not influence Daniel Defoe’s characterization of Crusoe nor The Adventures’ plot. I would suggest that the term ‘influence’ as Novak uses it to be problematically limiting.

Instead of “influence” it is more productive to discuss engagement. The Crusoe trilogy –

The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

(1719), and Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe (1720) – is better understood when imagined as a mediating text, which mediates between the different contexts that inform the world of Ḥayy’s composition, twelfth-century Morocco, on the one hand, and those that inform the world of Defoe, seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England, on the other. In other words, Defoe’s engagement of Ḥayy becomes a window through which the world of Ibn Ṭufayl finds entry into Defoe’s. We would expect the trilogy to include ideas from both worlds; that is, the two men had similar concerns about

somewhat similar issues. Yet the colonial context of Defoe’s age, the age of discovery and settlement, interposes itself between the religious, philosophical and political ideas of twelfth-century North Africa, as they appear in Ḥayy, and seventeenth- and early- eighteenth century England. Hence we need to first understand some of the intellectual and religious issues that form the context of Defoe’s engagement as these become crucial for an analysis of the Crusoe trilogy.

Novak identifies early modern discussions of solitude in the natural state as the context for his interpretation of the Crusoe-Ḥayy relationship. After pointing to parallels between the two narratives’ plots, and between the characters, Crusoe and Ḥayy, Novak recalls Samuel Pufendorf’s descriptions of living conditions in the natural state in De

Jure Naturae et Gentium (1672) and De Officio Hominis et Civis (1673) to explore whether Ḥayy influenced Defoe in imagining Crusoe’s shipwreck and sojourn on the desert island. Novak compares Pufendorf’s descriptions of isolated natural man and

Crusoe’s first reaction to his shipwreck and concludes that Crusoe’s fear is an illustration of Pufendorf’s description and that Crusoe is not influenced by Ḥayy. When speaking about natural states, it should be recalled that the emphasis of European moral and political philosophers like Pufendorf was to contrast European nations and natural states.

Despite European philosophers’ different characterisations of Africa and the Americas, mainly due to the latter’s newness (Pagden, European Encounters 11-12), the term

‘natural’ generally applies to both. Pufendorf identifies fear as the main emotion that engulfs one isolated in a natural state, and Crusoe’s first reaction to his shipwreck is that of fear. Novak quotes Pufendorf’s description of the “wretched Creature” isolated in a natural state “tremble[ing] at every Noise, and … ‘scar’d at the approach of any of his

Fellow Creatures” until his miserable days are “concluded by the Extremity of Hunger or

Thurst, or by the Fury of a ravenous Beast”; Novak compares this description to Crusoe’s own fear, “Lodg’d,” as he is “in the Tree all Night for fear of being devour’d by wild

Beasts” (qtd. in Novak, “Robinson Crusoe’s Fear” 240-41). True, Crusoe’s fears persist and re-emerge throughout both The Adventures and in a different context in The Farther

Adventures, but he does not conclude his life with this fear; he celebrates his arrival in

England with both the wisdom of an aged traveller and the wealth of a colonial adventurer. He neither starves to death nor is he devoured by wild beasts – though he believes himself to be threatened by “cannibals.”

Novak disregards the development of Crusoe’s character, whose continuous popularity lies in his inventiveness: while in solitude in the island, a natural state, he farms, builds a house, and domesticates animals, using his previous life experiences as well as supplies from the shipwreck, despite his fear. Contemporary thinking about the natural state is important to understanding the text, but Novak confines his analysis to the introductory part of the island episode in The Adventures. As for Ḥayy, Novak points out that Pufendorf’s description does not apply to Ḥayy in any part of the latter’s sojourn in his island. Contrary to Pufendorf’s assertion that the solitary, natural man is destitute “of all Arts and Assistances either invented by Men, or reveal’d by GOD,” Ḥayy appears as an example of the perfect hermit, one endowed with intellect to reason, will to worship and adore God, and ‘essence’ to ‘see’ the divine universe. Fear does not appear as a factor in Ḥayy’s character development. It is true that Ḥayy does not have the privilege of revealed religion, but he uses his rational faculties to assert God’s existence and later replaces rational thought with spiritual meditations that yield divine visions. Novak sees

the difference between Ḥayy’s promotion of solitary life in a natural state and Crusoe’s desire to escape both solitude and naturalness as evidence that Ḥayy did not influence

Defoe. Despite Novak’s reliance on fear to interpret Crusoe and his denial of Ḥayy’s influence on Defoe, I agree with Novak’s assumption that seventeenth-century political and moral philosophy are relevant to Defoe’s trilogy.

In fact, early modern European political theorists’ depiction of the relationship between natural and civil states as one of development, from the state of nature to the civil, is relevant to the relationship between Crusoe and Ḥayy. As we will see below, reason plays a major role in this development: civil society is seen as more rational than natural or privative states, yet Ḥayy depicts civil society as irrational and impious. When

Āsāl and Ḥayy decide that Āsāl ’s compatriots in the adjacent city-island state should be taught the knowledge Ḥayy has acquired in solitude, the two men are disappointed at the city inhabitants’ inability to comprehend the truths of their own religion, and, crucially,

Ḥayy attributes their inability to the distraction that the accumulation of wealth poses, which is why he eventually accepts the need for revealed religion’s intervention through laws that govern the distribution of property. The two men decide to return to the island, with Āsāl taking Ḥayy’s lead in meditative exercises. Ḥayy precipitates a specific kind of encounter: between representatives of the natural state and civil society, with the natural appearing as superior rationally and especially spiritually. This is relevant to Defoe’s world, as any reading of the island episode would have to recognize Crusoe’s encounter with Friday, preceded as it is by Crusoe’s fear of cannibalism and a prophetic dream of the encounter, as the most striking part of The Adventures, especially since the encounter occurs on the island, which is classified as a state of nature. In imagining the religious

aspect of the Crusoe-Friday encounter, Defoe mimics Ḥayy, specifically the Āsāl -Ḥayy relationship. The presentation of Friday’s conversion on the island clearly highlights

Friday’s rational and spiritual superiority to Crusoe despite the colonial context in which the encounter is depicted.

Early modern theorists postulate the beginnings of rights based, as Pufendorf – in

Elementa Jurisprudentiae, written in 1658 (Tuck 156-157) – suggests, on the acknowledgement of a power that can make its will known. This power’s will becomes natural law. Alternatively, rights begin with the licit or tacit consent of people on the distribution of property,7 as one of several ways the state of society emerges from the state of nature. The early modern discourse of political theory, as we will see below, is concerned with the relationship between and ultimately the limits that divide the natural state and the state of society. Private property plays a crucial role in delineating this relationship: in Two Treatises, Locke – following Hugo Grotius – theorizes that private property is removed from natural products that were common to all in the state of nature; labour and attachment, which can be defined as a claim, create private property. Private property becomes an important marker of progression towards a civil state, as John

Locke’s chapter “Of Property” in Book II of Two Treatises demonstrates (II.v). Ḥayy, on the other hand, depicts the city-island state as a state of ignorance, where members of society are concerned with the accumulation of wealth and protection of property rights at the expense of the acquisition of divine knowledge. Ḥayy attributes civil society’s

7 Pufendorf changed his position about the ability to impose one’s authority on others, arguing instead on the importance of licit or tacit agreement. Generally, though, Pufendorf’s influence on English moral and political philosophy was limited. See Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) 157-162.

irrationality and irreligion to the pursuit of private property, which is why city-dwellers need the law to regulate property relationships.

Of course in eighteenth-century England, deprecation of city life existed.

Jonathan Swift’s “Description of a City Shower” satirises the shallowness and even sinfulness of city life, and in fact, Defoe’s Crusoe trilogy includes elements of such satire. Nonetheless, Ḥayy’s depiction of civil society would have affected Defoe’s views on contemporary political theory, especially its concealment of evident aspects of exploration and colonization. In addition to explaining progression from natural to civil states in terms of tacit or licit agreement, population growth completes the explanation; as cities became larger, John Locke explains, they marked their territories with distinct boundaries (Two Treatises II.v). These boundaries, however, are contrasted to states of nature, which theoretically had no boundaries. This sort of thinking justified European nations’ expansion into natural states and early modern colonialism. Medieval humanist language that characterised the inhabitants of natural states as savages and cannibals survived into the early modern period, permeating the discourse of political theory.

Locke, for example, postulates that men can and do infringe on the rights of others, breaking the law of reason and inaugurating a state of slavery.8 Crusoe’s fear of cannibalism on the island is a relevant example of the persistence of this characterization.

While Crusoe exhibits the kind of fear Pufendorf associates with a natural state, the developing diversity of sources of fear points to Defoe’s critique of the colonial categories created by contemporary political philosophers. At the beginning Crusoe fears cannibalism, but soon, he also fears other European mariners taking refuge on the island.

8 Hence political theory also justifies the early modern slave trade. See John Locke, Two Treatises on Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) II.iii.

Hence both the “natural” or “pagan” islanders and the “civil” Christians are the source of his fear. The sequel, Farther Adventures, goes even further in highlighting the slipperiness of the colonial categories: an English maid – a member of civil society – contemplates cannibalism when faced with starvation close to English shores. European mariners massacre inhabitants of Madagascar, who have treated them civilly out of respect for the law of nations, which requires hospitality and commerce.9 Crusoe again fears for his own life as towards the end of Farther Adventures European gunboats pursue him. The limited scope in which Novak analyses Crusoe prevents him from considering that Ḥayy may have enabled Defoe to explore and critique contemporary thinking about natural states.10

Ḥayy was popular in early modern England for treating issues that were of concern, but one should not expect the narrative treatise to have precipitated change in all the media of its reception. To clarify this second component of engagement and to highlight an important recent study of Ḥayy and its impact on Europe, I now turn to

Avner Ben-Zaken’s Reading ‘Ḥayy Ibn-Yaqzān’, A Cross-Cultural History of

Autodidacticism, specifically Ben-Zaken’s treatment of the subject of autodidacticism in the context of early modern English natural philosophy or experimental science, another relevant interpretative context for the early modern English engagement of Ḥayy.

Ḥayy offers readers a unique example of autodidacticism. Before the two characters, Āsāl and Salamān, are introduced, the narrator walks the readers through

Ḥayy’s rational inquiry into nature and his experience of vision. Ḥayy’s solitary inquiry

9 See Anna Neill, “Crusoe’s Farther Adventures: Discovery, Trade and the Law of Nations,” The Eighteenth Century 38:3 (1997): 213-230; and Richard Waswo, “The Formation of Natural Law to Justify Colonialism, 1539-1689,” New Literary History (1996): 743-759 10 Defoe’s acquaintance with Ḥayy is presented below.

occupies about three quarters of the narrative treatise. The narrator punctuates each important finding Ḥayy makes with a mention of his age, starting with seven. This autodidactic scheme has drawn the attention of literary critics and historians. Ben-Zaken relies on G.A. Russell, whose research on the conditions surrounding Locke’s thinking on the subject of human understanding and acquisition of knowledge demonstrates that

Locke’s Essay on Humane Understanding (1690) is precipitated by Ḥayy. Russell also examines Locke’s relationship with the Pocockes – the elder discovered the manuscript, which the younger translated into Latin. Russell argues that Ḥayy could have been important to seventeenth-century English readers for its representation of childhood as a distinct phase of development. Ben-Zaken confirms Russell’s points and notes the important link between the Essay and Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1692) on the one hand and Ḥayy on the other when he lists in the introduction to Reading ‘Ḥayy

Ibn-Yaqzān’ popular eighteenth-century stories about “isolated wild boy[s]” like Tom

Telescope, Emile, Little Jack and Tommy Merton. Ben-Zaken also notes the stories’ stress on the young heroes’ education: these boys could “directly build knowledge from sensations … on the blank slates of their own natures,” as theorized in Locke’s Essay and

Some Thoughts and as presented in Rousseau’s 1762 Emile.11 While I agree with Russell that Ḥayy precipitated the Essay, I disagree with her contention that Locke’s argument in the Essay closely follows Ḥayy’s.12 Also I generally agree with Ben-Zaken that the emergence of Ḥayy in Europe and in early modern England in particular is a result of

11 As Kugler notes, however, narratives of the prodigal child autodidact, though influenced by Ḥayy, appeared towards the end of the eighteenth century, which is beyond the period being considered in this study. Kugler draws attention to the changed status of both the Ottoman and British empires during the long eighteenth century. See Kugler, Sway of the Ottoman Empire 181-187. 12 I show in Chapter Three that while Locke’s Essay is in agreement with Ḥayy’s initial method of inquiry – rational inquiry based on the observation of nature – Locke may be alluding to Ḥayy in what he considers a common logical error in assigning a voluntary agent to a cause.

“contemporary controversies [which] induced custodians and translators, who often identified with Ḥayy, to translate and diffuse the treatise to provoke discussions on autodidacticism” (2-9, 12). But I believe that it is important to stress autodidacticism as one of many links between Ḥayy and early modern England. It is also important to differentiate Ḥayy’s autodidacticism in twelfth-century Morocco – as described in

Chapter One – from that autodidacticism in early modern England. The aim of Ben-

Zaken’s work is to find a thread that links the twelfth-century Ḥayy with the different worlds in which it re-emerged – fourteenth-century Barcelona, fifteenth-century Florence and seventeenth-century England. I am more interested in specific instances of engagement in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Locke’s Essay Concerning Humane

Understanding and Defoe’s Crusoe trilogy. In these engagements, Ḥayy offers new ways of thinking or imagining.

When he discusses the early modern English discovery of Ḥayy’s manuscript by

Edward Pococke the elder, Ben-Zaken convincingly shows experimental science’s reliance on autodidacticism; for example, he discusses Pococke befriending the influential and leading experimentalist Robert Boyle in order to sell Ḥayy as a book on autodidacticism relevant to experimental science. Ḥayy easily found readers since experimental science was already an important feature of early modern English culture.

In The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers, Russell edits a collection of articles that demonstrate that the culture of experimentalism was one of the important causes of the interest in Arabic, as natural philosophers wanted to compare their observations with the relevant phenomena described in new translations of Arabic manuscripts. Many of these Arabic manuscripts were translated into Latin in the

medieval period, but by as early as the sixteenth century, English natural philosophers sought re-translations because they had discovered that some of the original medieval translations were faulty. Their discoveries were the result of the experimental method, and the reliance on direct experience of natural phenomena. Arabic science, in addition to its synthesis of Persian, Greek, and Arabic knowledge, was considered to be based on direct observation of nature; hence, new translations were needed to confirm the early modern observations English natural philosophers were making (Russell The ‘Arabick’

Interest 5-6, 14). Manuscripts were sought on a variety of subjects, especially medicine, astronomy, and mathematics as well as geography and history. As manuscripts were acquired, new translations appeared. Errors in the medieval, Latin translation of the seminal medical text the al-Qānūn fil-Tibb or The Canon of Medicine, for example, were corrected in the sixteenth-century edition (1595) – over a century before the first early modern Latin translation of Ḥayy bin Yaqzān appeared in England. The Canon’s author,

Avicenna (or Ibn Sīnā), was well known in Europe at the time. Arabic texts in mathematics, such as Alhazen’s, received similar treatment. The new early modern translations showed that errors in the earlier versions of Alhazen resulted from

“ignorance of the interpreter rather than the inelegance of the Arabe,” according to one early modern English mathematician (qtd. in Hall 153). In part, the need for Arabic manuscripts and translations was practical, as European astronomers and doctors, who sought the medicinal uses of plants, compared their observations with the more recent and accurately translated Arabic texts.

Both the experimental method and the interest in Arabic started about a century before the translation of Ḥayy. The early modern zeal for translation of Arabic

knowledge reverted to an earlier, medieval European interest in Arabic. As Siraisi has noted, though there were medieval, Latin translations of Arabic sources, medieval translators rearranged scientific material so that experiments were used to confirm pre- existing theories in contrast to the early modern practice of deducing from experiments or observations (78-86).13 Because the early modern practice was relatively new, it is understandable that the natural philosophers would want confirmation of their observations with information in newly acquired Arabic manuscripts and retranslations, as they believed the available Latin sources were unreliable; Raymond Mercier’s study shows this desire to confirm information noting that the natural philosophers’ looked for specific information in the manuscripts (158-214). The search for specific manuscripts became easier as Arab lands under Ottoman rule became accessible to Europeans under new agreements of diplomatic representation and Arabists in England became increasingly proficient in that language in the seventeenth century.14 Ben-Zaken accurately describes Ḥayy as an “oracle from the past, confirming experimentalism and empiricism [for] … readers already exposed to arguments in favour of inductive reasoning in the exploration of nature – placing particular emphasis on the methodological value of the work of self-conscious aid to contemporary practices of science” (104).

13 There were a handful of inconsequential exceptions. See Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990) 86-89. 14 Russell, introduction, The ‘Arabick’ Interest reminds us that the institution of permanent diplomacy begins with Italian relations with the Ottomans. Daniel Goffman confirms the Italian innovation but adds that the major element in the development of Renaissance diplomacy was the Ottoman Empire itself and the different labels and the legal consequences given to a foreigner. See Daniel Goffman. “Negotiating with the Ottoman State: the Ottoman Empire and the New Diplomacy” in The Early Modern Ottomans, Remapping the Empire, eds. Virginia Asken and Daniel Goffman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 61-74.

Unlike other newly translated Arabic manuscripts at the time, such as Ibn Sīnā’s

Canon, retranslated in full and in parts, the Arabic Euclid, and the pseudo-Jabirian

Summer perfectionis, retranslations of which appeared in the mid- and late seventeenth century (Russell, The ‘Arabick’ Interest 13-15), Ḥayy did not contain new information of value for seventeenth-century English natural philosophers, prompting an apology about its scientific content by one of the period’s translators.15 Yet the Ḥayy narrative fit into its scientific audience’s culture. While it corroborated the natural philosophers’ autodidactic practice, it also seemed to mimic other, collaborative practices, an important feature of which was the process of establishing an experiment’s objectivity.

The experimental method naturally included the necessary solitary work of the natural philosopher, but this by itself did not create objectivity in early modern practice.

Siraisi, Shapin and Guerrini separately note the two different stages of the experimentalist’s work. The first stage, called the trial, usually involves working with an assistant; the trial is where errors were expected until the experiment was perfected. This stage is followed by a public stage in which the experimenter’s peers, typically from the

‘gentle’ classes, acted as witnesses to the experiment through the general discussion that followed the experiment. Guerrini notes that the initial stage of experiment involves the

“solitude of the laboratory,” which can be a room in a gentleman’s house; once the experiment is perfected, it is made public through a presentation in front of peers. The trial was only recognized as an experiment when it was demonstrated in front of peers, whose role it was to verify it (Guerrini 394-396).16 Shapin likens the laboratory in the first stage to the “hermit’s hut” and the natural philosopher to a “priest of nature” (384).

15 This is Simon Ockley, whose translation, directly from the Arabic and not from Pococke’s Latin, appeared in 1708. 16 Also see Ben-Zaken, Reading ‘Ḥayy bin Yaqzān’ 113.

Probably the most influential natural philosopher at the time, the much-in-demand Robert

Boyle, changed his place of residence and hence his laboratory’s locations several times and even put out an advertisement asking his friends to excuse him from “receiving guests” while he conducted trials (Shapin 387). The work conducted in the trial stage was considered a solitary activity even though there was usually an assistant. However, the assistant was paid and was not considered a disinterested witness, a characterisation reserved for gentlemen. These trials were followed by a public presentation, which was called the experiment: witnesses’ observations confirmed the experiment through the recording of their ‘discourse,’ which was published and circulated in England and throughout Europe.

While Ḥayy did not provide new scientific information, the description of Ḥayy’s experiments and observations as well as his reasoned conclusions seemed to mimic seventeenth-century natural philosophers’ practice. Ḥayy circulated in England and throughout Europe much as did the experiments’ discourses. Thus though Ḥayy participates in the early modern experimental culture of autodidacticism, it also participated in the process of ‘witnessing,’ as it was circulated and read by many natural philosophers. If, as we have noted, it did not contain new scientific information, an important aspect of its value lay in its Arabic composition, Arabic knowledge and language having long commanded respect in early modern England.

Scholarly gentlemen and Arabic manuscripts were both considered witnesses to the work of the natural philosopher, as evidenced in the public reception of the experiment as well as comparison with and validation from translated Arabic manuscripts. Ḥayy only mirrored the circulating experiments’ discourses. Ḥayy was not

used to confirm or test early modern English natural philosophers’ work. Yet, Ḥayy still seems to have offered natural philosophers a new idea. Ben-Zaken mentions Robert

Boyle’s incomplete story, “The Aspiring Naturalist.” Boyle completed only two pages of the philosophical romance in which two characters appear, one of whom is named

Philaretus. This particular name is the pseudonym Boyle uses to describe himself, and the phrase “aspiring Philaretus” appears in Boyle’s autobiographic “An Account of

Philaretus, during his Minority” written in the late 1640s. Ben-Zaken attributes the composition of “The Aspiring Naturalist,” which was written in the 1660s, to Boyle’s relationship with Pococke the elder, through whom Boyle was acquainted with Ḥayy.

Though the Latin translation appeared in 1671, Pococke acquired the Ḥayy manuscript in the mid-1630s, suggesting an oral circulation of Ḥayy prior to its publication.17

While Ben-Zaken correctly notes Boyle’s interest in the “trope of the child prodigy” (115), which he associates with Ḥayy the character, I would like to point out that Ḥayy provides a model for the relationship between a member of European civil society and a representative of natural, pre-civil society that appears in “The Aspiring

Naturalist.” I note that in Boyle’s philosophical romance, incomplete as it is, Philaretus, the European natural philosopher, is on a natural island, where he appears as an auditor willing to learn from his host, Authades, the second character in the romance. After a short introductory paragraph, the remainder of the two pages are in Authades’ words. In these pages, Authades is considering what type of knowledge to reveal to Philaretus. It is significant firstly, that the character Philaretus is both a European visitor to the island and bears Boyle’s pseudonym, the metaphor for the aspiring natural philosopher. Secondly,

17 There is clear evidence for this oral circulation, appearing in the correspondence of members of Boyle’s influential circle, as we will see in Chapter Two below. See Michael Nahas, “A Translation of Ḥayy b. Yaqzān by the Elder Pococke (1604-1691),” Journal of Arabic Literature 16 (1985): 88-90.

the relationship is that of tutor and pupil. Authades makes reference to other

“philosophers” on his natural island who have acquired their knowledge through the “Art of Nature.” Hence while Ḥayy corroborates the existing culture of autodidacticism and mimics the experimental discourses’ circulation, which constitutes the social aspect of the culture and the experiment proper, in my view the specific relationship suggested here is precipitated by Ḥayy: the relationship between the European natural philosopher and the representative of pre-civil society. At a time when Locke hypothesises the ability of an

Amerindian ‘natural’ to acquire knowledge through education to become the equal of the

European in an attempt to highlight the importance of education, Boyle imagines the natural Authades – in a natural island populated with other natural philosophers – as someone who already has knowledge and tutors the European natural philosopher. Ḥayy ends with Āsāl and Ḥayy returning to the uninhabited island, where they form – what the

1686 translator of Ḥayy, George Ashwell, calls – a “fellowship” whose main activity is meditative exercise, where Ḥayy is Āsāl ’s tutor.18

Early Modern England and Ḥayy

The following chapters will show that a form of student-tutor relationship emerges from

Ḥayy’s English reception. Ḥayy seems to have enabled England’s early modern writers to critique or even disregard contemporary discourses surrounding natural and civil states and their respective peoples. It would have been easy for early modern English readers of Ḥayy to identify its hero as the ‘native’ or the ‘natural’ due to the age they lived in, and

18 We will see below two forms of fellowship that probably made it easier for Ḥayy’s reception: the Quaker Robert Barclay preferred a fellowship of worshippers so that when one is moved by the Holy Ghost to utter words, the rest are affected by the spirituality; and John Locke advocated religious societies studying scripture, with the most able to decipher scripture through reason to enlighten the rest, giving reason the role Quakers gave to the Holy Ghost.

the frame of reference that would have immediately come to mind includes the one

Novak mentions, moral and political philosophy. This frame of reference is analogous to what Pagden calls the “principle of attachment,” which Pagden offers as the enduring

European reaction to the encounter with the Amerindians in the New World, especially between the sixteenth and early-eighteenth centuries (Pagden, European Encounters 17-

24). This principle involves the attachment of a visually perceived aspect of the object’s culture to the subject’s contexts. European explorers transformed Amerindian rituals they considered visually similar to European ones into familiar Christian practices even though the original Amerindian rituals may not have carried a similar meaning. While

Ḥayy’s twelfth-century North African context was not entirely available to Ḥayy’s

English readers, their reaction to Ḥayy, as appears in Milton’s Book VIII of Paradise

Lost, Locke’s Essay, and Defoe’s Crusoe trilogy, suggests enough parallels with their cultural contexts that they were able to similarly insert Ḥayy into their own frames of reference. In addition to the discourse of political theory, mentioned above, another frame of reference seems to have been evident to Ḥayy’s adaptors. As we will see in the following chapters, both Defoe and Milton offer protagonists who have unusual tutors,

Friday in the case of Crusoe and none other than the angel Raphael in the case of Adam.

And if we consider Crusoe’s prophetic dream of Friday and the biblical allusion in that dream, where an angel intercepts the prophet Balaam, we can see that certain aspects of

Friday’s character represent an angelic figure. Because Ḥayy’s protagonist is easily perceived as a ‘natural’ in the period yet that same protagonist has visions in which he ascends the heavens, Ḥayy seems to have associated natural humanity with the angelic.

When the first translation of Ḥayy appeared in 1671, the translator, Edward

Pococke the younger, prefaced Philosophous autodidactus with warnings regarding its

Islamic content and cautions about its religious enthusiasm. These warnings were more prominent in the fourth translation of Ḥayy in the early modern period, Simon Ockley’s

1708 translation. It is interesting that in spite of its being recast as a book of natural philosophy, Ḥayy’s most important English readers, its translators, actually understood it differently. The translators presented Ḥayy as a book of natural philosophy and autodidacticism, evident in the title Philosophous autodidactus, yet they were aware that the book contained enthusiastic ideas, and they alerted their readers to that fact. Quaker apologist Robert Barclay, quoted below, emphasizes this element, what Quaker opponents termed ‘enthusiasm,’ for praise, especially the immediate acquisition of divine knowledge through vision without reliance on scripture. Only three years after its appearance in Latin, George Keith, who completed the first English translation from the

Latin, simply disregarded the warnings. Keith (1638-1716), a Quaker, refers to Ḥayy as an “account of Oriental Philosophy,” whose “wisdom” in the seventeenth-century is a given, considering the project of collecting and translating Arabic manuscripts at the time. As Nawal Hassan has noted, when Keith addresses readers saying that Ḥayy

“showeth excellently how far the knowledge of a man, whose eyes are spiritually opened, differeth from that knowledge that man acquireth simply by hear-say or reading,” his stress is on the contrast between “eyes” that are “spiritually opened,” on the one hand, and “hear-say” and “reading,” on the other (qtd. in Hassan 5-6). Keith employs the conventional Protestant contrast between eyes spiritually opened on the one hand and hearsay and reading to describe Ḥayy, seeing in it confirmation of his Quaker faith in the

inner light. This contrast is again highlighted by Robert Barclay (1648-1690), who, writing in 1678, refers to Ḥayy, a “book translated out of Arabick” (another reminder of the status of Arabic knowledge at the time), as an account of “one Hai Ebn Yakdan, who, without converse of man, alone on an island, attained to such profound knowledge of

God, as to have immediate converse with him” (qtd. in Hassan 6).19 Again, the stress is on Ḥayy’s relationship with God; Barclay’s point is that everyone is capable of such immediate communicating with God.

While early modern Europeans translated what seemed to be unfamiliar ‘pagan’ practices into their familiar Christian ones, part of the process explained by Pagden is to stress the superiority of revealed religion over observed natural religion. Amerindians were thought to have arrived at natural religion through the use of natural reason, common to all humanity. Barclay’s point – when he stresses the kind of knowledge Ḥayy has, which allows him to have “immediate converse with” God (126) – is to critique the prevalent distinction between revealed and natural religion and hence the division between ‘pagans’ and Christians in his Apology. Quakers did not share with their contemporaries the belief that what is common to all, Christian and non-Christian alike, is natural reason, through which pagans acquire some form of natural religion. To make the point clear, Barclay adds in the same passage, on the “account of one Hai Ebn

Yockdan,” that the “best and most certain knowledge of God is not that, which is attained by premises premised, and conclusions deduced,” which is a clear reference to reason,

“but that, which is enjoyed by [the] conjunction of the mind of man with, the Supream

Intellect, after the mind is purified from its corruptions, and is separated from all bodily

19 Robert Barclay, Apology for the True Christian Divinity (EEBO Editions: 1678) 126. The Apology appeared in Latin as Theologiae vere Christianae apologia and was first published in English in 1675.

images and is gathered with a profound stillness” (126; emphasis in original).

Purification of the mind and stillness describe Ḥayy’s final stage of inquiry into divine knowledge: meditative exercises that result in visions. It would seem that while Pococke foregrounded Ḥayy’s rational natural philosophy in the title, he really failed in steering readers away from Ḥayy’s enthusiasm, as Barclay’s reading shows. Ḥayy seems to have had such an impact on the Quakers that, as Russell notes, Keith’s translation coincides with the drafting of the Quaker manifesto, presented in 1675 and publicly discussed in

Aberdeen, one year after the publication of Keith’s translation of Ḥayy in 1674. A year later, Barclay published his Apology, defending the propositions presented in the manifesto (Russell, “The Impact of Philosophus Autodidactus” 247-249).

The stillness also describes a Quaker practice whose development precedes the publication of Pococke’s Latin translation of Ḥayy: Friends sit in silence as they banish corporeal thoughts and images from their minds in an inward retirement, a phrase repeated often in the Apology. They wait for the same Holy Ghost who moved the writers of scripture and whose appearance is signalled through dreams or visions;

Quakers relied on the spiritual light as opposed to scripture for redemption.20 The

Quaker belief can be summed up in this proposition: since Adam’s sin affects all humanity, all are equally saved by Christ; Barclay emphasizes that this salvation is

“exhibited to all men, both Jew and Gentile, Scythian and Barbarian,” and “Infidels and

Heathens” (127). Quaker leader George Fox expresses this Quaker position, emphasizing that both Christians and non-Christians, including Amerindians, “Egyptians and the stock of Ham,” have the inner light. Fox critiques prevalent English ideas of natural religion

20 George Fox reports having such a vision in his diaries, George Fox, The Journal (London: Penguin, 1998) 230, 341, 396-7. Fox is quoted below.

when he recalls a meeting at a governor’s house in an American colony in September

1675. In the presence of “a doctor” of religion, Fox recalls that he “called an Indian because he [the doctor] denied it [‘the light and the spirit’] to them.” Fox continues: “I asked him that if he did lie and do that to another, which he would have them to do the same to him, and that when he did wrong, was not there something in him, that did tell him of it, that he should not do so, and did reprove him, and he said there was such a thing in him, that made him ashamed of them, so we made the doctor ashamed in the sight of the governor and the people” (470). In the early modern period, Europeans,

Britons included, would claim that the source of shame was really a natural inclination or the effect of sociability, described by the influential Hugo Grotius in De Jure Belli ac

Pacis (1625), and at the same time the product of natural reason or divine illumination.

One page after citing Ḥayy as an example of Quaker faith in the Apology, Barclay offers his own conclusion on the “Light” by which people may “discern things [that] are vile, from things that are honest: Some call this Power, Natur, otherwise the Law of Natur, I truly judge it to be Divine” (127; emphasis in original).21 It is thus quite interesting that

Barclay and Fox see in Ḥayy an ally with which they can critique the dominant discourse about natural religion and the division it creates between those with access to divine revelation and those who are limited to natural reason.

When Quakers deny that natural reason and the “law of natur” are responsible for moral action, we should understand their position in terms of refusing this prevalent understanding of non-Christian religions. In fact, they refuse two prevalent meanings of

21 George Fox affirms the “true light which John bore witness to was the life in Christ … which was the true light which had enlightened every man that came into the world: which was a heavenly and divine light” and not, Fox emphasizes, a “natural light,” which is a reference to natural reason. See Fox, The Journal (London: Penguin, 1998) 230, 341, 396-7.

the term ‘natural religion’ – as referring to the use of reason to come to Christian truths mentioned above and as referring to non-Christian faiths. Hugo Grotius is the main theorist to include the latter meaning in his larger framework of natural law. In De Jure

Praedae (of which Mare Liberum was published in 1609), Grotius bases his theory on the development of rights on a natural sociability common to all humans (Tuck 59-60): he postulates that man has a natural liberty to use and acquire the goods of nature, a liberty that is linked to sociability through the recognition – by all people – of everyone’s freedom to use “any object of desire” through attachment, a claim of ownership or labour of some kind, a concept later taken up by Locke in Two Treatises of Government (1690).

No agreement with others is necessary as people have a natural sociability that enables them to see others’ rights in what they have already claimed or used for their own “self- preservation.” Grotius links natural and civil states through the conception of an agreement of a few within the state of nature to portion out a piece of land, which could be either private estates or nations. The importance of the theory lies in the proposition that while the formation of nations removes them from the state of nature, the laws of nature still govern their relations as they do individuals’ relations in the state of nature.

In other words, these nations act as individuals do in the state of nature. Locke expresses this understanding when he explains that people may be “governed by the Laws of the

Society” and hence form a commonwealth, “yet”, he adds, “in reference to the rest of

Mankind, they make one Body, which is, as every Member of it before was, still in the

State of Nature with the rest of Mankind.” In the same passage, Locke reiterates that the

“whole Community is one Body in the State of Nature, in respect of all other States or

Persons out of its Community” (Two Treatises, II, xii, 365). This discussion is related to

the competition amongst colonial powers over newly discovered territory, considered still in the state of nature and in particular over the use of the sea, which Grotius excludes from the claims of attachment: no property rights can be claimed over seas. What is important for us is the kind of support Grotius uses for natural law, which he develops in

The Jurisprudence of Holland (1619-1620): sociability is expressive of God’s will, but at the same time, it is natural and it is based on the human individual being a “reasonable being” (Tuck 67-68). In fact, as Jacqueline Lagree points out, Grotius offers common bases for natural law and natural religion: reason is the a priori basis for people’s understanding of both natural law and natural religion; what reason proposes is supported by history and by the universality of natural laws and religion. In other words, through natural reason, people recognize others’ freedom to acquire what becomes, on acquisition, their right; people also use natural reason to arrive at knowledge of God’s existence and the rules of morality. The rituals of pagans, imperfect monotheists, are classified as natural religion. Christianity, however, has a different classification, as it is the complete system of revealed religion. Thus while pagans do not have the ultimate truth because they rely on reason alone, Christians have revealed religion. This explains what Pagden notes regarding the “principle of attachment,” that when Columbus sees what he believes are islanders’ religious rites, he orders his men to confess and to perform communion in recognition of the islanders’ having arrived at their natural religion through reason but also to affirm the superiority of Christianity, his own revealed religion.

Grotius and Columbus’ emphasis on the contrast between natural and revealed religion allows us to appreciate Quakers Fox, Keith and Barclay’s replacement of the

contrast with the conception of the light that inhabits all humanity; we can also appreciate

Keith’s and Barclay’s use of Ḥayy to confirm and support their religious propositions.

However, the third translator of Ḥayy, the Anglican, royalist – and hence not favourable to Quakers – George Ashwell, critiques such Quaker enthusiasts in the preface to his translation, which appeared about twelve years after Keith’s translation and just eight years after Barclay’s Apology. Ashwell accuses Quakers of “presum[ing] to make an over-curious search, by natural light only, into such things, as neither Eye hath seen, nor

Ear heard, nor are discoverable by the heart of man” (Ashwell 3-4). The biblical phrase,

“[neither] Eye hath seen, nor Ear heard” in 1 Corinthians 2.9, appears in the text of Ḥayy as well; it describes the vision the character Ḥayy has, which is the culmination of his meditative exercises. The phrase shows firstly, that Ashwell ignores Quaker logic, which refuses to admit a role for any natural light – whether reason or imagination. This is perhaps because Ashwell rejects the claim that Quakers are moved by the Holy Spirit; if so, Ashwell’s rejection is similar to Locke’s position regarding private revelation.

Secondly, Ashwell is at pains to commend Ḥayy’s description of vision yet to critique

Quakers. Finally, Ashwell seems to highlight problems with contemporary thinking about natural theology and natural religion. After he quotes the familiar phrase from the text of Ḥayy in his translation’s preface, Ashwell curiously suggests that Ḥayy is divinely guided through divinely inspired vision and he links the vision to the Quran. This is curious because Islam was often placed along with pagan religions that belong to the realm of natural religion as opposed to Christianity. Lagree explains that according to

Grotius, the difference between Muslims and Jews on the one hand and pagans on the other is that the former two were perfect monotheists while the latter were imperfect

monotheists, worshipping God through idols. But all were considered to adhere to a form of natural religion. It is thus interesting that the two Quakers, Keith and Barclay, as well as the Anglican opponent Ashwell emphasize the non-traditional account of natural religion. Ashwell attempts to retrieve Ḥayy from Quakers, who were the first to claim it as an exemplary text of their faith. The Quakers recognized that the most striking element in Ḥayy is its description of vision. Ashwell praises the “figurative Expression” with which Ḥayy’s “Beatifical Vision of God” is described before he suggests the source of the description: “although not altogether irrational for a meer natural Philosopher to conjecture; yet, I suppose,” he adds, the figurative expressions of the beatific vision “are taken out of the Alcoran, the Author of this History being a Mahometan by Religion”

(11). Ashwell’s unwillingness to keep to a single source of the vision – first reason and then the Quran – is telling, for it is to this beatific vision that Ashwell refers when he says that Ḥayy’s search for the truth “brought him, before he is aware, unto the ends of his journey … the easie ascent of winding Stars which conduct to the top of an high Tower, or Pyramid ... Or rather like the leisure mounting of Jacob’s Ladder, whereon he saw the

Angels ascending as well as descending” (Ashwell 7).22 Thus, even the Anglican

Ashwell, who begins with the naturalness of Ḥayy’s religion, subverts its categories by implying, in likening Ḥayy’s ascent to Jacob’s, that the Quran is divinely inspired, and that this divine inspiration provides the explanation of Ḥayy’s visions. Significantly,

Ashwell seems to suggest a typological reading of Ḥayy when he asserts, in the same place where he makes the reference to the pyramid and Jacob’s Ladder, that the reader is

22 I return to Ashwell’s description of Ḥayy’s vision in relation to Milton’s Adam in Chapter Two below.

at last brought to the “very top of the Ladder, where God presents Himself unto his view.”23

In addition to natural religion, Quakers challenged ideas regarding natural theology. Reason connects the two senses of natural theology I treat here: one emphasizes the role of reason in interpreting Christian scripture and the other the role of reason in the observation of nature, bringing the latter closer to the conception of natural religion described above. In the sixteenth century, Montaigne argued for the need to bolster the Christian faith with evidence from nature and reason, what he called natural theology, a reference to the use of reason in confirming Christianity (ff. 138).24 Keith and Barclay’s references to Ḥayy cited above, especially the denial of “reading” and

“premises premised,” should be read as representing Quaker faith, which replaces reason and scripture with the inner light. A good example of a Protestant who advocated interpreting scripture through reason is John Locke, whose position, according to Kim

Parker, shifts from early Calvinism, anticipating the Holy Spirit’s guidance in interpreting scripture, somewhere between this Calvinism and rationalism (25-26). Even though he later decided that the scope of reason was limited when it comes to matters of faith, in his Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, he came to the conclusion that it could still be a guide in religious matters, stressing in 1687 that those more capable of understanding should instruct others on difficult parts of scripture (Parker 27-28). Earlier in the 1660s, Locke joined the congregation of Benjamin Whichcote, a Latitudinarian –

23 Cf 120-121 and 189-193 below. 24 Though Ḥayy was translated in the seventeenth-century in England, as Francesco Gabrieli notes, the idea of the coincidence of religion and natural reason was new to Latin Christendom until contact with Arabic. See Francesco Gabrieli “The Transmission of Learning and Literary Influences to Western Europe” in The Cambridge History of Islam, eds. P.M. Holt, Ann K.S. Lambton, and Bernard Lewis, Volume 2B (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) 851-852.

Latitudinarians were accused of being influenced by Socinianism, both groups giving reason a clear role in scriptural interpretation. In the 1670s, Locke was busy translating the essays of Pierre Nicole, a Jansenist who also stressed the role of reason in interpreting scripture. Locke’s own Reasonableness of Christianity and his Essay made him liable to the charge of Socinianism (Parker 13-16, 21, 26).25 The high esteem in which Locke holds reason stands in contrast to the Quaker critique. As we will see in Chapter One, in its own milieu, Ḥayy’s main thrust is that vision – and not reason – confirms the esoteric parts of the Quran. Writing in seventeenth-century England, George Fox suggests

Christians should “join the spirit” and “quench” the flesh (271-2, 19);26 through the outward stillness of the body and the inward retirement of the mind, they should banish corporeal images from the imagination to receive the inner light. Barclay, too, had warned that “this meddling in things spiritual by man’s own understanding, is one of the most dangerous evils.” The Quaker position echoes Ḥayy’s.

The second sense of natural theology concerns early modern English natural philosophers. Ḥayy’s inquiry into nature ends with the observation of nature and the use of reason to make logical conclusions, whereas natural philosophers in England viewed the process of inquiry into the natural state as a continuous one. To them the only way to properly ‘see’ paradise and to regain biblical paradise was to continue to delve behind nature’s surface, Joanna Picciotto explains. This is their natural theology: instead of focusing on God, they focused their efforts on the study of nature. In effect, the process

25 The Essay’s relationship with Ḥayy is the subject of Chapter Three. 26 Fox’s mention of his vision is not as detailed as Ḥayy’s. Even though I have not researched Fox’s knowledge of Ḥayy, it is not such a far-fetched assumption, considering the Quaker involvement with Ḥayy. Nabil Matar mentions that in a letter to the king of Algiers, arguing for the release of some Christian captives, George Fox quotes from the Quran. See Matar, “Some Notes on George Fox and Islam,” Journal of the Society of the Friends Historical Society, 55 (1989): 271-276.

of regeneration – after the Fall – through inquiry into nature was non-ending.

Considering the object of their inquiry, their methods included direct inquiry through the senses. Ḥayy, on the other hand, abandons his inquiry into the state of nature, in effect abandoning the use of his senses and reason, and refocuses his attention through meditative exercises on the Creator. Hence although the first half of the narrative reads like Royal Society members’ circulating descriptions of scientific experiments, and expressing their natural theology, Ḥayy’s ultimate argument would have challenged these specific readers’ assumptions about the scope of their scientific inquiry. Suffice it to mention here that when Ben-Zaken says of Ḥayy that it “unveils natural things that

‘neither the eye can see, or the ear hear, nor the human mind perceive’” (105), he erroneously attaches the phrase to the inquiry into natural phenomena, perceived through the senses. The phrase, “neither the eye can see,” which appears in Ḥayy and is a New

Testament passage, describes neither natural things nor natural philosophy; it appears in

Ḥayy at the culmination of visions, in the section that describes Ḥayy’s divine vision. It was properly understood and quoted by George Ashwell in the preface to his translation of Ḥayy. Ben-Zaken takes the phrase most commonly used of Ḥayy and places it in the wrong context, totally changing the meaning of the text as it was drawn on by both its immediate medieval Arabic and early modern English audiences. The point cannot be over-emphasized: Ḥayy challenged early modern natural philosophers’ reliance on scientific inquiry for regeneration even as it mimicked their circulating texts.

