Hayy Ibn Yaqzan Research Articles

The Innate Journey of Knowing God and His Graces in Hayy Ibn Yaqzan’s Novel

The innate journey of knowing God is through the mind itself, without the help of any other human being. This study examines the innate journey of knowing God and His graces through an analysis of the novel Hayy Ibn Yaqzan by Ibn Tufail. This fact can be seen in how the novel’s character, Ibn Yaqzan, is able to distinguish himself from the natural animal existence surrounding him, whereby his levels of awareness rise from sensory perception through contacting and dealing with things to mental awareness through mental consideration. According to this concept, in this case, we find a person who is not connected to society and does not grow up in a social environment. The development and improvement of Ibn Yaqzan’s mind and his senses, the improvement of his methods in dealing with others, and his acquiring civilised and cultural characteristics show that he is a primitive person who has not reached a stage of complete humanity. The main hypothesis of this research paper is that anyone can discover God by himself/herself and that the human soul has the ability to realise its value and develop an awareness of its difference and distinction. It demonstrates that solitude is required for the exercise of this awareness. Moreover, it shows that man is capable of acquiring all human virtues without necessarily being a part of society.

Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: The Natural Progression of the Mind and Intellectual Elitism

This paper argues that Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, the allegorical fable by Ibn Tufayl, provides a rational defense for monotheistic religions by emphasizing that the human mind can realize the absolute reality of existence through its dependence on itself without the influence of society, scriptures, or prophets. From this position, Ibn Tufayl engaged in a viral debate among Muslim thinkers – and Andalusian thinkers in general – at that time. That is, does revelation provide the only path to grasp the ultimate truth of our existence? Ibn Tufayl, among others, argued that both revelation and the human mind are paths to realizing the ultimate truth. To do that, Ibn Tufayl argued that human reasoning leads to the same core position of monotheistic religions; the claim that only one God created everything. However, despite Ibn Tufayl's defense of monotheism, his concept of the natural progression of the mind toward truth is problematic. His view implies that only a few people have the natural intellectual capacity to grasp the ultimate truth by depending on their minds, which introduces the problem of intellectual elitism. Finally, this paper offers ways to overcome the challenge Ibn Tufayl’s view faces. In its methodology, this paper relies on critical examination of primary and secondary sources relevant to Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqazan.

Utopia’s Cauldron: Travelers’ Lore and Korea (“Besila”) in the Persian Epic of Kush the Tusked

ABSTRACT Besila is a paradisical setting in the Kushnameh, an early twelfth-century Persian epic that combines the ancient Iranian messianic legend of Kangdez with more recent geographical knowledge, based on travelers' reports, of China and Korea. Besila’s messianic role in the narrative, its antipodal location, and its quasi-fictional status are quintessentially utopian, and yet little is revealed about the society of Besila. The Kushnameh instead emphasizes the means by which paradises are formed, including the rational origins of Besila’s monotheistic creed, organic growth, translatio imperii, travel, and geographical knowledge. The Kushnameh’s vision of universal monotheism anticipates the story of Hayy ibn Yaqzan, a later utopia with important connections to the development of Islamic political theory. The case of Besila thus suggests that the early modern genre of utopia has deep roots in the medieval discourse of travel and travelers.

