Producing Islamic philosophy: The life and afterlives of Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān in global history, 1882–1947

Abstract

In recent decades, the trope that classical Muslim thinkers anticipated or influenced modern European thought has provided an easy endorsement of their contemporary relevance. This article studies how Arab editors and intellectuals, from 1882 to 1947, understood the twelfth-century Andalusian philosopher Ibn Ṭufayl, and Arabo-Islamic philosophy generally. This modern generation of Arab scholars also attached significance to classical Arabic texts as precursors to modern European thought. They invited readers to retrospectively identify with Ibn Ṭufayl and his treatise, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān. Comparisons of Ibn Ṭufayl to European thinkers, and re-presentations of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān as the precedent or genesis of European thought, facilitated these editors’ global imaginaries, anti-colonial projects and political fantasies. This article tracks these projects and fantasies through the afterlife of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān from early printings and generalist surveys to later editions and studies, as Ibn Ṭufayl’s significance became sutured into his imagined importance for Europe, and for going beyond Europe.

End-of-Life Care, Dying and Death in the Islamic Moral Tradition

“…This work received incredible attention throughout history, including a great number of editions, translations, and analytical examinations (for examples, see Hourani 1956;Kukkonen 2016;Idris 2016;Somma 2021, 183-244).…”

End-of-Life Care, Dying and Death in Islamic Ethics

“…To reflect the significance of this aspect, this discipline is known by the name of "science of the hereafter" (ʿilm al-ākhira) (al-Ghazālī 2004a, 1:13-16;Ibn Khaldūn 1988, 611-615). In the same vein is the famous Sufi metaphor that human beings 11 This work received incredible attention throughout history, including a great number of editions, translations, and analytical examinations (for examples, see Hourani 1956;Kukkonen 2016;Idris 2016;Somma 2021, 183-244).…”

The Politics of Decolonial Interpretation: Tradition and Method in Contemporary Arab Thought

“…More recently, political theorists have started to pay close attention to how practices of interpretation undertaken in colonial, postcolonial, and East Asian contexts constitute political theoretic acts in their own right. Such studies have shown the role of interpretative modalities in enabling meaningful innovation and intellectual self-transformation in late nineteenth century Chinese reformist thought (Jenco 2014, 659), and in the “creative misappropriation” of pre-colonial traditions to help “navigate European empire and reflect on colonial and postcolonial contexts” for late nineteenth and early twentieth century Arab editors and publishers (Idris 2016, 383). Covering intellectual production in more recent periods, Euben and Zaman (2009) discuss how the anti-intellectualist mode of interpreting the Islamic tradition of the Islamic revivalist Sayyid Qutb (1906-66) was borne out of his concerns with achieving decolonization and critiquing the emergent secular postcolonial state, Goto-Jones (2009) elaborates on the Kyoto School’s world-historical mode of interpreting European and non-European history, and Iqtidar draws on contemporary debates about applying Shari’ah in the present to offer a sharper definition of the concept of tradition for political theorists (2016, 424).…”

“…The wide variety of colonial legacies notwithstanding, recent scholarship in postcolonial and comparative political theory has shown how establishing a relationship to pre-colonial traditions of philosophical, aesthetic, legal, literary, and religious thought and practice has come to serve as a critical resource for anticolonial thought (Chatterjee 1986, 1993; Gray 2016; Jenco 2015; Idris 2016). This article builds on this scholarship and expands its domain by examining if certain modes of recalling and rehabilitating past traditions hold more decolonizing potential than others.…”