Hayy ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Novel by Ibn Tufayl

This is the philosophical tale Hayy ibn Yaqzan, named after the hero of this story and written by the Muslim philosopher Ibn Tufayl (1105-1185). It was the first Arabic novel, and anticipated such European works as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, as well as the thought of a number of western philosophers including Locke and Kant. This paper will bring out the philosophical themes contained within the novel, centred on those key philosophical questions of ‘what can we know?’ and ‘how can we know?’. These questions have been with us since the beginning of philosophy and continue to be important today with such contentious debate concerning the veracity of non-empirical experience.