Haj ibn Jakzan - Ibn Tufejlovo remek-delo

Ibn Tufayl, the great Andalusian thinker of the 12th century, is important in the history of Islamic philosophical thought because of his masterpiece Hayy ibn Yaqzan. Ibn Tufayl's novel is one of the most translated texts of Islamic philosophy into Western languages. Hayy ibn Yaqzan is a story about a child born and raised on an island far from civilization and according to many historians of Islamic philosophy, it symbolizes the human soul on its developing spiritual journey towards eternal bliss. Ibn Tufayl's introduction to the book gives a unique insight into the thought background of this philosopher and shows how familiar Ibn Tufayl was with the ideas of prominent Islamic philosophers. The fact that Ibn Tufayl was not a student of any of the four philosophers he names in the introduction - Farabi, Ibn Sina, Ghazali and Ibn Bajja - justifies the choice of the translators of his book to give him the title of self-taught philosopher. Knowing that Hayy ibn Yaqzan is the story of a self-taught man, this nickname can be an additional sign that Ibn Tufayl wrote about himself in the novel. The main motive of Ibn Tufayl's Hayy ibn Yaqzan is the harmony of religion and science, that is, philosophy. Over time, Hayy unravels most of the most significant scientific achievements of Ibn Tufayl's time to finally devote himself to thinking about the origins of being. This thought development, before Absal, a symbol of religious revelation or mystical tradition, comes to the island, Hayy achieves independently without the help of other cognitive beings. Hayy's autodidacticism symbolizes the self-sufficiency of the rational method in dealing with the truth. From Absal, Hayy learns how to speak and learns about religious rituals, which he begins to practice. The pinnacle of Ibn Tufayl's skill in showing the harmony between religion and philosophy is reflected in the fact that Ibn Tufayl writes about philosophical discoveries in the allegorical language of religion.

السّيميائيّات الطّبّيّة في (حيّ بن يقظان) لابن طفيل

السّيميائيّات الطّبّيّة في (حيّ بن يقظان) لابن طفيل

Students of Revolution: An Essay on Ali Shariati’s Counter-Pedagogy

Though Ali Shariati is well-known as the “ideologue” of the Islamic Revolution of Iran, this essay considers Shariati conversely as a student of revolution. It begins by posing a distinction between the apprentice and the autodidact through reference to Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan and introduces a third term, the collaborator, that is crucial to Shariati’s account of counter-pedagogy. The essay then reconstructs Shariati’s critique of the pedagogical state. There, he recalls resisting interpellation by learning from other pasts, refusing instruction, and learning from others. Finally, I show changes in how Shariati conceptualized self-transformation, from an autodidactic process of soul-searching to a collaborative process that gives soul to a collective. On becoming immersed in the sounds of his compatriots grieving the martyrs of struggle, Shariati attests to being a student of history: the curriculum of a people becoming, the history of struggle, and its instructors, those who modeled it, pivoted around a refusal to be instructed. Overall, this essay develops an account of media environments as informal pedagogical spaces.

The Child in the Pentimento: A Restoration of the First Social Contract in Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzan

ABSTRACT In this paper I offer a restoration of the first layer in the portrait of political liberalism in order to see whether western liberalism can accommodate the subjectivity of children. In this early pentimento we find a social contract theory conceptualised by Ibn Tufayl, at the heart of which is the reasoning child in nature. In Hayy Ibn Yaqzan we not only have the political philosophy of the social contract, but a subjectivity that is more modern than indeed the later Enlightenment pentimenti as depicted by Locke, Rousseau and Defoe.

Loneliness As Self-Improvement: Ibn Tufail’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzan and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe

There are several kinds of loneliness: assumed, forcible, imposed, morbid, or “collective”. Loneliness may be creative, or empty; there is even loneliness with nothing at stake, as there is meaningful loneliness, and vulgar loneliness. All seem to share something – the ordeal of being with oneself, the fear that one will not be able to bear it in the end. In Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, loneliness becomes the protagonist’s tutor, he lives with loneliness and survives. In The History of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, the Andalusian novelist and philosopher Abu Bakr Ibn Tufail shows how reason can develop independently of the influence exerted by society. The two writers introduce two types of Robinsons, such as the medieval Hayy ibn Yaqzan, in the philosophical novel of the 11th century, the self-taught philosopher of the Grenadian Ibn Tufayl and the modern European Robinson Crusoe, as Daniel Defoe shows him in his renowned 18th century novel. The two protagonists present two completely different attitudes to society, the world, thought and God: attitudes that, being characteristic of the historical moment of each one, mark, at the same time, two dimensions of the human being.

Pemikiran Pendidikan Ibn Tufail: Studi Atas Kitab Hay Ibn Yaqzan

Abu Bakr ibn Tufail, known as great Islamic philosopher, meanwhile his education idea can be found in Hayy ibn Yaqzan, his magnum opus. He lived at the golden age of Andalusia in middle age, but his education idea appropriates as a contemporary teaching model. This paper has been written by analyzing and comparing Hayy ibn Yaqzan with contemporary teaching models. Ibn Tufail used rationality and intuition as a major source of human knowledge, both represent equal knowledge. His teaching model has the same characteristics as personal method teaching with a scientific approach. He hammered at the development of self creativity of problem-solving. Discovery method and inquiry methods used as his teaching method with neuro language program of metaphor and analyze case study as a technique of learning.

