An Arab Predecessor to Western (Trans-)Secular Thought: The European Enlightenment’s Encounters with Ibn Ṭufayl and the Islamic Enlightenment

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper challenges the supposed geopolitics of Enlightenment secularism in a case study on the European Enlightenment’s reception of Ibn Ṭufayl’s classical work, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān (Alive, Son of Awake). It demonstrates how, by appropriating the tropes, literary techniques, and fictional setting of the Islamic “original,” Christian (Protestant) culture began unknowingly inventing its own patterns of secular thought. It argues then that to the pantheistic Enlightenment’s transsecular approach this tale, allegorically depicting Islamic philosophy’s (falsafa) independence from religious orthodoxy and its perfection in mystical wisdom (tasawwuf), offered both a conception of truth and of the Orient that might have felt very familiar.