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The Journey of the Soul
by Ibn Tufail & translation by Dr Riad Kocache
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The Story of Hai bin Yaqzan is a truly remarkable product of 12th-century Moorish Spain. Professor Philip Hitti, in his History of the Arabs, characterizes the work as "one of the most delightful and original in the literature of the Middle Ages." It is widely regarded as the prototype for Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Best described, perhaps, as a philosophical romance, it tells the story of a young man, cast upon a deserted island as an infant, suckled and reared by a doe, who succeeds by his own efforts in fitting himself for life in his natural environment. The author, bin Tufail, was one of the outstanding philosophers and scientists of his day, and hence many strands are woven into the fabric of the tale.…
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"This is a novella which was written in the 12th century. Ibn Tufail was born in a town called Guadix near Granada and he was Ibn Rushd’s teacher who was a great philosopher. I think it is an extraordinary book. Many people see it as one of the inspirations behind Robinson Crusoe . There was a translation done of it from the Arabic into Latin just a few years before Defoe wrote Crusoe and there are various parallels between the two books. The story is that there is a boy who is the son of a princess and for various reasons the princess has to cast him off and she sets him afloat in a box and he arrives at an island and survives. The story is essentially how the boy becomes a young man and then a fully grown adult and his discovery of the world around him with no one to teach him. So you see this autodidactic journey that he goes on, first of all exploring the outer world around him, the animals and plants. And this journey starts turning into an inner journey and becomes essentially a story of a man’s journey towards ultimate truth. For me it’s really interesting because there is something quite modern about this book that was written in the 12th century – he talks about vivisection and how blood flows through the body. There is almost an understanding of evolution there. And also I think it is an incredible work of imagination. All the books that I have chosen are examples of the power of the Spanish imagination. Although Tufail starts with the scientific he ends up in the mystical, so for me this is a good kicking-off point. You have four Spaniards and one Englishman. Tufail is a mystic and Lorca is a poet and Buñuel, who is my next choice, is a visionary eccentric filmmaker – again working very much from the imagination."