It is significant that the seventeenth-century English Quaker critique of the stress on reason recalls the medieval European concern with ‘virtuous heathen.’ It is significant because for Quakers, Ḥayy mimicked this medieval concern while changing its objective.

In the context of arguing that reason cannot be a guide for virtuous actions, Barclay notes that the “natur before spoken of, by which the Gentiles are said to have done things contained in the Law, is not the common natur of men, but the Spiritual natur, that ariseth from works of the Spiritual Law, that is written in the heart.” We have seen this position before, but Barclay adds, “I confess, they of the other extream, … are pressed with this testimony by the Socinians and Pelagians.” The Socinian ‘heresy’ was common in seventeenth-century England, but the reference to the medieval Pelagians is curious because they may have been suggested to Barclay by Ḥayy. Barclay explains that attributing the virtuous acts of pagans or heathens to natural reason would make Christ’s coming unnecessary or would “leave them [the heathens] a way to salvation without him.” Barclay adds that the “worst of all” alternatives would be to say they were “still damned despite their virtuous acts” (66, 68).27 This statement reminds us that the medieval virtuous heathen debate was concerned with the need to acknowledge the virtue of heathen. The debate focuses on virtuous acts and the role of natural reason and natural law as these acts’ sources, and this attribution of virtue to reason seems to have persisted into the sixteenth century (Coleman 21-35; Hahn “Indians East and West”).28 The medieval virtuous heathen debate may have been suggested to Barclay by Ḥayy, which contains almost all of the features of medieval writing on virtuous heathen. These features include a dialogue between a representative pagan and a believer; an inquiry into each other’s faith or that of one of them; the voice of the pagan; an ironic contrast between the pagan’s society and that of the believer; the question of salvation as an effect of conversion; and a connection with a medieval present (Grady 7-10, 18-19, 23-24). All

27 This last consequence is directed at “most Protestants,” Barclay says, the Calvinists. Barclay of course includes Catholics in his criticism. 28 Quaker replacement of natural reason with the inner light has already been mentioned.

of these features are present in Ḥayy, but neither Barclay nor Fox mentions any of them.

There is one important difference between this medieval debate and Ḥayy, though. What we learn from the medieval virtuous heathen debate is that the objective of the ‘texts’ that treated the subject in the medieval period was to explain and recommend the virtuous heathen, to bring them from a pagan past or contemporary pagan world into a Christian present (Grady 24, 25, 46-47). Early modern English writers commenting on Ḥayy had the reverse object: Barclay, Keith, Ashwell, and, as we will see in Chapter Four, Defoe, used Ḥayy to validate their own religious positions.

Early modern use of Ḥayy, a work clearly identified by its translators and commentators as a Muslim text, to validate different Christian positions confirms Emily

Kugler’s observation that the “editorial interventions of this version [George Keith’s

Quaker translation of Ḥayy] from the realm of the scholarly into the religious identity of

England” (41), an observation that also applies to George Ashwell’s translation, especially the preface where Ashwell critiques Quakers and yet describes Ḥayy’s vision in a manner that suggests its source, the Quran, maybe divine revelation. Kugler’s thesis is that translations of Ḥayy reveal early modern English anxiety about Islam (24), especially in light of what Nabil Matar has demonstrated in terms of the military and cultural superiority of the Ottoman and North African states, which made conversion attractive, as well as the common occurrence of English conversions to Islam (Islam in

Britain 3-49).

Arabic Studies and Ḥayy in England

Though the extant translations of Ḥayy in England date to the late seventeenth century, half a century after Arabic was institutionalized as a philological requirement for medical students at Oxford and Cambridge, recognition of the value of Arabic and the interest in cultivating knowledge of the language started much earlier. The prominence of Arabic in commerce and diplomacy and as an international lingua franca, used by merchants and rulers as far away as the Malay sultanates, highlights its sway in the period. William

Bedwell (1563-1632) pointed out that the language was used in all lands inhabited by

Muslims, “from the shores of [the] extreme West Fortunate islands even to the islands of

Moluccas in the extreme East” (Holt, “The Background to Arabic Studies” 26). Though

Bedwell is considered the patriarch of Arabists in England, Robert Wakefield published his Oratio de laudibus & utilitate trium lingaurum Arabicae Chaldaicae & Hebraicae as early as 1528, anticipating the introduction of Arabic to the formal training of theologians later in the century. Wakefield’s Oratio contained Arabic type, probably the first publication to do so in England (Roper 12-32). Wakefield learned Hebrew and Syriac and taught in Tübingen before returning, in 1519, to England and becoming chaplain to

Henry VIII. Many Protestants in England developed an interest in eastern churches whose independence from Rome was seen as justification for an English national church, the Church of England (Hamilton 37-38). Eastern Christians were traditionally perceived as victims of Muslim persecution, but direct acquaintance with eastern Christians suggested otherwise. English clergy and other English travellers visiting the eastern

Christians were confronted with what they perceived as the ignorance of eastern

Christians, who were also hostile to the English clergy due to memories of persecution at the hands of European crusaders (Hamilton 46-47). This direct knowledge, according to

Hamilton, challenged the reprinted and often-quoted medieval texts about the East, and differences between Protestant and eastern Churches emerged. The more persistent scientific and cultural interest in Arabic remained, though, culminating in the translation of Ḥayy.

We can connect the career of the Arabist responsible for Ḥayy’s translation –

Edward Pococke senior, who supervised his son’s Latin translation – to the patriarch of

Arabic studies in England, the aforementioned Bedwell, whose death coincides with the year Arabic was introduced to Cambridge. Bedwell produced an Arabic version of the

Johannine Epistles and with the encouragement of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes an 800- page Arabic-Latin Lexicon, printed in 1595 through the Dutchman, Thomas Erpenius

(Hamilton 66 ff.) This cooperation illustrates the connections that existed between

European and British Arabists. With French-Ottoman political and commercial links offering links to eastern Christians, a Catholic Lebanese Maronite College was established in Rome, where the Maronite Gabriel Sionita taught Arabic. Bedwell also taught in Paris, where Erpenius and the German Matthias Pasor studied Arabic in 1609 and 1624-25, respectively. Erpenius and Pasor were Protestants. Protestant Orientalism charted its own course, with Erpenius replacing the self-taught Francis Raphelengius as the second professor of Oriental languages in Leiden in 1613; when Erpenius died, his pupil Jacob Golius filled his position in 1624. Both Bedwell and Pasor, who settled in

England, taught Pococke Arabic at Cambridge. With Pococke at Oxford and two years earlier Abraham Wheelocke (as first Chair of Arabic) appointed at Cambridge, this was perhaps the first time in Europe that Arabic language and culture, religion in particular, were studied in an organized and a “more accurate and dispassionate” manner,

particularly with Pococke’s Specimen historiae Arabu (1650) (Holt, “The Background”

24).29

After graduating from Cambridge, the man responsible for introducing Ḥayy,

Edward Pococke the elder, became chaplain to the Levant Company in Aleppo in 1630 and in 1637. Pococke visited Constantinople with his friend the mathematician John

Greaves. In Aleppo, Pococke cemented his knowledge of Arabic. He had several local teachers in Aleppo (Ben-Zaken 108, 110). He also had a local agent in Aleppo, where

European collectors and patrons competed for manuscripts in oriental languages, especially Arabic and Persian. Pococke, Laud, Robert Huntington, Golius and John

Selden were all collectors. Their collections ended up at Oxford while Erpenius’ large collection found a home in Cambridge. Pococke brought the manuscript of Ḥayy with him from Aleppo to England in or around 1636. Perfectly fluent in Arabic, Pococke would have immediately recognized the importance of the twelfth-century Arabic mystical-philosophical tale and especially its relevance to his seventeenth-century

English and perhaps even European milieu. The main lobbyists for the institutionalization of Arabic at the universities were, as would be expected, biblical scholars but also, as mentioned earlier, physicians and other natural philosophers.

Interest in Arabic was so strong in early modern England that in 1634, Archbishop Laud required that all ships, mainly merchant ships of the Levant Company, returning to

England from the East bring Arabic or Persian manuscripts (Wakefield 130).

The backdrop to Bishop Laud’s requirement is competition with European collectors and their patrons to acquire as many manuscripts as possible. Most

29 Also see Holt, introduction, The Cambridge History of Islam, eds. P.M. Holt, Ann K.S. Lambton, and Bernard Lewis, Volume 2B (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) page xviii. Comments by Kugler, Sway of the Ottoman on the anxiety connected to the academic study of Arabic are relevant as well.

manuscripts belonging to English and European collectors eventually found their way to

Cambridge and Oxford, with the Oxford Arabic collection in particular swelling so large that the university became a major centre of eastern learning in Europe (Wakefield 130-

132; Holt, “The Background” 23-26). The most notable endowments are Archbishop

Laud’s; Laud donated about one hundred Arabic manuscripts to the Bodleian between

1635 and 1640. John Selden gave one hundred and seventy Arabic manuscripts, ranging from the Quran to works of mathematics and astronomy, in 1659; and Thomas Greaves, who was a mathematician but also deputy Professor of Arabic in Pococke’s absence, added another twenty-one Arabic manuscripts in 1678. Pococke’s own collection of two hundred and seventy Arabic manuscripts was finally bestowed to Oxford in 1692. As for

Cambridge, the most notable donation was that of Thomas Erpenius, who was Chair of

Arabic at Leiden, Holland. Erpenius succeeded the first Chair of Arabic at Leiden,

Raphalengius, who set up the first Arabic press in Leiden, from which English Arabic studies developed. Significantly, many of these manuscripts were translated only in part and included in larger works, especially histories and scientific encyclopaedias. Some of the translated manuscripts had the Arabic and Latin appearing side by side, so that many at the time became familiar with Arabic type as well even though they might not have possessed the language.

Chapters of the Dissertation

The author of Ḥayy bin Yaqzān, Abubakr Ibn Ṭufayl, was born in or around 1105 in a small town close to Granada. Though he was a well-known physician and philosopher

and also held political office in the tāyfa or city-state of Granada, on its defeat by the

North African Almohads, Ibn Ṭufayl moved from Spain to North Africa, eventually becoming minister and physician of the Almohad philosopher king Abu Ya’qub Yusuf al-

Mansur. Al-Mansur was notable for changing the character of the Almohad dynasty from its austere beginnings. He was educated in both Muslim Spain and in Marrakesh, the capital city he made into an intellectual hub. Most critics and historians mention a significant audience with al-Mansur, in which Ibn Ṭufayl introduced a young Averroes

(or Ibn Rushd) to the court and hence to the world (Ben-Zaken 29-30; Tourneau 69-75).

In Ḥayy, Ibn Ṭufayl makes a substantial contribution to Islamic philosophy through a narrative that follows the life of the main character Ḥayy bin Yaqzān. An understanding of Ḥayy in its own milieu enhances our understanding of its appeal to the early modern English writers discussed in subsequent chapters. A fuller description of the narrative preceded by a discussion of how it both synthesizes and critiques Arabic-

Islamic philosophy appears in Chapter One, where I show that Ḥayy is better understood when seen as part of a philosophical controversy that occurred in ninth-century Baghdad.

Acknowledging this controversy is important as it highlights the ancestry of the ideas contained in Ḥayy as well as the role of Ḥayy in its own twelfth-century intellectual and political milieu. The Almohad movement’s founder, Ibn Tūmart, whose intellectual career was sharpened in Baghdad, connects Marrakesh and Baghdad; on his return to

North Africa, he founded the Almohad movement. Ibn Tūmart’s career is credited for uniting North African and Spanish Muslims with their co-religionists at the centre of the

Middle East, but his career also is responsible for the narrow rationalism of the form of

Islam he promoted, a rationalism I show Ibn Ṭufayl critiques. That rationalism can be

traced to Ibn Sīnā, whose influential rational, demonstrative method is illustrated through an earlier version of Ḥayy bin Yaqzān, written by Ibn Sīnā himself. Ibn Ṭufayl uses Ibn

Sīnā’s title, Ḥayy bin Yaqzān, to write a different story, one that transforms Ibn Sīnā’s earlier version into a more traditional and esoteric narrative. Ironically, Ibn Sīnā did write an important esoteric work, The Recital of Salamān and Absāl. Ibn Ṭufayl introduces these two characters’ names into his revised version of Ḥayy, offering an original defense of traditional, esoteric religion, as we will see in Chapter One.

With the exception of George Ashwell, it seems that the seventeenth-century translators of Ḥayy censure Ḥayy’s spontaneous generation from the earth. Pococke and

Keith considered spontaneous generation blasphemous in contradicting the creation story.

They found it so objectionable that they removed it from their translations, penning their attacks on the conception of spontaneous generation in prefaces and introductions. The early eighteenth-century translator Simon Ockley also finds spontaneous generation objectionable though he does not omit it from his version. To a poetic mind like John

Milton’s however, Ḥayy’s spontaneous generation from the earth seems to have been suggestive enough to offer a useful feature of Adam’s origin. In Book VIII of Paradise

Lost, Adam’s story of his earliest memories and the very first conclusions he reaches when he gains consciousness while in a prelapsarian state so closely parallel the process of Ḥayy’s spontaneous generation from the earth and his natural reasoning that we can explore the possibility of Ḥayy having influenced Paradise Lost.

Though Milton did not know Arabic, a comparison between Milton’s Adam and

Tufyal’s Ḥayy shows that the general culture of Arabic translation in seventeenth-century

England ensured that some members of the educational elite were exposed to Arabic

learning. Milton, in fact, used information from translated Arabic manuscripts, including translations where the Latin and Arabic appeared side by side. Milton’s use of a variety of encyclopaedias of science is also well known, and these often contained references to

Arabic natural philosophers. Milton was a member of circles that discussed Ḥayy prior to its 1671 translation; it is therefore possible that the major themes of Ḥayy, including its plot and spontaneous generation, were known prior to its publication and as early as the mid-1640s. The parallels between Ḥayy and Book VIII of Paradise Lost, which include

Adam’s recollections of his consciousness, his reasoning about his origins, and finally a dream in which he converses with God, are the subject of Chapter Two. Though Adam’s conversations with Raphael are not part of the parallels, I suggest the ways in which the relationship with an angelic figure is connected to Ḥayy. It is interesting to note here that

Ḥayy, which is part of Islamic ascension stories where an angelic figure guides the

Prophet or a believer, seems to recall this tradition to seventeenth-century English readers. As mediating text, Ḥayy may be seen as linking Milton’s Paradise Lost, where there are clear parallels between Adam’s story and Ḥayy’s development, and the

Prophet’s ascension story, which begins the cycle. Ḥayy may have also provided a model for the autobiographical form of Adam’s narration; to illustrate this, I end Chapter Two with a discussion of Ashwell’s Theologia Ruris, written in the first person and appended to Ashwell’s 1686 translation of Ḥayy.

In Chapter Three, I argue that John Locke’s Essay Concerning Humane

Understanding is in part a response to Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy. Though Ḥayy dwells on observation of natural phenomena and reason to prove the existence of God, it concludes that this kind of knowledge is indirect and hence limited. Locke would agree with this

conclusion. Ḥayy’s main message is that meditation and vision are the sole sources of direct knowledge of God. Reason and observation of natural phenomena can aid one in attaining knowledge of the existence of God but do not offer direct knowledge. Vision, however, seemed too close to the practice of Quakers and other enthusiasts in early modern England for Locke to accept. Ḥayy reaches conclusions about the limited nature of reason through what appear to be logical steps; he begins with the observation of natural phenomena, continues through the classification of phenomena and ends with what Ḥayy calls speculative thinking. It is through this method that Ḥayy concludes that there is a God. Ḥayy also realizes that this knowledge is limited as it does not provide any information about God or communication with God. This is when Ḥayy decides to begin meditative exercises and succeeds in having a vision.

Locke would have been as acquainted as Milton with the Arabic learning around him. My examination begins with Russell’s argument that Locke’s Essay was precipitated by his reading of Ḥayy (“The Impact of Philosophus autodidactus”).

Russell, however, ends her demonstration of Locke’s acquaintance with Ḥayy and its suggestion of the subject of human understanding with a promise to show the accord between the Essay and Ḥayy’s arguments. I make two points. First, Russell does argue persuasively that Locke was influenced by Ḥayy in considering the subject of the Essay.

Secondly and notwithstanding Ḥayy’s suggestion of the subject of the Essay, any examination of Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy and Locke’s Essay will conclude that the Essay actually refutes the possibility of vision as a source of knowledge, that is, Locke refutes

Ḥayy’s main argument. Locke would have recognized in Ḥayy’s main argument a similarity with the too familiar Friends, the Quakers. Because Locke is averse to the idea

of vision as a source of knowledge, he would have been keen to closely follow Ḥayy’s reasoning in order to argue against it. Ḥayy makes the kind of logical error Locke identifies in the Essay; when he explains the error, Locke mentions an unnamed Indian philosopher. In Chapter Three, I speculate about whether this Indian philosopher is an allusion to Ḥayy.

Not all who were familiar with Ḥayy disagreed with its main argument about the potency of vision. Quakers are a good example; they were the first to translate Ḥayy into

English a couple of years after its appearance in Latin. Quakers seemed to find in Ḥayy support for their belief in the inner light. Ḥayy also influenced Daniel Defoe, who, though not a Quaker, thought it an act of charity to write in Quakers’ defense. The relationship between Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Ḥayy is the subject of Chapter Four.

Unlike Milton and Locke,30 Defoe’s indebtedness to Ibn Ṭufayl has long been noted and discussed by several critics. Yet there is still substantial disagreement on the influence of

Ḥayy on Crusoe. Antonio Pastor and Nawal Hassan argue for Ḥayy’s influence on

Defoe’s Crusoe whereas an important Defoe critic like Arthur Secord argues against such an influence, in particular questioning or rejecting the notion of Defoe’s acquaintance with Ḥayy. Contemporary Defoe scholar Maximillian Novak completely ignores Ḥayy in his 2001 study of Defoe, even though he intends his study of Defoe to be similar to John

Livingston Lowes’ study of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” in The Road to Xanadu.31

Nonetheless, Novak’s comment on an “imaginative Defoe whose unconscious might combine four or five different works in a single image” (Daniel Defoe 540) is quite

30 To my knowledge, no one has demonstrated the parallels between Milton’s Adam and Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy. As for Locke, though Russell excellently notes Locke’s acquaintance with Ḥayy (“The Impact of Philosophus autodidactus”), she has not produced her study of how the main argument in Locke’s Essay follows Ibn Ṭufayl’s in Ḥayy. As I show in Chapter Three, Locke’s Essay in fact argues against Ḥayy. 31 In the discussion of Novak above, I showed how he argues against such an influence.

useful to my thesis on the close relationship between Defoe’s Crusoe and Ḥayy. Secord’s opinion, more typical of literary critics’ attitude towards the relationship between Crusoe and Ḥayy, cautions that the Crusoe plot could “easily be fitted into any skeleton outline” and advises that the first step in finding a source that may have precipitated the writing of

Crusoe should be to “discover an account of a man whose isolation extends over a considerable number of years.” Secord does not believe it is Ḥayy because the only evidence available is the “general probability that he [Defoe] may have read it” (qtd. in

Hassan, Ḥayy bin Yaqzān 31-33).32 Hassan, however, writing decades after this observation (1985), finds the evidence Secord requires.

Nawal Hassan locates Daniel Defoe’s unpublished Sale Catalogue of his books, which demonstrates the author’s acquaintance with Quaker beliefs and the Arabic sources

Dissenters like him used. Though it does not list all of these sources, the catalogue does contain Simon Ockley’s History of the Saracens, pointing to Defoe’s familiarity with one of Ḥayy’s English translators. Ockley, an Arabist of equal stature to Pococke, translated

Ḥayy directly from the Arabic (instead of relying on Pococke the younger’s Latin translation) into English in 1708. Defoe also owned books by Pococke the elder, the famed Arabist, who directed his son’s 1671 Latin translation of Ḥayy. Defoe also owned

32 I note Srinivas Aravamudan’s observation that, “The early Enlightenment … instantiates a different moment of world literature through translatio, or the indiscriminate carryover of literary goods from varied sources without always marking the context, language, and tradition of the works’ original production” (198). Aravamudan, following David Damrosh, defines translatio as “all those textual artifacts that crossed the linguistic and cultural boundaries of their principle production” (196). Though I agree with Aravamudan that finding material evidence of East’s influence on the West, especially canonical texts, is a pecular requirement – “requiring special pleading” (212) – that does not seem to apply when asserting non- eastern influences, researching such evidence provides important information on the conditions of contact that make the textual artifacts involved – Ḥayy, Paradise Lost, the Crusoe trilogy – texts that mediate between cultural and historical moments. Such historical research compliments comparative analyses; see pages 11-12 above. This is why it is important to note Daniel Defoe’s acknowledgement of Ḥayy bin Yaqzān, which not only provides evidence of his knowledge of the Arabic work, but offers insight into the kind of interpretation suggested by his engagement of Ḥayy. Srinivas Aravamudan, “East-West Fiction as World Literature: The Hayy Problem Reconfigured,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 47:2 (2014) 195-231.

Barclay’s Apology for the True Christian Divinity, which cites Ḥayy as an example of

Quaker belief.33 Defoe actually wrote a defence of Quaker and Dissenter belief in Christ, and posed as a Quaker in several articles published in the Review (1705). Defoe’s interest in religious matters is quite evident; his Continuation of Letters Written by a

Turkish Spy is a sarcastic critique of Christian morals. Defoe’s ownership of Barclay’s

Apology, however, points not only to his closeness to Quakers but to his familiarity with a text that mentions Ḥayy as illustrative of Quaker belief.

Defoe’s Sale Catalogue’s listing of Ockley, Pococke and Barclay may be sufficient evidence to support acquaintance with Ḥayy, but there is another curious listing. This is Paul Rycaut’s Spanish Critic (1681), a source for Defoe’s own

Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy. The latter confirms Defoe’s interest in

Turks in general, but it also indicates Defoe’s familiarity with the character Mahmut, whose dialogue with Ḥayy-like Androgio (or Andrenio) Defoe published in an advertisement for the Turkish Spy in his Review.34 Defoe read and praised the original author of Spanish Critic,35 who, the translator Paul Rycaut writes, “might have originally deduced his fancy from the History of Hai Ebn Yikhdan, wrote in Arabic by Ebn Tophail,

33 Barclay’s Apology was published in Latin in 1676 and English in 1676 and 1678. See Hassan, Ḥayy bin Yaqzān 123, note 31. 34 The Turkish Spy is a series of letters written by Giovanni Marana in Italian and French in the mid- seventeenth century. They were subsequently translated into English towards the end of the century. They can be described as the spy’s critique of Christian morality. The popularity of the spy, Mahmut, can be compared to Ḥayy’s in seventeenth-century England. See Hassan, pp. 11-12. A Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy at Paris appeared in England in 1718 and is thought to be penned by Daniel Defoe. The letters pretend to be translated to English from the original Arabic through Italian. The Review is best described by Charles West as the “beginnings of popular tabloid journalism and even the scandal sheets,” containing one of the first “bogus” letters to the editor. See Charles West, Daniel Defoe, A Biography (New York: Carol & Graf Publishers, 1998) page xiv. 35 The Spanish Critic or El Criticon by the Spanish Baltazar Gracian and translated to English by Paul Rycaut in 1681. Similarities between the Spanish Critic and Ḥayy point to the fact that Ḥayy was available in Spanish, translated by a Du Guevara, prior to its appearance in Latin (by Pococke in 1671) – See Hassan 124-125, note 51. Hassan also locates a “Dialogue” between the Turkish spy Mahmut (above) and Andrenio, the protagonist of the Spanish Critic, in which Andrenio and Ḥayy appear as one and the same character. See Hassan, Ḥayy bin Yaqzān 11-12.

and translated into Latin by Dr. Pococke” (qtd. in Hassan, Ḥayy bin Yaqzān 36). In

Defoe’s own Turkish Spy, there appears a dialogue between the Turkish spy, Mahmut, and the Spanish Critic’s Androgio. Mahmut approaches a man “born immediately out of the Earth, therefore [Mahmut] … call’d [him] Androgeus; who having been found in

Arabia, was thence Translated into Spain, and made the Companion of the Spanish

Critic.” It should be recalled that Ḥayy is also immediately born out of the earth. The translation suggests to me a change of identity but one that maintains the main substance of Ḥayy’s character. The translation actually mentions Ḥayy. When Mahmut says to

Androgio, “I perceive you can be no other then a True Born Englishman,” Androgio replies, “I am at this time a True Born Spaniard… For ever since I have been

Hispanioliz’d by Du Guevara, I reckon my self as much a Free Born Castilian, as if I could [count] back ten Generations; and have almost quite forgotten my Extraction in

Arabia, so very strange; and my Relation to the Son of Jockdan, who made the first

Discovery of me to the World” (qtd. in Hassan, Ḥayy bin Yaqzān 11-13). “Son of

Yockdan” is the English translation of the Arabic “bin Yaqzān,” “bin” meaning “son” – the “Relation of the Son of Jockdan” is Ḥayy. The quote not only shows awareness of the

Arabic original but is quite imaginative in the use of the subject and, it should be noted, the source is carefully pointed out, Ḥayy bin Yaqzān.

Androgio’s response to the question about his identity suggests the metaphor of the nesting dolls: he appears to Mahmut as a free-born Englishman but admits he is a free-born Spaniard whose ancestor is from Arabia. The metaphor, in which Ḥayy or some of his main identifying characteristics continuously re-emerge, is at the heart of

Chapter Four, where I discuss Defoe’s engagement of Ḥayy and the latter’s critique of

contemporary twelfth-century Morocco: a critique of rational religion and outward acts of the law as well as a traditional reclamation of scriptural interpretation – as demonstrated in Chapter One. Defoe’s engagement expresses parallel concerns as the Crusoe trilogy critiques contemporary political theory through his depiction of the violence of colonial practice. Crusoe also comments on the issue of the interpretation of scripture in the encounter between Friday, a natural man like Ḥayy, and Crusoe, civil man like Āsāl . I show that Ḥayy’s identity emerges through the spiritual features of Friday’s character in the island episode of The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, but because one of the main differences between twelfth-century Morocco and seventeenth-century England is colonialism, the spiritual features in Friday’s character are themselves eventually acquired by the narrator Crusoe by the end of the Crusoe trilogy. Thus even though Ḥayy is not listed in Defoe’s incomplete Sale Catalogue, it is clear that Defoe knew the character Ḥayy and the main thrust of Ḥayy. He was acquainted with two works that mention the substance of Ḥayy. There is, however, another piece to the puzzle. Though he does not mention Ḥayy in his 2001 biography of Defoe, Novak notes a similarity between the aforementioned Mahmut’s vision of the “Essential Beings” in The Turkish

Spy and Crusoe’s “Vision of the Angelic World,” published as a chapter in the third part of the Crusoe trilogy titled Serious Reflections on the Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.36

Novak believes Mahmut’s visions are the source of Crusoe’s vision in the third part of the Crusoe trilogy, but Novak does not consider Ḥayy’s visions a possible source for

Mahmut’s visions as well, though Novak is familiar with Ḥayy.

36 Unlike The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and its sequel The Farther Adventures, the third instalment, Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, is a series of short essays written by Robinson Crusoe on a variety of subjects, most noteworthy of which are the introduction, discussed in Chapter Four below, and a description of a dream of the angelic universe, bearing some similarities with Ḥayy’s own dream.

Chapter Four opens with a brief survey of criticism on the Crusoe-Ḥayy relationship. I note that most critics do not see the parallel between Crusoe and Āsāl on the one hand and Friday and Ḥayy on the other. Andrew Fleck is notable amongst critics in considering Crusoe part of civil society, but Fleck does not take into account Crusoe’s changed language at the time of Friday’s conversion nor does Fleck include Ḥayy at all in his discussion of the relationship between the two. It will suffice to say here that Fleck’s final sentence, which relies on JanMohamed’s affirmations about colonialist literature’s attribution of inherent and irrevocable barbarism to natives, does not neatly apply to

Friday in The Adventures nor to the sequel, The Farther Adventures: “As long as Crusoe and the colonizers can claim that Friday and the natives have not received the necessary revelation and become true Christians, imperial expansion can continue unimpeded.”

Friday, however, does become a true Christian, truer perhaps than Crusoe as the latter admits. The language Crusoe employs to describe Friday’s conversion recalls Defoe’s friends, the Quakers and other enthusiasts. At the time of his conversion, Friday’s spirituality manifests Ḥayy’s character. But rather than have Crusoe submit to Friday’s spiritual superiority as does Āsāl in accepting tutelage from Ḥayy, his spiritual master,

Defoe demands that his early modern English adventurer both appropriate Friday’s spirituality and after some time assert his superiority over natural man. Defoe’s engagement of Ḥayy is imaginative because it takes from Ḥayy a critical moment, the encounter between natural and civil men, makes the civil man the protagonist, and in doing so engages the contemporary discourse and reality of exploration and colonization.

Yet one can safely say that if at the heart of Crusoe’s character development is his appropriation of the spiritual features of Friday’s character, Friday’s spiritual

characteristics are in turn a manifestation of Ḥayy’s spirituality. That is, like a nesting doll, at the heart of Crusoe, the freeborn Englishman, is none other than our Ḥayy.

Defoe’s engagement of Ḥayy, like Milton’s and Locke’s engagements, suggests the degree to which Ḥayy occupied early modern English imagination, intellect and spirituality.

Chapter One

Abubakr Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy bin Yaqzān

In Ornament of the World, Maria Rosa Menocal discusses how Muslims, Jews and

Christians created a vibrant and tolerant society in al-Andalus, showing how the encouragement of diversity developed al-Andalus’ culture. The convivencia, or “eras of coexistence and comingling,” as Stephen O’Shea describes them, extended to include the whole Mediterranean: the “course of Muslim, Christian [and Jewish] complicity skips around the Mediterranean basin … and contributed to its halcyon moments of cultural exchange” (78-79). Andalusians together cultivated a thriving culture of knowledge, art, and commerce, as they all gained fluency in the Arabic language and developed their own forms of Arabic, Judaeo-Arabic and Mozarab, for varied religious and secular expression. It is a time when a Jewish rabbi was the caliph’s vizier and a Christian bishop a royal emissary, attesting to the convivencia and the accompanying fluency in the language of the court (Menocal 81, 88). This Arabic culture thrived in al-Andalus, which sat at the margins of both worlds, the European and Islamic, but in its vibrancy and diversity, al-Andalus mirrored more closely Baghdad, the centre of the latter. The decline of the Umayyad dynasty in Spain, which lasted for three centuries from the eighth century to the beginning of the eleventh, did not mean the end of the convivencia. Al-

Andalus broke up into smaller city-states from around 1009 until the end of the eleventh century when they were unified under the North African Berber Almoravid (1056-1147) and Almohad dynasties (1130-1269). The persistence of the convivencia explains Ibn

Ṭufayl’s encyclopaedic knowledge.

In this chapter, I analyse and interpret Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy bin Yaqzān, but since it has been recently discussed and in my view misrepresented, my analysis includes the intellectual, religious and political history to which Ḥayy belongs. I link the learned and heterogeneous culture in which Ibn Ṭufayl was born to an important religious debate known as the miḥnah (calamity or inquisition), which occurred in Abbāsid Baghdad about two centuries prior to the appearance of Ḥayy. The Abbāsid Caliph’s attempt to impose a rationalist religion in the miḥnah (832-847) was reincarnated in different form in North Africa and al-Andalus by the Almohads at the beginning of the twelfth century.

The founder of the Almohad movement Ibn Tūmart returned to Ifriqiyya, North Africa in

1118 from an educational trip to Baghdad and claimed he was Mahdi in 1121;37 Ibn

Tūmart claimed he was the infallible guide Muslims believe will appear at the end of time to rule all Muslims. It is important to review the history of the miḥnah – in which the Abbāsid Caliph Al-Ma’mūn (786-833) attempted to impose a rational religion – in

Baghdad and this Abbāsid capital’s connections with North Africa and al-Andalus to appreciate the effect of the revival of rationalist religion in Marrakesh and especially how

Ibn Ṭufayl reacts to this revival. I thus situate Ḥayy at the heart of Islamic philosophy, where Ibn Ṭufayl sits alongside his intellectual ancestors Ibn Sīnā (980-1037) and al-

Ghazālī (1059-1111), and I conclude that it is Ibn Tūmart’s rational religion that Ibn

Ṭufayl critiques. The revision of Ibn Sīnā’s Ḥayy – the namesake of Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy – involves rewriting Ibn Sīnā’s depiction of an allegorical visionary ascent that stands for rational thought. At the hands of Ibn Ṭufayl, rational thought yields no ascension whatsoever – al-Ghazālī was known for such critique of rational thought. Ibn Ṭufayl’s

37 The founder of Almohad movement, Ibn Tūmart, returned to Ifriqiyya (Tunis), North Africa in 1118 after an educational trip to Baghdad. Ibn Tūmart claimed he was Mahdi in 1121. See Roger Le Torneau, The Almohad Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969).

visionary ascension only begins with meditative exercises. Thus though his Ḥayy is often described as a mystical-philosophical tale, Ibn Ṭufayl’s main concern is to expose the limited knowledge that rationalist philosophy yields and to offer mysticism or Sufism as the ultimate vehicle for knowledge of the divine. Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy bin Yaqzān is better described as a decidedly Sufi narrative.

With the end of Umayyad rule in Spain around 1009, al-Andalus broke up into smaller city-states called tayfas until they came under Almoravid rule towards the end of the eleventh century. Most of the tayfas were able to continue the earlier level of openness due to a military arrangement with Spanish Christian armies that were paid to protect the city-states, which survived for close to a century. As we will see below, the main philosophers of Spain, including Ibn Ṭufayl and his older contemporary Ibn Bajjah

(Avenpace), were the products of the open culture and learning of the tayfa period, itself the inheritor of the Ummayad legacy in al-Andalus. It is only when these military arrangements were broached, with invasions of Christian armies coming from the north of Spain that the tayfas decided to invite protection from the powerful ruler of the

Almoravids Yousef bin Tashfīn, who was quickly conquering North African cities on several fronts from the mid eleventh century – the Almoravid empire survived until 1147, when Marrakesh was lost to the Almohads. It was at the invitation of the tayfas of al-

Andalus in 1086 that the Almoravids crossed over into al-Andalus, eventually reuniting the various city-states under Almoravid rule in 1094. In accepting this invitation, Yousef bin Tashfīn followed in the footsteps of the founder of the Almoravid movement,

Abdullah bin Yasin, who in 1055 had accepted a similar invitation from Moroccan

tayfas.38 When Yousef bin Tashfīn died in 1106, however, his son Ali, who became a recluse, temporarily muffled the open culture of al-Andalus. Though very brief, a second tayfa, emerged and quickly succumbed to the Almohads who had beaten Ali bin

Tashfīn’s army in Marrakesh in 1147. In this city, the Almoravid and Almohad capital,

Ibn Ṭufayl wrote Ḥayy bin Yaqzān.

Though originating in its founder’s long education in Baghdad, the Almohad movement centred on the character of its founder, Ibn Tūmart, and a form of rational religion that allowed no dissent or diversity and included elements of a rationalism that had been defeated in its birthplace, Baghdad. Yet this rationalism thrived in North Africa even if for a short time. It allowed little room for a convivencia like the one described by

Menocal and O’Shea, even though the contemporary Almohad intellectual landscape was to be dominated by such names as Ibn Bājja, Ibn Ṭufayl and Ibn Rushd (Averroes), inheritors of the earlier Almoravid and first tayfa cultures. Despite advances in philosophy, philosophical study was limited to the court and court patronage, leaving limited space for speculative thinking amongst the populace. In Reading ‘Ḥayy ibn

Yaqzān,’ Avner Ben-Zaken places Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy in the context of the Almohad creed, God’s oneness, and the “climax of gradual education, guided by reason,” which as we will see below is an element Ibn Tūmart brought from Baghdad and which Baghdad religious scholars had shunned or at least moderated. In this context, Ben-Zaken describes Ḥayy’s role as one of “solidify[ing] the political theology of God’s oneness and centraliz[ing] the political rule of the Almohads,” a role that would “entail intolerance.”

Ben-Zaken describes the character Ḥayy as “universal man,” yet he surprisingly and

38 See Ali M. Al-Sallaby, Dawlaty al-Murabitin wal-Muwahidin fy al-Maghreb al-Araby (Beirut, 2007) pages 62-65.

unfairly brands him an “Almohadi zealot” (26-29). While it is true that the emphasis on reason allowed no dissent, resulting in the persecution of Muslims, Christians and Jews, this characterization of Ḥayy as complicit with state ideology is not only suspect but grossly wrong.

In her recent book, Samar Attar presents Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy, a protagonist whose spontaneous generation from the earth frees him of familial ties, as an example of a cosmopolitan identity that stands in stark contrast to the somewhat defined tribal and racial identities that informed the Almohadi state (ff. 63). I agree with Attar that Ḥayy’s role in its own milieu was oppositional, but I believe it is important to understand the relationship between the text and both its philosophical and political contexts. We should also bear in mind that Ibn Ṭufayl was himself a mystic.

Philosopher, natural philosopher, physician, and chief advisor to Almohad philosopher-kings, who ruled North Africa and al-Andalus (1147-1269), Abubakr bin

Ṭufayl (1105 - 1185) was born in Granada in the first decade of the twelfth century. Ibn

Ṭufayl practiced medicine in Granada and in 1147 travelled to Marrakesh, where he became confidential secretary for the governor of Ceuta and Tangier. In 1154, the

Almohad Caliph Abu Ya‘qub Yusuf appointed him personal physician, a position that gave Ibn Ṭufayl both influence and patronage for his encyclopedic philosophic and religious knowledge. He remained in that position until 1182, when he nominated Ibn

Rushd (Averroes) for his position. Ibn Ṭufayl died in 1185.39 Ḥayy is Ibn Ṭufayl’s only known complete work, but Ibn Ṭufayl is part of a long line of philosophers that extends back to al-Kindi, known in Latin Christendom as Alkindus (800-873), al-Farabi or

39 See Lawrence I. Conrad, “Introduction: the World of Ibn Ṭufayl,” Ed. Lawrence I. Conrad, The World of Ibn Ṭufayl: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Leiden: Brill, 1996).

Alfarabius (870-950) and Ibn Sīnā or Avicenna (980-1037), and, in Ṭufayl’s time, his predecessor Ibn Bājja and his successor and student Ibn Rushd or Averroes (1126-1198), all of whom were known to Europe’s medieval and early modern scholars through Latin translations. In addition to these philosophers, Ibn Ṭufayl is part of Muslim theological and especially mystical traditions, the most notable names in which are al-Ghazālī (1059-

1111) and later Ibn Arabi (1165-1240) though these men are also often referred to as philosophers. In addition to the known titles of senior administrator at the court, philosopher, physician and natural philosopher, Ibn Ṭufayl was also a member of a North

African Sufi order. This is an important point: Vincent Cornell refers to the “evasion by

Western scholars” of Ibn Ṭufayl’s Sufism and explains that, “by denying or overlooking the long-lasting and seminal influence exercised over al-Andalus by theologians and mystics from the ‘other shore’ of the Maghrib for at least one hundred years before the birth of Ibn Ṭufayl, these scholars missed a prime opportunity to find the answer to at least one question about the nature of the Andalusian philosopher’s mysticism that had been available to them since 1958 … [when] Adolphe Faure published a critical edition of the noted Moroccan Sufi biographical work, Kitab al-tashawwuf ila rijal al- tasawwuf,” which mentions not only Ibn Ṭufayl’s Sufism, but also the fact that Ṭufayl was a Sufi Sheikh, who had important disciples (Cornell, “Ḥayy in the Land of Absal”

135-136). It is no wonder then that Ḥayy would comment on these Sufi traditions while anticipating the bold strides undertaken by the aforementioned Ibn Arabi. It is also no wonder that Ibn Ṭufayl’s preface to the reader and hence the treatise, Ḥayy itself, have been sources of contention amongst critics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Al-Ma’mūn’s Rational Religion and Baghdad’s Resistance

To address the misunderstanding surrounding Ḥayy and to appreciate its critique of its own world, we begin with its proper, perhaps surprising, roots in the society of ninth- century Baghdad under the Abbāsid Caliph Al-Ma’mūn (786-833). There are two parallels between twelfth-century Almohad dynasty and ninth-century Baghdad that are relevant to an understanding of Ḥayy’s critique. The first is the development of rational religion and the reaction to it in ninth-century Baghdad. The second is the related political attempt to enforce this rational religion by the Abbāsid Caliph Al-Ma’mūn, specifically his failure and the success of the Almohad founder Ibn Tūmart in creating a movement that consolidated power. The twelfth-century Almohad movement enforced a rational religion rooted in the ninth-century precedent.

By 656 under the second of the ‘rightly-guided’ caliphs, Umar, who ruled from the Prophet’s city, Medina in Arabia, the Muslim caliphate’s political borders had been established at the heartland of the classical world, including Arabia, Egypt, most of North

Africa, Iraq, Persia and Syria (al-Bili, Prelude to the Generals 5-23). Syria, however, was an important centre of power. Its inclusion resulted in a power struggle, which led to the creation of the first dynasty in the House of Islam, the Umayyad dynasty (662-750).

Ruling from Damascus, Syria, the Umayyads extended the frontiers of the Muslim empire towards the east and, more pertinent to our study, towards the west to the rest of

North Africa and into al-Andalus. Though the Umayyad Caliphate continued to flourish from its centre in Damascus, signs of discontent expressed themselves in Medina’s influence in the regions of Khurasan and Iraq, where the leading political opinion favoured the re-establishment of acceptable leadership descended from the House of the

Prophet. It is this call that led to the revolution that brought to power the Abbāsids, one of the two branches of the House of the Prophet, the other being their cousins the Alids

(descendants of Ali and Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter). Caliph Al-Ma’mūn, a philosopher king in his own right, had the weight of history on his shoulders, for his ruling family’s claim to power was a promise, which to him was yet to be fulfilled.

Although Abbāsid rule was also dynastic, Al-Ma’mūn believed the caliph’s office could best regain its leadership position by being at the centre of its subjects’ religious, social and cultural life. Al-Ma’mūn considered succession the foremost issue to settle: in an attempt to follow the earlier consensus, he thought of extending succession to include both branches of the House of the Prophet, so he named an Alid as his successor. This move met resistance (from mainly resentful Abbāsids) and anyway, Al-Ma’mūn outlived his successor. The succession plan ultimately failed; shortly before his death, Al-

Ma’mūn abruptly named his brother Al-Mu‘tasim as heir.

Al-Ma’mūn’s second concern manifested itself externally in the shape of rivalry with Byzantium, a feature that reappeared several centuries later in al-Andalus under the

Almohads. The Abbāsid-Byzantium relationship at the time can be characterized as one between military rivals, who were equal in power but different in social structure. While

Byzantium enforced a somewhat unified state religion, the Abbāsids ruled over a very independent and diverse society (al-Bili, Prelude 7-9). The diversity that characterized

Abbāsid society characterized al-Andalus as well. Under both the Umayyads and

Almoravids as well as during periods of disintegration when a number of smaller city- states emerged, Andalusian society was characterized by its religious and cultural complexity, seeming almost a match of Abbāsid Baghdad as Rosa Maria Menocal

notes.40 However nominally and at the beginning, the diversity within North African society seemed to end at the beginning of Almohad rule. When they supplanted the

Almoravids in 1147, the year they captured Marrakesh, the Almohads initially mirrored their Christian counterparts, forcing not only their Muslim subjects to accept their version of the creed but also forcing many of their Christian and Jewish subjects to convert. That the Almohads did not maintain this state does not diminish the precedent I draw here, for though the Caliph Al-Ma’mūn had tried and failed to enforce such pseudo-state dogma on his Muslim subjects in ninth-century Baghdad, the founder of the North African

Almohad movement, Ibn Tūmart, succeeded in the twelfth century. The apparent continuity between Al-Ma’mūn’s ninth-century attempt to impose uniformity as well as his means (rational religion) and later twelfth-century Almohad success created the historical environment that gave birth to the oppositional Ḥayy.

