# Simon Ockley

- id: simon-ockley
- dates: 1678–1720
- roles: translator

Cambridge Arabist, professor of Arabic from 1711, chronically poor and partly writing from debtors' prison. His 1708 Improvement of Human Reason translated Ibn Tufayl directly from the Arabic for English readers.

## Crossings

- 1708: Hayy ibn Yaqzan into English (translator) [attested]

## Sources

- Russell, G. A. (ed.) (1994). The 'Arabick' Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England.
- Ben-Zaken, Avner (2011). Reading Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan: A Cross-Cultural History of Autodidacticism.