Reading Ḥayy Ibn‐Yaqẓān: Rewriting the History of Ideas
Reading Ḥayy Ibn‐Yaqẓān is a mesmerizing study that will enchant
anyone interested in interdisciplinary, cross‐cultural explorations that
transform the way we look at the past and the present.
Reading Ḥayy Ibn‐Yaqẓān: A Cross‐Cultural History of
Autodidacticism by Avner Ben‐Zaken. Johns Hopkins University Press,
208 pages, $60.
By Justin Grosslight.
Avner Ben‐Zaken has become a frequently mentioned name among
historians nowadays. His research agenda, which examines the
transmission of texts and ideas between the Near East and Western
worlds, has provoked widespread discussion within the academic
community. But for all the controversy that his work has spawned, few
of its reviewers have articulated what has been the primary reason for
its well‐earned success. Ben‐Zaken’s most recent book, Reading Ḥayy
Ibn‐Yaqẓān: A Cross‐Cultural History of Autodidacticism, boldly
challenges conventional notions about how modern thought developed,
unifying historians of different backgrounds in a dialogue about the
history of reading and the emergence of ideas. The bottom line is that
Ben‐Zaken astutely questions well‐entrenched beliefs in intellectual
history and the history of science.
Composed in the 1160s by the al‐Andalusian savant Abū Bakr Ibn‐
Tufayl (c.1105–1185), Ḥayy Ibn‐Yaqẓān is a speculative fiction about a
boy named Ḥayy, who mysteriously appeared on (or was spontaneously
generated by) the island of Wāqwāq in the Indian Ocean. As Wāqwāq’s
only human inhabitant, Ḥayy is suckled by a mother gazelle, who passed
away when he turned seven. Curious about understanding the
circumstances of her death, Ḥayy teaches himself concepts in
Aristotelian biology, performs trial and error experiments in physics,
and then makes astronomical inquiries. In the end, Ḥayy seeks
communion with God to explain what he observes in nature. Using a
method described as “historical sampling,” Ben‐Zaken outlines the
influence of Ḥayy Ibn‐Yaqẓān’s intellectual journey across time and
1
space, from twelfth‐century Marrakesh to seventeenth‐century London.
Clocking in at just over 200 pages, Reading Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān presents a
compact but captivating history of autodidacticism, exploring how the
tale became a recurrent motif in struggles over the control of knowledge
between individuals and powerful institutions.
Ben‐Zaken’s first chapter highlights the cultural malaise during which
Ibn‐Tufayl composed Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān. Twelfth‐century Marrakesh was
embroiled in conflicts between the Almoravid and Almohad dynasties.
The Almohad triumph over the Almoravid dynasty hinged on the former
melding politically contentious ideas from popular Sufism together with
the philosophical work of Abū Ḥāmid al‐Ghazzālī (c.1058–1111).
Essentially, al‐Ghazzālī’s The Revival of the Religious Sciences rejected
the authority of pedantic theologians and jurists in favor of more
scientific investigations of nature. Though Ibn‐Tufayl was a member of
the Almohad faction, Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān represents his attempt to
reconcile Sufism’s focus on empirical reason with traditional bookish
perspectives. Ibn‐Tufayl’s choice of setting—on an island antipodal to
his world and populated with a gazelle whose name resembles that of
al‐Ghazzālī—was part of his polemical strategy. Placing the action in a
distant world made it possible to promote the importance of
autodidactic thought in a way that did not openly offend authorities.
Fantasy allowed the author to cloak his views as a thought experiment.
Next, Ben‐Zaken shifts his attention to the fourteenth century. Jewish
leaders in Barcelona became hostile to the growing practice of teaching
secular philosophy to adolescents in Catalonia and Provence. Alarmed
that these leaders were turning to excommunication as a way to punish
freethinking, the Jewish physician Moses Narbonni (c.1300–c.1362)
composed a Hebrew translation of—together with a commentary on—
Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān. In doing so, Narbonni shrewdly titled his analysis of
Ibn‐Tufayl’s book Yehiel Ben‐‘Uriel and renamed its protagonist Yehiel.