To counter the second concern, his subjects’ diversity, Al-Ma’mūn attempted to impose uniformity amongst his subjects: the mainly Persio-Aramaic culture that challenged Arab-Islamic culture and, perhaps more significantly, his subjects’ independence. Al-Ma’mūn could only attempt such a uniformity amongst his Muslim subjects – orthodox Islam gave him no authority over the conscience of his non-Muslim subjects. After the Ummayad ‘usurpation’ of power, Muslim society had relied on a popular class of scholars of Islamic jurisprudence, the ulama (singular: alim) or fuqaha

(faqih), who became Muslim societies’ natural leaders. Since there was no institution equivalent to the Christian church, Al-Ma’mūn considered wresting social and religious leadership of society back to the office of caliph from the ulama by inserting himself into

40 Also see Paul Magdelino, “The Road to Baghdad,” Ed. Leslie Brubaker, Byzantium in the Ninth Century: Dead or Alive? (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1998).

current religious and philosophical debates (al-Bili, Prelude 20-21). Al-Ma’mūn’s policies in this regard were continued – and then abandoned – by his successor, Al-

Mu‘tasim. A vast caliphate with several settled and urbanized administrative centres, around which complex regional economic, technological and cultural life had already been established, Abbāsid society was both affluent and independent, with well- established agricultural systems and transportation routes serving and connecting its regions. Contemporary descriptions of cities express a sense of belonging to the vast caliphate despite the many somewhat autonomous regions comprising it. Such affluence and especially independence meant that the relationship between caliph and subject was distant; he was not in the subjects’ daily horizon. In religious matters, subjects relied on the popular and respected ulama, who educated them on the specific details of their rights and obligations; the caliph did not play an important role here either. At the same time, the society as a whole looked to poets and essayists who entertained them with descriptions of the luxuries of life. Because subjects had access to knowledge and could carry on with their daily lives with spiritual and economic independence unaffected by the affairs of the state, Al-Ma’mūn was to find the imposition of what al-Bili describes as a “corollary of a state dogma” a challenge; even where the state administration was concerned, society’s independence and attitude were telling: people mocked the “marked esprit de corps” of the large bureaucracy that became a “class of professional clerks” with its own “distinguishing attire and training,” as efficient as these were in carrying out state duties (al-Bili, Prelude 15). The Caliph’s subjects were ‘sophisticated’ with crafts and literature meeting the tastes of the “relaxed and tolerant” cosmopolitan society, which

expressed its differences through lively “argumentation rather than … rigid and hostile confrontation,” that is, until Al-Ma’mūn’s intervention (al-Bili, Prelude, 9).

Well-read and a participant in the religious and philosophical debates of his time, the philosopher-king, Al- Ma’mūn, had to impose himself as the caliph and not simply as one amongst many in the ranks of ulama and philosophers. In religious matters, the more prominent at the time of the four schools of interpretation of Sunni Islam, Imām Mālik in

Medina, had already set the precedent. He refused the request of Al- Ma’mūn’s father,

Caliph Harun Al-Rashid, to print, distribute and hence impose his book the Muwatta on the faithful, insisting that since the Prophet’s companions had scattered around and beyond the caliphate’s vast empire with each companion carrying a portion of the

Prophet’s traditions, people should continue to be free to follow the traditions that had reached them (al-Laknawi 45-46). The traditions – or Prophet’s traditions – are seen as illustrative and complimentary to the Quran, and the admission of a variety of traditions allowed for broader interpretations. The second and very popular Imam Abu Ḥanīfa, though based in Iraq, the centre of political gravity, had refused any state appointment and in fact did not write most of his fiqh or Islamic jurisprudence. Both Mālik and Abu

Ḥanifa’s students disseminated their teachers’ opinions. Mālik and Abu Ḥanīfa are two of the main four fuqaha or ulama accepted amongst the majority of Muslim, the other two being Ahmad and al-Shafe‘i – both names will appear below. The popularity of these four fuqaha amongst Muslims earned them the title of imam. In Caliph Al-

Ma’mūn’s Baghdad, Imam Abu Ḥanīfa’s popularity was tangible not only in people’s reverence but in judges’ use of his interpretations in their rulings.

In addition to fiqh, there existed in Baghdad in particular other approaches to religious issues. Central amongst these was a philosophic debate as to whether the Quran was created (al-Bili, Prelude 15, 18-22), a debate that emerged out of an insistence on divine transcendence. The majority of Muslims shared the opinion of their ulama that the

Quran was not created; the claim of its ‘createdness’, they believed, would limit its message. Holding the opposite view were the Mu‘tazilites, whose starting point was

God’s transcendence: to emphasize divine transcendence, they considered everything beside God to be created. While the Mu‘tazilites believed that the Quran was the Word of God, they argued that God’s Word was created like any of God’s creation; though it had the special status of containing religious doctrine, it was not co-eternal with God.

The Mu‘tazilites were concerned with stressing divine transcendence, especially in their philosophic debates with adherents of the many other religions flourishing within the

Abbāsid Caliphate. Following a logically argued, unitarian position, the Mu‘tazilites accused adherents of other religions from amongst the Caliph’s subjects of committing the serious heresy of anthropomorphism, or tashbih, a heresy that would affect the world of the Almohads in North Africa centuries later. In ninth-century Baghdad, the

Mu‘tazilites considered belief in the eternity and uncreatedness of the Quran as analogous to Christian beliefs, as in their view the Word of God would share in God’s essence. The

Mu‘tazilites’ response to Christian claims regarding the divinity of Christ, considered by

Muslims to be a prophet like Muhammad, spilled over to their Muslim coreligionists on the createdness of the Quran. It was an intellectual quarrel. The Muslim community as a whole supported their ulama’s position that considering the Word of God part of creation would limit its infinite quality. It would open the Quran to change. Also there was

possibly the suspicion that the real aim of claiming the Quran was created was the desire to manipulate its content; otherwise, why would the Caliph support the Mu‘tazilite position? Like their main rivals, the Traditionists, for whom declaring the Quran’s createdness was tantamount to denying the validity of its message, the Mu‘tazilites relied on the Quran and the Prophet’s traditions, but they extended their evidence to include biblical and Persian religious traditions. The Mu‘tazilites also argued their positions rationally, making use of concepts derived from philosophy and logic. The Mu‘tazilites’ reliance on rationalist arguments stemmed from contact with other religions within the empire and without, and their arguments reflected the ways their opponents “in other religions were putting their own” (al-Bili, Prelude 18-19). In this, they seemed to share the Caliph Al-Ma’mūn’s concerns with the Byzantines, an external recalcitrant force, which partly explains Al-Ma’mūn’s siding with the Mu‘tazilites. The two medieval powers, the Abbāsids and Byzantines, had almost equal military power, but the

Byzantines seemed to present what one could call a unified state ideology. Al-Ma’mūn may have felt that he too needed to have a similar unified, internal position, but he could impose such a position only on those of his subjects who were Muslims. He probably esteemed that the issue of transcendence, the Mu‘tazilite position in particular, presented the best option to counter the Byzantine articles of faith. Such political considerations should nonetheless not cast doubt on Al-Ma’mūn’s own understanding of and belief in the issue of the createdness of the Quran.

That Al-Ma’mūn, who possessed extraordinary intellectual abilities and learning, had a position on the philosophical question of the day is not unusual. His methods, however, were new. He recruited some of the leading Mu‘tazilite philosophers and

participated himself in debating leading ulama in the palace. The debates degenerated into arguments and these quickly grew, with impatience, into torture. Unfolding in the palace, these ‘debates’ could have met the fate of other palace power struggles, of little interest to the Muslim community, as they did not have “burning religious, ethical and social issues,” (al-Bili, Prelude 7),41 for political battles had become by then of concern mainly to professional soldiers and careerists. When Al-Ma’mūn’s named successor, Al-

Mu‘tasim (795?-842) took office, the debates, referred to in Islamic history as the miḥnah, which can be translated into the “calamity,” “trial,” or “inquisition” continued even though Al-Mu‘tasim’s knowledge of fiqh and philosophy was minimal. By training and profession a soldier, Al-Mu‘tasim attended some of the debates, reportedly even showed some disapproval of the inquisitors’ methods and concern over the victims of the palace interlocutors. But he dared not, at the beginning of the miḥnah, which lasted roughly between 832 and 847, interfere in issues he did not fully comprehend, besides the fact that he respected his departed brother’s wishes. When Imam Ahmad bin Ḥanbal showed great courage in the face of his inquisitors, persistently denying the createdness of the Quran, news of the popular imam’s torture crossed the palace gates and circulated through Baghdad and beyond. People congregated in front of the palace gates in support of Ibn Ḥanbal. Al-Mu‘tasim was alarmed: he presented Ibn Ḥanbal to the demonstrators to show that the imam was alive and ‘well’. The miḥnah policy quickly came to an end, and the Muslim community asserted its independence with the ulama as their chosen leaders.

41 Al-Bili mentions this general lackadaisical attitude specifically in connection with the earlier power struggle between the caliph Al-Ma’mūn and his brother Al-Amin.

Al-Ma’mūn’s dream of consolidating religious and social power with the political power of the caliph’s office met the fate of his attempt to reform the rules of succession to add legitimacy to the caliph’s title: both policies failed. It is ironic though that parallel policies were to emerge three centuries later far away from Abbāsid Baghdad: in North

Africa under Almohads. Despite his arrival in Baghdad over two centuries after the

Mu‘tazilites had lost ground, the visitor from North Africa, Ibn Tūmart, was to find their rational tools developed in the service of the fuqaha’s study of Islamic jurisprudence and theology, established as the science of kalām.

Ibn Tūmart and al-Ghazālī

We have mentioned three (of the four) popularly established imams of interpretation:

Malik, Abu Hanifa, and Ibn Ḥanbal. The fourth is the Imam Al-Shafe‘i, whose popular school of interpretation had become part of the curriculum of the Nizamiya School in the

Baghdad Ibn Tūmart visited; on his return to North Africa, Ibn Tūmart created the

Almohad movement. An important Shafe‘i scholar, Al-Ash‘ari, had incorporated some of the rational tools for which the Mu‘tazilites were famous; though Al-Ma’mūn’s attempts to impose the Mu‘tazilite rational position in the miḥnah failed, their rational tools proved attractive to the Ash‘arites. Muslim philosophers, however, always challenged Ash‘arite rational tools. The adoption of Ibn Sīnā’s demonstrative method was key to the development of Ash‘arite teaching in Baghdad. The Ash‘arism of Ibn

Sīnā influenced Ibn Tūmart as appears from the founding documents that were to be taught by the Almohads (Griffel 753-813). Some of the early Ash‘arites, like the

Mu‘tazilites, had insisted that in order to be considered members of the Islamic faith,

each individual should be able to understand and demonstrate the need for the necessarily existent being, God; this was not a Byzantine-like insistence – as state policy – but merely their position, one position amongst others, but one which rendered those unable to logically demonstrate God’s existence unbelievers in the view of the rationalist

Ash‘arites. The Ash‘arites had thus adopted the Mu‘tazilite association of faith and knowledge or rather logic. By the twelfth century, however, most Ash‘arites had withdrawn this position; they no longer considered the masses unbelievers. Even though their position had changed by the time Ibn Tūmart visited Baghdad, he seems to have been influenced by their earlier position, as is evident in the teaching he imposed on his followers on his return to North Africa after he had spent a decade in Baghdad.

Connected to the importance laid on acquiring knowledge is Ibn Tūmart’s emphasis on the responsibility of each member of the faithful to enjoin good and forbid evil (Cornell,

“Understanding is the Mother of Ability” 73, 89-90, 99-100). Ibn Tūmart distinguished between the rational tools of the philosophers and those of the Ash‘arites, the mutakalimun (the fuqaha of kalām), as well as his revulsion against the asceticism of

Sufis. Frank Griffel mentions that around the time Ibn Tūmart visited Baghdad, some

Ash‘arites amongst the “rationalist fringes” of Baghdad still connected knowledge with faith, i.e. accusing the masses of disbelief (takfīr al-‘amma) due to their inability to demonstrate the existence of God and God’s unity. Takfir al-‘amma was fiercely attacked by the influential and charismatic Shafe‘i faqih and Sufi mystic Abu Hamid Al-

Ghazālī (Griffel 777). In his early days, Ghazālī was the leading figure in the introduction of the Ibn Sīnā’s demonstrative methods in the Ash‘arite Nizamiyya School

(or university) – he was the chair of the Baghdad school. By the time of Ibn Tūmart’s

visit however, Ghazālī had abandoned the prestigious position and, after becoming a roaming ascetic, emerged from his solitude as a champion of Sufism, a new position that included sharp criticism of his earlier teaching of kalām. He considered kalām, specifically the reliance on rational tools, as one of the main impediments to the apprehension of truth, as he states in his autobiographic al-Munqiz min al-Dhalāl (71-73).

Prior to resigning his position at the Nizamiyya School and adopting Sufism, Al-

Ghazālī had written on logic, using Ibn Sīnā’s demonstrative method. Ibn Tūmart was influenced by Ibn Sīnā’s Ash‘arism and Ghazālī’s rendering of Ibn Sīnā’s logic, but Ibn

Tūmart did not accept Ghazālī’s later Sufism. Ibn Tūmart departed from the (later Sufi)

Ghazālī on important key points. First, Ibn Tūmart’s association of faith with knowledge included his assertion that it was incumbent on every individual to seek the knowledge of

God’s existence, transcendence, and unity and this knowledge included demonstrative knowledge. In his Ihya Ulum Al-Dīn (Revival of Religious Sciences), however, Ghazālī makes researching and demonstrating issues of faith through fiqh or kalām unnecessary for each believer’s faith; Ghazālī considers it sufficient to base one’s belief in the article of faith – that there is no God but the [one] God – on “imitation and ‘listening’” – a reference to being born into a Muslim society (I.1).42 Al-Ghazālī believed that only a minority of people in society who had the leisure and ability to acquire the sciences of jurisprudence (fiqh) and kalām were required and that the rest of society was absolved from acquiring these sciences; in this, he positions fiqh with medicine and other professions needed by society but which could be acquired only by a few. Also unlike

Ibn Tūmart, who emphasized commanding good and forbidding evil as an individual responsibility that should be shouldered by his followers, the muwwahidun or Almohads,

42 My translation.

Ghazālī considered this responsibility not obligatory for each Muslim (Revival I.9). Ibn

Tūmart presented it as a central responsibility, as Vincent Cornell demonstrates

(“Understanding is the Mother of Ability” 89-90).

In contrast to Al-Ma’mūn’s failed attempts to enforce his position (on the createdness of the Quran), Ibn Tūmart had another advantage: Ibn Tūmart enforced his position not as a caliph, with little control over subjects’ beliefs, but as the Mahdi, a title for a reviver of religion who comes at the end of time; Ibn Tūmart based his proclamation on his teachings and the claim that he was infallible but also on his miracles and lineage.43 Ibn Tūmart’s strictness and organization played a major role in the movement’s success. Those who did not attend instruction were warned, severely punished and eventually killed (al-Sallaby 296-298). He would assign only ten students to a teacher (Damdash 126). Cornell explains that when the movement succeeded in supplanting the Almoravids, the Almohads devised a pyramidal administrative structure that had Ibn Tūmart’s founding group of ten members and their seventy students

“transformed into a class of theological administrators,” who were “sent to assist in and oversee the activities of political and military appointees.” Cornell likens their supervisory rule to that of guardians of the revolution in Communist Russia

(“Understanding” 85, 95). So we can see the difference between the affluent and independent societies under the Abbāsid caliphs and the kind of control the Almohad ruler had over his subjects. Together with proclaiming himself Mahdi on his return to

North Africa, Ibn Tūmart’s ability to impose his rationalistic creed reminds us of Al-

43 See Madeline Fletcher’s “Al-Anadalus and North Africa in the Almohad Ideology,” Ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, The Legacy of Muslim Spain (Leiden: Brill, 1994) 440-443.

Ma’mūn’s failure to impose the rationalistic creed of the Mu‘tazites on his Abbāsid

Empire as well as his failure to change the rules of succession.44

Though the Ash‘arites in the Abbāsid Caliphate had developed their rational tools through the adoption of Ibn Sīnā’s demonstrative method relying heavily on al-Ghazālī’s explanation of this method, the cause of Ghazālī’s later fame (or infamy) was The Revival of Religious Sciences, where he reclassifies religious sciences, demoting the rational tools of fiqh and kalam and announcing that the real religious knowledge was the domain of mystical, Sufi knowledge, a point also emphasised in his Niche of Lights. In the Revival and the Niche, Ghazālī makes his position in favour of Sufism and he elucidates this position in very clear terms. This clarity made Ibn Tūmart avoid Ghazālī’s Sufi works, preferring instead to teach Ghazālī’s earlier works on logic. Yet when the Almoravides burnt Ghazālī’s Revival, Ibn Tūmart’s Almohads used this event to rally support, especially from Sufis and Sufi sympathizers, against the Almoravids. Much has been made of the relationship between Ibn Tūmart’s Almohad movement and the Sufi mystics of Spain in particular, especially in light of the Almoravid burning of the Revival. No doubt the Almohads used the burning for political advantage, as a rallying call for their cause against the Almoravids who had ruled most of North Africa and al-Andalus.

However, the relationship in terms of the Almohad early ideology – between the

44 With regards to the issue of succession, it is worth mentioning here that while Ibn Tūmart proclaimed himself Mahdi and used miracles to win obedience from the Berber tribes of North Africa, both references to Mahdism and miracles became sources of embarrassment by the time of Ibn Rushd, as the Almohads attempted to make their creed more properly resemble the prevalent Ash‘arite school in Baghdad. Fletcher, “Al-Andalus” notes that later Almohad state philosophers de-emphasized miracles, amongst other things, in Ibn Tūmart’s founding documents. As for the issue of succession that troubled Al-Ma’mūn in the ninth century – consensus during the Umayyad period onwards was that the caliph should be from the House of the Prophet – Ibn Tūmart seemed to have been quickly settled it: while Ibn Tūmart proclaimed himself the Mahdi, he named Abdel-Mu’min, the founder of the Almohad dynasty, as his successor. His mixed Berber origin was well known and Arabic chroniclers described him and some of his heirs as being dark or black; Abdel-Mu’min was also believed to be a descendent of the House of the Prophet through his mother, a descent that cemented Berber tribal loyalty (Cornell, “Understanding” 85-86).

Almohads and Ghazālī’s Sufism – should not be understood as Ibn Tūmart’s acceptance of Sufi epistemology; if it were, Ḥayy could be seen, as Ben-Zaken sees it, as an attempt to tame the mystics through philosophy.45 It was in fact the other way round: through

Sufism, Ibn Ṭufayl was taming the philosophers and their emphasis on rational tools. It is true that Almohads were taking advantage of Sufi displeasure with the Almoravid burning of the Revival to rally support. They also used Ghazālī as the main source of teaching rational religion. As the thirteenth-century philosopher Ibn Ṭulmūs says in his

Madkhal li-Sinā‘at al-Mantiq (Introduction to the Science of Logic), Ibn Tūmart taught what he agreed with – logic – in Al-Ghazālī’s works (qtd. in Griffel 765). Also it is inaccurate to portray Almoravids as especially anti-Sufi. Though they were responsible for the burning, the situation was actually more complex, and in fact Sufism flourished under the Almoravids. Maribel Fiero asserts that the “Almoravid program of religious reform … went in fact together with an increasing interest in theology, the fundamentals of religion (usul al-din), and the rational sciences, as well as with the flourishing of

Sufism.”46 It should be recalled that after the fall of the Umayyad dynasty in Spain, many smaller Muslim city-states emerged, all of which prospered economically and culturally due to a military arrangement with Christian mercenaries (Nelson 196).

However, as soon as Alfonso threatened the peace through his military incursions, the city-states sent a couple of invitations to the Almoravid leader Yousef bin Tashfīn to protect them. The thirteenth-century historian Ibn Al-Athir mentions that Yousef bin

Tashfīn defeated Alfonso and returned to Marrakesh, but then the Andalusian city states sent emissaries to Yousef bin Tashfīn promising to obey him as their ruler if he brought a

45 Ben-Zaken, Reading ‘Ḥayy bin Yaqzān,’ names the chapter “Taming the Mystics.” 46 See Maribel Fiero, “Almoravids,” Medieval Islamic Civilization, ed. Josef W. Meri, Volume 1, 2006.

“letter” of appointment to office from the Abbāsid Caliph in Baghdad (445-448). The famed fourteenth-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun confirms the story: when the

“tyrant” Alfonso invaded the land of Muslims in Spain,47 they sought Yousef bin

Tashfīn’s help; he was busy conquering Marrakesh, so he sent his son from Sabtah (in modern-day Tunisia) and another of his army commanders to Spain where they again defeated Alfonso. Ibn Khaldun reports that Yousef bin Tashfīn’s success led the mashayekh (another reference to the fuqaha or ulama) to issue a fatwa calling for his removal – i.e. his conquest – of the city-states. One of the fatwas was issued by none other than Abu Hamid al-Ghazālī in Baghdad. This is when Yousef bin Tashfīn obtained the right to rule North Africa and al-Andalus on behalf of the Abbāsid Caliph in Baghdad

(Ibn Khaldun 247-250). Ghazālī issued this fatwa in favour of unifying the tayfa city- states under Tashfīn prior to his abandonment of his position as chair of the Nizamiya

School in Baghdad and prior to becoming an ascetic and a Sufi. Nonetheless, the

Almoravid rule was not as anti-Sufi as the later burning of Al-Ghazālī’s Revival would suggest. It is also not clear that his new Sufi position would have made him take a different position on unifying the tayfa states under Yousef bin Tashfīn.

The Almoravids are singled out by historians of the period for patronising knowledge, which included Sufism. While the Almoravid movement was founded by the

Berber Abdullah bin Yasin al-Jazzuli (1015-1059), the idea of reform and the counsel to find a jurist to travel to Berber areas originates in the Maliki and Ash‘ari jurist Imran al-

Fasy (d. 1039) whom Vincent Cornell describes as a Sufi who inculcated in his students a

“strong dose of ascetic … Sufism and the politics of social reform” (“Ḥayy in the Land of

47 Also see Lynn H. Nelson, “Christian-Muslim Relations in Eleventh-Century Spain,” Military Affairs 43: 4 (Dec., 1969): 195-198

Absal,” 141). As the movement extended its rule over al-Andalus with Yousef bin

Tashfīn’s unification of the tayfas, Sufism flourished to the greatest extent, according to

Maribel Fiero (“Almoravids,” Princeton Encyclopedia). Ibn Ṭufayl himself is a product of Almoravid patronage, for though he wrote Ḥayy while in the Almohad service he joined their service when he was fifty years of age, as Esmat Damdash notes. His birth and learning are the products of the open culture that flourished under the Spanish tayfas and the Almoravids. Damdash quotes the thirteenth-century Moroccan historian Al-

Murrakishi, who likens the patronage of knowledge by the Almoravid Yusuf Bin Tashfīn to none other than the “Abbāsid’s court in the early period of their reign” (84). Most of those who specialized in philosophy and logic, medicine, astronomy or mathematics first mastered Islamic sciences. Those with superior intellectual ability were introduced to philosophy and Sufism. Damdash reports that Yousef bin Tashfīn inquires about philosophy and the science of kalam from Ibn Rushd’s grandfather, Abul-Walid Ibn

Rushd, who responds positively, saying those who professed these sciences were worthy of emulation (93-94). However, philosophers circulated their knowledge amongst themselves and the Almoravid Sultans – as would happen with the later Almohads; the fear was of conservative segments of the populace, who were quick to accuse philosophers of atheism and use any apparent judicial error to demand that judges punished the philosophers “before the matter reached the Sultan,” according to the thirteenth-century historian Ibn Sa‘eed (qtd. in Damdash 86). Almoravid philosophers, including Ibn Bājja, who later became the Almohad king’s counsellor before Ibn Ṭufayl assumed a similar position, were acquainted with Greek and Muslim philosophical traditions, including Aristotle, Plato, as well as al-Farabi, Ibn Sīnā, the Mu‘tazilites and

especially al-Ghazālī. Things started to change when Yousef bin Tashfīn died and his son succeeded him.

Yousef bin Tashfīn’s son, Ali bin Yousef, became a recluse, banning all form of speculative thinking, not only Sufism. He did order the burning of Ghazālī’s Ihya, but the fourteenth-century Arab biographer and historian Al-Hafiz Al-Dahabi mentions that during Ali bin Yousef’s rule, not only Sufism but all the sciences were under threat, including the science of traditional hadeeth (prophetic traditions revived by Almohads), kalam, and philosophy. Al-Dahabi adds that after Ali’s army was defeated in Marrakesh at the hands of the Almohads, Ali became a recluse, abandoning his responsibility of government until he met Ibn Tūmart and the latter’s successor Abd-al-Mu’min in battle

(124-125). One thus has to agree with Damdash that it is difficult to characterise the

Almoravid period as anti-Sufi, as the persecution of knowledge in general occurred after

Yousef bin Tashfīn’s death and did not last long. The turbulence that occurred at the

Almoravid dynasty’s closing did not affect a philosopher like Ibn Ṭufayl, who is a product of the open atmosphere of Almoravid rule. Like his teacher and many others, Ibn

Ṭufayl found employment in the tayfa of Granada. They were drawn to the new powerful dynasty and employed by the new rulers, the Almohads.

The characterization of Almoravids as anti-Ghazālī and the Almohads as pro-

Ghazālī is thus too simple, for as we have seen, both the late Almoravids, with the recluse

Ali’s burning of the Revival, and the Almohads, through their founding ideology, were not comfortable with Sufism. This is important because Ben-Zaken interprets Ḥayy as an educational tool aimed at inculcating Sufis with rational philosophy, as Sufis’ power was increasing with the emergence of charismatic leaders. Ben-Zaken’s understanding here is

that Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy aimed to counter the political challenge of these Sufi leaders by assimilating them (29-30). My understanding is that Ḥayy actually supports the rise of

Sufism. If the rise of these leaders is connected with Ḥayy, the suggestion Ibn Ṭufayl makes is that the Sufis – including himself, a member of a Sufi order holding an important administrative position at the court – pose no political threat to the establishment because their concerns are otherworldly. Once we consider that the official

Almohad dogma under Ibn Tūmart taught rational religion and disparaged Sufi thinking and that Ḥayy actually demonstrates that rational, philosophical thinking is an insufficient route to knowledge of the divine, we can understand Ḥayy’s role. It critiques the philosophical thinking with which many in Ibn Ṭufayl’s elite circles of philosophers, royalty, and senior state administrators were familiar. Ḥayy also critiques the religious teachings the Almohad administration enforced on society, while at the same time emphasizing that Sufism is not concerned with government of society. Through Ḥayy,

Ibn Ṭufayl critiques the teachings of the founder Ibn Tūmart and the rational knowledge that characterised his religious teaching.

It is ironic that the mystical writings of Ibn Sīnā and Ghazālī are used in Ibn

Ṭufayl’s critique of the two giants’ own rational philosophies. On his part, Ibn Tūmart relies on Ghazālī to understand Ibn Sīnā’s rational demonstration of God’s existence and unity, as Griffel has shown, but Ibn Tūmart purposely omits references to what Ghazālī came to consider the only route to true religious knowledge, Sufism. Damdash notes Ibn

Tūmart’s omission when she considers Ibn Tūmart’s definition of knowledge as a “light in the heart”, light being a prominent Ghazālīan metaphor for illuminative philosophy or

mystical vision.48 Damdash correctly reminds us that Ghazālī uses the metaphor in his autobiographical al-Munqiz min al-Dhalāl, but perhaps Ghazālī’s most relevant work on mystical vision is the aforementioned Niche of Light, as Bashier notes. Ibn Tūmart’s use of the ‘light’ metaphor, however, refers to the light of reason. Ibn Tūmart and Almohads used the burning of the Revival to their advantage, to rally support for their movement against the Almoravids, but when Ibn Tūmart did use Ghazālī’s works, including the

Revival, in his educational program, he omitted what Ghazālī underscores right at the opening of the Revival, that rational religion is not of the spiritual sciences of the other world, that fiqh and kalam are not sciences of religion per se. Ghazālī makes the distinction between pilgrims on their way to Mecca and the guards that protect the pilgrims en route. The guards are likened to the fuqaha (and the philosophers of kalam).

While protecting the pilgrims allows them to reach the holy site, this protection is distinct from the spiritual dimension or aim of pilgrimage. Ghazālī allots the responsibility of developing this spiritual dimension to the Sufis (Revival I.1). This is what Ibn Tūmart omits from his articles of creed, articles that were edited and reproduced, translated from

Arabic to the Berber language, even to Latin, and disseminated throughout the Almohad

Empire. What Ibn Tūmart omits, Ibn Ṭufayl revives in Ḥayy.

The World of Ḥayy bin Yaqzān

A closer look at Ibn Ṭufayl’s use of Ibn Sīnā and Ghazālī in Ḥayy reveals Ibn Ṭufayl’s critique of Almohad official dogma. After the Ḥayy narrator walks us through the logical

48 In The Story of Islamic Philosophy, Ibn Ṭufayl, Ibn al-‘Arabi, and Others on the Limit between Naturalism and Traditionalism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), Salman Bashier clarifies the ways in which Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy bin Yaqzān develops the illuminative philosophy of Ibn Sīnā and Ghazālī.

steps of Ḥayy’s thinking – steps that echo Ibn Sīnā’s demonstrative method,49 the narrator announces that the resulting knowledge is insufficient and embarks instead on a description of Ḥayy’s mystical visions, which are informed by the mysticism of both Ibn

Sīnā and Ghazālī.

As Salman Bashier persuasively demonstrates (1-42), Ḥayy is part of the Sufi illuminative philosophy whose main figures are Ibn Sīnā and Ghazālī, the two names Ibn

Ṭufayl mentions in his introduction to Ḥayy. The main principle of the philosophy is that the rational mind has a limit, and when this limit is reached, the mind is “flooded with light” and the seeker becomes aware of the “limitations of his rational faculty” as well as the possibility of acquiring knowledge through “mystical illumination rather than mere rational conceptualization” (Bashier 10). While his description of God appears similar in some respects to the abstraction of the fuqaha, Ḥayy follows the rational steps that were laid down by Ibn Sīnā the philosopher to affirm knowledge of the existence of God but also to show the limits of this knowledge. Ḥayy’s rational inquiry ends with what he calls the necessarily existent being. Rather than ending his inquiry however, this revelation begins a new, more important inquiry, as Ḥayy is engulfed with what the narrator calls a “vehement desire” to know the necessarily existent being (Ibn Ṭufayl

66).50 This feeling would not have developed were it not for the rational steps that led to the recognition of God’s existence, and the feeling itself shows that the limit of the rational faculty has been reached: it offers demonstration of God’s existence; beyond that

49 See Dimitri Gutas, “Ibn Ṭufayl on Ibn Sīnā’s Eastern Philosophy,” Oriens 34 (1994): 222-241. Ibn Sīnā’s own Ḥayy bin Yaqzān is an allegorical narrative whose theme is rational inquiry. The narrative itself is not extant, but a version can be found in Shams Inati, Ibn Sīnā and Mysticism: Remarks and Admonitions Part IV (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996) 30-42. 50 I rely here on George Ashwell’s 1686 translation of Ḥayy, titled The History of Hai Eb’n Yockdan, an Indian Prince.

reason cannot offer any further knowledge. Yet the “vehement desire” strongly indicates that Ḥayy has to acquire more knowledge. This is when he decides that the epistemological methods he has used, sense perception and his rational faculties, have to be abandoned and replaced by meditative exercises that do not rely on the rational faculties or their source of information, the senses. The main feature of meditation is concentration on the desired object of knowledge. Ḥayy tries several meditative exercises, the last of which involves seclusion in a cave.

Ben-Zaken mentions recent archaeological findings in Ibn Ṭufayl’s native land of drawings in caves (38-39); such empirical data is misleading in connection with Ḥayy.

The objective of Ḥayy’s meditation in the cave is to ensure that no distractions enter through the senses. It could be an allusion to Ghazālī because the narrator mentions using Ghazālī in the preface to Ḥayy and not because of a similarity between names, a similarity Ben-Zaken finds in Ghazālī and gazelle; as Fedwa Multi-Douglas (56) and

Srinivas Aravamudan (228 n.31) note, the Arabic word ẓabya (and not ghazāla) is used in

Ḥayy’s Arabic original. The cave is also an important reference to prophetic visions.

Prior to revelation, the Prophet Muhammad spent decades in prayer in the cave of Hira in

Mecca.51 Ḥayy in fact contains several similar allusions that are common to both the

Hebrew Bible and the Quran: Moses in Ḥayy’s natural birth – Ḥayy’s mother places him on a wooden float trusting him to the water – and Abraham in Ḥayy’s pondering of the galaxy and his rational thinking. Ḥayy’s spontaneous generation from the earth is also suggestive of the nature of Adam’s first ‘creation,’ though some of Ibn Ṭufayl’s North

African readers, like many of Ḥayy’s seventeenth-century English readers, would have

51 The Prophet had many visions in this cave prior to the beginning of revelation. These visions are seen as the highest possible rank a Sufi, mystic or saint can reach, beyond which is the rank of prophethood. See al-Andalusy, Bahjat al-Nufus (Delights of the Hearts) (Cairo: al-Sidq, 1929) 10-11.

frowned upon the idea of spontaneous generation. It is in the cave that Ḥayy’s visions appear. He is not inspired by drawings on the walls of the cave; rather, the narrator explains, the cave enables Ḥayy to “conquer … himself so far, as to sit mute and solitary in the Bottom of his Cave, with his head bent down, and his Eyes fixed on the ground thus alienating himself from all sensible things, and corporeal faculties” (Ibn Ṭufayl 27-

28; emphasis added). The absence of sensible objects and corporeal faculties, i.e. apprehension by the senses, is important because Ḥayy’s earlier meditative exercises are occasionally interrupted by such things as the “sound of an animal or pain in his limbs.”

Now able to fully focus in the cave, clearing his mind of all sensual and sensuous apprehension as well as reflection, Ḥayy is on the path to vision. Whenever he is interrupted by “any object,” which may distract him from focusing on the “necessarily existent Being,” Ḥayy “repel’d it thence with his utmost force, and straightway rejected it” (Ibn Ṭufayl 31-32). This point cannot be overemphasized: once the rational faculty with its reliance on the senses has reached its limits, further knowledge is only possible when the senses and rational faculties are abandoned in favour of vision.

Ibn Ṭufayl introduces Ḥayy with a description of meditation, explaining that the seeker’s visions become surer and the seeker rises from one station to another. Ibn

Ṭufayl then illustrates the description in the narrative, with the final stage of the vision appearing in a mirror-and-lights analogy. What is interesting is that in the preface, Ibn

Ṭufayl affirms both that he has had a vision and that, as Ḥayy shows, the vision is achieved by mixing al-Ghazālī’s and Ibn Sīnā’s methods. Ḥayy’s final vision is related to Ghazzai’s short Niche of Lights, where the lights-and-mirror analogy originates, but it is with Ibn Sīnā’s explanation of the stages the mystic goes through that Ḥayy’s visionary

process begins. Referring to Ibn Sīnā’s explanation, Ibn Ṭufayl repeats in Ḥayy’s introduction that “When his [the Sufi’s] exercise and willpower reach a certain limit, there appear to him glimmerings of Truth, sweet like flashes of lightning that shine upon him and then go out. This is what they [Sufis] call ‘the instant’ (waqt), as each instant is surrounded by two griefs, one because of waiting for it and another because of mourning over it[s passing away].” With more exercise, “the coverings of light start coming upon him without practice,” but he will be interrupted and “his tranquility is disturbed” until he

“perseveres in the exercise;” continued exercise makes him “fully tranquil.” Ibn Ṭufayl’s reliance on Ibn Sīnā is evident as the italics indicate the parts that appear in both Ḥayy’s preface and Ibn Sīnā’s al-Ishārat wa-al-Tanbihāt (Allusions and Intimations). The description is originally Ibn Sīnā’s, who adds that with continued exercise, the Sufi

“takes hold of it [the vision] as he wishes” (qtd. in Bashier 36-37). Again, though the description is Ibn Sīnā’s, the italicized parts also appear in Ibn Ṭufayl’s introduction to

Ḥayy. The description is then illustrated in Ibn Ṭufayl’s narrative as well, as Ḥayy’s initial meditative exercises are interrupted. It is interesting that once Ḥayy’s vision, as

Ibn Ṭufayl describes it, is over and he “return[s] to the sensible World … he [begins] to loath and to be weary of this mortal Life here on Earth, and to be afflicted with a most eager and earnest desire after the life to come. Whereupon he indeavour[s] a return to that former place and state” (Ibn Ṭufayl 153-154). And confirming Ibn Sīnā’s assertion that with continued exercise the Sufi “takes hold of” the visions “as he wishes,” Ḥayy narrator tells us that after the third time he succeeds in entering that “noble state:” Ḥayy

“at length … made a Progress so far in this way, upon his oft returning to it, that he

thereunto attained as oft as he pleased, nor departed therefrom but when he pleased” (Ibn

Ṭufayl 154-155).

Ben-Zaken does not appreciate Ḥayy’s abandonment of rational thinking and sense perception and hence Ibn Ṭufayl’s critique of philosophy. In asserting that vision offers Ḥayy glimpses of the divine world, the narrator explains that the “lower World, made up of Objects of Sense … [is] the proper place of Multiplicity and Singularity, and that their true Nature is understood there, and that therein are found Separation and

Union, severing into Parts and Distinction, Agreeableness, and Difference.” This reference, which occurs right after the description of Ḥayy’s vision in the mirror-and- lights analogy, is quite contrary to the “Divine World, in or concerning which we cannot justly say, All, or Some, neither can we utter any thing concerning what belongs to it, whereto our Ears are accustomed.” Expecting the strangeness of the description here to invite some criticism, Ḥayy narrator retorts to him who says, “Thou hast transgressed the bounds, and exceeded the natural Reach of intelligent Men, and rejected the usual means of apprehending an intelligible Object,” by saying, “we readily grant it him, and give him leave to go on in his way, in the company of intelligent Men. For the Intelligence which he, and other Men like him, mean, and please themselves in, is that rational Faculty which contemplates the Singulars or Individuals among the Objects of Sense, and thence fetcheth out upon a diligent search, universal Notions” (Ibn Ṭufayl 41-42). Ḥayy narrator asserts that vision offers the mystic an understanding that is “above all these things” the putative critic is concerned about. Ḥayy’s critic is finally counselled to “stop his Ears” because he “understands nothing beyond these sensible Objects, and the Universals collected from them,” so he should “return to his own Company, to wit, the Society of

those, who enquire after, and understand the visible things of this world, being very little”

(Ibn Ṭufayl 42). The assertiveness and hostility the narrator shows seem to match the reaction expressed by critics of Ghazālī’s Sufism as well as the expected reaction of some of Ibn Ṭufayl’s readers. In his Revival of Religious Sciences, Ghazālī had elevated the knowledge gained by the mystic from experience of vision over the rational language of the philosopher and the guardians of rational religion. The tone of Ḥayy’s language does not mask the point the narrator makes in his description of Ḥayy’s visions, namely, that knowledge gained through the rational faculties is limited – or “very little” – when compared to the mystic’s knowledge.

Dimitri Gutas suggests that when Ibn Ṭufayl announces in Ḥayy’s preface that he has added Ibn Sīnā to Ghazālī, reference here is to Ibn Sīnā’s rational philosophy (“Ibn

Ṭufayl on Ibn Sīnā” 225-226). Part of Gutas’ argument is that in Ḥayy, Ibn Ṭufayl divides intellection and vision into different grades of knowledge, vision being the higher. Ibn Sīnā’s main contribution to Islamic philosophy and philosophy in general was to provide a logical system through which knowledge of God can be acquired, which is probably why Gutas thinks Ibn Ṭufayl refers to rational philosophy. My discussion of

Bashier above demonstrates that Ibn Ṭufayl actually quotes from Ibn Sīnā’s description of mystical states. Ibn Sīnā’s rational philosophy – his demonstrative method – appears elsewhere in Ḥayy and is not related to vision. As for Gutas’ suggestion that Ibn Ṭufayl divides intellection and division into different grades, this interesting reading would be an important revision of Ghazālī’s position. Ghazalli believed that intellect and logic cannot offer knowledge of the divine because reason’s realm is verifiable truth and that divine truths are accessible through vision or what Ghazālī calls the “eye of prophecy.”

According to Ghazālī, this “eye” “beholds the unseen” and what it “sees” is inaccessible to the sensual eye and intellect (Gutas, “Ibn Ṭufayl on Ibn Sīnā” 238-239).52 In effect,

Ghazālī believes that intellection and vision, first, are two different routes to knowledge and, second, yield different kinds of knowledge, whereas Ibn Ṭufayl, according to Gutas, presents two different routes to divine knowledge even though the resulting knowledge is qualitatively different. Though my interpretation of Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy rules out Gutas’ solution regarding a graded vision, I think the important question to ask, and one that is suggested by Gutas’ solution, is whether Ibn Ṭufayl believes it is possible to have vision without first exercising reason.

Bashier suggests it is only after the rational limits are reached that the mystical illumination occurs (1-4). Hence, on the one hand, reason cannot yield any mystical knowledge, but, on the other hand, mystical illumination can only begin after the rational mind reaches its limits. And indeed the connection between reason and vision do appear in Ḥayy’s experience. Ḥayy’s exercise of meditation starts after he exercises his reason to its limits, and meditation begins to succeed when “all Beings, besides his own, [slip] out of his memory, and [are] altogether banished from his mind.” Vision is finally accomplished when he manages at a later stage of meditative practice to also “wholly vanish out of his own Sight” (Ibn Ṭufayl 132).53 Vision is independent from reason, yet

52 For further reading on Ghazālī’s views on reason, see Hameed Nassim Rafiabadi, Emerging from Darkness (New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2002) 199 ff. and Muslim Science, Philosophy and Mysticism (New Delhi: Sarup and Sons, 2001) 118 ff. 53 A description is provided in Ḥayy: “whosoever thus contemplated it [the self-existent Being, God], was wholly abstracted even from his own Essence, which then quite vanished out of his Sight, and became as nothing; as all other Beings in like manner … except the Essence of the one, true, necessarily Existent, great, high, and powerful Being” (Ibn Ṭufayl 115). It may be opportune to note here that in the western tradition, Octavio Paz attributes the trope of the voyage of the soul to Plato and suggests that the tradition was revived in the Renaissance period, but Paz speculates about the source for Sor Juana’s “First Dream,” which he believes may be a lost source. See Octavio Paz, forward, A Sor Juana Anthology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). Ḥayy may well be the source for “First Dream;” Ḥayy became

reason has a role in recognizing God. When Ḥayy reflects on the deductive reasoning that accords him knowledge of God, he believes that the “best part of him [Ḥayy] is that thing whereby he knows the necessarily existent Being [God]; that also his intelligent

Form was somewhat Heroical and Divine … as could not be apprehended by any of the

Senses, nor of the Imagination” (Ibn Ṭufayl 110). It should be recalled, however, that while Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy reaches his rational limits and deduces the existence of God,

Āsāl is already a believer – he already believes in God. Guided by Ḥayy, Āsāl ’s journey begins with meditative exercise, i.e. Āsāl does not begin with rational exercises. This would suggest Ghazālī’s critique, mentioned earlier, of the extreme form of Ash‘arism which required the believer to rationally demonstrate God’s existence: Ghazālī’s opinion is that simply professing the article of faith is sufficient, i.e. being born into faith and accepting it is sufficient. This difference is important, as Ibn Ṭufayl seems to be suggesting that the believer, who can be any lay member of his own Sufi order in

Marrakesh, can embark on mystical meditation without needing to first master the demonstrative method. And as far as Ḥayy is concerned, this demonstrative method does not yield any vision, i.e. there is no “compromise solution” here as Gutas suggests (“Ibn

Ṭufayl on Ibn Sīnā” 238). Ḥayy’s need to convert to Āsāl’s faith as well as his supervision of Āsāl ’s meditative exercises – without recourse to reason or the demonstrative method – seems to confirm this interpretation.

