Abstract

The Story of Hai bin Yaqzan is a truly remarkable product of 12th-century Moorish Spain. Professor Philip Hitti, in his History of the Arabs, characterizes the work as "one of the most delightful and original in the literature of the Middle Ages." It is widely regarded as the prototype for Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Best described, perhaps, as a philosophical romance, it tells the story of a young man, cast upon a deserted island as an infant, suckled and reared by a doe, who succeeds by his own efforts in fitting himself for life in his natural environment. The author, bin Tufail, was one of the outstanding philosophers and scientists of his day, and hence many strands are woven into the fabric of the tale. Hai's physical development is paralleled by his psychological and spiritual development; astonishingly modern ideas on physiology, on the process of evolution, on the "scientific method," all find their place in knowledge which his observation and intuition combine to produce. Above all, the book is an allegory of the path towards enlightenment.