Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale

The text begins to relate a narrative of an island in the equatorial region near India, where a child was engendered without a mother or father. While many people believe the equatorial region to be too hot to sustain life, Ibn Tufayl relates how the rays of light from the sun actually warm the earth there in a way that is perfectly even and therefore perfectly temperate. Due to these ideal temperate conditions, he argues that a human baby could be created there without the need for parents.

However, others claim that the child who grew up on this island was actually the son of a woman whose brother was a very possessive and controlling king of a nearby land. After marrying a man named Aware in secret, she had a child that she was unable to keep due to fear of her brother’s anger. To save the child, the princess put him in a box and cast it into the ocean, entrusting his life to God. When the box washed up on this remote island, a doe heard the baby’s cries and took pity on him, allowing him to nurse at her udder and raising him as her own.

To those who believe that the baby was engendered spontaneously without any human parents, Ibn Tufayl provides a scientific explanation of how this is possible. He claims that in a mass of clay warmed by the sun, a spirit was produced. In the same way that the light of the sun is reflected differently by different objects, so too is the light of God’s word. While inanimate objects are like the transparent air that reflects no light, a human is like a mirror that reflects an image of the sun itself. Next, a three-chambered heart formed in the clay, with each chamber containing a different gaseous substance suited to its purpose. Finally, when the embryo had formed around the heart and spirit, the clay cracked open. The doe found and nursed the infant and from this point onward, the two versions of the story agree.

The infant, called Hayy, grows up being cared for by the deer. He slowly realizes how weak he is compared to animals and he feels ashamed of his naked body that has no hair or fur to cover it. Hayy begins to use leaves to cover his genitals and he learns to use basic tools like sticks to defend himself. By the age of seven, he has mastered the use of simple tools and using animal feathers instead of leaves to cover his nakedness.

Eventually, the deer who mothered him dies of old age. Hayy is confused by her death, believing her to be inanimate due to some injury or blockage in her organs. He intuits that when his eye is covered, he cannot see, and he suspects that some animating organ in her chest cavity must be blocked. Carefully, Hayy cuts his mother’s heart out and finds it to have two chambers. One is full of congealed blood and the other is empty. Hayy therefore concludes that the empty chamber must have contained some animating substance that has now departed. He realizes that the body is nothing more than a tool for this spirit and that he loves his mother’s spirit and not her corpse. After watching a raven bury another dead bird, he buries his mother’s corpse.

Hayy discovers fire accidentally after seeing some reeds on the beach begin to burn. He loves fire and enjoys how it gives off light. He believes it to be the same substance as the stars and heavenly bodies because it perpetually tries to rise upward toward the sky. Hayy’s love for fire causes him to deduce that the animating spirit of living creatures must be similar to fire, as living bodies are warm and dead bodies grow cold.

Hayy begins to dissect and vivisect other animals, discovering that the empty chamber of the heart in a living animal is filled with a hot white steam that dissipates upon death. Through this process, Hayy learns everything there is to know about the functions of a living body, achieving knowledge equal to that of any natural scientist.