In spite of the Ḥayy narrator’s emphasis on mystical vision and his insistence on the inefficacy of reason as a route to vision, Ḥayy’s editors insist that the first part of

popular throughout Europe once Edward Pococke, the younger translated it to Latin in the late seventeenth century; it may have also reached Sor Juana through Iberian sources of transmission. Ḥayy may just be the unknown “literary echo” that Paz suggests might have been Sor Juana’s model, but this requires a separate study. I would like to thank Professor Mary Nyquist for pointing out Sor Juana’s “First Dream.” See page 128, n17 below.

Ḥayy, the agreement of reason and religion/scripture – a common theme of Muslim philosophers – is the main theme. The first part involves observation and reason, the second mystical knowledge – in perfect solitude – and the third concerns dialogue with civil man, Āsāl. Confirming that mystical knowledge is the main theme of Ibn Ṭufayl’s

Ḥayy is the fact that the two characters, Āsāl and Salamān, introduced to complete the story are the two main characters in Ibn Sīnā’s mystical Recital of Salamān and Absāl – spelled Āsāl in Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy. Ibn Ṭufayl simply confirms to readers familiar with the Recital that he has changed the theme of Ibn Sīnā’s original Ḥayy into a story about mystical illumination right after he emphasizes that reason prevents vision. Yet in 1929,

A.S. Fulton begins his revised edition of Ockley’s early eighteenth-century English translation of Ḥayy54 with a lengthy introduction that commends Gauthier’s French critical edition, especially Gauthier’s belief that the main subject of Ḥayy is the nexus of philosophy and religion. Fulton thus extends the life of Gauthier’s error.

The Ḥayy Narrative55

Ḥayy’s plot is very simple, but its opening is both interesting and important enough to warrant censure by both Pococke and Keith. The opening is also memorable. First two islands are introduced: one uninhabited and the other a city-island state. The uninhabited

Indian island is “blest with a most pleasant and temperate Air.” The city-island state beside it is filled with “all the commodities of life ... well inhabited” and “govern’d by a

Prince of a proud and jealous Disposition” (1). The Prince of the city-island state rejects

54 This is Simon Ockley’s eighteenth-century translation. Abu Bakr Ibn Ṭufayl, The History of Ḥayy bin Yaqzān: The Improvement of Human Reason, trans. Simon Ockley, ed. A.S. Fulton (Frederick A. Stokes: New York, 1929). 55 I rely here and in subsequent chapters on George Ashwell’s 1686 translation.

all of his sister’s suitors, but she marries in secret and becomes pregnant. When she delivers, the princess fears for her son’s life, so she places the newborn in a chest and trusts it to the sea. For those familiar with the Qur’an and certainly for seventeenth- century English Christian readers, her prayers for the newborn recall both Moses’s mother and the Virgin Mary. The chest drifts to the uninhabited island and lodges in a

“shady Grove… thick set with Trees.” It is a “very pleasant place, sheltered from Wind and Weather, Rain and Sun” (3-4).

The Ḥayy narrator anticipates twelfth-century Muslim readers’ objections to spontaneous generation, but his anticipation ironically also applies to Ḥayy’s unexpected seventeenth-century English readers, who also censure spontaneous generation for the identical reason. Once the natural setting and the alternative births are provided, the rest of Ḥayy is divided into three parts: the discovery of the soul, speculative reasoning, and meditation. In the first section, a roe answers the child’s cries for nourishment and acts as the child’s mother. Eventually though the roe dies, spurring Ḥayy to begin his long journey to knowledge of God as he tries to revive her. In his attempts to learn what ails her, Ḥayy, finding no cause on the outside, decides to dissect her; this process is described with precision, as the twelfth-century author of Ḥayy is also a physician. Ḥayy reaches the ribs, which he believes must be protecting the most important part of the body. With some difficulty, he reaches the heart where he finds two cavities, the left empty. Now he begins to think that perhaps there was something in this cavity, and perhaps it has left and gone somewhere else (22-25). Soon Ḥayy gets the opportunity to catch a wild beast, which he dissects before the animal dies and on reaching the left cavity, he finds that it is filled with a “certain airy or thin vaporous Substance, like unto a

white Cloud or mist.” When he touches it, he finds it “so hot, that it scald[s] him; and the wild Beast instantly die[s].” Perhaps this airy substance is what departed from his mother, and perhaps it is this that showed him love and affection. From this experiment,

Ḥayy makes a generalization: all beasts have an airy substance that leaves when their bodies die (29-35).

The airy substance that beasts have, which Ashwell calls the animal spirit, leads

Ḥayy to begin his speculative thinking. First he compares animals to himself and considers the possibility that he too may have a spirit, which our translator Ashwell announces is the sensitive soul (53-4). Ḥayy then surveys the whole universe and starts to draw parallels with his own body; the different parts of his body are moved by his spirit, so perhaps the universe is the same with a spirit that moves all of the creatures inhabiting it. He also notices that all things have extension, shape, form and corporeity

(60-2). His observations about water also teach him that it evaporates when heated.

Although heat’s disposition is unlike water’s and it is an accident external to water, it changes water’s disposition (65-7). He applies the analogy to the universe. Ḥayy starts to search for the external accident, but this search, the narrator tells us, is limited to

“things Sensible” as Ḥayy’s attention is mainly focused on the “sensible world.” Ḥayy realizes that if the whole universe is like a body, then perhaps it too stands “in need of a voluntary Agent” (67, 75). In other words, like himself and the roe, a spirit may move the whole universe, and this spirit or agent cannot have the same qualities as the things of the universe, that is, extension, shape, form and corporeity. It should be noted here that

Ḥayy’s search for knowledge of the agent is described as a “vehement desire” (66-7), an interesting comment on Ḥayy’s psychology at this stage of speculative reasoning.

Ḥayy begins his meditations when he realizes that the voluntary agent cannot be sought amongst sensible things, i.e. in nature. He reflects upon his thought processes.

Although he begins with observations of sensible things, he believes that in his thinking, he does not use any of his senses to reach the conclusions he makes. He may have relied on his imagination, which represents the forms or images of things apprehended by the senses, but the apprehension of sensible objects, he reasons, precedes the thought process

(78-9). And since the conclusions he reaches are about the agent that moves the universe

– just as the animal spirit moves the roe when it is alive – then the agent cannot be a sensible object. In other words, this agent is apprehended “by somewhat that is not a

Body, nor faculty inherent in the Body” because it is itself an ‘Incorporeal Substance’”

(90-1). If not part of the natural world, how can the voluntary agent be known? This question troubles Ḥayy until he draws an analogy with one of his senses: an eye that sees a beautiful and perfect object will desire to see it again, and the desire is proportionate to the beauty and perfection of that object. Ḥayy notes that his “desire” to know the incorporeal object he concludes exists becomes “vehement,” and since the desire and the thought processes it spurs are not in themselves sensible, Ḥayy believes that his very essence, his spirit, is of the same nature as the voluntary agent, which is incorporeal, i.e. it cannot be known through the senses. To satisfy his vehement desire, Ḥayy decides to purify his thoughts of all sensible things so as to attain fuller knowledge of the voluntary agent. He decides to follow an ascetic lifestyle, which Ashwell attributes to “Al-Jonaid, that eminent Doctor and prince of the Suphii” (98-9), drawing attention to Ashwell’s expectation that seventeenth-century English readers are familiar or should be familiar with both Jonaid, whom Ibn Ṭufayl does not mention by name, and Sufism.

Asceticism brings us to the last stage in Ḥayy’s journey, where he moves from the use of reason to meditation. His first attempts are interrupted by things of the sensible world, such as a “sound of an animal or pain in his limbs,” so he decides to imitate the heavenly bodies, which he observes are constant in their motion. His experience with fire, which he chances upon, makes him draw comparisons between it and the heavenly bodies, especially the sun, due to the light and heat the fire produces (27-8). He also supposes that these bodies have knowledge of the voluntary agent, so he decides to imitate their action. He circles the whole island and then decides to stand in one place and rotate around himself as heavenly bodies do, but none of these movements enable him to remove sensible objects from his thoughts. He hence changes his routine in a way that suggests a theme common to seventeenth-century English writing: retirement.56

Ḥayy remains still in a cave and eventually succeeds in having a vision. The narrator tells us that Ḥayy “sit[s] mute and solitary” with his “head bent down, and his Eyes fixed on the ground” until he succeeds in removing from his thoughts “all sensible things, and corporeal faculties” (131). The result is a vision: “the Heavens and the earth, and whatsoever is comprehended between them … including himself… were removed out of his Memory and thoughts … whilst nothing remained with him besides that being, which is the only one, and the True one, and of permanent Existence” (132). Ḥayy apprehends

God, who cannot be apprehended by the senses. Though he gains knowledge of the existence of God through reason, the apprehension of God requires vision in which all the senses, including the imagination, are abandoned.57 The vision is described in terms of

56 Matar attributes the prevalence of the notion of retirement in seventeenth-century England to Ḥayy; Islam in Britain, 99-101. I discuss the notion in Chapter Four below. 57 Ibn Ṭufayl emphasizes in Ḥayy that while knowledge of God’s existence can be attained through observation of nature, with the use of the senses and reason, this kind of knowledge is, as Sami Hawi

ascension through such cosmological spheres as those of the moon and Saturn to the

“supream sphere” (143-44), but this is only an analogy, as the Ḥayy narrator explains that the experience cannot be articulated in words.

Once Ḥayy succeeds in having his vision, the narrator refers again to the adjacent city-island mentioned at the beginning of Ḥayy. A sect belonging to one of the “ancient

Prophets of pious memory” has spread in the island (ff. 156). Two men of extraordinary character are born on the island and join the sect, agreeing to “observe … its precepts,” entering into a “League of Friendship.” The two men are Āsāl and Salamān. The sect’s law teaches all things “which had existence in Nature,” describing some truths “by similitude.” When they come upon passages of the law that describe the “Most High,”

“Resurrection” and “Rewards and Punishments” in the afterlife, differences between the two friends’ characters appear. Salamān refrains from “interpretation,” preferring “other

Sayings which seemed to exhort them unto Civil Acquaintance and Fellowship.”

Salamān thus decides to “embrace humane society” and the laws that govern it. Āsāl on the other hand finds himself drawn to the “unfolding of things” and “significance of

Words.” Unlike Salamān who is drawn to passages that exhort to social and “mutual

Commerce,” Āsāl seeks “after solitude,” preferring those Sayings of his Law which tended thitherward” (158).

The two men recognize their differences and, taking leave of each other, part ways. Salamān remains on the island; he eventually (and conveniently) becomes its

“prince and sovereign.” Āsāl hears of the adjacent, uninhabited island where he decides to live a life of solitude, what the translator Ashwell also describes as a “commodious explains, “not only insufficient but also remote from the immediate intimacy of the mystical experience.” See Sami Hawi, “Ibn Ṭufayl’s Appraisal of His Predecessors and Their Influence on His Thought,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 7 (1967): 91-2.

retirement.” This is the island where Ḥayy is born and lives. Once on Ḥayy’s island,

Āsāl immerses himself in prayer and meditation upon God’s “glorious Names, and noble

Attributes.” He only stops when he feels the need to eat. In his explorations of the island, Āsāl does not see “any Man, nor [can he] perceive the footsteps of any one” (162).

Āsāl does not see Ḥayy at first because the latter is also busy in meditations in his cave, where he stays for as long as a week at a time. Hence Āsāl thinks he is alone in the island, and this fills him with joy. Soon, however, Ḥayy feels hungry and decides to look for food. Āsāl sees Ḥayy from afar and quickly assumes that Ḥayy must be a hermit like himself, in search of solitude, which Āsāl decides to respect so he keeps away from

Ḥayy. On his part, Ḥayy is astonished to see Āsāl, a creature he has never seen before.

He resolves to observe Āsāl; “overhear[ing] his Reading” and “notic[ing] his humble

Gesture,” Ḥayy realizes also that what he thinks is Āsāl ’s skin is actually an outer garment. Ḥayy concludes that Āsāl is “one of those Essences, which had the knowledge of the True One” (163-164). As Ḥayy comes nearer to Āsāl, Āsāl sees Ḥayy’s roughness and, frightened, flees, but Ḥayy outruns and captures him. To allay Āsāl ’s fear, Ḥayy utters comforting sounds, having not learnt human speech and strokes Āsāl ’s beard.58

Assured, Āsāl, who is conversant in several languages, tries to communicate with Ḥayy.

He resolves to teach Ḥayy speech, beginning with names, “applying each word to the thing thereby it signified.” Ḥayy is soon able to “speak his Mind” (168-169).

Āsāl listens intently to a description of the knowledge and mystical experiences

Ḥayy has and realizes that his religious law’s teaching is figuratively suggestive of the

58 Stroking of one’s beard as a form of endearment, especially to one’s elders or superiors, is common still today in parts of the Middle East and Africa. Interestingly, the practice appears in Aphra Behn’s Oronooko and in Defoe’s The Adventures and its sequel Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Emily Kulger also notes this link.

truths Ḥayy describes – only Āsāl’s law offers these truths through similitude. As the

“ways of Interpretation became easie” for him, the narrator explains, Āsāl ’s “Intellectual

Faculty grew strong.” This makes him hold Ḥayy in so much “Honour and Admiration” that he considers him one of the “Saints of God.” Āsāl hence decides to “wait upon him, to imitate him and to follow his Counsels in the performance of … legal [works]” (171).

Not only does he assume Ḥayy is like him, another hermit in search of solitude, Āsāl comes to consider Ḥayy more intelligent and pious than he is. Though he comes from the city-island, Āsāl concludes that Ḥayy occupies a higher spiritual rank than he does, hence the decision virtually to become Ḥayy’s disciple and servant.

When Āsāl explains to Ḥayy the teachings of his religious law contained in his scripture, Ḥayy recognizes the law’s truth. Ḥayy accepts the tenets of Āsāl ’s religious law and embraces his faith but not without raising questions about some of its teachings.

First, Ḥayy does not know why some of the truths are taught in parable, which he thinks can only lead people to the error of believing in the corporeality of God. This was in keeping with the teachings of Ibn Tūmart, himself influenced by the predominant school of thought in Baghdad. Second, Ḥayy questions the need to regulate the accumulation of wealth whether they through rules that organize trade or encourage the giving of alms.

Ḥayy reasons that such rules would encourage people to “vainly [employ] themselves about vain things.” Here, the Ḥayy narrator comments that Ḥayy at this point is

“ignorant” about “how dull and blockish, they [the inhabitants of the city-island state] were, how void of understanding, how ill advised, and how inconstant in their

Resolutions; insomuch that they were wholly like Brutes, yea more [likely are] they to

wander out of the way, wherein they are directed to walk by the Law of Nature” (174-

176).

Ḥayy persuades Āsāl that the two should declare the truth to the inhabitants of the city-island state to direct them to the “right way” (177).59 The two men arrive at the city- island state, where Āsāl ’s friends welcome them. Hearing of Ḥayy’s experiences in the island, they “flocked together … gathering about him” and “highly magnified and reverenced him.” In spite of the warm welcome, Ḥayy’s efforts to teach them higher truths fail. The more he teaches, the more difficult they find it to turn from external works to esoteric meanings. Ḥayy at last observes that behind civil society’s abhorrence of deeper, esoteric meaning is its members’ love of what they “possesst at present [that] they made choice of their Lusts for their God.” Ḥayy laments the accumulation of the

“Vanities of the World,” which he believes has blinded “their Eyes … captivating them by means of their delusive Fancies, even until they came to their Graves” (180-181).

Ḥayy decides that these city-folk are “justly ranked amongst irrational Creatures” incapable of fully understanding the truths “which the messengers of God spake, and the

Law” delivered. At the same time however, Ḥayy recognizes that this sort of people, though of little understanding, need the religious law with rule that govern property, for otherwise they would go astray. Ḥayy hence begs prince Salamān and his subjects’ pardon, “exhorting them to stick to their Resolution, and avowed Custom.” If they continue in “observing outward Works” till “Death seised on them,” Ḥayy explains, “they would at length obtain Salvation” (185-186).60 Ḥayy and Āsāl resolve to return to the

59 As Brugel notes, Ibn Ṭufayl here changes the Quranic classification to include believers – Muslims as well as Jews and Christians are still saved. 60 The complete quote reads, “until Death seised on them, they would at length obtain Salvation, and be placed amongst those who stand at the right Hand” (187). Though Ashwell identifies most Quranic

uninhabited island, where they resume their practice of meditation and visions. As representative Sufis in the narrative, the two men are not concerned with the government of civil society; hence, they are not a political threat to the Almohad rulers because Sufis’ concern is otherworldly. Sufis are also not concerned with criticizing civil society, whose government through the exoteric laws of revealed religion is suitable for most people’s understandings. If we remember that Ibn Ṭufayl was a member of a Sufi order, we will appreciate his protection of Sufis like him.

Like Ghazālī, Ibn Ṭufayl feels safe to divulge through a “thin veil” for those

“capable of understanding” what he suggest others before him have kept hidden. Ḥayy ends with a short note from the narrator/author, who says that in writing the “History of

Hai Eb’n Yockdan, of Āsāl also of Salamān,” he has not relied on any of his sources.

“We have made choice of such Words,” Ibn Ṭufayl concludes, “as are found in no other

Book.” This assertion saves Ibn Ṭufayl from any rebuke that he has not really followed

Ibn Sīnā in particular. We will see in the next chapter on the parallels between Ibn

Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy and Milton’s Adam the relationship between Ṭufayl’s choice of characters, Ḥayy, Salamān and Āsāl, and Ibn Sīnā’s original version, from which Ṭufayl has chosen these names.

references, he does not recognize this allusion. Ibn Ṭufayl here offers his own interpretation of the verse, which is that those who follow outward works of the law will be saved. There is a rank higher than those of the right hand, to which Ḥayy suggests people like Ḥayy and perhaps Āsāl , after more practice in meditation, belong.

Chapter 2

Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy and Milton’s Adam: Some Parallels

In the previous chapter, I discussed Ḥayy in its own context, starting with the Abbāsid

Caliph Al-Ma’mūn’s failed attempt to impose a specific form of rational religion on lively philosophical and religious debates at the centre of the caliphate, Baghdad. It was in both Baghdad and the previous capital of the Caliphate, Damascus, under the

Umayyads, that Arabs had developed sophisticated sciences of linguistic analysis, emerging out of which were many lexicons and dictionaries on the language of the

Quran. These resources affected all, both non-Arab Muslims, for whom the resources were originally intended, and Arabic-speaking non-Muslims. Jews living at the centre

Baghdad and as far away as Muslim Spain translated the Torah into Arabic, and developed exegeses, linguistic and liturgical poetry in the Arabic language based on

Arabic models as the different areas of Jewish studies expanded (Patai 104-106). The

Jewish traditions also modelled their own Hebrew lexicons on the Arabic ones (Russell,

The ‘Arabick’ Interest, introduction, and 130; Patai 126). With the English Reformation, the rise of the vernacular and the need for direct textual interpretation of scripture, access to the Bible’s sources, including Hebrew and its sister Semitic language, Arabic became important. In addition to the importance of Arabic to natural philosophers, theologians and academicians stressed the importance of the language for religious studies; even parliament was petitioned in a letter highlighting the role of oriental languages in providing “clearer knowledge of the sacred Scripture” (Toomer 192-194). English

Protestants in John Milton’s time drew on medieval Hebrew lexicons and biblical

commentaries; the Polyglot Bibles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are also products of these traditions (Russell, The ‘Arabick’ Interest, introduction). Trained in oriental languages, including Arabic, English theologians and biblical scholars, including the Arabists Wheelocke and Pococke, first Chairs of Arabic at Cambridge and Oxford respectively, used Old Testament and rabbinical commentaries to interpret biblical passages (Holt, “The Background” 28). Milton himself was deeply immersed in the study of Scripture for which knowledge of Hebrew was considered invaluable and other oriental languages extremely useful; he learned Hebrew, Chaldean and Syriac, and he taught his nephews the three languages (Taylor). As can be expected, Milton participated in the general culture’s interest in Arabic learning and Semitic languages for both scientific and religious purposes. Hence, even though Milton did not know Arabic, and there is no evidence of his direct knowledge of Ḥayy, such evidence is not necessary as

Milton was deeply immersed in a society described by historians of the period as one permeated by Arabic “at all levels, to include the court, the clergy, the colleges of universities, diplomatic service as well as mercantile companies” (Russell, The ‘Arabick’

Interest, introduction 1).1 The interest in Arabic included both privileged circles as well as a particular “subculture of the British populace” (Matar, Islam in Britain 84).2

In this chapter, I provide an overview of Milton’s participation in the seventeenth- century interest in Arabic to show his familiarity with and use of Arabic knowledge at the time and to note that the parallels in his writing with Ḥayy are suggestive of familiarity.

Milton was a member of influential circles that mentioned Ḥayy in private

1 I would like to acknowledge Russell’s edition of The ‘Arabick’ Interest, which includes a valuable collection of essays on the subject as well as her own chapter on Locke and Ḥayy in the collection she edits and introduces. 2 See both the introduction and Chapter One in Matar, Islam in Britain.

correspondence and probably in coffee houses and private residences prior to its publication. The introductory overview of Milton’s familiarity with Arabic is followed by a comparative analysis in which I discuss some clear parallels between Milton’s presentation of Adam’s conception in Book VIII of Paradise Lost and Ḥayy. I then suggest further parallels, not so clear, between Paradise Lost and some of Ḥayy’s sources. I suggest that the connections between Ḥayy and particularly some of its sources on the one hand and important motifs in Paradise Lost, on the other, encourage thinking about the extent of Milton’s engagement of Arabic and Islamic sources. The common motifs and possible historical connections between texts may not suggest a literary cycle, but identifying them can produce interesting insights into affinities and distinctions that transcend period and culture. It may certainly shed light on Milton’s engagement of

Arabic-Islamic sources connected to Ḥayy. The chapter ends with a discussion of

Ashwell’s Theologia Ruris, which Ashwell appends to his 1686 translation of Ḥayy, as a way of explaining how reading Ḥayy, presented through a narrator’s voice, was easily converted into the autobiographic first person in the period.

Milton was a student at Cambridge when Arabic was first introduced as a subject of study in 1632. Arabic was introduced to Oxford, two years later, in 1634. As a result of Laud’s university reforms, Arabic also became a philological requirement for the arts degree (Russell, introduction 9), but few acquired sufficient reading knowledge of the language. While Milton did not learn the language, he was certainly exposed to it in

Cambridge and in the 1640s in London, where Arabic was taught. As Russell suggests, it was not surprising to hear upper-school students making orations in Arabic, as the language was taught at least at Westminster and St. Paul in London (Salmon 61-62) as

well as at Sion College and London-House in St. Paul’s churchyard in 1647-1649

(Toomer ff. 187). Many private tutors also taught Arabic.

In addition to exposure to the language at Cambridge and London, at a time when they had become centres for the teaching of Arabic in the mid-seventeenth century,

Milton socialised and worked with circles directly engaged with Arabic: academics and natural philosophers concerned with learning and teaching the language as well as collecting and translating manuscripts. The bulk of letters to the Royal Society, for example, inquired about Islamic and Greek manuscript sources in Arabic (Hall 148-154).

These included medical or botanical terms, topics in astronomy, geography and history, as well as commentaries on biblical texts. The interest did not start with the establishment of the society, but the society illustrates the reputation England had for

Arabic learning amongst Europeans. The society’s secretary is a case in point. Before becoming secretary for the Royal Society, the German-born Henry Oldenberg travelled to

England in 1653 as the emissary of the Senate of Bremen, and mingled with members of

John Milton’s circle. He decided to settle in England, where he became Robert Boyle’s publisher and translator. Oldenberg, who befriended Milton as well (Hall 147-148), replaced him as tutor to Boyle’s nephew (Duran 40). Like Boyle, Samuel Hartlib was also active in educational pursuits, and there is evidence of his direct involvement in the appointment of the Dutch orientalist Christian Ravius, who taught Arabic and other oriental languages in London (Toomer 192-194). Ravius’ lectures were conducted in

English and not Latin; Milton knew both languages. This suggests that the seventeenth- century interest was not limited to the specialist, whether Arabist, theologian or natural philosopher. Alexander Ross’ 1649 translation of the Quran also underscores the

language’s popularity as well as interest in the subjects it carried.3 Patrons showed up at booksellers to inquire about copies of Ross’ Quran; part of Ross’ defense of the publication was the fact that the language of the Quran, Arabic, had been widely taught in

England and Europe. This was a time when the English public was also continuously occupied by news of English captivity abroad in the Mediterranean at the hands of

Turkish, Algerian and Moroccan ‘turks’, the common term used to describe Muslims, and

‘renegadoes,’ a reference to converts. News of travellers’ conversion to Islam widely circulated (Matar, Islam in Britain introduction and Chapter One). Nonetheless, and possibly because of the negative news related to Arabic, Milton would have shared his compatriots’ concern about both conversion and captivity. He was certainly a member of the circles that influenced “political policy and public perceptions,” groups which Emily

Kugler identified as being interested in the Arabic language (28).

Milton’s immersion in his Protestant culture, his membership in influential circles, and his keen interest in reading new books likely fostered his interest in any news of a new Arabic manuscript found in Aleppo, Smyrna, or elsewhere in the Middle East.

Such news would quickly circulate, and translations and commentaries on Arabic manuscripts would be eagerly awaited and prints quickly acquired. It is hence not surprising that Milton not only taught his nephews at least two Semitic languages, Syriac and Chaldean, but also owned books containing Arabic knowledge. Milton’s use of a variety of encyclopaedias of science is well known, especially in his seminal work

Paradise Lost. These encyclopaedias often contained references to Arabic natural

3 The translator was not named, but Ross was identified as the author of the accompanying apology. Though the bookseller was imprisoned, the translation – from French – was printed twice in 1649. Ross the royalist also used the opportunity to criticize the Commonwealth administration for encouraging heresy. See Matar, Islam in Britain ff. 76.

philosophers. Milton owned books by two leading Arabists, Edward Pococke, the name associated with Ḥayy, and John Selden, the jurist, Hebraist, and Arabist.

Many of Selden’s works contained Arabic in print, such as his Mare Clausum

(1635), De successionibius in bona defuncti (1636), and De juri naturali (1642), which

Milton studiously read and in fact owned (Hanford 275-276; Jackson 220-221; Roper).

Milton used many of Selden’s works, which discuss oriental, biblical learning, as sources for his own writing (Rosenblatt). Milton is known to have used De Sphaera (1608), which includes a section in Latin from the Arab astronomer Alfarangius; it is from this section that Milton derives the two names of the planet Venus used in Paradise Lost

(Gilbert 300, 304). De Sphaera contained a translation of the Naẓm al-Jawhar, with

Arabic and Latin print appearing side by side. Naẓm al-Jawhar – or Eutychius of Said ibn Batrik – was translated by Pococke, the famed professor of Arabic, and printed for

Selden in 1642 (Toomer 164 n. 80), with the Arabic original and the Latin translation appearing side by side. In addition to the two names of the planet Venus, Milton seems to have relied on the Naẓm al-Jawhar for another key phrase in Paradise Lost: the description of the “just men” in Book 11; Milton may have also consulted Samuel

Bochart’s work on biblical natural history, Hierzoicon, which also contained translated

Arabic commentaries (Allen 537-538). Milton owned some of Jacob Golius’ books, including De veritate religionis Christianae, which Pococke translated into Arabic

(Boswell 117-118; Toomer 145-146). Milton seems to have relied on the Polyglot Bible of 1657 – a work containing Arabic and to which Pococke and other Arabists contributed

– as a source for the phrase ‘Domini ecclesia’ from Syriac for his De doctrina christiana

(Fletcher “Milton and Walton’s Biblia Sacra Polyglotta” 84-87). A more systematic

review of Arabic resources available to Milton will no doubt uncover many more instances of indebtedness and influence. It is certain, though, that the fame of Selden and

Pococke as Arabic and Hebrew scholars could not have escaped Milton.

Like his contemporaries, Milton would have heard about newly-acquired manuscripts, anticipated forthcoming translations, especially by Arabists like Wheelocke,

Pococke, and Selden, and discussed the content of the Arabic texts with friends, just as members of his learned circle did. Milton’s circles discussed Ḥayy probably as early as the 1640s, when Pococke had just returned from the Levant with the manuscript. One can imagine such discussions to have been dominated by consideration of spontaneous generation from the earth, a subject that raised a bit more than an eyebrow as translators would later raise their pens to censure the concept that seemed to challenge the biblical creation narrative. As for the protagonist’s use of unaided reason to engage in natural philosophy and to logically deduce the first cause, God, the self-taught philosopher’s reasoned steps probably earned him the admiration of members of Milton’s circle.

Hartlib, Boyle and John Worthington wrote to each other about Ḥayy, which they commended as they anticipated Pococke the elder’s English translation. The group’s correspondence about Ḥayy continued until the 1660s when Milton is thought to have been preparing Paradise Lost. The specific correspondence P.M. Holt (“An Oxford

Arabist”) and Nahas find begins in 1659, when Worthington inquired about Ḥayy of

Hartlib, who in turn wrote to Boyle, a friend of Milton. In the same year, Hartlib thanked

Boyle for a printed copy of Pococke’s translation of an Arabic treatise on coffee, which was becoming fashionable in England at the time. Hartlib also inquired about Ḥayy

(Nahas 88-90). The treatise on coffee shows both the interest in Arabic translations and

100

the degree to which manuscripts chosen for translation were topical; Hartlib added that the paper on coffee “will be gustful no doubt to our coffee drinkers … who may add as many more good observations from their own experience.” One can expect similar interest in Ḥayy. In fact, Hartlib mentioned Worthington’s “huge commendations” of

Ḥayy to him in his letter (Nahas 89), suggesting, as is expected in these circles, that Ḥayy was talked about prior to its expected appearance in translation in print. Ḥayy may have been talked about as early as the late 1630s (Matar, Islam in Britain 99) as Pococke returned from Aleppo with the manuscript in the late 1630s, and so one can imagine him talking about its contents to his students, colleagues, friends and other acquaintances.

The correspondence between Worthington, Hartlib and Boyle continued in 1660, 1661, and 1662. Reference was made to Pococke’s translation and publication of an Arabic poem, Altograi, with another inquiry about Ḥayy, as to whether it was “appended” to the poem. Milton might have heard of Ḥayy, its plot and themes as early as 1640, in the late

1650s or early 1660s, when he was composing Paradise Lost.

The Ḥayy narrator shows that through meditation one can ascend to the “supream sphere,” described as “settled in the highest Degree of delight and Joy, Exultation and

Gladness, by reason of the Vision of that true and glorious Being” (144).4 Neither reason nor any of the senses is used in the meditative state that leads to vision. This meditative stage, however, is preceded by observation of nature and the use of reason through which

Ḥayy concludes that God exists. Though such knowledge or recognition is characterised as unsatisfactory in Ḥayy, the detailed presentation of Ḥayy’s reasoning, which occupies over half the narrative because it takes place over many stages of his life, is persuasive.

As Ashwell notes in the preface to his 1686 translation, Ibn Ṭufayl illustrates the stages

4 Quotes are from Ashwell’s 1686 translation of Ḥayy.

101

of Ḥayy’s thinking in steps that are easy to follow. The sequential progression of Ḥayy’s knowledge of God is relevant to Milton’s Adam as he recollects his first beginnings: in the first stage of acquiring knowledge, Ḥayy uses his senses to observe, contemplate, and analyse his natural surroundings. This movement from the use of the senses in the observation of nature to the application of natural reason that leads to knowledge of God and finally to vision is very similar to the movement presented in Paradise Lost, when

Adam recollects his own earliest observations on nature and use of reason.

The first printed translation of Ḥayy appeared in Latin in 1671, under the title

Philosophus Autodidactus sive Epistola Abi Jaafar, Ebn Tophail de Hai Ebn Yokdan.

There was a bit of confusion over the translator’s identity; at least in Europe, the translation was thought to be the work of professor Pococke, the father, a well known as a professor of Arabic, who wrote its introduction. The translation was actually completed by his son, Edward. Latin made Ḥayy accessible. Indeed the first translation into English from the Latin was by the Quaker George Keith in 1674. To him, Ḥayy confirmed

Quaker belief in the inner light inhabiting everyone, including pagans in a natural state, as Ḥayy was able to gain knowledge of God without the aid of scriptural revelation or representatives of an official church. Ḥayy illustrated these teachings in a coherent narrative form that soon made it popular amongst Quakers. The Quaker Keith gave a copy of his translation to the Cambridge Platonist Henry More, who gave it to Anne

Conway. The second English translation from the Latin was George Ashwell’s, who saw it as instructing the accessibility of divine truths to the light of natural reason. His translation, published in 1686, begins with a preface that censures all extremes of

102

religious belief in England at the time.5 He seems to have taken the middle ground, for he censures enthusiasts, who believed in direct illumination, scoffers, who ridiculed religion altogether, the “Covetous Worldlings,” and finally the “intemperate,” who were exhorted to learn from Ḥayy the “Virtues of Temperance, and modesty” (12-14).

Ashwell used Ḥayy to argue against Quakers, unfairly equating their faith in the inner light with a reliance on natural reason to gain knowledge of the divine. Quakers had championed Ḥayy to such a degree that Quaker apologist Robert Barkley cites it in his

Apology for the True Christian Divinity as illustrative of Quaker belief.6 The third translation into English was by an Arabist of learning equal to that of Pococke the elder.7

This was Simon Ockley, the author of History of the Saracens. Unlike Keith and

Ashwell, Simon Ockley did not depend on the Latin but translated directly from the

Arabic original into English. His translation, originally published in 1708, was edited and republished in 1929. Ockley took a position similar to Ashwell’s against enthusiasts, but he acknowledged that Ḥayy itself contains some enthusiastic notions.

The topical quality of Ḥayy made it both popular and engaging, which, in addition to Milton’s interest in Arabic learning and use of Arabic sources for Paradise Lost, would make it hard to believe he was not at least acquainted with Ḥayy. Indeed, multiple

Latin and English translations of Ḥayy made it accessible to early modern readers. All translations of Ḥayy mention that the author is Muslim and point out Quranic verses and motifs, especially those with echoes in the Christian Bible. Ashwell’s translation is

5 Like some of his contemporaries, Ashwell, the 1686 translator of Ḥayy, thought Pococke the elder, “the Learned Professor of the Oriental Tongues at the University of Oxford,” was the translator of the 1671 translation, Philosophus Autodidactus. Ashwell, Epistle Dedicatory, The History of Hai Eb’n Yockdan. 6 Keith’s and Barclay’s references to Ḥayy were discussed in the introduction above. 7 Nawal Hassan mentions another translation by an anonymous translator (1696). See Hassan, Ḥayy bin Yaqzān 7-8.

103

unique in that he does not translate word for word but takes “more liberty,” as he says in the preface, to keep the sense of the treatise for his English readers. Ashwell’s translation is closer to an oral discussion of Ḥayy prior to its publication. One can imagine that commendations of Ḥayy, such as the ones Worthington writes to Hartlib, also spread by word of mouth, led to discussions where Ḥayy was summarised or expanded on the different topical issues of Ḥayy. Discussants would move from one topic to the next, such as from Ḥayy’s spontaneous generation from the earth – a discussion that could include the wider topic of the creation of Adam and Eve as interpreted by Jews,

Christians, and Muslims – to current natural philosophy’s understanding of spontaneous generation. The different stages of Ḥayy’s life, the circumstances of his birth, simultaneously recalling Adam and the Prophet Moses, his observations of nature and his thinking about nature at different stages of his life are other topics that could have been discussed. The comparison in the ending of Ḥayy, of the state of nature with the state of society, would have certainly invited some comment by seventeenth-century English discussants. Oral discussion of the text would not be as ordered and true to the original as are Keith and Ockley’s translations. Because the liberty he takes in his translation brings it closer to the oral milieu in which Milton might have learned about Ḥayy, I rely on Ashwell’s translation in this chapter.

Ashwell’s position on spontaneous generation, a phenomenon important to

Milton’s Adam, attempts to make Ḥayy’s spontaneous generation from the earth acceptable by adding that the idea may have originated with Ibn Sīnā, who was well known to seventeenth-century English readers as a philosopher and physician.8 Ashwell

8 Selden, as mentioned earlier, relies on Ibn Sīnā – as well as Ibn Rushd and Maimonides – to discuss the divine revelation to prophets through the active intellect, an issue that is also directly related to Ḥayy. See

104

does not censure the phenomenon; on the contrary, Ashwell’s purpose is to make the unfamiliar notion familiar or acceptable to his readers by associating it with the respected

Ibn Sīnā. Pococke and Keith had censured spontaneous generation, which Ashwell defends; this change in attitude may suggest that the subject had some currency. Ashwell treats another unfamiliar idea in Ḥayy in a similar way; this is the possibility of stars being “intelligent bodies,” as Ashwell advises his readers that classical philosophers, for example Aristotle and Plato, and Church Fathers, such as St. Jerome and St. Augustine, considered this possibility. Ashwell again attempts to make the idea, and by extension

Ḥayy, acceptable to readers who had faith in reason, especially after the Quakers had claimed Ḥayy as representative of their enthusiastic faith.

Adam’s Story: Parallels with Ḥayy bin Yaqzān

Adam’s recollections from the point he gains consciousness in Book VIII of Paradise

Lost have important similarities with Ḥayy’s journey to knowledge of God. Ibn Ṭufayl begins with a description of Ḥayy’s spontaneous generation from the earth. Ibn Ṭufayl describes the process in some detail so as to add credence to the phenomenon and likely to his (secondary) thesis on the possible creation of Adam. Spontaneous generation from the earth is followed by a somewhat lengthy description of Ḥayy’s observations and the ensuing reasoned steps that ultimately lead to the conclusion that there is a first cause or a necessary being, God. This conclusion is signalled with Ḥayy’s “vehement desire” to know God, a desire that is immediately followed with the abandonment of sense

Philip J. Rosenblatt Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) 212- 213. Ashwell’s attribution of spontaneous generation to Ibn Sīnā may have been suggested by Ibn Ṭufayl’s preface to the reader or Ashwell may have attributed the idea to the well-known philosopher to ensure acceptance.

105

perception and speculative thinking, viewed as veils to allow Ḥayy to have the visions that eventually offer him the experiential knowledge he desires.

Though the three stages – (a) spontaneous generation, (b) observation of nature and use of reason, and (c) the mystical visions – Ḥayy’s experiences occupy the bulk of the text of Ḥayy; in Milton’s hand, and in the scheme of Paradise Lost, Adam’s parallel experiences occupy only a few lines in Book VIII. The three stages of Ḥayy parallel

Adam’s story, as he recounts it to Raphael in Book VIII of Paradise Lost.9 Adam’s recollections can also be divided into three parts. In the first, Adam describes his awakening, which seems quite similar to Ḥayy’s spontaneous generation; in the second, he discusses his awareness of his natural surroundings and himself, which coincides with his use of reason to conclude that there must be a God; and in the third, he expresses his desire to know and worship the creator with whom Adam converses in a vision.10

Missing from the final stage in the move from reasoning to vision are Ḥayy’s assertions that both his senses and reason are abandoned for the visions to occur; in fact, Ibn Ṭufayl mentions that the imagination as well is abandoned, as the knowledge (or images) contained in the imagination are nothing but reflections of knowledge acquired through the senses and hence connected with reason. Because of his position on reason, as a veil to direct divine knowledge, Ḥayy has to abandon reasoning altogether. Adam does not take a similar position on reason; hence, Adam’s vision, on the other hand, immediately follows his reasoning without Ḥayy’s remarks on the need to abandon reason. The

9 I rely on Oxford’s World Classics’ The Major Works, eds. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 10 Michael Lieb also divides the story into three parts, but he does not include vision in the third. See Michael Lieb, “Adam’s Story: Testimony and Transition in ‘Paradise Lost,’” eds. Kristin A. Pruitt and Charles W. Durham, Living Texts: Interpreting Milton (Selinsgrove: Susquehenna University Press 2000), 24-26.

106

implication is that Adam’s vision is linked with reason (Stevens 5-7, 55-68). Thus the parallels between Ḥayy and Adam do not include the types of vision each has.

Adam’s first recollections are of awakening in a “flowery herb.” The setting is not similar to the grove in which the infant Ḥayy’s chest lands, but if we recall, Ḥayy narrator offers two alternate beginnings for Ḥayy: either natural birth after which he ends in a grove in the uninhabited island or spontaneous generation. The setting Adam finds himself in reminds us of the ingredients of Ḥayy’s spontaneous generation. This is the first parallel with Ḥayy. Adam describes the moment of gaining consciousness thus:

As new waked from soundest sleep

Soft on the flowery herb I found me laid

In balmy sweat, which with his beams the sun

Soon dried, and on the reeking moisture fed. (253-62; my emphasis)

There are two interesting elements in these lines. The first has to do with moistness.

Adam awakes in “balmy sweat,” which is also described as “reeking moisture.” While the “balmy sweat” may be a reference to the comfort and ease that Adam’s generation from the earth involves, the second description, “reeking moisture,” suggests fermentation. This is especially true if we think of it as vaporous moisture. Adam cannot detail the entire process by referring to the bubbles, as the narrator in Ḥayy does, because

Adam can only describe the final stage(s), from the moment of his waking. In Ḥayy, however, spontaneous generation is described as beginning in moist earth that is fermented to the point when it is ready to receive a spirit from God. The Ḥayy narrator explains that perfect conditions combine to allow a large piece of the earth to come closest to the “Temper of Man’s Body.” This piece of earth is temperate, i.e. “the Hot

107

was so equally mix’d with the Cold, and the Moist with the Dry, that none of ‘em prevailed,”11 receives a light from the heavens. From the light’s heat “arose some

Bubbles by reason of its [the soil’s] viscousness.” This suggests the sort of fermentation appearing in Adam’s description above. The main ingredient of Ḥayy’s spontaneous generation then is a part of earth that is viscous, moist and vaporous, and, heated by the light of the sun, ferments. The Ḥayy narrator emphasizes that the heat’s source is not the sun itself, but the light’s heat. This coincides with the second element in the lines above,

Adam’s recollection: the sun. Adam is very careful to say that it is the sun’s beams, that is, its light that dries his moistness. This suggests that the heat from the sun is responsible for fermentation until, in the last stage of Adam’s creation, moistness completely dries.12 Presumably the stage right before Adam’s consciousness is best described by the Ḥayy narrator: in the midst of the bubbles, a part of the earth is in the right condition to receive a spirit of God, from which Ḥayy bin Yaqzān arises.

The second parallel is Adam’s reading of the book of nature, which itself can be divided into two parts: seeing nature and making logical conclusions about it. This process parallels Ḥayy’s observation of nature and his use of speculative reasoning.

