Ibn Tufail

Ibn Tufail, in full Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Abd al-Malik ibn Tufail al-Qaysi al-Andalusi, was an Arab Andalusian polymath, born around 1105 near Granada and died in 1185 in Marrakesh, who worked as a physician, philosopher, theologian and vizier under the Almohad rulers of Muslim Spain and North Africa, and who introduced the young Ibn Rushd, known in Latin as Averroes, to the Almohad court. He is remembered chiefly as the author of Hayy ibn Yaqzan, a philosophical narrative recounting how a child raised alone on a desert island, with no human teacher or society, reasons his way by observation and reflection alone to an understanding of nature and ultimately of God, a story usually regarded as the first philosophical novel. Working within the philosophical tradition descending from Avicenna, Ibn Tufail used Hayy ibn Yaqzan to explore whether reason unaided by revealed religion can arrive at ultimate truth, and the work later had a documented influence on European thought, including early ideas of the tabula rasa and the literary device of the desert island, after its translation into Latin and other European languages.