Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale

by Ibn Tufail

What Eastern wisdom could achieve that had been so rare in Andalusia and in Peripatetic thought was a philosophical approach to God and the mystic experience. Ibn Tufayl’s complaint is that, up to his own time, almost all the intelligence in his part of the world had been devoted to logic and mathematics. The possible objects of intellectual endeavor seemed to be divided, as one of his predecessors put it, between unattainable truths and readily available trivia.75 Such a position cannot destroy religion if there is a dominant tradition of faith to oppose it; but it suffocates rational religion by isolating the religious sphere from the intellectual. It was an escape from the stifling positivism of these rigid dichotomies—fact and tautology, reason and religion—that Ibn Tufayl sought in his oriental philosophy.