After he wakes up, Adam looks at heaven and quickly stands upright. Then he immediately starts to survey nature. Adam says,

Straight toward Heav’n my wond’ring eyes I turn’d,

11 Because George Ashwell, like George Keith, excludes spontaneous generation from his translation of Ḥayy, I rely on Simon Ockley’s 1708 version of Ḥayy for passages describing Ḥayy’s spontaneous generation from the earth; Abu Bakr Ibn Ṭufayl, The History of Ḥayy bin Yaqzān: The Improvement of Human Reason, trans. Simon Ockley, ed. A.S. Fulton (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1929) 39, 45-46. 12 In the 1640s and 1650s, English philosophers entertained the idea that creation processes included some form of fermentation. The theory, however, was an attempt to explain the first act of the creation of the universe and not the creation of Adam. See John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca: Harvard University Press, 1996) ff. 144. Ḥayy may have suggested to Milton the process for the creation of the first man, providing a detailed narrative description of the phenomenon.

108

And gaz’d awhile the ample Sky, till rais’d

By quick instinctive motion up I sprung,

As thitherward endeavouring, and upright

Stood on my feet; about me round I saw

Hill, Dale, and shady Woods, and sunny Plains

And liquid Lapse of murmuring Streams; by these,

Creatures that liv’d, and mov’d, and walk’d, or flew

Birds on the branches warbling; all things smil’d,

With fragrance and with joy my heart o’erflow’d. (257-65)

The natural phenomena are ostensibly only seen, as the first line and “saw” in the fourth line above show, and what Adam sees makes him happy. However, when Adam peruses himself, “limb by limb” (267), he wonders about his origin; “But who was I, or where, or from what cause, / Knew not” (270-71). This is knowledge he seeks, which suggests that in the preceding lines, Adam is actually thinking about nature and natural phenomena just as he is thinking about himself. He is thinking about origins. He is reasoning.

That Adam uses his senses to see and also think about nature is confirmed in the lines that follow. Adam first addresses nature before he gets the answer to his question,

“who am I?” “Thou sun,” he says,

fair Light,

And thou enlight’n’d Earth, so fresh and gay,

Ye Hills and Dales, ye Rivers, Woods, and Plains

And ye that live and move, fair Creatures, tell,

Tell, if ye saw, how came I thus, how here?

109

Not of myself; by some great maker then,

In goodness and in power preeminent. (273-79; my emphasis)

The poetic address to nature confirms that the answer to the question is found in nature.

Adam is thinking about the sun when he addresses it, and the same applies to all the natural phenomena he addresses, so that the quick conclusion provided in the last two lines is really a logical one. In other words, after describing the setting, Adam uses verbs that denote his use of the senses. He “gazed awhile [at] the ample sky,” “saw/ Hill, dale, and shady woods, and sunny plains,” and “Creatures that lived, and moved, and walked, or flew.” Then he “perused” and “surveyed” himself “limb by limb” (my emphasis).

These observations, coming closer to an examination in the last verb, are followed by the rhetorical interrogation of the natural surroundings so that the conclusion he reaches,

“Not of myself; by some great maker then,” is the result of his use of reason. This process parallels Ḥayy’s, who follows his observation of nature with logical conclusions about nature and himself. It is only then that Ḥayy concludes that there must be a cause, a maker. The difference between Ḥayy and Adam’s story lies in this: in the first we are provided with Ḥayy’s reasoning while in the second only the sequence of Adam’s reasoning is indicated, suggesting that Adam’s recollections are a summary allusion to

Ḥayy. Like Ḥayy, whose recognition of a maker makes him both praise God and desire to know him, Adam describes God in terms of goodness and power, and follows this with a desire to “know” and “adore” God (VIII.280).

So far, Adam’s story parallels Ḥayy in generation from the earth, observation of nature, and logical conclusions on the existence of a maker. The next stage is the vision of God. Ḥayy decides that God has to be incorporeal and hence cannot be known

110

through any of his senses. His retirement in a cave, where he meditates in order to go beyond his senses, results in his vision of God. This stage occurs after he concludes that there must be a cause, whom he desires to know. It is significant that in this stage, the vision, Ḥayy banishes all thought of the sensible world. This means he also has to control sense perception through meditative exercises. Ḥayy’s initial attempts are unsuccessful but he persists and has a vision. Similarly, as soon as Adam reaches the rational conclusion that he is the product of a great maker whom he desires to know and adore, Adam sleeps and has a vision of God. Before the vision, Adam sits pensive, suggesting Ḥayy’s silent sitting in the cave as he begins his meditations. Adam loses consciousness of his senses, passing over to another state. Adam describes his vision in terms of sleep:

There gentle sleep

First found me, and with soft oppression seized

My drowsed sense, untroubled, though I thought

I then was passing to my former state

Insensible, and forthwith to dissolve:

When suddenly stood at my head a dream. (287-92; my emphasis)

The “drowsed sense” and the “insensible” condition into which Adam “dissolve[s]” suggests that the “former state” is a new incorporeal state similar to the one Ḥayy reaches, but is in fact, as Charles Kaim suggests, a reference to sleep, which Adam has not experienced before (86). The parallels between Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy and Milton’s

Adam include observation of nature and reasoning, the vehement desire to know God, and vision, which is the last parallel. But Adam’s vision differs from Ḥayy’s.

111

In the meditative exercises, Ḥayy first succeeds in remaining in essence only, as he concludes that his essence is incorporeal and the first cause must be an “Incorporeal

Substance” (90-1). Meditative exercises allow Ḥayy to tap into his own essence, but that is not sufficient for vision. The first stage in meditation involves removing from himself all sense perception, including rational perception. In the next stage, he does not experience his own self. The end of the meditation is the apprehension of “that Being, which is the only one, and the True one, and of a permanent Existence”:

the Heavens and the earth, and whatsoever is comprehended between them,

all spiritual Forms, and corporeal Faculties … were removed out of his

Memory and Thoughts, together with his own Essence also amongst the rest;

so that all things seemed to vanish away, to be reduced to nothing. (132-33)

Because he has concluded that God is incorporeal, Ḥayy understands that he must not mix his meditation with any sensible faculty. He endeavours to avoid doing so by sitting silently and “alienating himself from all sensible things, and corporeal faculties; his Mind and thoughts being wholly intent on that one necessarily existent Being” (131). In the first attempts at vision, after he rids his thoughts of all sense and sensible faculty, Ḥayy realizes that “his own Being was not excluded [from] his thoughts.” Ḥayy continues his exercises “indeavour[ing to] wholly vanish out of his own Sight, and so be wholly taken up with the Vision of that true Being” until he succeeds in having such a vision (133).

Thus when Ḥayy has the vision of God, his own subjective self does not exist; in his meditative state, he does not appear as an individual, independent being (Hawi, Islamic

Naturalism and Mysticism ff. 233; Bashier, introduction).

112

The abstract language of Ḥayy’s vision can be contrasted to Adam’s vision.

Adam is transported to the fields he sees in his vision, and his transportation is physical as well. Adam apprehends a “shape divine” that raises him “over fields and waters, as in air / Smooth sliding without step” (VIII.295, 301-2, 314, 319). Adam is transported in the vision to the “garden of bliss,” and when he “wake[s]” from the vision, he finds that what he has seen in the vision is “all real, as the dream / Had lively shadowed” (PL

VIII.295, 301-2, 309-11, 314, 319). Ḥayy does not experience such physical transportation; when he wakes from the vision, Ḥayy returns to the same world with which he starts. In Paradise Lost, Adam wakes to find the reality of what is shadowed in the dream: Adam sees the garden, hears God, wanders, and sees the “Presence Divine.”

This is because Milton does not conceive of vision in the Platonic sense, where the substance of the vision is intellectual, abstract or ideal; for Milton the God-inspired vision has to have an image that can be seen (or a voice that is heard) to be comprehensible

(Stevens 32-33, 5-7, 55-68).

One way of looking at the difference between Adam and Ḥayy’s visions is through the early modern stress on the role of reason. If we recall the Quaker position against reason, which Quakers replace with the inner light, the purpose of Milton’s rewriting – or reinterpretation – of Ḥayy’s vision in Adam’s recollection will become apparent. Quakers Keith and Barclay, respectively, emphasize Ḥayy’s abandonment of reason in order to achieve vision and the inefficacy of any natural faculty, with the emphasis on reason, for any knowledge of the divine. They offer Ḥayy as an exemplary

Quaker; Quaker prayer involves sitting quietly in an “inward retirement,”13 awaiting the movement of the light within, the Holy Ghost’s prompting. Quakers believe it is a divine

13 See discussion in introduction above.

113

light that guides people to virtuous acts and knowledge of the divine. Against such

Quaker claims, the Anglican George Ashwell critiques enthusiasts. Ashwell uses Ḥayy to stress that Ḥayy’s use of reason is rewarded with divine illumination; he critiques

Quakers for pretending “so much to supernatural Revelations” because they are “dazzled with their fanciful lights, and sublime speculations, through the delusion of the Prince of

Darkness, transforming him into an Angel of Light” (9-10, 12). Ashwell’s point is that

Quakers have abandoned reason, which is why they are visited by Satan and not the Holy

Ghost. He misreads Ḥayy, which clearly critiques natural reason; Quakers also critique natural reason. In Ashwell’s view, improving on one’s own reason will lead to recognition of God, which in turn paves the way for inspiration from God through vision.

Ashwell says that Ḥayy “brings His Reader at length to the knowledge of God … beyond which steps, thus by him discovered and forepassed, no man can proceed any farther, but by the Light and Guidance of Divine Revelation.” Ashwell is not clear as to how this revelation happens, but he does present revelation as Ḥayy’s reward for the improvement of his natural reason. Ashwell seems intentionally to have ignored Ḥayy’s assertions about reason being a veil to knowledge, an assertion Ibn Ṭufayl first mentions in the preface to the readers. Instead of misinterpreting or misrepresenting Ḥayy as Ashwell does, it seems that Milton, who probably heard of Ḥayy prior to its publication in 1671, decides to omit any consideration of Ibn Ṭufayl’s disparaging remarks about reason, the part missing from the parallels with Ḥayy in Adam’s recollections.

In fact, Milton seems to express a common conception of knowledge when he has

Adam explaining to Eve how knowledge is acquired. “Know that in the soul,” Adam says to Eve,

114

Are many lesser faculties that serve

Reason as chief; amongst these fancy next

Her office holds; of all external things,

Which the five watchful senses represent,

She forms imaginations, airy shapes,

Which reason joining or disjoining, frames

All that we affirm or what deny, and call

Our knowledge or opinion. (V.100-108)

This explanation was current in Milton’s time. It was chiefly John Locke who later systematized it in his Essay Concerning Humane Understanding where he refutes enthusiasts’ belief and, as I show in the next chapter, Ḥayy’s main argument. The purpose of Adam’s explanation is to point out to Eve that her dream is an illusion that should not be taken seriously. After saying that fancy recreates in the imagination what the senses represent, which reason “joins and disjoins” forming our “knowledge or opinion,” Adam says that fancy “then retires / Into her private cell when nature rests,” i.e. during sleep. It is then that “mimic fancy” wakes to “imitate” the workings of our waking fancy. “But,” Adam adds, mimic fancy “misjoin[s] shapes” (V.100-114), giving false information in dream. Adam’s ability to reason, however, stands in contrast to

Eve’s focus on her reflection on water, as she admires her own beauty, which suggests that her abilities are limited to the sensual (Nyquist, “The Genesis” 99-127).

Unlike Eve, Adam exercises his reason to its limit; surveying nature and obtaining natural knowledge in ways that suggest Ḥayy’s natural theology, Adam concludes that there is a God, whom he – like Ḥayy – finds himself desiring to know. Because of this

115

exercise of reason, Adam is rewarded with the divine vision; what he sees in the dream he sees through his imagination, because imagination’s “glass has been cleared by its harmonious interaction with reason” (Stevens 188). If the metaphor for the vision whose source is divine is light, one can say that reason cleanses the glass of imagination to allow this light to enter. Ashwell refers to the cleansing of imagination’s glass when he describes Ḥayy’s ascent: to use Ashwell’s language, after Ḥayy discovers through well- reasoned steps to the utmost limits that reason can take him, “where no man can proceed any farther,” Ḥayy is guided “by the Light and Guidance of Divine Revelation.” Absent from Ashwell’s description of this process are Ḥayy narrator’s disparaging remarks about reason. Nonetheless, that this was the understanding of some of Ḥayy’s readers who championed reason suggests that Milton could have understood it the same way, especially if he had access to Ḥayy’s plot and themes prior to its publication when members of his own circle discussed the anticipated translation. If, however, Milton actually read Ḥayy, it is likely that such an astute mind would have understood its argument as a pseudo-Platonic one against reason and sense perception. In either case, the parallels – reasoning relying on sense perception of nature that leads to rational apprehension of God’s existence, followed by the desire to know God, and then by vision

– that indicate Milton’s familiarity with Ḥayy carefully exclude any disavowal of reason.

Vision, Ascension, and the Angelic Companion

It would seem that the parallels between Ḥayy and Paradise Lost include the relationships between Āsāl and Ḥayy as well as Adam and Raphael, respectively, in the context of ascension. In Adam’s case, his desire to ascend culminates in the Fall. The

116

point here is that Paradise Lost addresses the theme of ascent – as does Ḥayy. Secondly, rather than argue that the parallel is a result of Milton’s reliance on Ḥayy, I suggest that examining Ḥayy’s sources reveals interesting parallels between the tradition upon which

Ḥayy is based and Milton’s Paradise Lost and that reading Ḥayy recalls this tradition. In fact, the theme of ascent is mentioned in the 1686 translation of Ḥayy, the only translation to defend the idea of spontaneous generation, which Milton presents in

Adam’s conception. Ashwell speculates that the idea probably originated in Ibn Sīnā, who was well known and respected in seventeenth-century England. In the preface to his translation, Ashwell commends the “gentle steps” with which Ibn Ṭufayl takes the reader

“sensibly onward, without any toilsome labour,” contrasting Ibn Ṭufayl with contemporary English “Learned men,” whose writing on the same subject is too “subtle, sublime, and metaphysical for common understandings: so that they leave men still in the dark … more perplexed than they were before.” This concerns Ḥayy’s treatment of the rational proofs that lead to the existence of God. Ashwell then expresses appreciation of the way the narrative presents the “end of his [Ḥayy’s] journey,” the visionary experiences, which Ashwell describes thus:

like the easie ascent of winding [sic.] Stars, which conduct to the top of an

high Tower, or Pyramid, such as that in Egypt: or rather like the leisure

mounting of Jacob’s Ladder, wheron he saw the Angels ascending, as well as

descending … till he [Ḥayy] has brought him [the reader] to the very top of

the Ladder, where God presents Himself unto his view. (5-6)14

14 Suzanne Conklin Akbari drew my attention to the similarity of Ashwell’s description – the pyramid reference – to the Prophet’s ascension story. As the discussion shows, there is a link in the Islamic tradition between Ibn Sīnā’s Mi‘rāj, in which the Prophet’s ascension is transformed into an allegorical rational interpretation, and Ibn Sīnā’s own allegorical Ḥayy, which Ibn Ṭufayl rewrites in order to replace the

117

It is interesting that for Ashwell, Ḥayy’s visionary experience has the structure of ascension – whether a tower, a pyramid15 or Jacob’s ladder. More to our point, this association with ascent or ascention reminds us of the original Ḥayy bin Yaqzān.

Ibn Ṭufayl models his own Ḥayy bin Yaqzān on Ibn Sīnā’s originals, for there are several, in both themes – vision and ascent/ascension – and title. Looking at the different versions of Ḥayy’s originals reveals interesting connections that should encourage us to consider Milton’s possible engagement of these texts or at least ideas contained in them as part of the traditions upon which Paradise Lost is based, notwithstanding their belonging to different cultural traditions and periods.

In his version of Ḥayy, Ibn Ṭufayl combines names from two different and easily identifiable works by Ibn Sīnā. The mystical Recital of Salamān and Absāl and Ḥayy bin

Yaqzān have been mentioned in passing. Ibn Sīnā’s Recital is about three characters: half brothers Absāl and Salamān and the latter’s unnamed wife, who falls in love with her brother-in-law and attempts, unsuccessfully, to seduce him. Ibn Sīnā refers to the two characters Absāl and Salamān in his Ishārat, which Ibn Ṭufayl quotes in the introduction to his Ḥayy.16 Salamān, Ibn Sīnā explains, “typifies thyself,” a reference to the rational soul, according to Ibn Sīnā’s thirteenth-century commentator Nasr al-Din Ṭūsī, while

Absāl typifies the “degree that thou hast attained in mystical gnosis,” a reference to the intellectus contemplativus (qtd. in Hasanali 82). The unnamed wife would hence refer to the temptation presented by the world. Unlike his Recital, Ibn Sīnā’s Ḥayy bin Yaqzān, is

original emphasis on rational thinking with Sufi, mystical experience in what seems to be an attempt to reclaim the ascension to its traditional, religious, spiritual realm. 15 Though not within the scope of this study, it is noted that the seventeenth-century Mexican poet Sor Juana Inez’s poem, “First Dream” or “First, I Dream,” begins with such an image of a pyramid. As mentioned earlier, the poem is suggestive of Ḥayy’s influence on the narrator’s attempt to have a vision. 16 See discussion on Ibn Ṭufayl’s reliance on Ibn Sīnā in the Introduction.

118

a completely different allegorical story. In it, Ibn Sīnā personifies the active intellect as it guides a philosophical initiate to intellectual perfection (Hughes 20-21). Considering that

Ibn Sīnā writes two different works, each with its own objective, Ibn Ṭufayl’s combination of Ibn Sīnā’s Recital and Ḥayy becomes interesting. Hasanali suggests that

Ibn Ṭufayl creates a triangular relationship within Salamān: the “virtuous but literalistic”

Salamān who follows God’s law; his experience of the “inner states of earthly life” represented in Ḥayy; and the journey represented in Āsāl. Though Hasanali’s interpretation is credible in light of Ibn Sīnā’s mystical Recital, one can still offer a non- allegorical reading of Ibn Ṭufayl’s version of Ḥayy without losing its visionary or Sufi import.

If in Ibn Sīnā’s hands, Absāl’s wife represents the world, which tempts Salamān, in

Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy, the world is the temptation that seduces Salamān. It is interesting that

Ibn Ṭufayl choses not to represent the tempting world through a female character.

Salamān represents the love of private property, which is regulated by divine law. Āsāl is not tempted by the world: he is guided by Ḥayy, whose mentorship will ultimately result in Āsāl’s visionary ascention. In Ibn Sīnā’s text, the contrast is between Salamān and

Absāl while Ibn Ṭufayl’s version draws our attention to the relationship between Ḥayy and Āsāl: we are given a complete narrative of Ḥayy’s life from birth to meditative visions, after which visions Ḥayy becomes Āsāl’s spiritual guide. Ibn Ṭufayl’s emphasis allows us to consider Adam’s guide in Paradise Lost: Raphael.

Though the difference between Raphael’s advice to Adam and Ḥayy’s to Āsāl vis-

à-vis the relationship between reason and ascent/vision is clear, the relationships between the twin characters in Book VIII and Ḥayy include a guide as well. In fact, Raphael’s

119

emphatic language to Adam about the antithesis between the active desire for an ascent and true worship only highlights the importance of the two main motifs: ascent and, in this case, angelic guide. In Book VIII of Paradise Lost, before Adam narrates his story from birth to vision, Raphael cautions him that the distance between heaven and earthly paradise is unimaginably large. Raphael’s speech on the “inexpressible” distance of heaven is a recognition of Adam’s desire for a heavenly ascent, which is why he dissuades Adam from feeding this desire: “Solicit not thy thoughts with matters hid /

Leave them to God above, and him serve and feare … Heaven is for three too high … be lowlie wise” (VIII 113, 167-73). According to Clay Daniels, Raphael mentions the scala naturae, which suggests the value of earth as a new heaven, but Adam interprets

Raphael’s references in terms of the ladder of contemplation (179-181). Raphael directs

Adam to rely on reason. After narrating his story, Adam expresses his love for Eve in ways that make Raphael remind Adam that “true Love … refines / The thoughts, and heart enlarges, [and] hath his seat / In Reason.” Raphael has understood Adam’s desire for neo-Platonic ascent, which is why the angel explains that it is reason that is the “scale

/ By which heav’nly Love thou maist ascend” (VIII.589-590).

Raphael’s words to Adam can be read as Milton’s critique of Ḥayy through

Raphael. I am suggesting, however, that the parallels between Ḥayy and Paradise Lost include the common motif of mentorship and an ascent despite the different attitudes or routes suggested for vision and ascent/ascension. Also while these two parallels in particular may be attributed to Milton’s possible familiarity with Ḥayy either directly or indirectly, further examination of Ḥayy’s sources points towards a connected group of texts in which vision, ascent/ascension and an (angelic) guide are central.

120

Ibn Sīnā’s Ḥayy is actually one of two, closely related, narrative treatises on the theme of ascension. The original story of an ascent involves the Prophet Muhammad having a vision in which he is guided by the angel Gabriel first to Jerusalem and then up through seven heavens. During the journey, the Prophet is shown heaven and hell, introduced to several other prophets and in some versions has some form of interaction with God. Ibn Sīnā first changes the Prophet’s ascent in his version, the Mi‘rāj (or the

Ascent), in which he replaces the angel Gabriel, who acts as the Prophet’s guide in the vision, with the active intellect responsible for the “emanation of forms abstracted from matter into the human rational faculty” (Hughes 175). Ibn Sīnā changes the spiritual, religious nature of the original into the attainment of intellectual perfection. Once Ibn

Sīnā represents the Prophet’s ascent as a rational one, Ibn Sīnā can then recommend a similar rational ascent for any believer: this is Ibn Sīnā’s Ḥayy. Aaron Hughes explains

Ibn Sīnā’s Ḥayy as part of the attempt to recommend philosophy by presenting it in the form of a theme that is central and acceptable to his Muslim readers: Ibn Sīnā reconciles the “intellectual perfection of the philosophical initiate” with the Prophet’s ascent, which stresses the “religious ascent of the believer” (174). Ibn Sīnā follows his allegorical rendering of the Prophet’s ascent with Ḥayy bin Yaqzān, where the protagonist is no longer the Prophet but a figure representative of ordinary humanity. Though expressed in terms of ascent, the ascent or vision in Ibn Sīnā’s Ḥayy describes the development of the protagonist’s rational powers. The active intellect, which Ibn Sīnā uses to replace the angel Gabriel in his Mi‘rāj, is now personified by Ibn Sīnā as Ḥayy bin Yaqzān, who guides an unnamed initiate. Thus the three versions – the original religious ascent of the

Prophet Muhammad; Ibn Sīnā’s Mi‘rāj, also about the Prophet Muhammad, but an

121

allegorical, rational ascent; and finally Ibn Sīnā’s Ḥayy, which makes the rational ascent attainable to ordinary people – are connected even though the nature of the ascent changes. The three versions also have a guide, but it is an angel only in the first version.

The fact that the original idea behind Ibn Sīnā’s Ḥayy and Mi‘rāj is the Prophet

Muhammad’s ascent further clarifies Ibn Ṭufayl’s use of the title Ḥayy bin Yaqzān: Ibn

Ṭufayl re-establishes the spiritual aspect of the Prophet’s ascent and he recommends

Sufism to the believer. Ibn Ṭufayl follows Ibn Sīnā in giving everyone the potential for visionary ascent, but Ibn Ṭufayl limits the inquiry into philosophy to this world, i.e. prior to vision and ascent. Ibn Ṭufayl offers a Ḥayy whose inquiry into natural phenomena and his conclusions about the existence of God precede the vision. When the vision begins,

Ibn Ṭufayl makes it clear that it is a spiritual vision, as he stresses that the rational faculty is abandoned so that the vision can begin. While the believer’s ascent is through vision, this vision certainly alludes to the Prophet’s ascent, which is also bodily – and it is generally understood that bodily ascent is limited to the rank of prophethood. In addition to retrieving and re-establishing the traditional religious, spiritual ascent from Ibn Sīnā’s adaptations, making Ḥayy both the protagonist and the guide refocuses attention on the relationship between the angel Gabriel and the Prophet. In the original ascent, the angel

Gabriel explains what the Prophet sees during the ascent and answers the Prophet’s questions. When we think of Milton’s Adam, we can see that the traces of spontaneous generation that appear in Paradise Lost and Milton’s presentation of Adam’s rational recognition of God have affinities with Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy. But these affinities are not limited to Ḥayy. We are reminded of the Prophet Muhammad’s audience with the angel

Gabriel when we consider that when he tells his story, Adam is having a conversation

122

with Raphael. “How sutly to detaine thee I devise,” Adam says addressing Raphael,

“Inviting thee to hear while I relate, / Fond, were it not in hope of thy reply: / For while I sit with thee, I seem in Heav’n” (VIII, 207-210).

Though Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy, through his visions, can be seen as an angelic figure,

Ḥayy is a human character, leaving one to speculate about the possible sources of inspiration for the relationship between Milton’s Adam and the angel Raphael. Adam’s vision – unlike Ḥayy’s – is bodily, very much like the Prophet Muhammad’s ascent in which Gabriel appears as his guide; after the initial vision that follows his reasoning,

Adam expresses the desire to ascend, the desire Raphael admonishes. A version of the

Prophet’s ascent was accessible in Latin through the medieval Latin translation, Libro della Scala (Francesco Gabrieli, “New Light” 173-180). This raises the possibility that reading Ḥayy would have made Milton rely on a version of the Scala in conceiving the dialogue between Adam and Raphael. Perhaps Milton read references to the story in the

Quran or a biography of the Prophet, both accessible from 1649 (Matar, Islam in Britain

76-83). Instead of speculating on Milton’s direct or indirect familiarity with and use of the Scala, my intention here has been to note that the parallels between Book VIII of

Paradise Lost and Ḥayy, which Milton was possibly familiar with, are interestingly connected to Ḥayy’s original, the Prophet Muhammad’s ascent, based on which Ibn Sīnā began the Ḥayy cycle. It would seem that Milton reacted to Ḥayy in a similar way to

Ashwell: while Ashwell thought of an ascent, expressed in the image of the pyramid and

Jacob’s Ladder, Milton presents Adam’s desire for an ascent, which ends with the Fall, through a dialogue with an angel. The common motifs and historical connections between the original story, Ibn Sīnā and Ibn Ṭufayl’s versions, on the one hand, and Ibn

123

Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy and Milton’s Paradise Lost, on the other, suggest that further research into

Milton’s engagement of Arabic-Islamic sources would yield rich results. I also propose that the shared elements in Paradise Lost and the Islamic stories of ascent would encourage us to think of Milton’s work and these stories as part of a common cross- cultural cycle.17

Ḥayy, Adam, and Ashwell’s Theologia Ruris

I conclude with a note conjecturing on the transformation of Ḥayy’s narrative voice into a first person, autobiographical voice, as in Adam’s recollections. The early modern period saw the development of spiritual autobiography, which I will discuss in relation to

Robinson Crusoe, and of which Adam’s story is an early illustration. Ḥayy’s story, on the other hand, is biographical fiction. Yet Ashwell appends to the translation his own

Theologia Ruris, sive Schola & Scala Nature: or the Book of Nature. Ḥayy is referred to as “natural Theology” that “expose[s] to our Eyes … the whole Book of Nature with the ways and means, whereby all Arts and Sciences are to be invented” (9). The Theologia is mostly a didactic echo of Ḥayy, as Ashwell advises his readers to use their senses to

17 I would also include Sor Juana’s First Dream in the proposed cycle. Born in seventeenth-century, colonial Mexico, Sor Juana’s possible familiarity with Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy may be found in the Spanish line of transmission, which requires further research. The similarities are striking: the opening lines, “Pyramidal, lubugrious,/ a shadow born of earth/ pushed heavenward its towering tips,/ like vacuous oberlisks bent on scaling stars,” have echoes of Ḥayy’s first attempts at vision. In First Dream, the attempted visionary ascent fails, a failure that is signaled in the “burst of bouncing light” that assaults the dreamer, “restoring to every outer sense/ full functioning” as the dreamer finds herself “awake,” which is a fitting word with which to end the poem. See A Sor Juana Anthology, transl. Alan S. Troublood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988) 171, 194-195. In the Penguin edition, the poem is called First I Dream, and the opening lines are translated even more suggestively, with the keywords “heaven” and “ascend” in addition to “pyramidal” and “obserlisk:” “Pyramidal, doleful, mournful shadow/ born of the earth, the haughty culmination/ of vain obelisks thrust towards the Heavens,/ attempting to ascend and touch the Stars” (1-4). In this version, the failure of the attempted visionary ascent is signaled right at the beginning of the poem; Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, transl. Margaret Sayers Peden (London: Penguin, 1997).

124

contemplate nature from which they can learn about God. The individual components of nature, he explains, are but letters, which, “when they are fitly joyned together, (as by

Divine Providence, so by humane Meditation) meet as it were in words” (197). What is very curious, though, is that Ashwell addresses nature the same way Milton’s Adam does in adopting the autobiographical “I” in the process – though only in a couple of introductory pages. Ibn Ṭufayl’s fictional, philosophic-mystical biography of Ḥayy appears to provide the model for the personal “I” of these philosophical-religious passages. “O ye pleasant Fields, ye Hospitable Shades, ye clear running Brooks,” the narrator Ashwell says, addressing nature, when he describes the pleasures he gets from it.

A few lines after that, he makes an affirmation that echoes what is to be learnt from

Ḥayy: “But God grant, that I may so fix my Eyes here, and gratifie my Senses, as not to neglect the improvement of my Mind.” This is perhaps how Ḥayy was received: the biographical easily becomes autobiographical.

Ashwell’s vocatives to nature in the Theologia Ruris can also be considered pastoral, of which two elements are noteworthy. One is song and imitation, where the pastoral shepherd’s song is echoed and completed or complemented by other shepherds.

This exchange can be within a literary work or across literary works whereby a speaker in a new work echoes that of a previous work (Alpers 27, 37, 59). When across literary works, the newer work does not often openly acknowledge the previous one. This element appears in Ashwell’s translation, as the narrator’s vocatives echo Ḥayy’s surveying of nature, even though Ḥayy never really addresses nature. The knowledge the

Ashwell narrator prays God may grant him points to a desire to draw the same conclusions Ḥayy makes. What is interesting is that in apparently imitating Ḥayy,

125

Ashwell’s narrator summarizes in a few lines the larger narrative of Ḥayy’s observations and reflections about nature without openly acknowledging Ḥayy.

Of course the Theologia Ruris is appended to Ashwell’s translation of Ḥayy and hence clearly alludes to it, but my point here is that, first, though Ashwell provides an epitome or abstract of Ḥayy, the text is not mentioned. It is assumed that the reader has read Ḥayy and understands the allusion. The second point I would like to make is that in their brevity, the vocatives are similar to Adam’s in Book VIII of Paradise Lost; it is hence not far fetched to think that Milton has done the same with Adam, who similarly echoes and epitomizes Ḥayy. Also, in the context of the pastoral tradition, Ḥayy may have been representative of the possibilities of what one can and should achieve by way of religious reflection on nature, and so the allusion in the apparently simple vocatives in

Ashwell’s Theologia on the one hand conceals the complexity of Ḥayy and, on the other hand, makes the arduous process of reasoning Ḥayy goes through seem natural.

The second element of pastoral to appear in Ashwell’s Theologia is that of a gathering of speakers, in this case metaphorically, that is, including readers, who are invited to participate in natural theology by observing nature. Ashwell’s appeal in his preface to various enthusiastic sects can be read in this context: it is an appeal to improve their minds. Once the readers have read Ḥayy, they can participate in the narrator’s “I” in the appended Theologia. Read in this way, the narrator’s vocatives call readers to participate in the acquisition of natural knowledge, which leads to knowledge of God.

Milton’s Adam in Book VIII of Paradise Lost differs because he is prelapsarian; his early memories are able to include both. Despite Milton’s reservations about unmediated, abstract vision, his prelapsarian Adam does have both knowledge and vision. In

126

considering Ḥayy a model for the speakers, Ashwell’s narrator in the Theologia and

Milton’s Adam in Paradise Lost can be seen as commemorating Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy.

127

Chapter 3

Some Notes on John Locke’s Indian Philosopher in The Essay

Concerning Humane Understanding

In “The Impact of Philosophus Autodidactus: Pocockes, John Locke and the Society of

Friends,” G.A. Russell establishes John Locke’s knowledge of Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy to conclude that the Arabic mystical-philosophical tale may have actually precipitated

Locke’s thinking about “what object of understanding we were or were not fitted to deal with,” the subject of The Essay Concerning Humane Understanding. As evidence of

Locke’s knowledge of Ḥayy, Russell cites Locke’s close acquaintance with the Pocockes, who were responsible for the first early modern Latin translation of Ḥayy, the coincidence of Locke’s thinking of the subject of the Essay with the appearance of this

Latin translation in 1671, and Locke’s likely authorship of a summary of the 1686

English translation of Ḥayy from Pococke’s Latin. Russell also promises a comparative study of Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy and Locke’s Essay to demonstrate that Locke follows Ḥayy’s main argument. Russell has not yet produced this important comparative study, but she is, I believe, correct in arguing Locke’s knowledge of Ḥayy and his reliance on Ḥayy to formulate his ideas on the subject of human understanding – in effect, that Ḥayy inspired

Locke’s thinking on the subject of human understanding. Having said that, Russell’s view that Ibn Ṭufayl and Locke hold similar points of view on the subject of human understanding is surprising, as Ḥayy and Essay offer strongly opposing views. Thus after a brief overview of the evidence Russell provides on Locke’s acquaintance with Ḥayy, I argue that Locke disagreed with its major claims. After discussing the passage where

128

Locke identifies what he believes is a common logical error, an ‘error’ Ḥayy clearly also makes, I raise the question of whether the curious reference to an “Indian Philosopher” in

Book II of the Essay – a reference that appears in the context of the logical error – is an allusion to Ḥayy.

According to Russell, Locke was likely “intimately acquainted with the progress” of the Ḥayy’s translation project; that is, in addition to having read Ḥayy once the translation was completed (233). It is assumed that Edward Pococke the elder, the famed professor of Arabic at Oxford, supervised his son’s translation of Ḥayy from Arabic to

Latin. It was published in 1671. Locke’s close acquaintance with the Pocockes is also well known. Russell reminds us that Pococke the elder was Locke’s tutor at Oxford and a close friend. Locke fondly recalls his former professor’s lessons as well as his personality (239-244). When Locke later taught at Oxford, Pococke the younger was

Locke’s student. The two were also colleagues of a sort, as Locke commissioned the younger Pococke to prepare translations from the Arabic – under the direction of the father, Pococke the elder (243). Given this close acquaintance and the nature of the

Oxford academic community, Russell suggests, one can expect the Pocockes to have discussed their translation project with Locke while they were working on it. In fact, as mentioned earlier, news of Ḥayy and anticipation of the Pocockes’ translation circulated widely prior to the appearance of the Latin translation, so it can be assumed that a close friend like Locke would have been acquainted with Ḥayy.

Pococke’s translation of Ḥayy was reviewed in July in 1671, suggesting that the actual publication of the translation, titled Philosophus autodidactus or the self-taught philosopher, was a few months earlier – only the publication year of Philosophus

129

autodidactus is available. Russell points out that this is the time Locke says he first thought of writing a study of human understanding. In the “Epistle to the reader” included in the 1689 edition of the Essay, Locke recalls a meeting with acquaintances in which they talked about the subject of the human intellect. Locke explains that in the course of the discussion, he realized that they had taken the “wrong course … that it was necessary to examine our own abilities, and see what objects of our understanding we were or were not fitted to deal with.” Locke adds that human understanding was a subject he “had never before considered,” and we know from James Tyrell that the topic that he, Locke, and about four others were discussing when Locke suggested human understanding concerned “principles of morality and revealed religion” (qtd. in Russell,

“The Impact” 231-232). Russell places the meeting with acquaintances, the occasion for writing the Essay, in the few years leading up to 1671, the year of the publication of

Pococke the younger’s translation of Ḥayy in England. She convincingly concludes that the period 1667-1671 when Locke was thinking about the issue of human understanding and writing about it in portions coincides with the time the two Pocockes, father and son, were working on the translation (243). Considering Locke’s acquaintance with the

Pocockes, it is likely that Locke knew enough about Ḥayy to find it relevant to his own thinking about human understanding and the sources of human knowledge.

Russell presents even more interesting evidence for Locke’s knowledge of Ḥayy.

Right after the Latin translation of Ḥayy appeared in 1671, George Keith, the Quaker, prepared an English translation in 1674. About a decade later, in 1686, another English translation appeared: this is George Ashwell’s. It appeared in 1686. The last date is interesting for two reasons. First, in the same year (1686), a long summary of Ashwell’s

130

translation appeared in Jean Le Clerc’s Bibliothéque Universelle et Historique, for which

Locke contributed articles. In fact, Locke collaborated with Le Clerc in producing the

Bibliothéque. Russell notes that Locke is believed to be the author of the summary of

Ashwell’s new translation of Ḥayy in the Bibliothéque. Locke authored several articles and reviewed books in 1686 and 1687, including a book by his friend Robert Boyle, whose connection with Ḥayy has already been noted. Locke was also the only contributor to the Bibliothéque in the period 1687-88; 1687 is the year he moved to

Holland where he stayed until 1689 (Russell, “The Impact” 250-251).

It has already been mentioned that Quakers used Ḥayy to champion their enthusiasm. In the preface to his 1674 translation of Ḥayy, Keith commends Ḥayy’s mystical knowledge; in the longer title to his translation, Keith emphasises that Ḥayy’s final knowledge of God is not based on “premises premis’d.” Also, Quaker apologist

Robert Barclay cites Ḥayy to illustrate Quaker belief, explaining that Ḥayy is a good example of the “conjunction of the mind of man with the supreme intellect.”1 Russell notes Locke’s close acquaintance with Quakers and that he actually stayed with a Quaker while in Holland (Russell, “The Impact” 248-249). One can speculate that Locke and his

Quaker hosts discussed Ḥayy, especially since Ashwell openly critiques Quakers in the preface to his 1686 translation of the Ḥayy.

The Essay, Simple and Complex Ideas vs. Substance2

It should be noted that Locke’s discussion of the term ‘substance’ – whether it denotes some substrata – is open to different interpretations.3 In order to introduce his

1 Also discussed in the introduction above. 2 All quotes are from John Locke, An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (Encyclopaedia Britannica: Chicago, Il., 1952)

131

understanding of substance, Locke explains simple and complex ideas and how they form our perceptions. Locke defines simple ideas as received either through the senses or through reflection. He explains that when the mind has received ideas from without, “it

[then] turns its view inward upon itself, and observes its own actions about those ideas it has, takes from thence [the mind] other ideas [perceived earlier and stored in the mind], which are as capable to be objects of the contemplation as any of those it received from foreign things” (II.v, vi.1; II.vii.1). Hence the objects of contemplation in the mind are objects perceived earlier through the senses and recalled in the mind. Locke concludes that none of our ideas has any other source: “I grant all this, but desire any one to assign any simple idea which is not received from one of those inlets before mentioned, or any complex idea not made out of those simple ones” (II.vii.1-2, 10). Ideas stored in the mind can be compounded in different ways, producing complex ideas, a topic we will return to below, but it is important to note that external objects perceived through the senses and ideas earlier perceived and reflected upon are, for Locke, exclusive sources of knowledge.4

As for the process of perception, Locke stresses that we perceive the operations of objects in our minds and senses. An example Locke provides is that of “manna” when he says, “sweetness and whiteness are not really in manna … but the effects of the operations of manna, by the motion, size, and figure of its particles, on the eyes and

3 For a summary of the different interpretations of Locke’s treatment of ‘substance,’ see Lex Newman’s “Locke on the Idea of Substratum,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 81 (Sept. 2000): 291-324. Also see Edwin McCann’s “Locke on Substance” in Lex Newman (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Locke’s Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 4 Locke also explains that people are not expected to remember all of their past experiences, but interestingly enough, he adds that there are superior creatures like angels, who can “constantly … view the whole scene of all their former actions” and of course there is God, “who knows all things, past, present, and to come.” Despite the limitations that most people have, Locke mentions a Monsieur Pascal, who Locke reports is said to have “forgot[ten] nothing of what he had done, read, or thought, in any part of his rational age” (II.x.9).

132

palate” (II.vii.18). Locke divides qualities into three types. One concerns the “bulk, figure, number, situation, and motion or rest of [an object’s] solid parts;” another is a power in an object “by reason of its insensible primary qualities” to produce different sensations and ideas, such as colour, in us; a third is the power in a body to affect yet another mediating body, which in turn produces sensations and ideas in us (II.x.23-26).

Hence, the bulk, shape and constitution of bodies give them a power to produce qualities.

But Locke argues that we do not perceive these primary qualities directly. Instead, these qualities produce another set of qualities – secondary qualities, such as colour – which we do perceive.

We mentioned above that complex ideas are made up of combinations of simple ideas. Locke divides these complex ideas into three categories: modes, which are ideas that do not exist externally, such as a triangle and a square; substances, ideas that do subsist by themselves whether these ideas are single like a sheep or collective like a flock of sheep; and relations, the different relations that ideas have with each other (II.xii.3-7).

Discussion of the second of these complex ideas – substances – is where the reference to the Indian philosopher occurs. It is also where critics offer differing interpretations.

Even in Locke’s time, readers questioned his explanation of substance. It is therefore important to note that when Locke introduces complex ideas and explains their three different types, he concludes the chapter by reiterating the earlier point about sense and reflection being the only sources of knowledge (II.xii.8).5

5 Complex ideas, Locke explains, “however remote soever they may seem from sense, or from any operations of our own minds, are yet only such as the understanding frames to itself, by repeating and joining together ideas that it had either from objects of sense, or from its own operations about them: so that those even large and abstract ideas are derived from sensation or reflection” (II.xii.8).

133

It is well known that Locke takes aim at the belief in innate ideas as well as the

Cartesian duality: his emphasis on the sources of knowledge where substances are concerned seems to be directed against the notion of the separation of body and soul.

This is only part of the context of the Indian reference, though. The other two parts are the nature of God and the origin of earth. Locke attributes the idea of the separation of body and soul to the modification of simple ideas. These new, modified ideas are created

“within the mind itself” and do not correspond to the ones originally perceived. Locke explains that when one claims a “foreign object” is the source of the new ideas, one has fallen into the error of modification. To illustrate his point and to critique those who believe in the Cartesian duality, including his Quaker friends, Locke asks, “Who told them … that there could be nothing but solid things, which could not think, and thinking beings that were not extended? – which is all they mean by the terms body and spirit”

(II.xiii.16). Even though people have clear ideas of solidity, extension and even thinking, denying that material objects can think is a simple idea that is wrongly attached to solidity, Locke explains. The same applies to denying that there are thinking subjects without solidity.

Locke applies the error of modification to the general use of the “two syllables, substance.” Locke asks whether the word ‘substance’ retains the “same sense” when it is applied to “the infinite, incomprehensible God, to finite spirits, [and] to body” (II.xiii.17).

If it were possible to apply the word to God and any physical body, such as a “tree and a pebble,” then these ‘substances’ would differ only in their constitution, Locke explains.

“If, however, the word is applied in three different significations,” people would need to make it clear what those three ideas are and to “give them three distinct names” (ibid).

134

Locke’s main point is not that God, spirits and bodies do not have substances: he objects to the fact that we talk about them as if we know what their substances are. He suggests that we would do better to acknowledge our ignorance in the use of the term. It is in this context that Locke makes the reference to the Indian philosopher in Book II of his Essay.

