# Hayy ibn Yaqzan

- id: hayy-ibn-yaqzan
- original title: حي بن يقظان / Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān
- author: Ibn Tufayl
- language: Arabic
- composed: c. 1163–1184, al-Andalus
- field: philosophy

A philosophical novel about a child who grows up alone on an island and reasons his way, unaided, to physics, metaphysics and God. Written in 12th-century al-Andalus; rediscovered by 17th-century Europe at exactly the moment Europe was arguing about innate ideas.

## The chain

- **1671** Arabic -> Latin, translation as "Philosophus Autodidactus" [attested]
  Edward Pococke the younger (translator), Edward Pococke the elder (editor), Oxford
  A bilingual Arabic-Latin edition, the son translating at twenty-three, the father supplying the Aleppo manuscript and the preface. Published the year Locke drafted the first versions of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in the same university.
  Evidence: Russell 1994
  - **1672** Latin -> Dutch, translation [disputed]
    Johannes Bouwmeester (translator), Amsterdam
    Published anonymously in 1672 and reissued in 1701. The translator is unnamed in the book; scholarship places the work in Spinoza's circle, with Bouwmeester the usual candidate, and even the source text, the Latin or the Arabic itself, is argued over.
    Evidence: Russell 1994; Ben-Zaken 2011 (the Spinoza circle attribution and its limits)
  - **1674** Latin -> English, translation as "An Account of the Oriental Philosophy" [attested]
    George Keith (translator)
    The first English version, made from the Latin by the Quaker George Keith, whose movement read the self-taught islander as a parable of the inner light.
    Evidence: Russell 1994
- **1708** Arabic -> English, translation as "The Improvement of Human Reason" [attested]
  Simon Ockley (translator), London
  Translated directly from the Arabic, bypassing the Latin. Eleven years before Robinson Crusoe, whose debt to the book is often suggested and still debated.
  Evidence: Russell 1994; Ben-Zaken 2011

## Worth knowing

The whole European career of the book runs through one physical object: a manuscript copied in 1303, bought in Aleppo in the 1630s by Edward Pococke the elder, and shelved in the Bodleian. His son's Latin translation came off the Oxford press in 1671, the very year John Locke, a colleague and friend of both Pocockes, drafted the first versions of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The self-taught islander and the tabula rasa met in the same building.

## Sources

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

Confidence grades: attested (named in the medieval record or settled in scholarship), probable (standard view with real uncertainty), disputed (scholars disagree).