J. J. Rousseau, Emile and Religious Education

J.J. Rousseau, thinker of the Age of Enlightenment, breaks a new ground in education with his work Emile. In his novel, Emile is the name of the child he has grown up imaginatively. Rousseau, describing Emile's life and his relationship with his instructor from birth to adolescence, discusses teacher-student relationship, and he defends that children are innate, pure and noble, and that they must be protected from the negative effects of society. This vision, called the return to nature and aiming to protect children from society's artificiality and self-esteem, is recognized as Naturalism in education world. The basic idea of this movement is that child development is carried out without undue interference and limitations. Parents and educators should be good observers, helpers for providing appropriate experiences, and should be in a position that allows children to grow according to their natural abilities. Rousseau, recommending Robinson Crusoe lifestyle, is opposed to compulsory and restricted education. Rousseau himself, who seems to have influenced many thinkers such as Daniel Defoe, Pestalozzi, Froebel, Dewey, Vygotsky and Piaget, has also been influenced by others. Emile is thought to have been influenced by the work Hayy Ibn Yaqzan written by Avicenna and Ibn Tufail centuries ago. Rousseau also mentions religious and moral education in his work. To him, it is more meaningful to teach children how to choose truthfully, how to choose by using their minds and experiences and to respect their free will, rather than giving them a religious education shaped and modified by society. Although it is not possible to practice today, important points to be taken into consideration in religious education draw attention. In our theoretical article, we have tried to investigate the still-influential Naturalism movement and Rousseau's views on religious-moral education, and contribute to the field. We aim to create an awareness of this subject which has not been researched by any independent study.

Two Iberian Cases of Intellectual Mysticism

Two Iberian Cases of Intellectual Mysticism

Hayy ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Novel by Ibn Tufayl

This is the philosophical tale Hayy ibn Yaqzan, named after the hero of this story and written by the Muslim philosopher Ibn Tufayl (1105-1185). It was the first Arabic novel, and anticipated such European works as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, as well as the thought of a number of western philosophers including Locke and Kant. This paper will bring out the philosophical themes contained within the novel, centred on those key philosophical questions of ‘what can we know?’ and ‘how can we know?’. These questions have been with us since the beginning of philosophy and continue to be important today with such contentious debate concerning the veracity of non-empirical experience.

The process of civilization in ibn Tufayl's Hayy ibn Yaqzan

Originally written as a philosophical work, Ibn Tufayl's Hayy ibn Yaqzan incorporates in its story many elements that could be regarded as elements of the civilizational process in modern times. In this paper we will analyze these elements of the civilizational process and try to reassemble them into a clear theory of civilization. In order to conduct these analyses, the elements found in the story will be contrasted and perceived through the concepts of civilization found in the works of Ibn Khaldun and Arnold J. Toynbee. The resulting conclusion will point out many similarities between these authors in conceiving civilizations, especially in the notions of the development of intellect and the unity of humankind. But it will also show us the crucial divergence in the importance and existence of society and its binding elements such as 'aṣabiyya. Still, Ibn Tufayl's uniqueness and originality will be seen in his tripartite definition of existence and his own take on the goal/s of the civilizational process.

The Arabic-Speaking Peoples and “Globalization”: The Eighteenth Century

In the eighteenth century, there could be no globalization without navigation and ocean-worthy fleets that could carry trade, ideas, colonists, and missionaries far and wide. The Arabic-speaking peoples from Morocco to Iraq did not have such means of communication and therefore whatever was ‘globalized’ in terms of books and ideas was done by means of European Arabists and publishers. Two cases in point are Hayy ibn Yaqzan and the Arabian Nights. In that century, there was a globalization of western culture, but not a culture of globalization.