This reference appears in a section that begins with this rule: “Substance and accidents of little use in philosophy” (II, xiii). Hence the Indian philosopher is cited to illustrate both the connection between and the error of using the words “substance” and

“accident.” Locke explains that those “who first ran into the notion of accidents, as a sort of real beings that needed something to inhere in, were forced to find out the word substance to support them” (II.xiii.19). Given his earlier assertion regarding the error of modification – making up an idea in the mind and wrongly attributing it to an external object – Locke’s aim here is to offer ‘accidents’ as an example of where the error occurs.

First, Locke explains, people make the mistake of attributing an accident to a real being; and then they follow this mistake with another: they say that the real being has substance.

According to Locke, the first error of considering an accident a real being causes us to make the second error of trying to give the postulated being a substance when in fact we know neither the cause of the accident nor its constitution.

The following passage illustrates Locke’s connection between the words

“accident” and “substance”:

Had the poor Indian philosopher (who imagined that the earth also

wanted something to bear it up) but thought of this word substance, he

needed not to have been at the trouble to find an elephant to support it,

135

and a tortoise to support his elephant: the word substance would have

done effectually. (II.xiii.19)

We take it that the unnamed Indian philosopher’s first premise is that the earth needed something to support it, as suggested by Locke’s use of the word “imagined.” This is the first error; why would the Indian philosopher make such an assumption? The second error is the conclusion that the earth’s support is an elephant (which is in turn supported by a tortoise). The error of the Indian philosopher lies in claiming to know what supports the earth when in fact there is no real elephant to suggest that; the Indian philosopher does not really perceive an elephant supporting the earth to make the assertion. Locke would say that the idea of an elephant supporting the earth is wholly made up in the

Indian philosopher’s mind.

When Locke asserts that the word “substance” would do philosophically what the mystic narrative does, Locke’s point is that the Indian philosopher would have sounded much like ‘us,’ English and “European philosophers,” who are the real object of criticism. European philosophers’ use of “substance” (and “accident”), Locke says, is as good as the Indian philosopher’s conclusions regarding the supporting elephant and tortoise. After saying that the word “substance” would have helped the Indian philosopher “effectually,” Locke adds,

And he that inquired might have taken it for as good an answer from an

Indian philosopher, – that substance, without knowing what it is, is that

which supports the earth, as we take it for a sufficient answer and good

doctrine from our European philosophers, – that substance, without

knowing what it is, is that which supports accidents. So that of

136

substance, we have no idea what it is, but only a confused, obscure idea

of what it does. (II.xiii.19; emphasis added)

The comparison with the Indian philosopher shows that the object of Locke’s criticism is the common usage of a term by European philosophers. The Indian philosopher is only cited to illustrate their faulty logic.

Locke’s insistence that we commit an error when we attribute ‘being’ (hence

‘substance’) to a certain cause is relevant to the Ḥayy. Before turning to Ḥayy and whether its views on the subject of the sources of knowledge, especially knowledge of

God, are comparable to those expressed by the European philosophers Locke critiques in

The Essay, I would like to add that Locke does not deny the existence of God. While he does critique the use of the word ‘substance’ to highlight general ignorance of the constitution of whichever substance is being referred to, Locke does not actually deny that there is something there, a substratum.6 Locke’s claim probably relies on us not being equipped to determine the nature of God. As for natural phenomena, Locke does say, for example, that our idea of a horse is a complex one, made up of several simple ideas emanating from the horse’s secondary qualities; Locke’s point is that we can neither say that the horse does not exist nor can we say we know what its substance is. Locke’s stress is on the latter point. It is interesting that elsewhere in the Essay, Locke asserts that the now insensible particles that emanate from an object to our senses may become known in the future. An early modern English natural philosopher would probably

6 See Martha Brandt Bolton’s discussion in “Substances, Substrata, and Names of Substances in Locke’s Essay,” Locke, ed. Vere Chappell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)

137

understand this to mean that the right tools would eventually be invented in the future to aid our limited human senses, made dull by the Fall.7

The Ḥayy: Accidents & Substance/Essence

Now let us turn to Ḥayy to see whether Locke’s Essay does follow Ibn Ṭufayl’s thesis, as

G.A. Russell proposes. It is interesting to note at the outset that Locke’s reference to the

Indian philosopher is relevant to the Ḥayy’s main themes. To reiterate, the subject of

Locke’s comments on the term ‘substance’ involves three main topics: the Cartesian duality, the nature of God, and the earth’s support (II.xiii, 16, 17, 19). In these three topics, as we will see below, the Ḥayy’s account is quite different from Locke’s Essay. In fact, the term ‘substance’ is used in Ḥayy – in the Arabic and in Ashwell’s English translation – in the way Locke critiques.

Ḥayy’s acquisition of the knowledge that leads him to God includes two main steps relevant to Locke’s Indian philosopher. The first concerns the division of body and spirit, which is analogous to the Cartesian duality Locke critiques. Ḥayy’s speculative reasoning starts when his ‘mother’ the roe dies. He searches for the ailment that impedes her ‘vigour’ and motion, but finds none from the outside. He proceeds to dissect her, reaching the middle part, which he finds protected with strong ligaments. After he cuts through to the heart, he finds two cavities. The right contains blood, which, Ḥayy notes,

7 I paraphrase Picciotto’s explanation thus: early modern English natural philosophers believed that before the Fall, Adam’s naming of things was based on his ability to properly perceive the constitution of the natural phenomena he named, hence the appropriateness of the names. After the fall, however, his senses became dull. This is why fallen humanity is able to see only the outward appearances of natural phenomena. As a remedy – and to gain redemption – natural philosophers relied on instruments to ‘see’ beneath appearances, but the problem is that the process of uncovering the outward layers to see what lies beneath seems unending: every layer signals another yet to be discovered or uncovered. Understanding this natural theology may help us appreciate Locke’s pronouncements on substance. See Picciotto, “Reforming the Garden.”

138

clots when it is outside the body, becoming useless, and Ḥayy’s earlier observations show him that the body itself can live on and enjoy movement despite the loss of some blood.

So he turns his attention to the left cavity, which he finds empty. Ḥayy speculates that something must have left the cavity, so he decides to find out what it is (23). He supposes that whatever was in the left cavity must have given the roe its life, vigour and movement. He captures and dissects a living beast to see what resides in the heart.

When he reaches the left cavity, he discovers it contains a “certain airy substance or thin vaprous Substance, like to a white Cloud or mist.” When Ḥayy touches it, he finds it “so hot that it scald[s] him, and the wild beast instantly” dies (31). This seems to confirm

Ḥayy’s theory about the role of what lies in the left cavity.

The dissection experiments make Ḥayy think that the vaporous thing in the heart’s left cavity is what gives “life and motion” to the beast and that every creature must have something like it (31-2). Ḥayy hence makes the following conclusion about the actions of the body: seeing (eyes), hearing (ears) as well as the functions of internal organs (liver, kidneys etc.) must perform their “office” by virtue of this “Spirit in the heart.” He considers different animals, which he groups into species,8 before turning his attention to himself. He decides that he too must have a spirit “superadded to his Corporeity” (36,

44-5). It should be quickly noted here that Ḥayy’s conclusions contradict Locke’s description of the Cartesian duality in Book II of the Essay.

The second step in Ḥayy’s thinking leads to the idea of God. Ḥayy’s discussion employs the terms “substance” and “accidents.” These are the terms used by the early modern English translators of the Ḥayy, but Ḥayy’s logic suggests the use of these terms,

8 It should be noted that Ḥayy speculates that each specie has one essence, a spiritual essence, a point deemed by Locke both uncertain and useless though Locke does accept the concept of species, based on the perceived secondary qualities of each specie.

139

and it is both the logic and the terms that Locke critiques. Ḥayy notices that water evaporates into the air when it is heated, so that its original qualities disappear. These qualities seem to issue from the water’s nature and form, but with evaporation, it seems to Ḥayy that the “warm Beams of the Sun” change the nature and form of water.9 Since

Ḥayy supposes the sun’s beams produce a new object, the vapour, Ḥayy draws this general conclusion: “when any thing [is] a-new produced, it must needs have some

Producer” (63-65). Applying this conclusion to all forms, Ḥayy observes that “they all

[have] their Existence a-new, and so necessarily [require] some efficient Cause.” But since every successive object Ḥayy experiences is “liable to Generation and Corruption,” there must be some “voluntary Agent” that is unchanging and which gives them all

“Being” in the first place. Calling the cause or accident a voluntary agent suggests it is a thinking being, which Locke would say is an error of modification – making up an idea in the mind and attributing it to an external object.

Ḥayy then turns to the origin of the universe. Ḥayy looks up to the heavens like the prophet Abraham: he examines the sun, moon and stars and observes that they all seem to draw a larger circle whether from east to west or north to south, and that their circular motions describe a “Heaven … of Spherical Figure.” This observation leads him to an analogy between the “whole Orbe … composed of Parts mutually conjoyned” and the body of a “single animal” that has a “variety of Limbs.” Ḥayy concludes that the universe is a “compleat Substance, which [stands] in need of a voluntary Agent” just as an animal has a spirit (71-75). This specific conclusion points to Locke’s observations

9 Ḥayy concludes that the sun’s warm beams (the second object) have the power to change the nature of water (the first object), while Locke would argue that evaporation is one of the qualities of water – what Ḥayy calls its disposition. For Locke, power proper belongs to the first object (water) not the second (sun’s beams).

140

about the error of supposing the earth is supported by a being, whether an elephant or a substance; it is an error because we “know not what” that support is (II.xiii). Here Ḥayy draws a conclusion about the earth’s support, the voluntary agent.

A third difference is in the nature of the voluntary agent, which Ḥayy supposes is always immaterial. Whether the world is created out of nothing, and hence needs an agent with the power to give it being, or created anew by a cause to give it a new form, the voluntary agent, for Ḥayy, must be immaterial. If it were material, it would itself be a form in need of some power to produce it. In this way Ḥayy concludes that there is a necessary efficient, immaterial cause, which is also a voluntary agent. Ḥayy goes further to assert that all things which have a “Being in Nature, [stand] in need of this Agent for their Existence.” No form can have existence without the “efficient Cause”. Such thinking would have sounded compelling to many early modern European readers, but

Locke chastises European philosophers when they make similar arguments, as we have seen. Thus, the twelfth-century Ḥayy and the seventeenth-century Essay hold opposing views on the idea of the separation of body and spirit, the nature or origin of the universe, and the nature of God. The most important difference, the last one, concerns the subject of the Essay’s Book II, our sources of knowledge.

For Ḥayy, there is another source of knowledge, besides the two Locke specifies.

While Locke asserts that our sources of knowledge are sense perception and reflection on ideas earlier perceived, Ḥayy not only concludes that vision or mystical meditation is another source of knowledge but also includes an (analogical) description of his vision.

The path to vision begins with the desire to know God: once, through what appear to be easy, logical steps as Ashwell describes them, he rationally apprehends that there is a

141

God, Ḥayy’s desire to know God becomes “vehement.” It is interesting that Locke also posits a desire for knowledge in his explanation of simple and complex ideas when he says that God has attached or “joined” to some ideas “or several thoughts … a perception of delight,” suggesting that almost all ideas are attached to a perception of delight or pain

(II.vii.1-3). The desire to know God makes Ḥayy use a faculty other than his senses, especially with his earlier conclusion that he is made up of body and spirit. He decides to turn his attention away from sense perception because he believes senses can only perceive material objects and he has concluded that the voluntary agent – God – must be immaterial. Ḥayy meditates until he has a vision of God: the vision is an out-of-body experience and an ascension into the heavens, where Ḥayy says he has seen “that which neither Eye hath seen, nor Ear hath heard, neither ever yet entered into the heart of Man to conceive” (130-133).10 The vision mainly involves an ascent into the heavens, from the “supream Sphere … settled in the highest Degree of Delight and Joy, Exultation and

Gladness, by reason of the Vision of that true and glorious Being” through several spheres to the “Sphere of Saturn” etc. (144-145). It is interesting, though, that despite the esoteric descriptions Ḥayy offers of the vision, the exercise of meditation begins with a

“simple vision” where he asserts that an “extraneous Object,” which is not described, is perceived; that is, Ḥayy emphasizes that the objects perceived in vision are real and not imaginary. However, because Ḥayy’s perception in vision does not include any of the senses, it would not meet Locke’s criteria for what constitutes knowledge. Ibn Ṭufayl’s purpose here is to show that while reason (observation based on sense perception and reflection) can lead us to knowledge of God’s existence, this kind of knowledge – the one elaborated upon by Locke – is of qualitatively lesser value than vision. Thus, that reason

10 I rely on George Ashwell’s version, Ibn Ṭufayl’s The History of Hai Eb’n Yockdan.

142

provides limited knowledge is a point that Locke and Ibn Ṭufayl agree upon,11 but Ḥayy adds that vision is also a source of knowledge. In fact, for Ḥayy vision is the major source of knowledge.12

The Ḥayy, The Essay, and the Poor Indian Philosopher

The popularity of Ḥayy with Quakers and other enthusiasts would by itself warrant an interest in its subject – human understanding. Moreover, the Quakers’ use of Ḥayy to illustrate their faith would warrant careful study of its well-thought out and reasoned steps for anyone who would want to refute it. But is this what Locke has done? In other words, could the reference to the Indian philosopher, where Locke critiques the mistaken assertion about knowing what supports the earth, be an allusion to Ḥayy? This is an important question, given that the context of the reference deals with issues that are raised by the Ḥayy, and given that Ḥayy and Book II of the Essay are in disagreement on these issues.

As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Russell makes a good case for

Locke’s close acquaintance with Ḥayy prior to the publication of the Essay. Whether

“the Indian philosopher” in Book II of the Essay is an allusion to Ḥayy is another question. The title to Ashwell’s 1686 English translation gives us a hint: “The History of

Hai Eb’n Yockdan, An Indian Prince: or, the Self-Taught Philosopher,” with “Indian

Prince” appearing in bold and in special font. Ashwell refers to Ḥayy as an Indian prince, the first such prominent ethnic reference in any early modern translation of Ḥayy’s title.

11 On Locke’s comments on the inadequacy of human knowledge, see Martha Brand Bolton, “Substances” 115-117 12 This assertion is in line with Descartes’ views, which are also critiqued by Locke. See Lex Newman’s “Locke on the Idea of Substratum” 5.

143

And it is an understandable title given that Ḥayy is set on an island close to Ceylon, an island off the southeast coast of India. Calling Ḥayy a “prince”, however, is more interesting because the first Latin translation refers to him as Philosophus autodidactus in the title (1671), which George Keith translates to the Self-Taught Philosopher (1674).

And of course Ḥayy is a philosophical treatise that takes the form of a (mystical- philosophical) tale. Thus describing Ḥayy as both Indian and a philosopher would be understandable.13 We do, however, need to re-examine the reference itself as Locke uses it.

The full quotation actually mentions the Indian philosopher twice, which makes the comparison quite curious. The definite article, in “the Indian Philosopher,” suggests that the reader would be able to identify the allusion. The article, the word “imagined,” and the fact that the Indian philosopher is cited to illustrate Locke’s response to the person who inquired, are all directly relevant. Here is the full quote:

Had the poor Indian philosopher (who imagined that the earth also

wanted something to bear it up) but thought of this word substance, he

needed not to have been at the trouble to find an elephant to support it,

and a tortoise to support his elephant: the word substance would have

done effectually. And he that inquired might have taken it for as good

an answer from an Indian philosopher, – that substance, without

knowing what it is, is that which supports the earth, as we take it for a

13 Ashwell’s decision to call Ḥayy a prince instead of the more appropriate title of philosopher is curious. Perhaps this is part of the practice of elevating natives or naturals, an elevation that included describing them as royalty, as Aphra Behn does in Oronooko. Also, members of the English aristocracy were patrons of the arts, a fact that makes the connection viable. Finally, Ḥayy narrator gives us two alternative beginnings for Ḥayy: spontaneous generation from the earth and the secret marriage of the princess, i.e. Ḥayy is a prince in this second option.

144

sufficient answer and good doctrine from our European philosophers, –

that substance, without knowing what it is, is that which supports

accidents. So that of substance, we have no idea what it is, but only a

confused, obscure idea of what it does. (II.xiii.19)

We may take “he that inquired” to be an actual member of the group who met in Oxford to discuss the issue of human knowledge as early as 1671 with the publication of

Pococke’s Latin translation of the Ḥayy. But because the first time Ḥayy is identified as

Indian is Ashwell’s 1686 translation of the Ḥayy, the inquirer could alternatively be a

Quaker interlocutor in Holland.

There are two important objections to the proposition that Locke alludes to Ḥayy when he makes the Indian philosopher reference in the Essay. The first is the fact that

Ḥayy does use the term “substance.” The second is that the tortoise is relevant to creation myths of Native Americans, with which Locke was well-acquainted.14 Hence we should ask what information Locke gives us about the Indian philosopher to which he refers in the quote. When Locke states that the word “substance” would have come to the rescue in the first reference, he of course suggests that the Indian philosopher does not use the word. However, in the second mention of the Indian philosopher, when the object of his criticism, European philosophers, is made clear, Locke states that the Indian philosopher does actually use the word “substance.” In this second mention, the comparison is between the Indian philosopher’s use of the word “substance” and

European philosophers’ use of both “substance” and “accidents.” That the Indian

14 For Locke’s close acquaintance – in fact, first-hand acquaintance – with Native Americans, see James Farr’s “Locke, ‘Some Americans,’ and the Discourse on ‘Carolina,’” Locke Studies 19 (2009): 19-96.

145

philosopher does use the term, and that he links it logically to the idea of ‘accident,’ is important because we know that Ḥayy uses the term, as we have seen above.

This brings us to the other objection: perhaps Locke refers to some Native

American creation myths. Had Locke mentioned the tortoise alone, it would have made sense to make this assumption. But of course the elephant does not appear in Native

American creation myths. Perhaps Locke intentionally mixes Indian and Native

American creation myths, which would draw attention to the tone with which he provides the Indian philosopher’s example. In fact, Locke uses another example, which was considered offensive by important segments of his readership. As Locke’s notes to his patron Lord Thomas Ross show, readers were offended by Locke’s comparison of

European philosophers’ use of the word “substance” with children’s use of the word

“something” – the reference to the children appears in a later chapter,15 where the Indian philosopher is mentioned again (II.xxiii.2). Could it be that Locke is speaking about two different Indian philosophers? Indeed, the first time the phrase “the Indian philosopher” is mentioned, it has the definite article “the,” suggesting readers’ familiarity, while the second mention uses the indefinite article. Though this would apparently solve the issue of the non-use of the word “substance” in the first reference and its use in the second, it is nonetheless highly unlikely that these are two different Indian philosophers. It is more plausible to suggest that Locke uses the Indian philosopher’s example quite liberally: the absence of the word ‘substance’ or its usage by the said Indian philosopher is only a metaphor, a rhetorical move, for the point Locke wishes to make about “substance” and

15 Locke later explains, “[Children] who, being questioned what such a thing is, which they know not, readily give this satisfactory answer, that it is something: which in truth signifies no more, when so used, either by children or men, but that they know not what; and that the thing they pretend to know, and talk of, is what they have no distinct idea of at all, and so are perfectly ignorant of it, and in the dark” (II.xxiii.2)

146

“accident” – the elephant and tortoise being the metaphors. This is suggested by the fact that I could find no Indian tradition that has the world supported by an elephant, which in turn is supported by a tortoise. The tortoise does figure prominently in Native American creation myths, as it does in Hindu mythology; but the elephant does not appear in

American creation myths, whereas in Hindu mythology it does not seem to be connected to the tortoise nor is it related to a creation myth.

Locke, it seems, intentionally uses the tortoise, which figures in Native American creation myths, with the elephant that is a common sight in India, knowing that such an explanation of the earth’s origin is not in circulation. It is likely the case that Locke made up the story – in the first reference – to illustrate the connection between the complex ideas “substance” and “accident,” and to make it seem simple-minded, “privative,” naive, etc. – the product of natural reason at its most elementary. I suspect that Locke’s readers understood that the reference was there only to make a point; otherwise, they would have been offended by the comparison as they were with the comparison with children.

Locke’s patron, Lord Ross, who had strong connections with India, would have had some knowledge of Indian mythology. Locke liberally and immediately follows the first mention of the elephant and tortoise with a second mention in which the philosopher has actually used the word “substance” to explain away his thinking about the earth’s support or cause. Stated differently, Locke attempts to demonstrate that “our European philosophers’” use of the terms “substance” and “accidents” is as no better than the

Indian philosopher’s use of the term “substance” to explain away the earth’s origin had he said it was supported by an elephant and a tortoise.

147

Locke’s mention of the Indian philosopher’s use of the word ‘substance’ suggests that Locke’s readers knew little of Indian philosophers and their views. Perhaps the little that the readers did know revolved around the narratives of origin.16 As shown above, discussion of the earth’s origin appears at a crucial point in Ḥayy: when Ḥayy considers this origin, he makes the final logical move to affirm that God is the origin of life. From here, Ḥayy takes another step to define God: the immaterial, voluntary agent who supports the universe. In other words, after Ḥayy draws his conclusions about the origin of the earth and the nature of God, Ḥayy seeks visions. In Locke’s view, Ḥayy is not justified in seeking visions, which Locke rejects as sources of knowledge. The steps that lead Ḥayy to seek visions are, in Locke’s view, two: the first is assuming the earth or universe depends on God and the second is following this assumption with a definition of

God. Locke’s suggestion would simply be that we do not know what supports the earth and we cannot define God as if we have certain knowledge of His nature.

If Locke’s Indian philosopher is indeed an allusion to Ḥayy, it would be a more accurate title than Ashwell’s Indian “prince,” not only because of Ḥayy’s setting and

Ḥayy’s first appearance in England as a philosopher but also because Locke does elsewhere mention an Indian prince. This is the allusion to the King of Siam in Book IV of the Essay. Locke mentions the King of Siam’s doubts about the possibility of the weather being so cold that frozen ice could withstand the weight of an elephant. The story illustrates reason’s limits when not furnished with sufficient experience. There

16 Ḥayy starts thinking about the earth and then moves on to the universe, after he observes the circular movement of the stars.

148

have been many renditions of Locke’s King of Siam story;17 different seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers recount the story of the king, who also occasionally appears as an Indian prince. The existence of many renditions confirms that they were used to illustrate whatever the particular point being made is. In Book II of the Essay, despite apparent contradictions, Locke is quite consistent regarding his critique of the term and concept “substance” as used by European philosophers. The apparent contradiction is likely a rhetorical move that worked quite well for Locke, who had to answer to the comparison of European philosophers with children but not with the Indian philosopher. Ḥayy – and Arabic knowledge in general – were held in high esteem in the seventeenth- and early-eighteenth centuries, but the suggestion here is that the Europeans are the children while the “Indian philosopher” stands in for the entire non-European, non-Christian representative of “natural” reason or “natural” religion.

I would like to conclude by discussing some similarities between Locke’s treatise and the Ḥayy. Locke begins Book II with the interesting description below:

Follow a child from its birth, and observe the alterations that time makes, and

you shall find, as the mind by the senses comes more and more to be

furnished with Ideas, it comes to be more and more awake

Locke adds,

And so we observe how the mind by degrees, improves in these; and

advances to the exercise of those other qualities of enlarging, and abstracting

ideas, and of reasoning about them, and reflecting upon these (II.i.22;

emphasis added)

17 For an analysis of the alterations of Locke’s Indian Prince story, see Lloyd Blitzer’s “The ‘Indian Prince’ in Miracle Arguments in Hume and His Predecessors and Early Critics,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 31:3 (1998): 175-230.

149

Ḥayy’s life is divided into classical seven-year periods, with the conclusions or knowledge Ḥayy acquires at seven years being clearly identified with his age in the Ḥayy.

Locke speaks about the “alterations that time makes,” which he connects with the mind being furnished with new ideas. Furthermore, while ‘furnishing’ the mind with ideas is language habitually used by Locke, one cannot help but notice that his explanation includes key terms associated with Ḥayy: ‘improve’ and, more significantly, ‘awake’.

The title of the first English translation (Keith’s 1674) includes the phrase “Improvement of Human Reason,” and we are also reminded that the literal translation of the Arabic title

Ḥayy bin Yaqzān is Alive son of Awake, which appears in Ashwell’s English translation.

‘Awake’ is our protagonist’s last name. These parallels or markers appear in Book I, while the “Indian philosopher” is mentioned in Book II of the Essay.

Identifying Ḥayy through these better-known, positive markers is important because when he critiques Ḥayy, Locke uses a different marker, supposedly a negative one. That he uses an ethnic marker in the negative illustration involving the elephant and tortoise, is not surprising. Making the Ḥayy’s main character the target of his attack is important partly because of the need to argue against the dualism of mind and body associated with Descartes and because Quakers offered Ḥayy as an illustrative example of their faith. The Quakers’ focus was on the visions Ḥayy experiences, the out-of-body ascent into the heavens culminating in vision. Because Ḥayy’s decision to begin his spiritual meditations is based on the assumption that his spirit and God share the same immaterial substance, Locke has to critique the logical foundation on which Ḥayy bases his decision. The sarcasm may thus also be directed at the Quakers, not just “our

European philosophers,” whom Quakers may have sought to support their claims. Thus

150

the most memorable lines in Book II of the Essay, the polemical lines that may also be taken to allude to Ḥayy, Quakers, or both are these:

All those sublime Thoughts, which tower above the Clouds, and reach as high

as Heaven it self, take their Rise and Footing here: in all that great Extent

therein the mind wanders, in those remote Speculations, it may seem to be

elevated with, it stirs not one jot beyond those Ideas, which Sense or

Reflection, have offered for its Contemplation” (II.i.24)

151

Chapter 4

Self-Composition and Appropriation: Crusoe, Friday and Ḥayy Bin Yaqzān

Despite the existence of some parallel religious, philosophical, and political ideas in twelfth-century North Africa and seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England,

Ḥayy is free of the categorical superiority of civil society over the natural state commonly asserted by seventeenth-century English political philosophers like Locke. In the Two

Treatises, Locke differentiates civil societies and natural states, a classification that becomes important for the justification of colonialism in the early modern period.

English readers of the Ḥayy, including Daniel Defoe, would have immediately noticed the absence of the more familiar colonial categories in the Āsāl-Ḥayy encounter, which is an encounter between representatives of civil and natural states, an encounter that is mirrored, in important ways, in the Crusoe-Friday encounter, as I show in this chapter.1

Building on the critical discussion of the Crusoe trilogy and its relationship with the

Ḥayy, I offer two important, complimentary contributions. I illuminate the nature of

Crusoe’s character development and its reliance on Friday by connecting the early modern colonial discourse with spiritual autobiography. I also show that the spiritual dimension of Friday’s character is in part a manifestation of Ḥayy’s spirituality, elements of which appear in Crusoe’s description of the effect on himself of Friday’s appearance and religious inquiry. In effect, Crusoe’s spiritualty is informed by Friday’s, which is, in turn, informed by Ḥayy’s. Writing in a different age, however, Defoe has to carefully navigate Crusoe’s spirituality in the age of discovery’s colonial realities.

1 Defoe’s familiarity with Ḥayy is discussed in the Introduction.

152

When Locke cites the new-found America as an example of a natural state vis-à- vis the more civilized England, he refers to the natural state as wild and inhabited by primitive Amerindians who have not developed as the English have done. Hence, whereas America lies waste in a state of nature open to Euro-colonial claims, in Locke’s view, labour, through which property is removed from common ownership, together with the increase in European populations, necessitated the building of cities and, “by consent,” setting out “bounds of their [Europeans’] distinct Territories.”2 Although

Locke ostensibly offers an historical account of the development from a state of nature to cities and nations or a state of society – and in spite of the fact that Two Treatises’ immediate concern, according to Michael Austin, is, more than justifying the Glorious

Revolution, setting up the theoretical framework for a Protestant line of succession after

Queen Anne’s death as in it Locke argues against the traditional rules of succession (410)

– this historical account offers justification of European expansion.3 Locke’s description of the Amerindians suggests they lack the moral ability – exemplified in their lands still lying in waste – to develop civil society. Locke highlights the contemporary applications of his categories when he refers to the inhabitants of the “uncultivated wast of America left to Nature,” the Amerindians, as “wretched inhabitants.” The language of Euro- colonialism and its projections onto geographical sites is indicative of the different

2 When Locke explains the development of European nations, he contrasts them to the natural state of America when he says, “whether in the wild woods and uncultivated wast of America left to nature, without any improvement or tillage, or husbandry, a thousand acres will yield the needy and wretched inhabitants as many conveniences of life … as the ten acres of … fertile land in Devonshire where they are well cultivated?” John Locke, Two Treatises, II.v, 287-88, 295, 294. The adjective ‘natural’ is mostly used in this chapter to refer to non-European ‘natives’ unless otherwise stated. 3 In the Two Treatises, Locke argues against divine right, and at the same time he provides the logic for slavery and colonial expansion.

153

categories to which the “wild Indian” and the civilized European belong.4 These categories are not applicable to Ḥayy. Though his island seems to be wild and uncultivated, its only inhabitant is not wretched. Ḥayy is able, through observation, experiment and the use of reason to obtain rational knowledge of God’s existence. Ḥayy the environmentalist also sets clear limits for his use of nature’s fruits – for subsistence only – so as to protect nature.

Seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English philosophers may have conceded that non-Christians sometimes have a natural religion through the use of reason, but the way Ḥayy’s reasoning is fleshed out, through several logical steps, was hardly expected of a natural at the time. Ḥayy looks very much like an ideal member of civil society. In fact, Ḥayy inverts the hierarchies Locke builds in Two Treatises. While

Locke associates human beings’ bestial qualities with the natural state, where the state of nature is more frequently disturbed by the state of war,5 Ḥayy attributes bestiality to city folk. The early eighteenth-century translator of the Ḥayy, Simon Ockley, faithfully translates from Ibn Ṭufayl’s Arabic original the word, “an‘am,” which the Ḥayy narrator uses in reference to city folk; the Arabic term denotes camels, cows, goats etc. Ockley

4 See Mary Nyquist, “Contemporary Ancestors of de Bry, Hobbes, and Milton,” University of Toronto Quarterly 77.3 (2008): 837-875. 5 Although a situation leading to a state of war can theoretically occur in the state of society, Locke clearly associates this state of war with the state of nature when he begins his concluding paragraph on the section titled, “Of the State of War,” with this statement: “To avoid this State of War (wherein there is no appeal but to Heaven, and wherein every the least difference is apt to end, where there is no Authority to decide between the Contenders) is one great reason of Mens putting themselves into Society, and quitting the State of Nature” (emphasis in original). Hence the state of war, where “Men are not under the ties of Common Law of Reason” and “may be treated as Beasts of Prey” because they have become “noxious Creatures,” is a state that is properly associated with the state of nature (Two Treatises, II, iii, 282, 279).

154

renders Ḥayy’s verdict on city-folk thus: “ [Ḥayy] understood … that the greatest part of them were like Brute Beasts” (64).6

Though there is no mention of Ḥayy in Locke’s Two Treatises, Defoe critic

Maximillian Novak focuses his discussion on the relationship between Ḥayy and Defoe’s

The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, specifically, in a situation where a member of civil society becomes a natural or “goes native.” In his article, “Robinson Crusoe’s Fear and the Search for Natural Man,” Novak focuses on Crusoe’s immediate reaction to the shipwreck for an analysis of The Adventure’s relationship with the Ḥayy. Because the island on which Crusoe is shipwrecked lies outside the bounds of European nations,

Crusoe assumes the island is wild, inhabited by beasts and cannibal savages. Novak points out Crusoe’s immediate sense of fear of the wilderness when he arrives on the island as well as Crusoe’s frantic efforts to preserve himself from falling prey to wild beasts. Crusoe’s fear is depicted in ways that suggest to Novak two things: Crusoe’s sudden fall into naturalness and his incipient insanity. Hence, while Locke sees the

Amerindians as wretched and America a wild and uncultivated waste, Novak focuses on

Crusoe’s fear that “either Savages … or wild Beasts” live on the island (43).7 As the title of the article suggests, Novak relies on contemporaneous classification to analyse Crusoe, whom he labels a “natural” during the island episode.

Novak draws an important conclusion about the relationship between Ḥayy and

The Adventures: he sees, correctly, a contradiction between the Ḥayy’s message, one that idealizes solitude, and Crusoe/Defoe’s unfavourable treatment of solitude in The

Adventures. Crusoe wishes to escape from the island, the natural state, in contrast to

6 Simon Ockley’s 1708 translation of Ḥayy, titled The Improvement of Human Reason, is published as an ebook by the Project Gutenberg EBook in 2005. 7 All quotes are from Robinson Crusoe, Norton Critical Edition, Ed Michael Shinagel (1975).

155

Ḥayy’s preference for the uninhabited island over the adjacent city-island state. Ḥayy and his pupil Āsāl return for good to the uninhabited island after their unsuccessful attempt to teach the mystical meanings of the religious law to the city-island state’s citizens. Ḥayy and Āsāl give up on both members of civil society and the city-island state, and Ḥayy ends with the two men returning to the uninhabited island to continue their spiritual meditation in solitude. However, while I agree with Novak that The

Adventures and Ḥayy offer diverging views on the value of solitude, I would like to point out, first, that the influence of one text on another should not mean that both have to express identical views: the preference for solitude in a natural setting, the island. Also, as this chapter will show, the place of solitude in The Adventures, despite Crusoe’s desire to escape from the island, is more nuanced and complex than Novak suggests.

Because he focuses on Crusoe’s first reaction to his shipwreck on the island,

Novak’s analysis of the textual relations between Ḥayy and The Adventures misses crucial, parallel, island encounters between representatives of natural and civil states:

Ḥayy and Āsāl/Salamān in Ḥayy and their counterparts in The Adventures, Crusoe and

Friday. Novak takes Crusoe’s ‘degeneration’ as his point of departure because Novak considers the shipwrecked Crusoe on the uninhabited island as a natural man. Yet it is clear that Crusoe’s membership of civil society does not cease on the island. The inability to consider Crusoe’s development as he negotiates his solitude through the other human being in the natural state limits Novak’s contribution to the debate on the specific relationship between Ḥayy and The Adventures. This is despite the fact that Novak begins his article by affirming that from around the seventeenth-century and up to the publication of The Adventures in 1719, the two possible sources for Defoe’s novel are

156

news of Selkirk’s shipwreck and the Ḥayy. Nonetheless, the lack of interest in considering Friday and Ḥayy as two natural men in their respective relationships with

Crusoe and Āsāl/Salamān makes Novak’s contribution to the debate virtually a denial of

Ḥayy as one of The Adventures’ sources. In his 2001 bibliography, Daniel Defoe, Master of Fictions, Novak completely fails to mention Ḥayy.

Another important critic confirms the relationship between Ḥayy and The

Adventures. This is Nawal Hassan. Hassan analyses the relationship between the twin characters Crusoe/Friday and Ḥayy/Āsāl, and she reaches a different conclusion from

Novak’s: Hassan confirms the influence of Ḥayy on Defoe. Yet like Novak, Hassan sees the parallel between Crusoe and Ḥayy on the one hand and Friday and Āsāl on the other.

This is even though it is easier to understand the relationship between Ḥayy and The

Adventures if we consider the parallels between Crusoe and Āsāl/Salamān, who come from civil society, on the one hand, and the indigenous Friday and Ḥayy on the other.

Though not the protagonist, Friday is, like Ḥayy, natural man. Friday at different times fits two early modern stereotypes of natural man, that he is prelapsarian and innocent, or postlapsarian and “privative.” But at crucial points in The Adventures, Friday also exhibits some of Ḥayy’s qualities, namely, his rationality and spirituality. The similarities between Ḥayy and Friday’s ‘naturalness’ will be shown in the discussion below. The temptation to see a parallel between the protagonists Ḥayy and Crusoe, a temptation Hassan falls into, is so strong that her reading misses the specific role Friday plays in the development of the colonial and spiritual aspects of Crusoe’s character.

The encounter between Crusoe and Friday points to the expanding early modern

European colonial world in which The Adventures is set. So it is understandable that

157

throughout the adventures and its sequels, Defoe maintains Crusoe’s identity as member of civil society. Peter Hulme accepts this fact and offers an important description of the role of the shipwreck and the encounter with Friday in the development of Crusoe’s colonial identity. Hulme argues that Crusoe’s generosity to his subjects on the island as well as Friday’s loyalty, expressed as a form of gratitude – notwithstanding the fact that similar gratitude is expressed by other Europeans taking refuge on the island – conceal the violence of slave labour occurring elsewhere in the colonies. Slavery is practiced on

Crusoe’s Brazil plantation, which is out of the readers’ view, yet we learn with Crusoe, at the end of The Adventures, that these plantations are successful enough to make him a wealthy man. On the island, which Crusoe quickly realizes is “environ’d every Way with

Sea” and “no Land to be seen” anywhere close (40), Crusoe manages to return to the shipwreck to retrieve a few items. This suggests to Hulme that Crusoe’s concern on the island is one of survival, and that the ‘history’ he recounts does not necessarily posit the island exclusively as a source of generalisations about a natural state and its relation to a civil state, the kinds of generalisations that interested theorists like Hobbes and Locke.

Though Crusoe does in fact make important comparisons between the island and

England, Hulme is correct in asserting that Crusoe’s cultural and ideological suppositions as a civilized man are not eradicated after the shipwreck.8 The alternative to a simplifying reading of origins that posits Hobbes and Locke as models is one that suggests Descartes. Both Descartes and Crusoe, Hulme suggests, “set out to become …

8 This is although Crusoe does, as Novak notes, provide a performance of degeneration. Novak relies on Pufendorf’s depiction of natural man, discussed in the Introduction. The adventures on the island move beyond Novak’s point, however, to include conversion and the encounter with natives, which also move the story beyond Crusoe’s comments on the use of money, or the lack thereof, a point that alludes to Locke’s reflections on property. The incidental ‘pseudo-empirical’ evidence Crusoe provides of Locke’s theories does not radically change Hulme’s argument, which is that Crusoe seems to re-compose his identity as civilized man.

158

self-made men: involved in a long quest for the composition of self” (189),9 which reminds us of the titles of the Ḥayy’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century translations.

Pococke the younger’s 1671 Latin translation of Ḥayy and Keith’s 1674 English version

(from the Latin) refer to the protagonist as Philosophus autodidactus or the self-taught philosopher. Hulme does not refer to the Ḥayy, but he helpfully suggests stages in the process of Crusoe’s self-composition. Self-composition in particular points to a crucial element of what I consider is Crusoe’s acquisition or appropriation of elements of Ḥayy character as they appear in relation to Friday.

The first stage in Hulme’s analysis is Crusoe’s realization that he is shipwrecked and that he is alone on the natural state. His first reaction is fear, which for Hulme is an example of decomposition. Novak also notices Crusoe’s fear but interprets this fear as a sign of degeneration. Novak, however, does not consider Crusoe’s adjustment to his new situation, an adjustment Hulme describes as constituting self-composition. After the initial shock, Crusoe manages to establish his home and a routine, what Hulme calls the extended and chronological selves. Decomposition reappears with Crusoe’s discovery of the footprint and fear takes hold of him again. His reactions vary from earlier thoughts of hiding his home to demolishing it, freeing his animals, and destroying his fields. Once

Crusoe finds human remains, the presence of cannibalistic Caribs is confirmed, and he vomits in disgust, a kind of self-purification. What happens next is interesting. Crusoe has a prophetic dream of saving a ‘savage,’ whose appearance Crusoe now anticipates.

When the dream is fulfilled, Crusoe can continue his ‘adventures.’ Hulme considers the encounter with Friday the last stage of self-composition because it completes the colonial allegory, which is Hulme’s main concern. Friday is ‘acquired’ and converted, and the

9 Hulme’s analysis is not concerned with whether Defoe actually took Descartes’ writing as a model.

159

other Caribbeans, now clearly identified as cannibals, can be managed and reduced with gun-powder. This is illustrated in the episode in which Crusoe successfully repels a

‘native’ attack on the island, during which Friday’s father and a European captive are saved while other Caribbeans are killed, an episode Hulme explains in terms of the reality of European colonization in that area. The “chance meeting with Friday” and the latter’s loyalty is a plot, with the word’s double meaning that “obscures the question of enslavement” and the colonial production of wealth through “violently extracted labour- power” in Crusoe’s plantation in Brazil, wealth Crusoe is suddenly aware of at the end of

The Adventures (Hulme, 201-202).10 Thus for Hulme, the island episode veils and mimics the central issue of the colonial administration of the Caribbean.

Though he provides a good platform for the study of Crusoe’s self-composition,

Hulme’s explanation is only half of the story. Hulme does not discuss Crusoe’s first dream on the island, which illuminates Friday’s role in Crusoe’s self-composition. There are two dreams – Hulme discusses the second only. Crusoe falls ill for several days, and the first dream occurs during this illness. In this first dream, Crusoe sees a man warning him to repent. The immediate result of the “terrible Dream” – in which Crusoe sees “a

Man descend from a great black Cloud, in a bright Flame of Fire, and light upon the

Ground” – is that Crusoe does in fact repent (64-71). The first dream’s significance is apparent when we consider its relationship to the second dream, in which Crusoe dreams of saving a ‘savage’ and this second prophetic dream is confirmed in Crusoe’s saving of

10 In Lisbon, Crusoe discovers that his plantation in Brazil, cared for by a ‘partner,’ has made him rich, a source of wealth, which, according to Hulme, “displaces the moral economy” of Crusoe’s island, a displacement that Hulme considers is Crusoe’s final stage of decomposition, with which the adventures end (221-222). This, however, is only so if one stops at The Adventures. Defoe did write two sequels, which as I show below, continue the process of self-composition and appropriation of important aspects of natural man.

160

Friday. In the first dream, the man, whom Crusoe sees descend from a black cloud, carries a “long Spear or Weapon in his Hand;” Crusoe adds that as soon as the man counsels repentance, the man “lift[s] up the Spear that [is] in his Hand, to kill me” (64-5).

Crusoe ends the passage by confirming that the weapon is a spear, which emphasises the identity of the man in the dream: he looks like a ‘savage’ or a natural, as the image of a figure holding a spear is a common early modern marker of savagery.11 The dream indicates or rather foreshadows the role the ‘savage’ will have on Crusoe. As soon as

Crusoe wakes up from the dream, he starts thinking of “divine Knowledge” (65). Crusoe admits that this is the first time he has thought of divine knowledge since his disobedience of his father. The dream leads to repentance, Bible reading and a conversion experience. Hence, even though Hulme does not mention this first dream, it does in fact constitute the beginning, rather than the end, of the process of self- composition. Since the second prophetic dream of saving a savage and the encounter with Friday occur after Crusoe’s conversion experience, we expect that Defoe uses the second dream to further develop Crusoe’s character. The dream “comes to pass,” as

Crusoe puts it (143-146).

It is not simply the colonial self that is being composed; the two dreams represent the beginning of the development of Crusoe’s spiritual self as well. As the discussion below shows, the first dream leads to a conversion experience, and the second dream leads to a religious or spiritual retirement, presented as having more value than the earlier conversion experience. The dreams highlight what I consider is Defoe’s reading of Ibn

Ṭufayl’s depiction of natural Ḥayy guiding civil Āsāl’s spiritual development. We now turn to Crusoe’s characterisation in light of the Ḥayy.

