THE DECLINATION OF A CIVILIZATION BREEDS THE BIRTH OF ANOTHER CIVILIZATION

A Review of " Hayyu Ibn Yakzan's "Tale by Ibn Tufayl

Written by Ridwan Zakariyah

Maybe I need to remind the west of who is this “prominent thinker of his time, Ibn Tufayl," . Even though in the western discourse, nobody ever mentions him nor his influence on the European civilization. A man of great legacy. He was able to crystalize what would later become an argument in the later years. Spirituality and religion, are they two different things or the same thing? Why is it that Hayyu ibn Yakzan is mostly if not always, orchestrated by the western chroniclers when talking about their western legacy? why is he omitted in the making of European civilization that is now the central point of the global political and intellectual discourse.

Haay ibn yakzan( the Alive son of Awake) is a story of a child – a princess’s son- whose birth was kept secret. He is cast upon the shore of an equatorial island where he is suckled by a doe and spends the first 50 years of his life without contact with any other human being. The story was written by Abu Bakr Ibn Abd al-Malik Ibn Tufail, a thinker, poet, mathematician, medical doctor, physicist, erudite, psychologist and chronicler. He lived in the era of Islamic civilization in Andalussia – which is now called “Spain”- before the invasion of Andalus and the scramble of the last city in Andalus; Granada. It Is said that Ibn Tufayl took his title from a work by Avicenna which is totally different. The tale was written in Arabic language and was published in English in 1708. One could argue that the tale inspired the Daniel Defoe’s book “Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Andalus civilization and its influence on aftermath Spain is a broad topic which I am hoping to address in another article.

From my reading of the novel, I came across how it is possible for someone that grows up in uninhabited land to be able to ascribe to himself the attributes of human being. Even though he was nurtured by an animal and live in their midst, he was still able to acquire the knowledge of his conscious mind which helps him to understand his surrounding and his environment. Although, human beings are social beings but Hayyu ibn Yakzan story does question the assumption of the sociality of human being. He grows up in an environment where there is no one like him nor anyone who has the same structure just like him. It is really hard to imagine that situation of an ordinary man who would be able to adapt to a society that is incomparable to his, a faculty that is differed from his and a metaphysical phenomenon that is weird to his.

Hayyu ibn Yakzan story, to me, tends to advocate the metaphysical argument of “how is knowledge acquired”? We have different school of thoughts that shared different opinion on this discussion. Cartesian’s school of thought that is represented by Rene Decarte assumed that the process of acquiring knowledge is a rationalist process which implicitly affirms the theory of “rationalism” which is the idea that a knowledge can only be acquired by “reason” or by inherent organism which is the mind. “Cogito Ergo Sum”, the famous quote of Decarte, Is an exemplification of the rationalist school of thought. On the contrary, “Empiricism”, which is another school of thought that is represented by John Locke, Thomos Hobbes, Francis bacon and others. Empiricists believe that a knowledge can only be acquired through external factors of things which exist outside our phenomena, an idea that implicitly stated that a knowledge can only be possible by the means of experimentation. John Locke, the famous British philosopher, believes that human beings are born with what he called” Tabula Rasa” or “a blank state” meaning human brain is in a blank state when they are born and they only acquire knowledge after engaging themselves in insurmountable experimentation of what exists within them and how they can make sense of things that exist in the universe. My main point here is that the story of Hayyu ibn Yakzan supports the empiricist theory and even it is a solid proof of the empiricist claim.

Presumably, the narrator of the story explains how Hayyu ibn Yakzan coincidently found himself in an uninhabited Island with animals. He grows up as one of them, simulating their behavior, adapting to their mode of life but he is always concern of his natural differentiation from others. This led to a matter of suspicion and skepticism which later prompts the matter of observation and that is how is journey began. He started to examine every single thing that exists in his environment; water, trees, fire, birds, wolf, deer, ant, air and lot more. After his thorough observation, he came to understand the secret behind the main four properties of the universe; water, sand, fire and air. He examines the metaphysical phenomena of things, substance, matter and particles and he discovers the fundamental structure of the physical and physiological things in front of him. After his deep, strenuous and severe observation and experimentation, he concludes that there must exist a supreme being that created this universe and everything that existed beneath it. There must be a perfect designer and architect that constructed the outstanding and immaculate order of things in the universe. There must be a “necessary being “which is independent from any other being while other things are contingent on his existence; the maker and the designer of the universe which some people call “GOD” while psychologists call it “THE SOURCE OF THE COLLECTIVE CONCIOUSENESS”.

Hahyy ibn Yakzan story affirms the claim of the acknowledgement of a supreme being that existed before the creation of the universe and that he is the creator of the world and the maker of the order in it. This story also alludes to the improvement of reason and the scientific use of experimentation of things which the Europeans later adopted and helps them to flourish the advancement of European technology. Articles have been written on how Ibn Tufail does not only influence the West but also had a significant role in the making of European civilization.

The story postulates a dynamic relationship between religion and spirituality. From a sociological perspective, taking into consideration what the German sociologist; max weber, and Clifford Geertz, the American anthropologist, said about religion which is that “it is a man-made phenomenon. From that perspective, one could easily claim the difference between “spirituality” and “religion” and that spirituality does exist without religion. Although they also correspond, sometimes as we have seen with Assad and Hayyu ibn Yakzan. Ibn Yakzan has no religion, but he is engrossed in spirituality which is a way of nourishing his mind and also connecting himself to the creator of the universe. Spirituality, I would say, is tantamount to religion and it is a natural receptive phenomenon in all human being.

Consequently, Ibn Tufail idea is to assert his ideology that it is possible for someone to adapt in the midst of species that are different from human being. In addition, he concretizes the problematic issue of “mysticism” and those who are against it, given an example of how Assad, a character in the story that lives in inhabited land, came to the conclusion of living an ascetic lifestyle and isolating himself in a seclusion. His meeting with Hayyu ibn hyakzan solidifies the idea that mysticism is all about spiritualism and nothing more, which in our contemporary world, has digressed from his primary goal.

To bring the discussion to an end, I would say that the story does not only show the conspicuous capacity of Arab thinkers and how their philosophers are. Avicenna, Averroes and El Ghazali and others are sufficed as a proof of how intellectual the Arab philosophy is and also a glimpse to the buried legacy of the Islamic civilization that existed when Europeans are still invisible and that also shows not only historical bias but how unscrupulous the European chroniclers are. Admittedly, it rehabilitates and reconfigures the fundamental structure of Arab reasoning, the Islamic civilization and that civilization is not a pure phenomenon but a fragmentation of different civilizations which could be illustrated thus “THE DECLINATION OF A CIVILIZATION BREEDS THE BIRTH OF ANOTHER CIVILIZATION”.

Written by Ridwan Zakariyah