Samar Attar. The Vital Roots of European Enlightenment: Ibn Tufayl's Influence on Modern Western Thought.

Samar Attar. The Vital Roots of European Enlightenment: Ibn Tufayl's Influence on Modern Western Thought. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, inc., 2007, 174 pages. Hardcover $65.00.

THIS IS NOT ONLY A SCHOLARLY BOOK which fills a serious gap in classical Arabic studies, it is also a timely foray into the ever intensifying east-west debate. Ever since the modern colonial period when Western imperialist powers took over much of the non-Western world and held it as a source of riches and a dumping ground for Europe's industrial surplus products, Europeans contended that the enlightenment was a purely Western development. As a way of justifying their colonial exploitation, these Europeans claim that non-Western populations, particularly Arabs and Muslims were relegated to the depths of intellectual depravity because they never participated in the enlightenment. Lack of development, both political and economic was blamed on the absence of a parallel intellectual phenomenon among these same non-Westerners. Even Czarist Russia's extended feudal age was blamed on its isolation and non-participation in the enlightenment. This movement has assumed gigantic dimensions as the world moved towards the nineteenth century, becoming synonymous with rationalism, scientific development and modernity. Pursuing a separate track of historical development, therefore, automatically excluded these non-European races from the definition of modernity.

Samar Attar has executed a difficult philosophic coup by forcing upholders of this school to confront their indebtedness to Arab thinkers of a previous epoch who clearly influenced the renaissance. This in itself is not a new discovery since careful scholars have long recognized the impact of Arab and Islamic thought on the medieval heritage of Europe. Few seriously believed that the enlightenment was a singular rediscovery of the classical heritage of Greece and Rome. Yet, for most, especially in the nineteenth century, who were eager to establish Europe's divergence from the civilization of the non-Christian world, the assertion of Arab and Islamic isolation and lack of development proved to be very comforting.

Attar bases her study on a singular idea, expressed by George Sarton in a letter to Henry James in 1935, in which he states:

      The scientific activity is particularly interesting from the
   historical point of view because it is not simply creative but
   cumulative.... Michael Angelo stands upon the shoulders of
   Phidias, but that does not make him any taller. On the other
   hand, Newton stands upon the shoulders of Galileo and
   because of that he can see further.... (1).

She then proceeds to prove the enormous impact of Daniel Defoe's The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner, on the thought of the enlightenment, and then to demonstrate the impact of a well-known Arabic classic, Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, on Defoe. This turns out to be a piece of literary detective work, as well as a competent expose of a particularly rich period in human history when ideas traveled from Arab Spain to Italy, and then to Britain and other destinations. Her work is divided into eight chapters with such revealing titles as: Introduction: Buried in the Dust of History; A Forgotten Arab Mentor of European Thinkers; Serving God or Mammon? Echoes from Hay)/ ibn Yaqzan and Sinbad the Sailor in Robinson Crusoe; The Book that Launched a Thousand Books; A Philosophical Letter, an Allegorical Voyage, or an Autobiography?; Hayy ibn Yaqzan as a Model in Modern European Literature. Her concluding chapter, titled: "A Humanist Thesis Subverted?" examines how the West failed to recognize this humanistic interconnection to Islamic Arab thought. As an example of this, she reminds of what Samuel Huntington, one of the proponents of the dichotomy of the two civilizations, concluded in his well-known work The Clash of Civilizations:

      The West differs from other civilizations not in the
   way it has developed but in the distinctive character of its
   values and institutions. These include most notably its
   Christianity, pluralism, individualism and the rule of law,
   which made it possible for the West to invent modernity,
   expand throughout the world, and become the envy of other
   societies. In their ensemble these characteristics are peculiar
   to the West. Europe, as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has said, is
   "the source--the unique source" of the "ideas of individual
   liberty, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and
   cultural adoption.... These are European ideas, not Asian, nor
   Middle Eastern ideas, except by adoption." (The Clash of
   Civilizations, 311, quoted on 130).

Who was Ibn Tufayl, and what made his work, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, so seminal to the development of Western humanistic thought? In her carefully constructed chronology of his life, his work, and the impact of his ideas, Attar traces his birth to 1100 or 1110, in an area to the northeast of Grenada, Spain. This makes him a contemporary of the more famous Andalusian philosopher Averroes ibn Rushd, who was born in Cordova in 1126. For much of his life, Ibn Tufayl served as an adviser and physician to the Almohad Sultan, Abu Ya'qub Yusuf of Morocco and Spain. Ibn Tufayl, known also as Abubacer, was a philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, physicist and a poet. There are no traces of his scientific works. His major surviving work, Hayy, was written either in 1160 or 1170, and he was responsible for inviting Averroes to Sultan Abu Ya'qub's court where he was prompted to focus on Aristotelian works of antiquity, which eventually found their way to European universities. Ibn Tufayl's allegorical work, Hayy, was first translated into Hebrew in 1349 by Moses of Narbonnne, with a second translation in Latin in the second half of the fifteenth century by Pico della Mirandola. Another Latin translation directly from the Arabic version by Edward Pococke appeared in 1671. Finally, an English translation by George Keith appeared in 1674. Ibn Tufayl, who died in Morocco in 1185, was never acknowledged as the main inspiration for several works during the Renaissance, not only Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, which appeared in 1719.

The similarities between Ibn Tufayl's and Defoe's works are too compelling to ignore. On a superficial level alone, both had the main theme of man's survival in a state of nature, deprived of society or cultural memory and forced to learn things by a process of personal discovery. But on a deeper level, both works prove the value of utilizing the empirical method of scientific discovery and the consequences of relying on human reasoning. Using a very bold stroke, both demonstrate the human ability to discover knowledge of the divine without the assistance of established religions. The two works provide original insights into the nature of education and seem to advertise the virtues of peaceful co-existence, religious tolerance, and non-violence. The authors, it turns out, though living centuries apart, shared certain common anxieties relative to the nature of religious intolerance and the impact of religion on politics.

Attar proposes that Defoe was also influenced by the model of Sinbad the Sailor, whose exploits were translated by Europeans before they became aware of The Thousand and One Nights, which was not translated until the eighteenth century, appearing first in French between 1703 and 1713, at least six years before the publication of Robinson Crusoe. Defoe's novel also exercised a lasting effect on Jean-Jacques Rousseaue who mentions being indebted to Defoe for the main theme of his Emile, but Defoe never acknowledged the earlier Arabic novel. When the rich legacy of Defoe's work is finally recognized, the enlightenment will be viewed as having been birthed as a result of the works of people like Ibn Tufayl, Avicenna (lbn Sina), and Averroes. What these Arab and Muslim scholars taught Europe from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries was the courage to move away from Western, specifically Christian dogma and the straightjacket of the medieval philosophical tradition. Europeans, thanks to the Arab rationalist legacy, learnt how to question and reject religious and philosophical authority and to rely on reason, rather than on faith, in order to break away from the medieval intellectual legacy.

Attar managed to bring together a wealth of information based on her grasp of Western and Arab intellectual history, in order to re-establish the lost connection between the thought of Western enlightenment and the Arab and Islamic rationalist and philosophical tradition. This is a tour de force, a must reading for all those who have despaired over the irrationalist attack on Muslim civilization and its adherents in recent years. Attar's work is in the finest tradition of comparative literary criticism and a painstakingly careful study which finally answers many questions left obscured by the fog of ideological works, medieval and modern.

Ghada H. Talhami is D.K. Pearsons Professor of Politics Emerita at Lake Forest College, Illinois.