Hayy Ibn Yaqzan
Granada · 1185
I
Ibn Tufayl
Ibn Tufayl
c. 1110 CE–c. 1185 CE · Granada
Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Tufayl, known in medieval Latin Europe as Abubacer, was an Andalusi (Muslim Spanish) philosopher, physician, and government official. He was born in Wadi Ash (modern Guadix, near Granada), most often dated to around 1110 (some sources give c. 1105); the precise year is uncertain, and the early-Islamic-calendar estimates given by later sources are traditional rather than firmly documented. He died in Marrakesh in 581 AH / 1185, a date the sources record with confidence.
Trained as a physician, Ibn Tufayl worked as a secretary to the governor of Granada and later in Ceuta and Tangier in North Africa. Under the Almohads — the Berber dynasty then ruling Spain and the Maghrib — he became court physician and a close adviser to the caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf. A well-known account, transmitted from Ibn Rushd's own report, holds that around 1169 Ibn Tufayl introduced the younger philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes) to the caliph and encouraged him to write his commentaries on Aristotle; when Ibn Tufayl stepped back around 1182 he is said to have recommended Ibn Rushd as his successor.
His enduring fame rests on Hayy ibn Yaqzan ("Alive, son of Awake"), a philosophical tale about a man who grows up alone on an island and reasons his way toward knowledge of the world and the divine. The work drew on Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and the writings of Ibn Bajja (Avempace), and was later translated into Latin and other European languages, where it influenced Enlightenment-era debates about reason and nature.
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Stop 1 of 4Served / Secretary
GranadaגרנדהAl-Andalus, Spain
What they did here
Trained as a physician, he is reported to have served as a secretary to the governor of Granada before moving into Almohad administration. The chronology of his early career is only loosely documented.
About Granada
Granada is a city in Andalusia, southern Spain, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada. It became a major city of al-Andalus in the 11th century as capital of the Zirid taifa kingdom, where the Jewish statesman and poet Samuel ibn Naghrillah served as grand vizier; a massacre of the city's Jews followed in 1066. From the 13th century Granada was capital of the Nasrid emirate, the last Muslim-ruled state in Iberia, whose rulers built the Alhambra and whose court attracted Muslim scholars. The Catholic Monarchs took the city in 1492, and it became Christian over the 16th century; the Carmelite John of the Cross was prior of a monastery there and wrote major works in Granada.
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Ibn Tufayl’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.