The World of Ibn Tufayl: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Hayy ibn Yaqzan.

• Author: Heath, Peter
• Position: Review

Edited by LAWRENCE I. CONRAD. Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science, Texts and Studies, vol. 24. Leiden: E. J. BRILL, 1996. Pp. 305. HF1 150, $97.

This book is the result of an interdisciplinary symposium that Lawrence I. Conrad organized in 1987 under the auspices of the Wellcome Institute in London, on the subject of "Ibn Tufail and His World." The conference proceedings and the contents of the book are not identical; not all the conference papers appear here. Dimitri Gutas, for example, published his contribution in Oriens 34 (1994), while Conrad states that he solicited several papers from "colleagues who Were unable to attend or who were subsequently asked for contributions to fill gaps" (p. 5), although he does not further identify which these were.

The ten papers included are interdisciplinary in the sense that scholars from particular disciplines - Islamic history, Arabic literature, Sufism, the history of medicine, theology and law, and Islamic and Jewish philosophy - are represented. In another sense, however, the papers tend to be disciplinary in that writers pose questions about Ibn Tufail and his treatise, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, that more involve preoccupations of their own disciplines than reflect truly interdisciplinary concerns. In my opinion, the most useful papers are those that first understand Ibn Tufail on his own terms as a philosopher and then place him in the context of individual disciplines, as opposed to those which seek to incorporate Ibn Tufail into their own disciplinary concerns on their own terms. In general, the quality of the papers is high; most contribute to enhancing our knowledge of Ibn Tufail's "world."

In the first paper, "The Rationality of Everyday Life: An Andalusian Tradition," Dominique Urvoy contends that Ibn Tufail confronted two principal questions. How does thought manifest itself? And what is its structure? Ibn Tufail's answer, according to Urvoy, is that "the most humble experience is already, by itself, structured like a thought" (p. 40). The sources for this insight, Urvoy claims, are two. First is the influence of Ibn Tumart, the founder of the Muwahhid (Almohad) dynasty; second is the general influence of the overall "rationality" that typifies Andalusian culture (other examples which Urvoy offers are the structures of post-Ziryabian music and a fifteenth-century cookbook). Although one may 'accept the general relevance of both these influences on Ibn Tufail's thought, their specific...