The Shipwrecked Sailor in Arabic and Western Literature

Shipwrecked sailors can make literary heroes, as proven by Ibn Tufayl alAndalusi’s/Abubacer’s 12th century philosophical novel Hayy ibn Yaqzan (The Alive, Son of the Awake One). World-famous, it was translated not only into English (1645, 1674, 1696), French and German but also into Czech, Dutch, Italian, Hebrew, Latin, Persian, Polish, Russian and Turkish, although condemned by some Muslim and Christian preachers. Ibn Tufayl grew up near Granada as a physician, astronomer, and neoPlatonic philosopher. For centuries, he was the world’s only bestselling author. Hayy’s translation into English probably was even instrumental for the development of the English novel. The story of Hayy can indeed be seen as a forerunner of Edward Pococke’s Philosophus autodidactus (1671) whose story reappeared in Sindbad the Sailor (in One Thousand and One Nights) and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Quakers, in turn, saw Ibn Tufayl as proof for their view of religion as individual experience of an ‘inner light’. (p. 23)