By doing this, he brazenly attacked the scholar Asher Ben Yehiel (1250–
1327), a powerful opponent of teaching philosophy to youth. Narbonni
thus turned Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān into a political statement: not only did the
story venerate a child who learns philosophy in isolation, but also this
version openly associated the name of the work and its protagonist with
Narbonni’s opponents. Provence‐Catalonia scholars eventually lost their
2
pedagogical campaign—causing Narbonni to flee—but his work became
the vessel through which Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān came to the attention of early
modern circles.
Chapter three situates Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān within the sociopolitical world
of Italian humanist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494). Having
escaped papal condemnation for promoting natural magic and the
Kabbalah in his Theses, Pico sought refuge by residing in Florence.
Under the liberal rule of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–1492), Florence
flourished as an intellectual haven, especially for iconoclastic thinkers
who supported the Platonic notion that happiness was tied to a fusion of
truth, nature, friends, sensuality, and God. Pico fell into this camp,
combining his studies with sodomitic practices and a homosexual
relationship with the poet Giorlamo Benivieni (1453–1542).
After Lorenzo’s death, Florence quickly became pious and conservative.
Reactionary astrological forces, which reviled homosexuality and
science, had predicted the demise of Lorenzo de’ Medici, and they
became the target of Pico’s fury. For Pico, transcribing (Narbonni’s
commentary on) Ḥayy served as a personal defense against an
increasingly restrictive Florentine milieu. Biological developments on
Wāqwāq were shaped by the climate, not the heavens; ideas were
formed through the careful empirical investigation of a manipulatable
universe. Ḥayy implicitly rejected astrological determinism while
promoting scientific thought. Ḥayy also reinforced the mainstream
Renaissance view that individuals were the masters of their own social
destiny.
Finally, Ben‐Zaken recounts the tribulations of Oxford Orientalist
Edward Pococke (1604–1691) and his 1671 edition of Ḥayy. Pococke
discovered the work while working in Aleppo, but it was not until after
England’s Civil War that the study of autodidacticism became deeply
significant to him. Given his Royalist sentiments and polyglot talents,
Pococke remained isolato while researching at Parliamentarian Oxford
during the Civil War, fearing that articulating his beliefs would
jeopardize his welfare. For him, Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān’s themes of solitude
and self‐learning resonated strongly.
3
The text also intrigued the philosopher Robert Boyle (1627–1691),
Pococke’s later patron, who found its rejection of dogmatism, its
discussion of spontaneous generation, and its argument that one can
know God through empirical studies consistent with his own
experimental values and those of his colleagues at the Royal Society.
Following the Civil War, Boyle helped Pococke promote these open‐
minded views. Pococke retitled his version of the book Philosophus
autodidactus for sales purposes, while Boyle promoted it in the Royal
Society’s Philosophical Transactions, thus asserting that empirical and
experimental thinking should be part of a serious scientific and religious
education.
Articulating the drama of intellectual comprehension through a
compelling narrative is no simple feat, particularly because
understanding how premodern people read has proven to be elusive for
contemporary historians. Scholars such as Robert Darnton, Roger
Chartier, Ann Blair, and Adrian Johns have made significant headway in
connecting what early modern people read to their beliefs and feelings,
but the majority of publications in the history of reading persist as
myopically focused studies or as macroscopic statistical analyses. Eight
years ago, Steven Shapin ruefully lamented a “crisis of readership” in the
history of science (and related fields), noting that, in an attempt to
ensure professional credit, scholars have focused their research on
historical minutiae, increasingly filling much of their work with
paralyzing disciplinary jargon, limiting their provocative ideas
(needlessly) to academic audiences. Readership in historical disciplines
has atrophied as a result of these problems.
