Opinion
<https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion>
The Muslims Who Inspired Spinoza, Locke and Defoe
A novel written by a 12th-century Arab writer about a boy alone on an
island influenced the Daniel Defoe classic ‘Robinson Crusoe.’
Mustafa Akyol
<https://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/mustafa_akyol/index.html>
ByMustafa Akyol
<https://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/mustafa_akyol/index.html>
Mr. Akyol is a contributing Op-Ed writer.
NYT, April 5, 2021,3:14 p.m. ET
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Credit...Illustration by Arsh Raziuddin/The New York Times
In this age of anxiety, anger and contestations between the West and the
Islamic world, many epoch-shaping stories of intellectual exchanges
between our cultures are often forgotten.
A powerful example comes from literature. Millions of Christian, Jewish
and Muslim readers across the world have read that famed tale of the man
stranded alone on an island: “Robinson Crusoe” by Daniel Defoe, the
18th-century British pamphleteer, political activist and novelist.
Few know that in 1708, 11 years before Defoe wrote his celebrated novel,
Simon Ockley, an Orientalist scholar at Cambridge University, translated
and published a 12th-century Arabic novel, “Hayy ibn Yaqzan,”//or
“Alive, the Son of Awake,” by Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Tufayl, an
Andalusian-Arab polymath. Writing about the influence ofIbn Tufayl’s
novel
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/mar/22/featuresreviews.guardianreview1>on
Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe,” Martin Wainwright, a former Guardian editor,
remarked, “Tufayl’s footprints mark the great classic.”
Ibn Tufayl’s novel tells the tale of Hayy/,/a boy growing up alone on a
deserted island, with animals. As he grows up, Hayy uses his senses and
reason to understand the workings of the natural world. He explores the
laws of nature, devises a rational theology and entertains theories
about the origin of the universe. He develops a sense of ethics: Out of
mercy for animals, he turns vegetarian, and out of care for plants, he
preserves their seeds.
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Hayy then leaves his island and visits a religious society. He finds
that the teachings of reason and religion are compatible and
complementary. Yet he notices that some religious people may be crude,
even hypocritical. He returns to his island, where he had found God and
developed his concepts of truth, morality and ethics by relying on
observation and reasoning.
Ibn Tufayl’s message was clear — and for its times, quite bold: Religion
was a path to truth, but it was not the only path. Man was blessed with
divine revelation, and with reason and conscience from within. People
could be wise and virtuous without religion or a different religion.
The translations of “Hayy ibn Yaqzan” in early modern Europe — by Edward
Pococke Jr. into Latin in 1671, by George Keith into English in 1674, by
Simon Ockley into English in 1708 — sold widely. Among the admirers of
Ibn Tufayl’s work were the Enlightenment philosophers Baruch Spinoza,
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and John Locke, who were trying to advance a
sense of human dignity in a Christendom long tormented by religious wars
and sectarian persecutions.
Fans of the novel also included a new Protestant sect: Quakers. Mr.
Keith, a leading Quaker minister, who translated the novel//into
English, helped publicize it in European intellectuals circles. He
admired the novel, for it echoed the Quaker doctrine that every human
being had an “inward light” — regardless of faith, gender or race. That
humanist theology would have profound political consequences, making
Quakers, in a few centuries, leaders in world-changing campaigns:
abolition of slavery, emancipation of women, and other worthy causes.
The insights in Ibn Tufayl’s work that inspired the Quakers also shined
in the works of Abul-Walid Muhammad Ibn Rushd, also known as Averroes.
Ibn Tufayl, who served as a minister in the court of an Almohad caliph
of Islamic Spain, commissioned Ibn Rushd, to write commentaries on
ancient Greek philosophy, which became the main source for the European
rediscovery of the Greeks, earning him great reverence in Western
intellectual history.
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What is less known is that Ibn Rushd also sought to harmonize his
philosophical insights with Islamic law — the Shariah. At the core of
Ibn Rushd’s effort was the vision of Ibn Tufayl’s philosophical novel:
Religion and reason were both independent sources of wisdom. Religion
had its written laws, while reason had its unwritten laws, the universal
principles of justice, mercy or thankfulness. When there was a conflict
between these two, Ibn Rushd argued, written laws of religion should be
reinterpreted as they were inevitably bound with context.
Ibn Rushd applied this vision to the debate on jihad, criticizing the
militant Muslims of his time who called for jihad “until they uproot and
destroy entirely whoever disagrees with them.” He saw that position as
reflecting “ignorance on their part of the intention of the legislator,”
or God, who could not have reasonably willed “the great harm” of war.
He used the same perspective to critique the enfeebling of women in
medieval Muslim society, which was a result of the denial of their
intellectual capacity. He did his best to advance the most
women-friendly views in Islamic jurisprudence: Women had the right to
refuse polygamy, enjoy equal right to divorce, avoid the face veil, or
to become judges.
Ibn Rushd’s other key contribution to modern Europe was his call for
open debate, where views are freely expressed and rationally measured.
“You should always, when presenting a philosophical argument, cite the
views of your opponents,” he wrote. “Failure to do so is an implicit
acknowledgment of the weakness of your own case.” The late Rabbi
Jonathan Sacks, a towering intellectual we lost last year,had traced
<https://rabbisacks.org/one-thing-a-muslim-a-jew-a-christian-and-a-humanist-can-agree-on/>how
Ibn Rushd’s insight was picked up by the 17th-century Rabbi Judah Loew
of Prague, John Milton and John Stuart Mill.
Yet conservatives in Islamic Spain abhorred Ibn Rushd’s indulgence in
philosophy and accused him of being a polytheist after he cited a Greek
philosopher who was a worshiper of Venus. He was publicly humiliated,
exiled and forced into house imprisonment. His books on philosophy were
burned. They survived in Hebrew or Latin translations in Europe, but
most of the Arabic originals were lost.
This loss has had grim consequences for Muslims. Powerful orthodoxies in
the Islamic world — although parochialism and bigotry have proliferated
in other communities as well — are still denying values distilled from
the “unwritten laws” of humanity: human rights, religious liberty, or
gender equality. They rather preach blind obedience to old verdicts,
without asking “why and how,” and without deploying reason and
conscience. The result is a troubling religiosity that relies on
coercion instead of freedom, and generates moralism instead of morality.
The way forward for the Islamic world lies in reconciling faith and
reason. A good first step would be to reconsider what Ibn Tufayl’s “Hayy
ibn Yaqzan” and the works of Ibn Rushd were trying to tell us.
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