From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe ed. by E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken (review)

Reviewed by: From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe ed. by E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken Karl Steel e. jane burns and peggy mccracken eds. From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Pp. 280. isbn: 978–0–268–02232–7. $38. This superb, well-illustrated anthology well represents medieval cultural studies’ recent focus on animals and other nonhuman subjects. It attends chiefly to Middle English and French literature, with a welcome aside into medieval Christian doctrine. Its topics range from stones to mother’s milk, werewolves and lions, gendered souls, free-floating genitalia, and monstrous founding mothers, demonstrating the range of materials that become available to scholars once we cease to presume that humans are the only proper subject of our attention, or that the category of ‘the human’ is an already answered question. Summaries of the essays follow: in the first, Jeffrey J. Cohen immediately turns away from the title’s beastly purview by considering rocks. Cohen clears away anthropocentrism to understand a stone as ‘a protagonist rather than an ancillary object’ (26), and finds his heroes in the gendered, mobile, and desiring diamonds of lapidaries. Cohen calls for a reimagining of the old divisions between human and nonhuman and organic and inorganic, and for an opening up of our parochial chronologies to the unfathomable expanses of lithic time. Next, Peggy McCracken studies the importance given to nursing in the story of the swan knight, Decameron 6.2, and Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, in which a child isolated from birth is nursed and educated by a doe, more or less deliberately, in the ways of God and nature. In all these stories, a child’s first nurse has lasting effects, rendering the child noble or servile, and more or less human. As McCracken observes, the act of nursing troubles who might count as a child’s ‘mother,’ and also aligns women and animals through their shared edibility. Then, Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner’s investigation of the Chevalier au Lyon tracks the thematic links between Laudine and the dragon to study the permeability of borders between animals and humans; it usefully points out that the romance’s frequent animal metaphors diminish after Yvain encounters the lion. However, Bruckner’s use of terms like ‘natural force’ (82), ‘human nature’ (73), or ‘subhuman’ (80) could have been avoided had she applied more critical pressure to the uncertain, differential, and contingent construction of the categories of human and animal, and culture and nature. Dyan Elliot’s fascinating, deeply learned essay treats the doctrinal problem of the identity of souls: if the self comprised both body and soul, does soul also have gender? Did women have the image of God or only his likeness, and would ‘natural’ [End Page 127] gender hierarchies persist eternally? Elliot describes how these debates played out in the patristic period and especially the High Middle Ages, whose response to dualist heresies ultimately led the Church to argue for a kind of ‘shadow corporeality of the soul’ (112), with all this implied about the permanence of gender hierarchy. Like Elliot, Elizabeth Robertson considers the gendering of souls in medieval theology and art: she treats the Middle English ‘Disputacion betwyx the Body and Wormes,’ in which a pack of consuming worms scolds a body for neglecting its spiritual health during its life. Robertson’s wide-ranging argument considers the Old and Middle English context of body/soul debates, late medieval transi tombs, the poem’s bizarre program of illustrations, and the way that poetry itself gives voice to the dead. Robertson identifies the poem’s bodily voice as that of a soul, gendered female, which emphasizes the poem’s association between bodies and women; the worms as masculine, inflicting sexualized violence and a moral accusation simultaneously; and the male dreamer who witnesses the debate as himself ravished by the vision. In Robertson’s reading, the poem imagines acceding to the will of God as accepting one’s own rape. Noah D. Guynn’s study of the werewolf lais Bisclavret and Melion is not specifically about animals, gender, or human hybrids. Rather, he focuses on narrative...

East-West Fiction as World Literature: The Hayy Problem Reconfigured

This article focuses on the reception history of translations of Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan and how natural theodicy, empiricist experimentalism, and philosophical fiction influenced eighteenth-century England. Discussing the status of Ibn Tufayl’s ideas in relation to Edward Pococke, John Locke, Robert Boyle, and Daniel Defoe allows scholars to go beyond the East-West dichotomy and instead create an opening from eighteenth-century studies onto recent debates around world literature. Using Hayy as a prism, we can understand the opportunities as well as the drawbacks of a world literature paradigm, as theorized by Wolfgang von Goethe, Erich Auerbach, and more recent scholars.