Reading Ḥayy Ibn‐Yaqẓān is a refreshing alternative to the scholarly
commitment to the narrow. By focusing on specific cases, the book
engages profoundly with extant sources while speaking cogently to the
available secondary literature. Furthermore, the study’s engaging
descriptions foster meaningful conversations about scientific ideas
without making sweeping, all‐inclusive claims. Ben‐Zaken has created a
lucid space for historical engagement among researchers and laypeople
alike—making good on his “proposal for a more unified cultural history
with disciplinary fusing” that makes him a doyen of writing about the
history of ideas for the public rather than for the academy alone.
4
Anyone who is passionate about reconstructing the transmission of
scientific knowledge should relish this book.
Ben Zaken’s more specific achievements in this book are manifold. By
asserting that Ibn‐Tufayl wrote Ḥayy Ibn‐Yaqẓān in response to political
unrest, the book’s first chapter moves the conversation beyond the
customary discussion of philology and textual analysis in a way that
invites scholars of medieval Islam to reassess their earlier
interpretations. Ben‐Zaken’s second chapter emphasizes the much‐
overlooked role of Jewish actors such as Moses Narbonni, Moses
Maimondes (1135–1204), and Jochanan Alemanno (c.1435–1504?)—
among several others—in making intellectual history. Chapter three
reinvigorates Pico della Mirandola, who is remembered principally for
his humanistic orations, by focusing on his anti‐astrological,
homosexual, and Kabbalistic interests. Most significantly in his fourth
chapter, Ben‐Zaken challenges the prevailing historiography of early
modern science, indicating that the roots of experimental natural
philosophy did not originate with Robert Boyle and his colleagues in the
Royal Society. Instead, the foundations of experimentalism were built
with the spread of Ḥayy Ibn‐Yaqẓān throughout al‐Andalus and al‐
Maghrib five centuries earlier. Furthermore, Ben‐Zaken implies that
Boyle’s goal of consensus building among witnesses for confirming
experimental practices was not his own idea; rather, it was borrowed
from the Dutch‐born jurist and Parisian denizen Hugo Grotius (1583‐
1645). This claim challenges the heart of Steven Shapin and Simon
Schaffer’s research, which has guided history of science scholarship
over the past generation.
Despite these brilliant accomplishments, I have some quibbles with the
book. My major reservation is that some of Ben‐Zaken’s actors are
connected more tenuously to Ḥayy Ibn‐Yaqẓān than his narrative
suggests. For example, Pico della Mirandola only wrote about his
familiarity with Ḥayy Ibn‐Yaqẓān once— in an autobiographical
reference in his first book, Disputationes adversus astrologiam
divinatricem (published posthumously, 1495). Also, Pico never
published his own Latin translation of the book. Furthermore, versions
of Ḥayy Ibn‐Yaqẓān fell into the hands of a number of readers who are
beyond the scope of Ben‐Zaken’s text. How did they react to Ḥayy’s
5
challenging ideas? It would be interesting to know why Ben‐Zaken
chose to focus on the group of thinkers who appear in his book. An
alternative history of autodidacticism—potentially bypassing Ḥayy Ibn‐
Yaqẓān entirely—could emerge from an analysis of, for example,
Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Montaigne’s Essays (first “A” edition
1580), or Rene Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637).
Nevertheless, Ben‐Zaken tells a fabulous yarn about the transcultural
evolution of scientific ideas. With humanities projects increasingly
tailored to the margins of academic attention, Reading Ḥayy Ibn‐
Yaqẓān serves as a poignant reminder of why historical research is
important. As each of Ben‐Zaken’s sketches demonstrates, valiant
individuals challenged the norms of their era in a quest to become
independent “modern men” guided by reason rather than blind faith.
Reading Ḥayy Ibn‐Yaqẓān is a mesmerizing study that will enchant
anyone interested in interdisciplinary, cross‐cultural explorations that
transform the way we look at the past and the present.
6