11 See Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

161

Ḥayy and The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

My discussion of Defoe’s specific engagement of Ḥayy in The Adventures diverges from

Hulme’s contention that Crusoe’s encounter with Friday facilitates the veiling of the colonial allegory. Hulme does not mention Ḥayy. I show that, on the contrary, Defoe’s engagement of Ḥayy in The Adventures develops Crusoe’s character to reveal – rather than conceal – the violence of colonial practice, a revelation that is illustrated in the sequel, The Farther Adventures. It is a revelation that undermines the colonial categories with which The Adventures begins. The Adventures develops a spirituality that confronts colonial practice: Defoe mirrors Ḥayy and the Āsāl-Ḥayy encounter in the characterization of Crusoe on the island and in the Crusoe-Friday encounter. Āsāl learns from Ḥayy the spiritual meanings of symbolical passages in the sacred book and the effect of this learning is that both can see that the inhabitants of the city-island state from which Āsāl comes are actually like “wild Beasts” in their blind accumulation of wealth and property. In The Adventures, the three-year retirement on the island where Crusoe and Friday engage in biblical study includes clear suggestions of Friday’s role in leading the interpretation of biblical passages and Crusoe’s spiritual development. The effect of the retirement is that in subsequent adventures Crusoe encounters and protests the barbarity involved in colonial practice.

When the two characters, Āsāl and Salamān, are introduced towards the end of the Ḥayy, the narrator emphasizes their differing inclinations. Both pious friends grow up in a city-island state that has accepted an unnamed prophet’s monotheistic religion, but the two men part ways because Salamān prefers the laws that govern society while

162

Āsāl inclines towards the more symbolical, mystical passages in their sacred book. Āsāl decides to meditate in solitude to inquire into the meanings of these passages. He finds the solitude he desires in the uninhabited island, where he meets Ḥayy. The Ḥayy narrator characterises Āsāl and his relationship with Ḥayy:

1. Āsāl began to search farther into the inmost Nature of things, was inclined to

search into the mystical Senses of Words [in the Law], and diligently imploied

himself about interpreting them. But Salamān, his Friend and fellow student,

chiefly observed the outside, and visible surface of the Law (157)

After Āsāl leaves the city-island state and travels to the adjacent island, he meets Ḥayy:

2. Then he [Ḥayy] declared to him [Āsāl] … what Progress he had in Knowledge,

until at length he had attained unto that degree of Conjunction with God (169)

3. Whereupon he [Āsāl] addressed himself to wait upon him [Ḥayy], to imitate him,

and to follow his Counsels in the performance of Such works as he had occasion

to make use of, namely, those legal ones, which he had formerly learned in the

Books of his Religion (171)

Interpreting religious law is central to the twelfth-century Ḥayy. The seventeenth- century world into which Ḥayy is translated was also concerned with interpretation of scripture. Like many of his contemporaries struggling with the issues of interpretation,

Locke, who according to Kim Parker can be considered as contributing to an early stage of biblical criticism which was to flourish in the late eighteenth century, suggests that difficult passages should be considered normal speech and situated in their historical context. Locke highlights the use of reason as the guide in interpreting scripture, but his emphasis on reason as guide differs from many of his contemporaries’ views on the role

163

of the Holy Spirit as guide when reading the Bible. Both views, however, were concerned with and highlight the question of interpretation. This concern with the meaning of scripture appears in Ḥayy as well. The quotes above (from Ashwell’s 1686 translation of the Ḥayy) remind us of Āsāl ’s inclination toward the symbolic verses of his religious law. The emphasis on “law” and “works” in Ḥayy would have reminded early modern readers of Roman Catholicism with its emphasis on external practices to the exclusion of inward faith. Seeking to understand the hidden meaning of the verses in a solitude referred to as a “commodious retirement,” Āsāl abandons the city-island state and heads to Ḥayy’s uninhabited island. Āsāl hopes that prayer and supplication in solitude will help him understand the symbolic verses. Āsāl meets Ḥayy on the uninhabited island: this is when Āsāl learns about Ḥayy’s condition and finds the knowledge he seeks. Despite Ḥayy’s conversion to Āsāl ’s faith, Ḥayy’s role as spiritual guide in the interpretation of difficult verses for Āsāl is emphasized in the Ḥayy. Ḥayy’s teaching, the Ḥayy narrator explains, makes the “ways of interpretation” of symbolic verses so easy for Āsāl that “neither remained anything dark or difficult in those Precepts which he had received” (165-167).

Āsāl and Ḥayy travel to the city-island state where they try to explain the meaning of the symbolical verses to city folk before deciding to return to the uninhabited island.

They prefer the natural to the social state. Hence, Ḥayy’s experiences on the island and the encounter with Āsāl also touch on the relationship between society and a natural state, revealed and natural religion, and civilized and natural humankind. For the early modern

English reader, these issues were topical and account for the Ḥayy’s popularity. Like many of his contemporaries, Defoe was probably aware of the topical philosophical and

164

religious issues raised by Ibn Ṭufayl’s narrative. What he seems to have gleaned from

Ḥayy for The Adventures’ island episode includes the central relationship between pupil and teacher, but it is a relationship between Āsāl, who is originally from the city-island state, acquiring, through tutelage, some of natural Ḥayy’s spiritual qualities. Ḥayy ends with Āsāl deciding to remain Ḥayy’s student or disciple, to wait upon and serve Ḥayy, but this is not simply an issue of inverting the colonial categories.

As Anthony Pagden explains, although Amerindians, for example, were sometimes expected to have, through reason, natural religion, the reaction of an encounter with them is usually a reminder of the veracity and completeness of

Christianity, which is why Columbus orders his men, when faced with pagan rituals, to perform Christian rites (Pagden, European Encounters 17-24). Grotius confirms the veracity of Christianity, especially when an encounter with non-Christians is anticipated: he describes – in verse – the Christian religion for “Dutch sailors whose destiny it was to travel across the world and meet men of other faiths,” dealing with, Jacqueline Lagree explains, “those truths which are common to all,” i.e. natural religion. The sailors would then be able to “explain their own faith” to the “pagans” they met in an attempt to convert them (Lagree 30 and 38, note 55). The point here is that seventeenth- and early eighteenthc-century European Christians would not expect the natural Ḥayy already to have arrived at the kind of knowledge adherents of the revealed religion – for Grotius and most early modern Europeans, this meant Christians – have difficulty interpreting.

Protestants engaged in serious quarrels over issues of interpretation. Quakers advocated reliance on vision instead; Locke referred to vision as private revelation, which, in his opinion, should be subjected to reason (Parker 43-44). Ḥayy appears to value the kind of

165

reason Anglicans and conservatives championed, but it then reveals reason’s limitation to knowledge of natural phenomena. According to the Ḥayy, knowledge of the divine is accessible through vision alone. In its presentation of Ḥayy and the knowledge Āsāl seeks, Ḥayy creates an association between natural man and the natural state on the one hand and knowledge of the divine, on the other, the kind of knowledge that enables interpretation of scripture.

The twelfth-century hierarchy that has Ḥayy privy to special knowledge and act as

Āsāl ’s tutor confronts the seventeenth-century European, colonial context. Hence when the Ḥayy-Āsāl relationship is reflected in the Friday-Crusoe encounter, the acquisition of knowledge and development of character take the shape of appropriation. One can thus talk of Defoe transferring some spiritual qualities to Crusoe. Before Friday can play an interpretative role similar to Ḥayy’s, Crusoe has to first repent and start reading the Bible, which occur as a result of the first dream. Yet even this repentance is connected, albeit indirectly, to Friday. G.A. Starr points out that this dream is a biblical allusion to the story of Balaam. An examination of the Fourth Book of Moses reveals the allusion Starr suggests. In chapter XXII of the Authorised English Bible of 1640, we are told that King

Balak sent messengers to Balaam several times to entreat him to curse the Israelites.

After first prohibiting his voyage, God permitted Balaam to accompany Balak’s emissaries, but there was a condition: “Go with them,” God announced, “but yet the word which I shall say unto thee, that thou shalt do.” Balaam travelled, however, before he was told what the words were, so “Gods anger was kindled; and the angel of the LORD stood in the way for an adbersarie against him.” In the angel’s first two appearances,

Balaam did not know why his donkey, which could see the angel, did not heed

166

commands to go forward. It is only in the third appearance that Balaam saw the angel:

“Then the LORD opened the eyes of Balaam, and he saw the angel of the LORD standing in the way, and his sword drawn in his hand: and he bowed down his head, and fell flat on his face.” Similar to Balaam’s sin of embarking on a trip without permission, Crusoe on many occasions identifies his sin as his decision to travel without his father’s permission. Crusoe considers his captivity and the shipwreck on the island as two warnings from God he has not heeded, but Crusoe’s eyes, like Balaam’s, are opened with the first dream.

It is interesting that the biblical allusion and the repentance occur when Crusoe reaches the farthest point geographically – he is shipwrecked far from England. Starr explains that “spiritual disaffection [is signalled] through the language of physical distance” (Starr 55-56), but he does not discuss the significance of the island as a natural state nor point to the colonial context, which is signalled through the threatening

“savage.” Starr refers to naturalness in Pauline terms: natural man being fallen man prior to repentance. The dream may suggest that while the natural state, the island, is the point of Crusoe’s most extreme alienation from his father or Christianity, it paradoxically becomes the site of his blessing. The allusion Starr identifies allows us to consider the island, which is a natural state in the colonial taxonomy, a blessed place endowed with some special qualities akin to the ‘wilderness’ to which Moses leads the Israelites, qualities that allow divine communication and guidance as is exemplified in the first dream. Crusoe describes the island as a “meer State of Nature” and records these paradoxes: that his disobedience of his father and his captivity occur the same day and, more significantly, that his “wicked Life” and “solitary Life, begun both on a day” as

167

well (86, 97). It is the first dream that forces him to reflect and to realize that the island has offered him a solitude, which he announces is a “State of Life … much easier … to my Mind, as well as to my Body” because, he adds, quoting 1 John 2.16, he has “neither the Lust of the Flesh, the Lust of the Eye, or the pride of Life” (94-5). Yet he is “King, or

Emperor” on the island (94)! Crusoe’s reflection on his new spirituality betrays a hesitation to abandon his civil or ‘colonial’ self.

Dreaming of the unnamed ‘savage’ and the Balaam allusion signal three other developments. The first is an important character development. Crusoe’s continued stay on the island allows him to view the ‘naturals,’ whom he identifies as pagans and cannibals, as potential converts. Secondly, Crusoe narrates Friday’s conversion and the conversion of other ‘naturals,’ whose ‘natural’ spirituality is emphasized, especially in the sequel, The Farther Adventures. Finally, the emphasis on the spirituality and religiosity of the natives is followed by a parallel characterization of Europeans as potentially cannibals and definitely savage, as the discussion of the Madagascar episode will show. Friday’s conversion in particular adds depth to Crusoe’s religious understanding and adds authority to his ‘history.’ Friday is both a representative of natural savagery and has innocence that qualifies him for conversion. Replacing the angel with Friday suggests to early modern readers the association of naturalness with prelapsarian innocence while the biblical allusion suggests a role for a natural pagan like

Friday in Crusoe’s spiritual regeneration. The innocence is connected to the dream’s allusion: it suggests that Friday is not only capable of becoming Christian, but, like

Balaam’s angel, can also spiritually guide Crusoe.12 The angel is God’s emissary,

12 In seventeenth-century England, Quakers gave Ḥayy such a ‘guiding’ role, as mentioned in the Introduction above.

168

carrying God’s message. When Defoe replaces the angel with a ‘savage,’ the dream foreshadows Friday’s entry into the narrative and suggests his role in Crusoe’s spiritual regeneration. I propose here that Defoe is able to imagine this role for Friday because of the Ḥayy. Friday’s appearance is introduced through the dream that suggests the role he is to play for Crusoe, and it is Ḥayy that suggests a link between the role of spiritual guide in the interpretation of scripture and a ‘natural.’

In terms of plot, the dream occurs after Crusoe has salvaged some books from the wreckage under the pretext of preventing the loss of “Reckoning of Time.” Amongst the books are three Bibles and “two or three Popish Prayer-Books” (48). He makes a chair and table and starts writing his journals, which, as Starr points out, come out of the seventeenth-century tradition of spiritual autobiography (69-71). Crusoe records all experiences, including mundane details, but his reflections merge to become confessional. The journals make no reference to God for a few pages until Crusoe finds corn, which he believes is “directed purely for [his] sustenance, on that wild miserable

Place,” but his “religious Thankfulness to God” quickly begins to “abate” (58). An earthquake produces no religious reflection (59-61). It is only when he gets very ill, shivering with fever, that, not knowing “what to say,” Crusoe cries, “Lord look upon me,

Lord pity me” which he repeats “for two or three Hours” till he falls asleep (64). This is when he has the first dream, the “terrible Dream.” The man descends from the cloud, stands on a “rising Ground” and in a “Voice so terrible” says to Crusoe, “Seeing all these

Things have not brought thee to Repentance, now thou shalt die.” He then lifts up his spear as if to kill Crusoe. The horror of the dream makes Crusoe realize that his father’s warnings “are come to pass,” which makes Crusoe utter what he describes as his “first

169

Prayer,” adding, “if I may call it so” (64, 67). The dream leads to Crusoe’s conversion experience.

Crusoe offers three versions of his conversion experience. The first is the

“terrible dream” described above. The second is in suggestions of natural reason contained in some questions, which are quite important because they suggest another allusion Starr misses, but which I am sure some early modern readers recognized. “What is the Earth;” “Whence is it produc’d;” “What am I, and all the other Creatures;” and

“whence are we?” Crusoe asks. “It is God,” he answers (68). We have actually seen both the rhetorical questions and the answer: they are similar to Adam’s in Book VIII of

Milton’s Paradise Lost, discussed in Chapter Two above. They are also similar to

Ḥayy’s though Ḥayy’s questioning occupies the bulk of the Ḥayy narrative. Adam’s and

Crusoe’s rhetorical questions both summarize and allude to the process of reasoning

Ḥayy goes through, but their purposes are different. Ḥayy and Adam’s reasoning leads to their acquisition of knowledge of God in the absence of revealed law and prior to knowledge of religion – even though Adam’s should be read, as I have suggested, as a possible allusion to Ḥayy as Milton does not provide the logical steps that lead Adam to conclude with God’s existence. Crusoe’s purpose, on the other hand, is to reflect upon his present condition. The immediate result of Crusoe’s ‘reasoning’ is that God has willed the misfortunes he experiences. Crusoe asks, “Why has God done this to me?”

(68). This again is a reference to Crusoe’s disobedience of his father.

Even though the threat of death in the first dream results in Crusoe’s reflections, the dream actually has a limited role in the actual stages of the conversion experience.

The focus in Crusoe’s process of conversion is on the effect of his continuous reading of

170

the Bible. After Crusoe reflects on his predicament, he turns (or rather returns) to the

Bible. Crusoe is born a Christian and has received religious instruction by his father though he has forgotten it after many years of seafaring (65). The words of the Bible, he tells us, “made some Impression upon my thoughts,” enabling him to compare himself to the “Children of Israel.” He begins to wonder, “Can God himself deliver me from this

Place?” (69). Made drowsy by the tobacco, Crusoe is ready to sleep, but not before kneeling down, which “he had never … done in all [his] life” he announces, and praying to God to fulfill his promise. A sip of rum and Crusoe is fast asleep. It is not clear whether he wakes two days later refreshed because of the prayer or the effect of the tobacco and the rum, but he does “[renew] the medicine all three Ways,” with food, tobacco and rum (69-70).

Following several days of renewed medicine, conversion begins. It is signalled through recognition of God’s providence and a religiosity based on attachment to the word of God. One sign of redemption is Crusoe’s acknowledgement that during what he calls his ‘misfortunes,’ God has delivered him many times. In recognition of God’s favours, Crusoe does his part: “I kneel’d down,” he says, “and gave God Thanks aloud, for my Recovery from my Sickness.” This occurs as he is ready to go to sleep. “In the morning,” he adds, “and beginning with the New Testament, I began to seriously read it.”

Reading the Bible eventually leads to faith: with a “kind of ecstasy of joy,” Crusoe cries,

“Jesus, thou Son of David … give me repentance.” Crusoe’s conversion is clearly founded on the Bible, what he refers to as “a true Scripture view of Hope founded on the

Encouragement of the Word of God” (70-71).

171

It is important to note that reason and vision play a limited role in Crusoe’s conversion because he is a member of civil society. Reason and vision are properly stages in the conversion of natural men, whether Ḥayy or, as we will see below, Friday.

Any cursory knowledge of the Ḥayy, whose reasoning Crusoe’s rhetorical questions above recall, informs an early modern reader that reason and vision are Ḥayy’s main activities while emphasis on reading revelation belongs to Āsāl and Salamān, both, like

Crusoe, civilized men.

The sincerity of Crusoe’s conversion is confirmed through his missionary-like conversation with Friday. The conversation also shows the difference between Crusoe and Friday’s stages of conversion. Crusoe uses common sense, which he refers to as natural reason, to persuade Friday. Crusoe’s comments are interesting: he says, “Nature assisted all of my Arguments to Evidence to him [Friday] even the Necessity of a great first Cause.” Friday accepts that Crusoe’s God is the true God because He hears prayers even though He lives “up beyond the sun” whereas Friday’s God, “who liv’d but a little way off, and yet could not hear, till they [the elders] went up in the great Mountains”

(156-57). Friday seems to accept that the practice of limiting communication with God to elders is a “Cheat.” Defoe’s early modern English readers would recognize the exclusive role elders have in Friday’s pagan religion as similar to their popular perception of the role of Catholic priesthood, as Crusoe explains it to Friday. However, Crusoe finds it hard to “imprint right Notions in his [Friday’s] Mind about the Devil” (157). Friday’s objections were familiar to early modern English readers, as they resemble English missionaries’ accounts of the objections of ‘natives’ they encountered.13 Commenting on

13 See, for example, Paul Hunter, “Friday as Convert: Defoe and The Accounts of Indian Missionaries,” The Review of English Studies, New Series, 14:5 (August, 1963): 243-248.

172

one limitation of natural reason, Crusoe explains, “there appeared nothing in all of this the Notion of an Evil Spirit” – “all of this” refers to Crusoe’s arguments on the necessity of a great, first cause. Crusoe reports that Friday “puzzle[s]” him about God’s power to overcome the devil (157, 158).

Crusoe’s account suggests that natural reason is not sufficient to bring about

Friday’s conversion, which requires the ‘intervention’ of the Holy Spirit. Faced with the difficulty of persuading Friday of the necessity of believing in the devil, Crusoe admits that he is “but a young Doctor, and ill enough qualified for a Casuist, or Solver of

Difficulties.” His solution is to tell Friday that God will “at last punish” the devil. This does “not satisfie Friday,” who wonders at the delay, drawing a conclusion Crusoe does not intend. “So you, I, Devil, all wicked,” he says, “all preserve, repent, God pardon all.”

Though he has just learnt the English language, judging from his objections and conclusions, Friday is able to hold his ground. Crusoe admits as much when he says,

“Here I was run down again by him to the last Degree.” Crusoe responds to the difficulty in persuading Friday through reason by introducing a significant Dissenting context for

Friday’s conversion. “Though they [“the meer Notions of Nature or reason] will guide reasonable Creatures to the Knowledge of God,” Crusoe concludes, in an aside to the reader, “nothing but divine Revelation from heaven can form the Knowledge of Jesus

Christ, and of Redemption purchas’d for us” (158). Although Dissenters and non-

Dissenters alike shared the view that reason guides reasonable creatures to knowledge of

God, the reference here is interesting. It would seem from the phrase “divine revelation,” that Crusoe is pointing to Scripture. In fact, he is not. He adds, “I say, nothing but a

Revelation from Heaven, can form these in the soul” (158; emphasis added). And so

173

Crusoe prays to God for help “in assisting by his Spirit, the Heart of the poor ignorant

Creature, to receive the Light of the Knowledge of God in Christ” (158; emphasis added).

These lines are suggestive of both Quaker faith and the Ḥayy. One page after Barclay mentions Ḥayy as an example of the inner light, where he emphasizes that the light within inhabits “all men,” Barclay criticizes those he calls “high Professors,” which is an interesting reference considering Crusoe’s reference to himself as not a “doctor” in disputes, the phrase used by Fox. Barclay says “high Professors” should not “boast the

Law and the Scripture, and the outwards knowledge of Christ,” because, he adds, “the

Infidels and Heathens, [do] know him not that way.” Barclay suggests instead that all men should be invited to “mind the Light in them” (127).

Expressing Friday’s conversion in terms of a “light” that works within the heart is language peculiar to Quakerism. It is interesting that Crusoe places Friday in this context. On the one hand, we are told that Friday converts in the end, which suggests that he does so through the workings of the inner light. However, the description of the actual conversion is missing from Crusoe’s account, suggesting perhaps that Defoe is unable to imagine Friday’s interiority. Perhaps Crusoe does not describe Friday quaking because he wants to downplay enthusiasm in the Restoration period as well as call for religious unity. At the end of this section, Crusoe issues a familiar critique of religious “Disputes,

Wrangling, Strife and Contention,” which, he says, are “useless” (160). Crusoe informs the reader that Friday is “now a good Christian, a much better [one] than I, though I have reason to hope … that we are equally penitent” (159).

Quakers’ association with Ḥayy was known in Dissenting and non-dissenting circles; they were the first to translate it into English and to cite it as an illustration of

174

their faith. Crusoe and Friday’s respective conversions bring us to the specific relationship between Ḥayy and The Adventures. I point to two parallels, one between

Crusoe and Āsāl, and another between Friday and Ḥayy. Both Crusoe and Āsāl have access to scripture in which they (already) believe. However, Ḥayy and Friday rely on natural reason to accept the necessity of a first cause; this is one step. Another step involves an internal spiritual experience unaided by scripture and one that involves discreet knowledge of/from the divine. Crusoe refers to the working of the Holy Spirit on

Friday’s heart, though we are not offered a presentation of this internal revelation. With

Ḥayy, the process of meditation results in vision. It is only after their internal spiritual experiences that Friday and Ḥayy convert. The parallels are curious because it is to

Crusoe and Āsāl ’s respective faiths that Friday and Ḥayy convert and the process involves Crusoe and Āsāl teaching their languages to Friday and Ḥayy, yet receiving important illumination on their respective scriptures from the two natural men.

Despite Friday and Ḥayy’s conversions to Crusoe and Āsāl ’s faiths, the two supposedly natural men play an important role in the improvement of the civilized men’s faiths. Āsāl ’s relationship with Ḥayy is informative. We are told that Āsāl inclines towards the symbolical passages of his revelation, but that he cannot understand their import. That is why he chooses to abandon his city-island state to meditate in solitude in the uninhabited island. It is after he meets Ḥayy, who has experienced internal spiritual vision, that Āsāl learns the meaning of the symbolical verses that puzzled him. We are told that Ḥayy makes the “ways of interpretation” so clear that Āsāl fully understands his own faith. There may be a parallel here with Crusoe, though it is not as neat as the parallels mentioned above. If we take the first dream as foreshadowing Friday, he

175

appears as a spiritual guide for Crusoe. This is the first dream, in which a savage appears carrying a spear. G.A. Starr explains that the dream is an allusion to the angel that intercepts Balaam, forcing the prophet to return, that is, metaphorically to return to God and literally to return and wait for God’s command. Replacing the angel with a ‘savage’ suggests the role Friday is meant to play for Crusoe, one that is perhaps similar to Ḥayy’s for Āsāl. We should remember that Āsāl recognizes that his understanding of his faith is limited and that it is Ḥayy who teaches him the hidden meaning. As a token of his appreciation and also in recognition of Ḥayy’s tutelage, Āsāl, we are told, decides to

“wait upon” Ḥayy. A suggestion of similar tutelage, though brief, appears in The

Adventures.

Crusoe says he inquires into Friday’s questions with “more Sincerity than

Knowledge.” Then Crusoe admits that these questions really “inform’d and instructed” him in “many things that either I [Crusoe] did not know, or had not fully consider’d before” (159). It would therefore seem that the internal revelation Friday has makes him raise issues Crusoe has not considered before and, as Ḥayy does for Āsāl , clarifies these for Crusoe. Although Crusoe has a conversion experience prior to meeting Friday, the effect of the Quaker-like inner illumination Friday has offers Crusoe better insight into

God’s words. It is interesting that in the first dream’s allusion to Balaam, the angel carries God’s word; for Crusoe, the dream leads to the study of the Bible, God’s word, as well. However, the wrangling and strife earlier referred to may also be a reference to the questions of interpretation that troubled Crusoe’s contemporaries. God’s word needs interpretation. It seems that Ḥayy’s interpretative abilities are what Ḥayy suggests to

Defoe for this part of the Crusoe-Friday encounter. Also, in the biblical allusion and the

176

Ḥayy, Balaam and Āsāl return to their respective peoples with God’s message; Crusoe’s spiritual development enables him to speak to his compatriots about native innocence and civil Englishmen’s barbarity in Madagascar. In any case, though already repentant and redeemed, Crusoe experiences further spiritual development at Friday’s hands.14

Friday’s companionship has results in more vital spiritual development than

Crusoe’s earlier conversion as is evidenced in the period they spend in religious conversation: instead of the few days it takes Crusoe to have his conversion experience,

Crusoe and Friday converse for “three Years,” Crusoe informs us. It is understandable that Friday’s “serious Enquiries” make Crusoe a “much better Scholar in the Scripture

Knowledge,” he concludes, “than I should ever have been by my own private meer

Reading” (159-60). The reference to the earlier “reading” as “private” and “meer” is an interesting way to describe Crusoe’s earlier study of the Bible. The reference suggests that Friday clarifies some passages for Crusoe. Again, Crusoe’s stress on the quality of reading the Bible after meeting Friday reminds us of Āsāl ’s own reading of his religious law. The spiritual meanings of the verses remain inaccessible for Āsāl until he meets

Ḥayy, who finally clarifies them. The companionship of Friday and Ḥayy is essential to

Crusoe and Āsāl ’s respective understanding of their particular religious laws and respective spiritual development. This relationship is evidenced in Āsāl and Crusoe’s gratitude: we read that after he understands the hidden meaning of his law, Āsāl

“address[es] himself to wait upon him [Ḥayy] and to follow his Counsels;” after Crusoe

14 Although Andrew Fleck recognizes Crusoe as civilized man in the island, he does not see in Friday’s conversion the Quaker echoes I describe. This is although Fleck notes that Crusoe’s fear of cannibals “corrodes his relationship with God,” requiring repentance. Fleck hence concludes that the spiritual hierarchy that has Crusoe as Friday’s pedagogue is maintained throughout the island episode, which is contrary to what I describe here. This is probably because Fleck does not include Ḥayy in his discussion. Andrew Fleck, “Crusoe’s Shadow: Christianity, Colonization, and the Other,” Historicizing Christian Encounters with the Other, Ed. John C. Hawley (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998)

177

has inquired into matters he has never considered before and understood through Friday what he could not alone through “private meer reading” of the Bible, Crusoe has “great

Reason to be thankful that he [Friday] ever come to me [Crusoe]” (159).15

One can go further to suggest that the spiritual aspect of Friday’s character is suggested by the Ḥayy. When Robert Barclay cites Ḥayy as an example of Quaker faith in the Apology for the True Christian Divinity, a book Defoe owned, Barclay refers to the kind of mystical knowledge that is gained through vision. Evidently Quakers chose Ḥayy as a representative text because it illustrated their faith in the inner light in a narrative form that was both coherent and easier to understand than existing writing. The Ḥayy narrator describes the vision through an analogy that includes an ascension into heaven because the experience comes dangerously close to being blasphemous, as the removal of the perception of one’s individual self and absorption into what appears to be the Essence is preceded by the illusion of seeing the Essence. Such ‘seeing’ would seem to place boundaries or limits on the Essence that is supposed to be boundless. That this Muslim mystical ‘union’ was an affront to conservative Muslims was not unknown to early modern English readers, as the third translator of the Ḥayy, George Ashwell, referred to a famed Muslim Sufi whose pronouncements to that effect cost him his life (Ashwell, preface). As if to downplay the Quaker features of Friday’s conversion, Crusoe does not represent the actual conversion experience Friday has. Crusoe does suggest, however, that Friday has an internal illumination where the spirit, the light – as some Quakers believed – visits Friday’s heart. And since this form of Quaker faith is linked to Ḥayy’s experience in the narrative first translated into English by Quaker George Keith, one can conclude that Friday’s spiritual experience and role is somewhat modelled on Ḥayy’s.

15 Hulme does not mention this gratitude.

178

Fear of explicitly endorsing enthusiasm during the Restoration may not be the only reason Crusoe refrains from representing Friday’s conversion. Crusoe’s creator is a man of his time. While the association between so-called ‘savagery’ and potential enslavement did not readily exist for the twelfth-century author of the Ḥayy, it was part of the seventeenth-century world of Defoe. This is perhaps why Crusoe sets up the initial encounter with the new Ḥayy in Lockean terms. The conditions of the state of war, familiar to early modern readers, are met, yet Crusoe does not make Friday a slave. At the beginning of the encounter, once Friday realizes Crusoe has saved his life, Friday behaves “as if he had been taken Prisoner.” Friday kneels and places Crusoe’s foot on his head (204).16 To Crusoe, Friday acknowledges that the conditions of the state of war are met, making him Crusoe’s slave. On his part, Friday may have considered himself, about to be devoured, as good as dead, and hence Crusoe’s act of saving him equivalent to preserving his life as a war prisoner.17 Crusoe explains that Friday kneels in

“acknowledgement … of my right for saving his Life” and sets Crusoe’s foot on his head

“in token of swearing to be my Slave for ever” (147). Despite this colonial context,

Crusoe does not accept Friday as a slave. He insists instead that Friday is both a servant

– not an unusual position – and a companion. In fact, the stress is on the latter as Crusoe refers to the three-year spiritual conversations with Friday as a “retirement.” Starr reminds us that the early modern English repentant would refer to his prayer in solitude as a retirement, as in the case of Edward Walpole who described “look[ing] up to

Heaven” in solitude as a “comfortable Retirement” (qtd. in Starr 117). Crusoe’s spiritual conversations do not occur in solitude. In a way, it is a negotiated solitude. Āsāl cannot

16 See Mary Nyquist, “Hobbes, Slavery, and Despotical Rule.” Representations 106 (2009): 1-33. 17 See Mary Nyquist, “Hobbes, Slavery.”

179

learn without the company of Ḥayy; similarly, Friday’s presence proves essential to

Crusoe’s spiritual development. Once the retirement is added to the many parallels between Crusoe/Friday and Āsāl /Ḥayy, one can see the ways in which Ḥayy precipitates the early modern encounter in The Adventures’ island episode or at least that the latter contains allusions to the Arabic mystical-philosophical tale.

The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe18

We have seen how Crusoe’s character develops spiritually in the island episode with

Friday’s appearance. Crusoe’s spirituality manifests in the sequel, The Farther

Adventures, where Crusoe’s spiritual development interestingly coincides with a critique of the prevailing colonial discourse that divides people into civil and savage. It is as if

Crusoe’s association with Friday, pagan and savage but finally spiritually superior, has made Crusoe realize that the received assumptions regarding the civility of Europeans and the savagery of ‘natives’ cannot stand. Yet the exceptions to Euro-colonial assumptions regarding civility/barbarity are preceded by Friday’s disappearance, which itself paves the way for Crusoe’s newly expressed spirituality.

One challenge to the attribution of cannibalism to ‘savages’ occurs at the beginning of Crusoe’s second voyage from England. The first stop is Ireland, but from there, the wind drives their ship for several days until they see a French ship on fire in the middle of the sea. The few crew members of the French ship who are saved by Crusoe’s crew are so happy that they are “thrown into Extasies and a kind of Frenzy,” which

Crusoe likens to the “Exalties [of] poor Friday” upon meeting his father (19-22). This occurs just off Ireland, not in far away waters. When Crusoe meets another ship

18 All quotes are from Daniel Defoe, The Farther Adventures (London, 1719).

180

requiring rescue, his memory takes him to his shipwreck on the island. The rescued ship is damaged and lost for such a length of time that its occupants “were almost starv’d.”

Crusoe likens their condition to his own “coming on Shore in [his] island,” which he describes thus: “I had never the least Mouthful of Food, or any Prospect of pricing any; besides the hourly Apprehension I had of being made Food of other creatures” (27-30).

The creatures referred to here are wild beasts, but the apprehension does remind us of

Crusoe’s fear of being eaten by cannibals.

Cannibalism is introduced by one of the rescued members of the ship, an English maid. Though herself starved and fearing death, she is “broken hearted” at the sight of her mistress, who is on the verge of dying when rescued. The maid loves her mistress, yet confesses that despite her love and due to starvation, she “should certainly have eaten, with as much relish, and as unconcerned, as I ever did the flesh of any creature appointed for food.” I have added the emphasis here because this is an exception that indicates that cannibalism is not limited to the ‘savages’ in a state of nature but can be imagined by the supposedly civilized English. This is one of two places Anna Neill notes

Crusoe attaches to the civil English an attribute commonly associated with ‘savages.’

The second is the Madagascar episode described below. The driver of these exceptions is the fact that Crusoe has acquired a spirituality that brings him closer to Friday despite their conventional relations as colonizer and colonized. Crusoe’s first dream brings about a conversion experience and second prophetic dream leads a three-year religious retirement on the island in Friday’s company. Once Crusoe straddles the two societies, civil and ‘natural,’ he shows that the savagery and cannibalism associated with natural

181

societies can be attached to civil societies as well. This way, Crusoe can remove himself from both.

Crusoe then offers an example of Englishmen’s savagery. Crusoe’s ship has now arrived at Madagascar, an island where Crusoe and his crew can engage in “free converse, traffic, and commerce,” according to the law of nations. The conduct of commerce is interrupted, however, by a crew member’s “violat[ing] or debauch[ing] a young woman” of Madagascar. Crusoe considers this a violation of the law of nations, which the people of Madagascar respect. The violation of the law of nations costs the

Englishman his life. Instead of accepting punishment, the crew decide to kill all of the natives, who originally treat the crew “civilly,” Crusoe explains, describing the “heaps of bodies … all covered in blood and dust.” Crusoe’s disgust emphasizes both the inversion of the colonial categories, as here it is the English crew who are savage, and Crusoe’s spiritual or moral superiority. The disgust parallels his reaction to discovering human remains, which he supposes are victims of cannibalism, on his island. In Madagascar,

Crusoe not only refrains from participating in the massacre but protests it. One suggestion here is that the spirituality Crusoe has discovered on the island in Friday’s company is responsible for Crusoe’s moral superiority, one that pits him against members of his own crew and, significantly, his own nation. Another is the fact that Friday’s absence from this part of the story makes Crusoe the only witness to the massacre and hence the only one to express horror. Were Friday present, his innocence would have taken away from Crusoe’s moral superiority simply because it would have been shared; one can imagine Friday looking accusingly at Crusoe, associating him with his countrymen and their actions. Now that Friday is dead, it is up to Crusoe to play that

182

role. The process of Crusoe’s self-composition hence involves the appropriation of

Friday’s innocence and spirituality. The challenge now, however, is that extricating himself from civil society – European nations – has consequences for Crusoe.

In the process of exhibiting or appropriating a spirituality associated with Friday,

Crusoe does not realize that he aligns himself with natural or native society as he quits civil society. Indeed Crusoe’s expression of disgust of the crew’s behaviour leads to his expulsion from the ship. Crusoe and another English merchant then purchase a Dutch ship unaware that it is involved in a mutiny. They are pursued as pirates and are forced to remain “quite out of the Course of all European ships” and “Commerce of the

European nations,” a confirmation of Crusoe’s loss of status as civil man (235). Crusoe recognizes his new position when his ship is pursued by the European longboats: “I must confess,” he says, “to have been in the most dangerous Condition I ever was in thro’ all my past life” (227). The fear of death symbolises his fear of dying as an Englishman. It can be equated to a threat to his identity as civil man, and, ironically, its conditions resemble the threat a ‘native’ would feel when faced with gunpowder. This is a crucial part of the Crusoe narrative because it signals a complete departure from the parallels with the Ḥayy. The fear of dying as an Englishman also suggests that in his critique of the English crew’s behaviour in Madagascar, Crusoe has critiqued the colonial categories which form part of what it means to be English; once Crusoe reveals the categories to be false in practice, his allegiance to this ‘national’ identity is in question and his life is threatened.

Crusoe is like Āsāl, as he comes from the city-island state, but unlike Āsāl,

Crusoe wants to continue trading despite his more confident spirituality. Āsāl decides to

183

quit the city-island state to live in prayer for the remainder of his life in the uninhabited island under the tutelage of Ḥayy. Friday’s presence overshadows Crusoe’s who has just experienced a conversion experience, but as soon as Friday disappears, Crusoe is confident enough to express open disapproval to his crew’s behaviour in Madagascar.

While Āsāl can simply disappear with Ḥayy in the uninhabited island, Crusoe cannot readily do so even if he wants to. Part of the reason was that many nations were subject to European colonial mercantile expansion in the early modern period. This is in contrast to the twelfth-century Almohads, who, following the lead of earlier Muslim dynasties, were more concerned with what they thought of as ‘chasing away’ empires of somewhat equal power as opposed to venturing, in conquest, into what Europeans regarded as natural states. In other words, Āsāl feels safe in the uninhabited island because the adjacent city-island state has no interest in colonial expansion. Crusoe’s spiritualty, however, threatens his civil identity enough to potentially cost him his life. His return to

England, therefore, involves realigning himself; he must distance himself from natives while, at the same time, maintain the spiritual maturity he has acquired in Friday’s company. Since he refers to the three-year religious conversation on the island with

Friday as a ‘retirement,’ Crusoe would need to redefine the term.

The departure from the earlier use of the term ‘retirement’ appears in Crusoe’s chosen route back to England. Threatened by European ships, Crusoe decides to travel overland. After curious descriptions of his journey through China, Crusoe arrives at the territories of Muscovy, where the theme of retirement is broached again. This occurs in the town of Tobolsky, to which nobility, generals and courtiers who fall out of favour with the Czar are banished. Crusoe meets an exiled minister, a prince, who refers to his

184

exile as a retirement. The prince explains that his retirement brings his “Tempers down” and offers him a “Calm within, under the Weight of the greatest Storm without” (315).

This is why the prince rejects Crusoe’s offer of an escape from Tobolsky. The prince’s preference is similar to Āsāl’s; Āsāl prefers the uninhabited island to the city-island state because that is where he can continue to meditate as Ḥayy has taught him. The prince’s description of retirement brings the term closer to Ḥayy’s exercise of meditation but without a reference to vision. The prince declines Crusoe’s offer of an escape because, he explains, returning to his “former miserable greatness” would open the door for

“pride, ambition, avarice and luxury,” qualities whose absence Crusoe approvingly notes when he was solitary on the island. The prince’s association of city life with these negative characteristics is not unusual; though a common theme, Ḥayy puts these words in the mouth of a ‘natural,’ who concludes that passion, lust and love of material wealth blind the city-island state’s inhabitants. The prince explains the negative characteristics of city life in terms of the soul becoming a “slave to his own senses” (323), echoing another Ḥayy description. The reference to the senses reminds us of Ḥayy’s explanation that the route to direct, divine knowledge begins with freeing oneself from sense perception to give full liberty to the soul. The prince’s banishment, however, reminds us of Crusoe’s island as well. Though removed from his wealth and the “conveniences of life,” the prince asks that Crusoe think of him “only as a man, a human creature, not at all distinguish’d from another.” This levelling reminds us of Crusoe’s companionship with

Friday; the two belong to different categories, civil and ‘savage’ yet the retirement they enjoy in religious inquiry levels their ranks – one master, the other servant – and they become spiritual companions. Here in Tobolsky, however, the prince reassures Crusoe

185

that he has “something rescu’d from the shipwreck of our fortunes, which keeps us from the meer necessity of hunting for our food” (318). The absence of hunting signals the term’s disassociation with the natural state, as the retired prince maintains his identity as member of civil society.

The prince has access to the metaphoric shipwreck of his fortune while Crusoe had access to the contents of an actual wreckage. Nonetheless, the fact that Tobolsky is part of the territories of Muscovy makes it an interesting place for retirement. It is not at the centre of civil life, but it is not a natural state either. Being at the periphery of

Muscovy, Tobolsky seems to be a transitional state, which allows ‘retirement’ to move from its association with a natural state proper to a natural state-like place, one that is formally within the territories of Muscovy. The difference is important, as it signals a reversal in Crusoe’s mind. After describing and protesting the horror of his crew’s massacre of the inhabitants of Madagascar, Crusoe now counsels similar treatment of

Tartars under Muscovy’s rule (299). Crusoe’s counsel, which is almost out of character now, follows expressions of disgust at Tartars’ worship of an “idol made of wood, frightful as the devil” (295); we may recall that on island in The Adventures, Crusoe allows all, Protestant, Catholic and pagan, freedom of worship, a toleration not advocated even in England in the Commonwealth and Restoration periods. Yet here Crusoe expresses disgust at idolatry and counsels a massacre. The stress on idolatry points to a distinction between these two ‘natural’ states, one within the borders of Muscovy, a

Christian-European nation state, and the other in the state of nature.

Though the Tartars and the exiled Russian nobility in Tobolsky are under the rule of Muscovy, the Tartars enjoy some degree of freedom in terms of the arms they bear and

186

the gods they worship. The nobility exiled in Tobolsky, however, are completely within the control of the Czar and are Christian. The lines that are drawn demarcate, first, a natural state where retirement is possible, in a Tobolsky that is similar to Crusoe’s island, and, second, a place where retirement is not possible, where savage, pagan naturals live.

This is in spite of the fact that Crusoe himself allows pagans to live and worship freely on his island and that amongst the pagans is Friday’s father. Advocating killing every man, woman and child for worshipping an idol comes only a few pages before describing the exiled prince’s retirement and suggests that the usage of the term ‘retirement’ is in the process of changing. And indeed, that change is discussed at the beginning of the sequel,

Serious Reflections.

Serious Reflections19

Though the term ‘retirement’ appears in only few (but crucial) pages in The Adventures and in The Farther Adventures, the term is discussed at some length at the beginning of

Serious Reflections. In this final instalment, Robinson Crusoe reaches England, where he has time to reflect on his adventures. He begins with a definition of retirement: it is the

“exact Government of … Thoughts” in “Divine Contemplations,” requiring “Composure of Soul, uninterrupted by any extraordinary Motions or Disorders of the Passions” (6).

We might recall that once Ḥayy concludes that his essence is part of God’s

Essence and the two are immaterial, he decides to prohibit his senses from focusing on material objects. We might also recall that in the city-island state, Ḥayy complains that city folk are unable to receive his message about the spiritual significances of their religious law because they are ruled by their passions, illustrated in their lust for material

19 Quotations are from Daniel Defoe, Serious Reflections (London, 1720).

187

possessions. They are unable to take charge of their souls and they are ruled by their senses. Ḥayy’s meditation takes him in the opposite direction: freedom from the senses’ outward look to the soul’s internal gaze, what the Quaker Robert Barclay would call inward retirement. After circling the island and twirling like a dervish, Ḥayy decides to sit still in a cave. Ḥayy’s exercise of meditation is interrupted by movements of animals or rustles of leaves, but after a few attempts Ḥayy is finally able to govern his senses.

Once he removes “all sensible things, and corporeal faculties” from his attention, Ḥayy has a vision, which he describes thus:

The Heavens and the earth, and whatsoever is comprehended between

them … including himself … were removed from his Memory

and thoughts … whilst nothing remained with him besides that being,

which is the only one, and the True one, and of permanent Existence.

(131-132)

Ḥayy stresses here that the apprehension itself is not experienced through the senses.

Ḥayy’s description can hence be divided into two: one has to do with the process of banishing sensual perception of material objects and the other with the vision itself.

Crusoe’s description of retirement looks like a paraphrase of Ḥayy’s practice of meditation rather than visionary union. The focus of Ḥayy’s meditation is the nature of the vision itself, but his meditation includes a description of how one is transported into a different consciousness. Crusoe’s focus is the distinction between two kinds of solitude, an escape from the world, which he announces is “unlawful,” and meditation in the world, which he refers to as the retirement of the soul (11-12). Crusoe explains that proper retirement is possible when the soul is as “powerfully engag’d” as St. Paul’s.

