Ibn Tufayl is a philosopher, astronomer, physician, mathematician born in Wadi-Ach in 1110 in the present-day city of Cadiz in Andalusia, during the reign of the Moroccan Almohad dynasty. Little is known of his life as an author; most of his works having unfortunately been lost, we are left with a few versified pieces, of contested authenticity, recounting events of the period in which he lived. His prodigious philosophical novel, Hayy Ben Yaqdhan, is the only manuscript to have been passed down to posterity, and the one that made his glory. His narrative tells the story of a young boy, Hayy Ben Yaqdhan, the sole inhabitant of an island completely untouched by civilization.
Hayy Ben Yaqdhan, considered by some a forerunner of the Age of Enlightenment, will have a significant influence on the European world. Edward Pococke, the famous British orientalist and professor at Oxford, undertook the translation of his masterpiece in 1671. Ibn Tufayl’s work will be a major source of inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The famous story of Tarzan is, of course, directly inspired by the child Hayy Ben Yaqdhan.
Tarzan the wise man is the afterword to Ibn Tufayl’s Self-Taught Philosopher. — Severine Auffret
Lessing and the author of "Life of Pi", Martel, were manifestly influenced by the literature and the philosophy of Ibn Tufayl. Considered the very first philosophical novel in literary history and one of the first to conceptualize the notions of the self-education of a being cut off from civilization, of the feral child and of the tabula rasa, it will provide Voltaire with material for his philosophical tales. Baltasar Gracian, for his Criticon, and thinkers as prestigious as Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, John Locke, Thomas More and Isaac Newton will be marked by this masterful work.
A political actor within the empire, from 1163 he becomes the physician and advisor to the Almohad sultan Abu Yaqub Yusuf in the then capital of the empire, Marrakech. He will also have been the protector of Ibn Rochd (Averroes) and the instructor of the famous astronomer Nur-Ed-Din Al Betrugi. He dies in 1185 in Marrakech, and the sources attest to the presence of the Moroccan caliph at his funeral, striking proof of the importance of this polymath’s achievements.