188

Crusoe affirms that when St. Paul had a vision, which Crusoe presents in the context of retirement in the world, St. Paul was

Wrapt up, whether it be in to the third Heaven. Or to any Degree

of lower Exaltation: Such a Man may well say … Whether I was in

Body, or out of Body, I cannot tell. (12)

Despite the suggestive similarity between St. Paul’s and Ḥayy’s visions, an important difference remains. While Ḥayy’s meditation focuses on the end of the vision and knowledge of God, Crusoe’s presentation of St. Paul focuses on the journey itself. Even in The Adventures, on the island, though Crusoe does not represent Friday’s conversion,

Crusoe does say that it requires the Holy Spirit visiting Friday’s heart, suggesting a mystical experience in which God’s presence is felt. In this first section of Serious

Reflections, titled “Of Solitude,” Crusoe’s description of St. Paul’s vision involves self- composure that enables the ‘initiate’ to rise to the third heaven. And because here he begins his discussion of retirement – he says a man should “retire into himself” – with a denial of its customary association with a “retreat” from society (11), Crusoe’s new focus is on the will to initiate and maintain retirement. Like any good Protestant, Crusoe censures the “Hermit in his Cell, or a Solitair in the deserts of Arabia” and extends his disapproval to the Christian hermit who retires “into Abbeys, and Monasteries” (3-6) – a familiar Protestant critique. Crusoe’s logic is that the hermit needs solitude because he is unable to maintain “strict Retirement” in the midst of society; such a hermit does not have the will nor the resolve to do so. Retirement then requires a strong will, and hence the “exact Government of … Thoughts” becomes the focus of Crusoe’s definition of

189

retirement and also the point of his disagreement with the Ḥayy narrative, where solitude, as a retreat from society, is a necessary ingredient of retirement.

Besides the Protestant disapproval of the practice, there are two more reasons for

Crusoe’s departure from the association of retirement with the kind of perfect solitude he censures. While Ḥayy can focus on his experience of absorption into the Essence, such a focus would prove problematic for Crusoe as it was for the author Defoe and for Quakers.

It may be recalled that Defoe defended Quakers from the charge that they did not believe in Christ. This is because descriptions of the light within did not necessarily include a reference to a historic Christ. If the process of meditation and vision, which is the substance of the term ‘retirement,’ involves removing from oneself all material objects of the senses, the object of the soul’s apprehension must then be immaterial, abstract.

Ḥayy’s conclusion about the nature of God is that His is Essence is like his own essence, that is, immaterial or beyond the material, but for Crusoe, Christ is an object of worship.

Christ is a historic figure and cannot easily be the subject of a vision, where that subject is immaterial and abstract. Crusoe hence focuses instead on the process of vision.

Quakers speak about the spiritual experience in terms of the movement of the Holy Ghost in the believer’s heart.

The second reason for the departure is in the sequel, The Farther Adventures. The irony of the new definition of retirement is that Crusoe’s own spiritual development is made possible through religious conversations with Friday, conversations that are described as a retirement – in Crusoe’s words, “the retir’d Part of my Life” in The

Adventures (160). The change seems to be motivated by the desire to maintain a civil identity. Because the spirituality Crusoe gains on the island and in Friday’s company

190

proves threatening to his life and his identity as civil man, Crusoe needs to redefine this retirement in a way that enables him to maintain his civil identity. Hence he has to disassociate the practice of retirement from natural states; in Serious Reflections, he refers to it as a retirement of the soul (11). Crusoe’s own association with a natural state is signalled first through the inversion of colonial categories in the English maid’s desire to cannibalise her mistress. The second appears in his abhorrence of the massacre in

Madagascar. However, Crusoe’s association with a natural state means he must relinquish his civil identity, a move that results in an almost immediate threat to his life by European gunners and longboats in pursuit of his ship. This is when Crusoe begins his reversal; he ends his adventures by highlighting the Tartars’ savagery and paganism and by returning to the theme of retirement in Tobolsky.

The reversal, however, also signals the appropriation of Friday’s spiritual qualities. While on the island, Friday’s role as Crusoe’s spiritual guide is manifested in the first dream, where instead of an angel bearing God’s message, it is a ‘savage’ who speaks with some sort of divine authority. The relationship between the dream and God’s word becomes apparent after Friday’s conversion, as he sheds light on issues in the Bible of which Crusoe is ignorant. When Friday is removed from the narrative and Crusoe continues to exhibit a mature spirituality, this spirituality is still associated with a natural state; Crusoe’s crew evict him after his disapproval of the Madagascar massacre. This

‘eviction’ is confirmed in the subsequent pursuit and Crusoe’s admission that he can no longer travel in European maritime trading routes. Spirituality associated with a natural state threatens Crusoe’s membership in civil society and citizenship of a Euro-colonial nation. The colonial state’s reach is far and wide, however, and Crusoe has either to

191

relinquish membership in civil society or surrender his newly found identity. He chooses neither. He decides to redefine retirement in a way that removes its association with solitude as well as the natural state and natural society.

Crusoe/Defoe does not imagine ways of belonging other than those dictated by the English, European and Christian worlds in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In fact, Crusoe could have chosen to go native or become a renegade! A large number of English men and women were absorbed into native-American tribes of North

America and Muslim societies of North Africa. Their stories remain largely untold though we are starting to hear some of their voices – mostly the captivity narratives of those who returned. Nonetheless, Defoe takes the confrontation between his newly found spirituality and Euro-colonial ideology to what seems to be its logical conclusion, through imagining Crusoe’s farther adventures. The fact that Defoe is able to devise a more philosophical solution in re-placing retirement in the state of society speaks to the originality and authenticity of his engagement of the Ḥayy.

192

Conclusion

Considering England’s mixed relationship with Islam and North Africa, the early modern

English engagement of Ḥayy was positive. Nabil Matar describes the fear with which the

English received news of their countrymen and women’s captivity or conversion on

Mediterranean sea and land. Such fear seems to have coexisted with a positive perception of North African kingdoms (and the Ottoman Empire) as places of opportunity. The English viewed the Arabic (and Persian) manuscripts circulating in

England as containing valuable knowledge. These manuscripts addressed linguistic, geographic, historical and, most importantly, scientific topics: English natural philosophers used Arabic manuscripts to confirm their observations of natural phenomena and often believed that Arabic knowledge was necessary to continue scientific research. A mystical, philosophical narrative treatise, Ḥayy would seem to be outside the scientific arena, but Milton’s, Locke’s and Defoe’s engagement of Ḥayy is closer to natural philosophers’ use of translated Arabic manuscripts than to English polemical responses to translated Arabic works that contained religious material. Though

Ḥayy was identified as a Muslim text and spontaneous generation received some critical attention – in Milton’s case imaginative attention – it seems that Ḥayy did not produce a polemical religious response against Islam because it was not perceived as a defence even though in it Ibn Ṭufayl reclaims the spiritual aspects of Islam from the rationalistic spirit prevalent at his time. The absence of religious polemic together with its themes and narrative framework facilitated the Ḥayy’s positive reception in early modern England.

The preceding chapters suggest that English writers treated Ḥayy as part of their own heritage. Emily Kugler’s observation that seventeenth-century English Protestants

193

felt an anxiety about Islam’s proximity is interesting, as my analysis of Milton’s, Locke’s and Defoe’s engagement of Ḥayy, which is clearly identified as a text written by Muslim, shows they had little anxiety about using its themes and framework in their own works.

In their reliance on Ibn Ṭufayl, they engaged aspects of Ḥayy, which they knew belonged to a different time, place and culture, as a necessary step for the development and expression of their own ideas. Although they knew that Ibn Ṭufayl was Muslim, in their engagement of Ḥayy, Milton and Locke wrote and presented their works, Paradise Lost and the Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, with the announced purpose of explaining the ways of God to men and of detailing the limits of human knowledge, respectively. Defoe’s Crusoe trilogy reveals the violence of colonial practice and its effect on ‘naturals’ while appropriating these same naturals’ spirituality and removing it from the natural state into the state of society. Each of these writers saw in elements of

Ḥayy important parts of their own projects. I would thus add to Kugler’s observation that the engagements of Ḥayy I analyse in the previous chapters reveal that these writers considered the North African, Arabic work, consciously or not, as part of a common tradition and that this common tradition includes medieval European writing. I would like to emphasize that the three early modern English writers I analyse in the chapters above treat Ḥayy less as a ‘foreign’ text to be appropriated than one to be claimed and built upon. This may be why Ḥayy receives somewhat similar treatment by the Medieval

European writers whom Ben-Zaken studies. Ḥayy is not entirely new to early modern

Europe. To appreciate its place in early modern European culture, we need to better understand its circulation in earlier historical periods as well. As a mediating text, Ḥayy is unique in being claimed by different traditions and at different times. And in as much

194

as the works of Milton, Locke and Defoe are founding texts in the English tradition, the suggestion here is that Ḥayy becomes and should be studied as part of this tradition.

Were Ibn Ṭufayl’s work to be included in early modern and Restoration English studies, it would receive the status it deserves.

The early modern period includes appropriations of Ḥayy that have not been studied here, in particular Dryden’s Almanzor and Almahide, or The Conquest of

Granada (1669). This appropriation, however, involves the larger North African and

Iberian history to which Ḥayy belongs. Dryden’s Almanzor suggests early modern

English knowledge of medieval North African history as it combines the fourteenth- century Spanish conquest or re-conquest of Granada with earlier eleventh-century

Almoravid history and twelfth-century Almohad (philosophical) fiction, the Ḥayy.

Besides suggesting some knowledge of North African medieval history in early modern

England, the play presents its protagonist as a ‘noble savage’ – the first recorded instance of the use of the term, as Nawal Hassan (Ḥayy bin Yaqzān) and Maximilian Novak note

(“Primitivism,” 458).

While the protagonist’s name is similar to that of a sixteenth-century Moroccan king in correspondence with the English monarch at the time, as Nabil Matar notes

(Britain and Barbary 13-16), Almanzor’s preference to live a hermit’s life and his discovery of his father, the head of the Spanish army, may allude to the plot of the twelfth-century Ḥayy. Almanzor’s love for Almahide and his decision to return to the desert is likely a more interesting reference to one of the two founders of the earlier

Almoravid dynasty. The better-known Yousef bin Tashfīn controlled Morocco and al-

Andalus to the north, but his cousin Abubakr bin Umar, who originally delegated the

195

northward conquest to Tashfīn, moved southwards into the desert after building

Marrakesh. In fact, bin Umar divorced his wife, the famed Zeinab al-Nafzāwiya, leaving her in Marrakesh where she married bin Tashfīn. Dryden’s Almanzor can be interpreted as relying on two characters, one Almoravid and the other Almohad; a third is added when Almanzor discovers that his father is his adversary, the King of Spain’s general, and hence Almanzor switches sides. He is thus appropriated to represent the Spanish conquest or re-conquest. The irony is that the Spanish re-conquest of Granada from

North African rulers is attributed to North African figures: Dryden’s protagonist, who refers to the North African Almoravid and Almohad dynasties that had conquered Spain,

‘discovers’ a Spanish lineage or becomes Spanish, switches sides and plays the decisive role in the Spanish conquest. This switching of sides, which leads to Spanish victory over former conquering powers, is quite suggestive of the English perception of the role of North Africa and Arabic manuscripts in the rise of Europe. Staging Almoravid and

Almohad history and turning important figures into Spanish ones resulting in the Spanish re-conquest and its emergence as a major power suggests an English desire to do the same: ‘adopt’ Arabic knowledge, history, and figures to develop England’s aspirations.

The collection, translation and circulation of Arabic manuscripts in early modern England offered Arabic knowledge upon which mainly English natural philosophers could build: their projects eventually played a role in tilting the balance of power in favour of England vis-à-vis North African kingdoms and the Ottoman empire. In Dryden’s Almanzor’s case, the specific history and figure are taken from Almoravid history, Abubakr bin Omar and Zeinab al-Nafzāwiya, and Almohad fiction, Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy bin Yaqzān. The

196

common theme seems to be the asceticism and Platonic love that characterise the medieval, North African Almanzor.

Dryden’s Almanzor announces that he is a “noble savage” in a North African context that is appropriated for the Spanish re-conquest. This history opens interesting avenues of research, especially the connections it suggests between the North African

Almoravid dynasty and Spain and the relationship between these connections and the early modern English association of North Africa with royal slaves and the inhabitants of the New World. Could the “elegance, decorum and pomp” with which Moors rode through London in contrast to the way in which sub-Saharan and Indian slaves were paraded in that city in the sixteenth century (Matar Britain and Barbary, 16) have suggested to Dryden the medieval North African history? Could the different light in which the non-European North Africans actually appeared in the streets of London have suggested to Aphra Behn the characterization of Oronooko and critique of the institution of slavery? In ways that require further research, the extent of English knowledge of medieval North African history is important to English writers’ perception of their own place in the world vis-à-vis the medieval North African Islamic conquest of the Iberian peninsula, as well as the seventeenth-century maritime threat from North African kingdoms and the Ottoman empire, competition with Spain, and the developing representation of Amerindigenes and Africans.

Milton and Defoe’s engagement of Ḥayy raises the issue of the representation of women, and in this regard, the legendary Almoravid Zeinab al-Nafzāwiya, whom their contemporary Dryden dramatizes in Almanzor and Almahide, is an interesting figure.

The Almoravid Abubakr bin Omar, who appointed his cousin Yousef bin Tashfīn at the

197

head of an army and returned to the desert to continue military campaigns, reportedly first constructed the city of Marrakesh with the aid and counsel of his wife al-Nafzāwiya.

On his departure, bin Omar divorced her and suggested that she marry his cousin, bin

Tashfīn, whom bin Omar appointed governor of Marrakesh. With her counsel, bin

Tashfīn built a powerful and affluent state; when the ascetic bin Omar later visited

Marrakesh, he abdicated power to bin Tashfīn and returned to the desert. While the ascetic bin Omar decided to divorce al-Nafzāwiya because an urbanite like her would not get accustomed to life in the desert, her fame and bin Omar’s final decision to abdicate and return to the desert would have been very suggestive for someone like Ibn Ṭufayl.

The history suggests that bin Omar, who had to return to the desert to suppress a revolt, divorced al-Nafzāwiya because he believed that an ascetic life in the desert was not appropriate for her. The story would have suggested to Ibn Ṭufayl Ibn Sīnā’s Recital of

Salamān and Absāl, which I have identified as part of the of visionary stories John Milton probably engaged in Paradise Lost. In the Recital King Salamān’s wife, who is presented as a symbol of the material world, tempts her brother-in-law Absāl while the king is out at war. Absāl resists the temptation in order to develop spiritually. The parallel between al-Nafzāwiya and Salamān’s wife lies in their association with the material world and this world’s antithesis to an acetic life and spiritual development.

In Ibn Ṭufayl’s rendering, Āsāl leaves the city-island state governed by Prince

Salamān to return with Ḥayy to the uninhabited island to engage in spiritual meditation in the hopes of having a vision. One can speculate that Ibn Ṭufayl set Ḥayy in a far away island to avoid angering his Almohad patrons, as Āsāl and Ḥayy’s departure is somewhat similar to the Almoravid bin Omar’s; we recall that Ibn Ṭufayl presents Ḥayy to illustrate

198

the mystical experience he has had, and hence the suggestion is that bin Omar is a personal hero. Rather than include a female character that is representative of material wealth, Ibn Ṭufayl writes within a Sufi context where the journey of the soul is feminized and the natural state of the uninhabited island is also feminized. In fact, and as Ben-

Zaken has noted, Ḥayy’s surrogate mother, the gazelle, which nurtures Ḥayy physically and spiritually, is an allusion to al-Ghazālī’s Sufism.

In the early modern English texts that engage the Ḥayy, it would seem that the inward turn that accompanies spiritual development, whether as a result of the use of reason or a reward for the exercise of reason, involves turning away from the female figure. Milton’s Eve, for example, plays an important role in Paradise Lost, but she is mostly absent in Adam’s visions. Were Milton aware of the feminization of Ḥayy’s journey in search of God, a spiritual journey that includes reasoned steps and vision, he would have found it to be very interesting. The absence of a central female character is even more pronounced in Defoe’s The Adventures and the Farther Adventures. It is interesting that Dryden’s play ends with Almahide and Almanzor together at last but after his newly found Spanish ancestry and her conversion to Christianity, in what appears to be a familiar medieval European representation of Muslim wives converting to

Christianity. If, as I have mentioned, we consider Ḥayy as a mediating text that recalls the tradition to which Ḥayy belongs – and in Chapter Two, I noted the similarities between Paradise Lost and the Muslim ascension cycle – it would seem appropriate to conduct a cross-cultural study of Zeinab al-Nafzāwiya in relation to Ibn Sīnā and Ibn

Ṭufayl’s medieval, mystical-philosophical narratives, Milton’s epic poetry and Defoe’s fiction.

199

I conclude by speculating on how Defoe’s engagement of Ḥayy suggests parallels with Ibn Ṭufayl’s Sufism. Twelfth-century Marrakesh and seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century London are thriving political centres each with its own share of turbulence. While Ibn Ṭufayl, a Sufi sheikh, does not express anxiety, he does offer

Ḥayy as an antidote to those immersed in rationalist thinking and material wealth to effect a change similar to Ghazālī’s. Ghazālī abandoned his position as president of the leading university in Baghdad, the centre of the medieval world, and went on a spiritual journey.

On his return, Ghazālī critiqued the rational tools he had earlier taught and condemned their replacement of the spirituality implicit in religious worship. Though Ibn Ṭufayl also critiques rationalist religion and civil society in the Ḥayy, he practices Sufism in

Marrakesh, where he is a senior Almohad administrator, even though he sets his protagonist in a far-away island – an island described by Arab geographers and travellers

(Ben-Zaken 30-31). Ibn Ṭufayl presents the island as uninhabited in order to describe his spiritual experience, but the city of Marrakesh, the centre of power at the heart of the

Almohad dynasty, is where Ibn Ṭufayl practices Sufi meditation and abandons worldly concerns to give expression to a spirituality that has as its seat the soul.

Probably without access to the details of Ghazālī and Ibn Ṭufayl’s personal lives,

Defoe imagines a similar manoeuvre to Ibn Ṭufayl’s through Crusoe. The Crusoe trilogy’s conclusion does not simply critique the ways in which political theory conceals the violence inherent in the practice of colonialism. Defoe defines retirement as governing oneself in the face of the distraction posed by the material world. This redefinition allows Defoe to safeguard Crusoe’s spiritual identity against a rationally conceived natural law. Like the withdrawal to the interior of the island and the

200

withdrawal from maritime travel, Crusoe advocates retirement at home, within yet away from a turbulent society and into an inner spiritual world. He advocates a state of continuous retirement of the mind in divine contemplation in what Novak has referred to as an escape from the “hurried life” of London. On his arrival in England, Crusoe points to a “longer journey than all” the ones mentioned in his adventures: learning the “value of retirement, and the blessing of ending our life in peace” at home in London (The Farther

Adventures 353). It is interesting that this ‘longer’ journey of retirement comes at the end of the adventures, making the retirement in the island episode and at Tobolsky necessary imaginative journeys that become metaphors for the retirement of the mind or heart.

There is also similarity here between Defoe’s Crusoe and Ibn Sīnā’s Recital of Salamān and Absāl, which Ibn Ṭufayl alludes to in the Ḥayy. In the Recital, the characters are personifications of different aspects of ourselves and the plot marks the kinds of spiritual journeys one must make. Defoe’s Crusoe can be read in a similar way. Ibn Sīnā’s and

Ibn Ṭufayl’s Salamān and Absāl/Āsāl can be seen as representing the social-adventuring and spiritual sides of Crusoe’s character. Crusoe has decided to safeguard his spirituality, his inner Absāl.

With the exception of Locke, early modern engagements of Ḥayy seemed to have sought similar assurance: the Quakers, Ashwell, Milton, and Defoe sought assurance that transcendent spirituality was still accessible to them. Locke did seek solace, but he sought it in the interpretation of scripture based on reason. Nonetheless Locke’s emphasis on interpretation reveals a need for spiritual solace similar to the one expressed by his contemporaries at a time of colonial expansion and political, social and religious turbulence at home.

201

Works Consulted

Primary Sources

A Sor Juana Anthology. Transl. Alan S. Troublood. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Al-Andalusy, Ibn Aby Jamra. Bahjat al-Nufūs. Cairo: al-Sidq, 1929.

Al-Bili, Osman S.A. Ismail. Introduction. The Perfect Guide to the Sciences of the Quran, by Imām Jalāl-al-Dīn ‘Abd al-Rahman al- Suyūṭī. Transl. Hamid Algar, Michael Schub, and Ayman Abdel Haleem, and reviewed by al-Bili Reading: Garnet Publishing, 2011.

Al-Dahaby, Shams-al-Dīn. Siyar A‘lām al-Nubalā. Vol. 20. Beirut: Mu’assasat al-Risala, 1996.

Al-Ghazālī. Ihyā Ulum Al-Dīn (Revival of Religious Sciences). Beirut: Academic International, 2005. - - -. Mishkāt al-Anwār [Niche of Lights]. Beirut: Alam al-Kutub, 1986. - - -. Al-Munqiz min al-Dalāl [Deliverance from Misguidance]. Beirut: Andalus Press, 1967.

Al-Laknawi, Abd al-Ḥayy. Introduction. The Muwatta of Imām Muhammad by Mālik ibn Anas. Turath Publishing: London, 2004. 1-50.

Ashwell, George. Preface. The History of Hai Eb’n Yockdan, An Indian Prince. By Abubakr Ibn Tufayl. Transl. Ashwell. London, 1686. - - -. Theologia Ruris. The History of Hai Eb’n Yockdan, An Indian Prince. By Abubakr Ibn Tufayl. Transl. Ashwell. London, 1686.

Authorized English Bible. London, 1640.

Barclay, Robert. An Apology for the True Christian Divinity. London, 1678. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Behn, Aphra. Abdelazar (1676). The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol II. Eds. Montague Summers and J. Todd. New York: Benjamin Bloom, 1967.

Boyle, Roger. Mustapha. London: 1665. - - -. The History of Henry the Fifth. London: 1664.

Defoe, Daniel. The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. London: S.O. Beeton, 1862. - - - . The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. London, 1719. - - -. Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe London, 1720. - - -. Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy. London, 1718.

202

Dryden, John. The Conquest of Granada. London, 1672.

Fox, George. The Journal. Ed. Nigel Smith. London: Penguin, 1998.

Grancian, Baltazar. The Spanish Critic (El Criticon). Transl. Paul Rycault. 1681.

The Holy Bible: Consisting of the Old Testament and the New. Authorized English Version. London, 1640.

Ibn al-Athīr, Ali. Al-Kāmil Fil-Tarīkh [The Complete History]. Vol. 9. Beirut: Dar-al-Kitub Al-Alamiyya, 2003.

Ibn Khaldun, Abu Zayd. Tarikh Ibn Khaldun [History of Ibn Khaldun]. Vol. 6. Beirut: Dar-al-Fikr wal-Tiba‘a, 2000.

Ibn Tufayl, Abubakr. The History of Hai Eb’n Yockdan, an Indian Prince. Transl. George Ashwell. London, 1686.

Ibn Tufayl, Abu Bakr. The History of Ḥayy bin Yaqzān. Trans. Simon Ockley ed. A.S. Fulton. Frederick A. Stokes: New York, 1929.

Locke, John. Reasonableness of Christianity. London: 1696. - - -. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Chicago, Il.: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952. - - -. Two Treatises of Government. Ed. Peter Laslett. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 2004.

Milton, John. The Major Works. Eds. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg Oxford University Press: New York, 2003.

Montaigne, Michel de. The Essays of Montaigne. Transl. John Florio. London, 1603.

The Qur’an. Transl. M.A.S. Abdel Haleem. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. Transl. Margaret Sayers Peden. London: Penguin, 1997.

The Adventures of (Mr. T.S.), An English Merchant. London, 1670.

Secondary Sources

Akman, H. Beyazit. “The Turk’s Encounter with Defoe.” Digital Defoe 1:1 (Spring 2009): 76-85.

Allen, Don Cameron. “Milton’s Winged Serpents.” Modern Language Notes, 59

203

(1944): 537-538.

Al-Bili, Osman S.A. Ismail. Prelude to the Generals: A Study of Some Aspects of al-Mu‘tasim’s Rule. Reading: Ithaca Press, 2001. - - -. Thulathiyat al-hukm fi-al-‘usūr al-‘abbāsiya: al-khilāfa, wal-sulta, wal-dawla (The Caliphate, Power and the State in the Abbāsid Period). Beirut: Sharikat al-Matbu‘at, 2004.

Alpers, Paul. What is Pastoral? Chicago: Chicago UP, 1996.

Altrocchi, Rudolph. “Dante and Tufail.” Ithaca 15:3 (Sep., 1938) 125-128.

Aravamudan, Srinivas. “East-West Fiction as World Literature: The Hayy Problem Reconfigured.” Eighteenth-Century Studies. 47: 2 (Winter 2014): 195-231.

Armstrong, Nancy and Tennenhouse, Leonard. “The Interior Difference: A Brief Geneology of Dreams, 1650-1717.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 23:4 (Summer, 1990): 458-478.

Attar, Samar. The Vital Roots of European Thought: Ibn Tufayl’s Influence on Modern Western Thought. Lenham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010.

Austin, Michael. “Saul and the Social Contract: Constructions of 1 Samuel 8-11 Cowley’s ‘Davideis’ and Defoe’s ‘Jure Divino.’” Papers on Language and Literature 32:4 (Fall 1996): 410+. Academic OneFile. Web. 23 Mar. 2014.

Barud, Muhmud. The Shipwrecked Sailor in Arabic and Western Literature: Ibn Tufayl and His Influence on European Writers. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2012.

Bashier, H. Salman. The Story of Islamic Philosophy, Ibn Tufayl, Ibn al-‘Arabi, and Others on the Limit between Naturalism and Traditionalism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011.

Bell, Ian. “King Crusoe: Locke’s Political Theory in Robinson Crusoe,” English Studies 69:1 (1988): 27-36.

Black, Allan. “Avicenna in the Age of Columbus.” Columbus and the New World. Eds. Joseph C. Schnaubelt and Frederick Van Fleteren. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1998. 19-40.

Ben-Zaken, Avner. Reading ‘Ḥayy Ibn-Yaqzān’: A Cross-Cultural History of Auto- Didacticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2011.

Blitzer, Lloyd. “The ‘Indian Prince’ in Miracle Arguments in Hume and His Predecessors and Early Critics,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 31:3 (1998): 175-230.

204

Bolton, Martha Brandt. “Substances, Substrata, and Names of Substances in Locke’s Essay,” Locke, ed. Vere Chappell. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. 106-128.

Boswell, Jackson Campbell. Milton’s Library: A Catalogue of the Remains of John Milton’s Library. New York: Garland Pub., 1975.

Braithwaite, William C. The Beginnings of Quakerism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1961.

Burgel, J.C. “Ibn Ṭufayl and his Ḥayy bin Yaqzān: A Turning Point in Arabic Philosophical Writing.” The Legacy of Muslim Spain. Ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1994. 830-848.

Burian, Ohran. “Interest in the English in Turkey as Reflected in English Literature Of Renaissance.” Oriens 5:2 (Dec. 31, 1952): 209-229.

Coleman, Janet. Piers Plowman and the Moderni. Roma: Edzioni di storia e letterature, 1981.

Conrad, Lawrence I. “Introduction: the World of Ibn Ṭufayl.” The World of Ibn Ṭufayl: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Ed. Conrad. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996. 1-37.

Cornell, Vincent J. “Ḥayy in the Land of Absal: Ibn Ṭufayl and Sufism in the Western Maghrib During the Muwahhid Era.” The World of Ibn Ṭufayl: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Ed. Lawrence I. Conrad. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996. 133-164. - - -. “Understanding is the Mother of Ability: Responsibility and Action in the Doctrine of Ibn Tūmart.” Studia Islamica 66 (1987) 71-103.

Dahiyat, Eid Abdallah. Once Upon the Orient Wave: Milton and the Arab Muslim World. Hesperus Press, 2012.

Dandash, Ismat A. Adhwa Jadida Ala Al-Murabitin [New Light on the Almoravids]. Beirut: Dar-al-Gharb al-Islami Press, 1991.

Daniels, Clay. “Milton’s Neo-Platonic Angel?” Studies in English Literature, 1500- 1900 44:1 (Winter, 2004): 173-188.

De Montequin, F.A. “Muslim Spain and the Maghrib: The Artistic Relationship in The Almoravid and Almohad Periods.” Bulletin (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies) 14:2 (1987): 162-171.

Dunlop, D.M. “The Diwan Attributed to Ibn Bajja (Avenpace).” Bulletin of SOAS 14:3 (1952): 463-477.

Duran, Angelica. The Age of Milton and the Scientific Revolution. Pittsburgh, Penn.:

205

Duquesne University Press, 2007.

Ekhtiar, Shelly. “Ḥayy ibn Yaqzān: the Eighteenth-Century Reception of an Oriental Self-Taught Philosopher.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 302 (1992): 217-245.

Farr, James. “Locke, ‘Some Americans,’ and the Discourse on ‘Carolina,’” Locke Studies 19 (2009): 19-96.

Feingold, Mordechai. “Patrons and Professors: The Origins and Motives for the Endowment of University Chairs – in Particular the Laudian Professorship of Arabic.” The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth- Century England. Ed. G.A. Russell. New York: E.J. Brill, 1994. 109-127.

Feiro, Maribel. “Almoravids.” Medieval Islamic Civilization. Volume 1. Ed. Josef W. Meri. London: Routledge, 2006.

Fletcher, Madeline. “Al-Anadalus and North Africa in the Almohad Ideology.” The Legacy of Muslim Spain. Ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1994. 235-258.

Fromherz, Allen J. The Almohads: The Rise of An Islamic Empire. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Gabrieli, Francesco. “The Transmission of Learning and Literary Influences to Western Europe” in The Cambridge History of Islam. Volume 2B. Eds. P.M. Holt, Ann K.S. Lambton, and Bernard Lewis. Cambridge: UP, 2008. 851-889. - - -. “New Light on Dante and Islam.” East and West 4:3 (October, 1953).

Gilbert, Allan. “Milton’s Textbook Astronomy.” PMLA 38:9 (1923): 297-307.

Goffman. “Negotiating with the Rennaisance State: the Ottoman Empire and the New Diplomacy.” The Early Modern Ottomans, Remapping the Empire. Eds. Virginia Asken and Daniel Goffman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 61-74.

Griffel, Frank. “Ibn Tūmart’s Rational Proof of God’s Existence and Unity and His Connections the Nizamiyya Madrasa in Baghdad.” Los Almohades: prolemas y perpectivas. Volume 2. Eds. Patrice Cressier, Maribel Fierro, and Louis Molina. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigationes Cientificas, 2005. 753-813.

Grady, Frank. Representing Righteous Heathens in Late Medieval England. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Guerrini, Anita. “The Ethics of Animal Experimentation in Seventeenth-Century England.” Journal of the History of Ideas 50: 3 (Jul.-Sep., 1989): 391-407.

206

Gutas, Dimitri. “Ibn Ṭufayl on Ibn Sīnā’s Eastern Philosophy.” Oriens 34 (1994) 222-241. - - -. “On Graeco-Arabic Epistolary ‘Novels’.” Middle Eastern Literatures 12:1 (April 2009): 59-70.

Hahn, Thomas. “The Indian Tradition in Western Medieval Intellectual History.” Viator 9 (1978): 213-34.

Hall, M.B. “Arabic Learning in the Correspondence of the Royal Society 1660-1677.” The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England. Ed. G.A. Russell. New York: E.J. Brill, 1994. 147-157.

Hamilton, Alastair. “The English Interest in the Arabic-Speaking Christians.” The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England. Ed. G.A. Russell. New York: E.J. Brill, 1994. 30-53. - - -. William Bedwell: the Arabist. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1985.

Hassan, Nawal M. Ḥayy ibn Yaqzān and Robinson Crusoe. Baghdad: Al Rashid House for Publication, Iraqi Ministry of Culture and Information, 1980. - - -. “A Study of Eighteenth-Century Plagiarism.” Islamic Quarterly 27 (1983): 30-48.

Hasanali, Parveen. Texts, Translators, Transmissons: ‘Ḥayy Ibn Yaqzān’ and Its Reception in Muslim, Judaic and Christian Mileux. Diss. McGill U, 1996.

Hawi, Sami. “Ibn Tufayl’s Appraisal of His Predecessors and Their Influence on His Thought.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 7 (1967): 91-2. - - -. Islamic Naturalism and Mysticism. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 1974. - - -. “Ibn Tufayl: On the Existence of God and His Attributes.” Journal of the American Oriental Society. 95:1 (Jan.-Mar., 1975): 58-67.

Holt, P.M. “The Background to Arabic Studies in Seventeenth-Century England.” The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England. Ed. G.A. Russell. New York: E.J. Brill, 1994. 20-29 - - -. “An Oxford Arabist: Edward Pococke (1604-1691).” Ed. Holt. Studies in the History of the Near East. London: Frank Cass, 1973. 3-26.

Hourani, George F. “The Principal Subject of Ibn Tufayl’s Ḥayy Ibn Yaqzān.” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 15:1 (Jan., 1956): 40-46.

Hunter, J. Paul. “Friday as a Convert: Defoe and the Accounts of the Indian Missionaries.” The Review of English Studies 14:55 (Aug., 1963): 243-248.

Hughes, Aaron. “Me‘raj and the Language of Legitimation in the Medieval Islamic and Jewish Philosophical Traditions: A Case Study of Avicenna and Abraham ibn Ezra.” The Prophet’s Ascension: Cross-cultural Encounters with the Islamic Mi‘raj Tales. Eds. Christiane J. Gruber and Frederick Stephen Colby.

207

Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2010. 172-191.

Inati, Shams. Ibn Sīnā and Mysticism: Remarks and Admonitions Part IV. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

Kaim, Charles Andrew. Milton’s God and the Sacred Imagination. Diss. U British Columbia, 2004.

Killan, Carolyn G. “The Development of Western Grammars of Arabic.” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 43:3 (Jul., 1984): 223-230.

Kruk, Remke. “An 18th-Century Descendant of Ḥayy ibn Yaqzān and Robinson Crusoe: Don Antonio de Trezzenio” Arabica 34:3 (Nov., 1987): 357-365.

Kugler, Emily. Sway of the Ottoman Empire on English Identity in the Long Eighteenth Century. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2012.

Lagree, Jacqueline. “Grotius: Natural Law and Natural Religion.” Religion, Reason and Nature in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Robert Crocker. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001. 17-40.

Le Tourneau, Roger. The Almohad Movement in North Africa in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1969.

Levtzion, Nehemia. “The Western Maghrib and Sudan.” The Cambridge History of Africa, 1050-1600. Vol. 3. Eds. J.D. Fage and Roland Oliver. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977. 331-462.

Lieb, Michael. “Adam’s Story: Testimony and Transition in Paradise Lost” Living Texts: Interpreting Milton. Eds. Krisin A. Pruitt and Charles W. Durham. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehenna UP, 2000. 21-47.

Lowes, John Livingston. The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination. New York: Houghton Miffli, 1927.

Mahmud, A. Haleem. Al-Tasawwuf ind Ibn Sīnā. Cairo: al-Angelo Press, 1970.

Magdelino, Paul. “The Road to Baghdad.” Byzantium in the Ninth Century: Dead or Alive? Ed. Leslie Brubaker. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1998. 195-213.

Matar, Nabil. “Some Notes on George Fox and Islam,” Journal of the Society of the Friends Historical Society, 55 (1989): 271-276. - - -. Islam in Britain, 1558-1685. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. - - -. Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery. New York: Columbia UP, 1999.

208

- - -. Britain and Barbary, 1589-1689. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. - - -. Europe Through Arab Eyes, 1578-1727. New York: Columbia UP, 2009.

McCann, Edwin. “Locke on Substance.” The Cambridge Companion to Locke’s Essay Concerning Humane Understanding. Ed. Lex Newman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 157-191.

Menocal, Maria Rosa. Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. New York: Black Ray Books, 2001.

Mercier, Raymond. “English Orientalists and Mathematical Astronomy.” The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England. Ed. G.A. Russell. New York: E.J. Brill, 1994. 158-214.

Moore, Michael S. The Balaam Traditions, Their Character and Development Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990.

Moore, John Robert. “Defoe’s Religious Sect.” The Review of English Studies. 17:68 (Oct., 1941): 461-467.

Nahas, Michael. “A Translation of Ḥayy Ibn Yaqzān by the Elder Edward Pococke (1604-1691).” Journal of Arabic Literature 16 (1985): 88-90.

Nelson, Lynn H. “Christian-Muslim Relations in Eleventh-Century Spain” Military Affairs 43-4 (Dec. 1979): 195-198.

Newman, Lex. “Locke on the Idea of Substratum,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 81 (Sept. 2000): 291-324.

Newman, William. “Arabo-Latin Forgeries: The Case of the Summa perfectionis.” The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England. Ed. G.A. Russell. New York: E.J. Brill, 1994. 278-296.

Nicolson, Marjorie. “Early Stage of Cartesianism in England.” Studies in Philology 26:3 (Jul., 1929): 356-374.

Niell, Anna. “Crusoe’s Farther Adventures: Discovery, Trade and the Law of Nations.” The Eighteenth Century 38:3 (1997): 213-230.

Novak, Maximillian Novak. “Robinson Crusoe’s Fear and the Search for Natural Man.” Modern Philology 58:4 (May, 1961): 238-245. - - -. Daniel Defoe, Master of Fictions. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. - - -. “Crusoe the King and the Political Evolution of His Island,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 2:3 (Summer 1961): 337-350. - - -. “Primitivism.” The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 4,

209

The Eighteenth Century. Eds. H.B. Nisbet and Claude Rowson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 456-469.

Nyquist, Mary. “The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity in the Divorce Tracts and Paradise Lost.” Re-Membering Milton. Eds. Mary Nyquist and Margaret E. Ferguson. New York: Methuen, 1987. 99-127 - - -. “Contemporary Ancestors of de Bry, Hobbes, and Milton,” University of Toronto Quarterly 77.3 (2008): 837-875. - - -. “Hobbes, Slavery, and Despotical Rule.” Representations 106 (2009): 1-33.

O’Shea, Stephen. The Sea of Faith. New York: Walker & Company, 2006.

Pagden Anthony. The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology. New York: Cambridge UP, 1982. - - -. “Ius et Factum: Text and Experience in the Writings of Bartolome de Las Casas.” Representations 33, Special Issue: The New World (Winter, 1991): 147-162. - - -. European Encounters with the New World. New Haven, Yale UP, 1993. - - -. Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire. New Haven, Conn.,: Yale UP, 1995.

Pastor, Antonio. The Idea of Robinson Crusoe. Watford: Gongora Press, 1930.

Patai, Raphael. The Jewish Mind. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1977.

Parker, Kim Ian. The Biblical Politics of John Locke. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2004.

Paz, Octavio. Forward. A Sor Juana Anthology. Transl. Alan Trueblood. Cambridge, MA: Friends and Fellows of Harvard College, 1988.

Piccioto, Joanna. “Reforming the Garden: The Experimentalist Eden and Paradise Lost.” ELH 72:1 (Sring 2005): 23-78.

Quiggle, Doyle R., Jr. “Ibn Ṭufayl’s ‘Ḥayy ibn Yaqzān’ in New England: A Spanish- Islamic Tale in Cotton Mather’s ‘Christian Philosopher’?” Arizona Quarterly 64:2 (Summer 2008): 1-32.

Rafiabadi, Hameed Nassim. Emerging from Darkness. New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2002. - - -. Muslim Science, Philosophy and Mysticism. New Delhi: Sarup and Sons, 2001.

Reilly, Matthew. “No eye has seen, or ear heard’: Arabic Sources for Quaker Subjectivity in Unca Eliza Winkfield’s The Female American.” Eighteenth- Century Studies 44:2 (Winter 2011) 261-283.

Rogers, John. The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1996.

210

Roper, Geoffrey. “Arabic Printing and Publishing in England before 1820.” Bulletin (British Society of Middle Eastern Studies) 12 (1985): 12-32.

Rosenblatt, Jason Philip. Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Russell, G.A. Introduction. The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England. Ed. G.A. Russell. New York: E.J. Brill, 1994. - - -. “The Impact of Philosophus Autodidactus: Pocockes, John Locke and the Society of Friends.” The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth- Century England. Ed. Russell. New York: E.J. Brill, 1994. 224-263. - - -. “The Role of Ibn Tufayl, A Moorish Physician, in the Discovery of Childhood in Seventeenth-Century England.” Childcare Through the Centuries Eds. J. Cule and T. Turner. Cardiff: STS Publication for the British Society for the History of Medicine, 1986. 166-178.

Al-Sallaby, Ali M. Dawlatay al-Murabitin wal-Muwahidin fy al-Maghreb al-Araby [Almoravid and Almohad States in the Arab Maghreb] Beirut: Dar al-Ma‘rifah, 2007.

Salmon, Vivian. “Arabists and Linguists in Seventeenth-Century England.” The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England. Ed. G.A. Russell. New York: E.J. Brill, 1994. 54-69.

Schildgen, Brenda Deen. “Dante and the Indus.” Dante Studies 111 (1993): 177-193.

Paul Semonin, “The Almoravid Movement in the Western Sudan: A Review of the Evidence.” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 7 (1964): 42-59.

Shapin, Steven. “The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England.” Isis 79:3, A Special Issue on Artefact and Experiment (Sep., 1988): 373- 404.

Simmons, L.M. “Confession of Faith of the Almohades.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 3:2 (Jan., 1891): 360-363.

Aravamudan, Srinivas. “East-West Fiction as World Literature: The Hayy Problem Reconfigured.” Eighteenth-Century Studies. 47: 2 (Winter 2014): 195-231.

Stevens, Paul. Imagination and the Presence of Shakespeare in Paradise Lost Madison: University of Wisconcin Press, 1985.

Starr, G.A. Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965.

Stroumsa, Sarah. “Avicenna’s Philosophical Stories: Aristotle’s Poetics Reinterpreted.” Arabica 39:2 (Jul. 1992): 183-206.

211

Tantawy, Sayyid. Al-Qissa fi-l-Quran al-Karim [The Story in the Holy Quran]. Cairo: Al-Ma‘arif Press, 1995.

Taylor, Ivan E. “John Milton’s view on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.” The Modern Language Journal 33:7 (Nov., 1949): 528-536.

Tilman, Nagel. The History of Islamic Theology from Muhammad to the Present. Princeton, NJ: Markus Weiner Publishers, 2000.

Toomer, G.J. Eastern Wisdome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth- Century England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Tuck, Richard. Natural Rights Theories, Their Origin and Development Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Wakefield, Colin “Arabic Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library: The Seventeenth-Century Collections.” The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth- Century England. Ed. G.A. Russell. New York: E.J. Brill, 1994. 128-146.

Waswo, Richard. “The Formation of Natural Law to Justify Colonialism, 1539-1689.” New Literary History 27.4 (1996): 743-759.

Watt, W. Montgommery and Catchia, Pierre. A History of Islamic Spain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996.

Webster, Tom. “Writing to Redundancy: Approaches to Spiritual Journals and Early Modern Spirituality.” The Historical Journal 39:1 (Mar., 1996): 33-56.

West, Charles. Daniel Defoe, A Biography. New York: Carol & Graf Publishers, 1998.

West, Richard. Daniel Defoe, the Life and Strange, Surprising Adventures. New York: Carrol & Graff Publishers, 2000.

212