From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe ed. by E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken (review)

Reviewed by: From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe ed. by E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken Holly A. Crocker E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken, eds. From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe. South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Pp. 280. $38.00 paper. This collection is groundbreaking, not least for its intellectual generosity: in asking what happens to gender in narratives that challenge the boundaries of the human, essays in this volume connect the driving questions of posthumanism to feminist, queer, and postcolonial methodologies. In so doing, this anthology denudes posthumanism of some of its claims to novelty and singularity: investigating the limits of the human becomes less abstract and grandiose when these authors—from [End Page 286] French, history, English, German, and women’s studies—pursue the myriad ways in which cross-species, shape-shifting, and in/organic bodies prompt us to think more precisely about gender’s connection to embodiment. This is the best kind of achievement for a critical anthology: across eight chapters considering bodies as diverse as desirous stones, winged penises, and nursing animals, From Beasts to Souls offers a welcome answer to all those conference panels that for the past decade have been asking “w(h)ither feminism, queer theory, or postcolonialism?” By tracking the specificities of gender in bodies that confound any categorical articulation of the human, articles in this essay collection establish posthumanism as a theoretical methodology deeply indebted to the medieval past, and vitally important to the future of medieval studies. Posthumanism’s imbrication in medieval European sources is perhaps most evident in Chapter 1, “The Sex Life of Stone,” by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Here Cohen investigates the motility and potential desire of stones to ask, “Could such a stone be gendered?” (17). In thinking about this question through the Pygmalion myth, medieval lapidaries, and Mandeville’s Travels, Cohen builds a case for seeing stone as part of a “queer ecological materialism” (23), which grants stone agency and desire, powers that remain independent of human obsessions and manipulations. To establish this possibility, Cohen investigates those human fantasies of gender and sexuality that render stone inert, passive, a reflection of human fantasies of stability and permanence. The contrast between these views and those of medieval lapidaries, which invest stones with an active, elementary form of vertu, allows Cohen to connect Mandeville’s discussion of diamonds to a vibrant, nonhuman world of desire, reproduction, and gender. And although Cohen does not fully acknowledge it (his essay is too focused on establishing the independence of lithic desire, in my view), the chapter is masterful at showing how misogyny and heteronormativity seek to shape bodies that cannot fully be known. In Chapter 2, “Nursing Animals and Cross-Species Intimacy,” Peggy McCracken considers the animality that mother’s milk potentially confers in the Old French Crusade Cycle, the Decameron, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, and a Krakow altarpiece entitled The Punishment of Unfaithful Wives. These diverse narratives share the belief that cross-species nursing should only be predicated by need. Because mother’s milk is understood to pass on maternal virtues or faults, stories of nursing deer, or of [End Page 287] women who suckle animals, must be overcome with a return to humanity. In La naissance du Chevalier au cygne, like the Decameron and Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, the animal intimacy of nursing must ultimately be abandoned. In the Krakow altarpiece, by contrast, the “unnatural” act of adultery is punished by forcing women to nurse puppies in public. Animal intimacy is a risk to humanity, but it also uncovers the misogynist assumption that women are more closely connected to animals. Through her deft readings, McCracken shows how women are distanced from humanity through the intimacies of maternity itself. While the stories are meant to provide limit cases, “These stories suggest a mixing—of person and animal, of the human and the bestial” that is persistently associated with women in the Middle Ages (43). Chapter 3, “The Lady and the Dragon in Chrétien’s Chevalier au lion,” by Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, pursues a more figural interspecies mingling. By exploring the tale’s...

The Texture of the Divine: Imagination in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Thought (review)

AARON W. HUGHES. The Texture of the Divine: Imagination in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Thought. Bloommgton: Indiana University Press, 2004. Pp. x + 273.Over the past decade, a number of scholars have come to question the existence of a clear dichotomy between philosophy and mysticism in late antique and medieval thought. Scholars for generations have argued the allegiances of such enigmatic figures as Avicenna and Ibn Tufayl for the philosophical and mystical camps, usually betraying their own modern concerns as much as they shed light on the subjects of their studies. Scholars have often characterized Jewish Neoplatonists, who invested their energies into literary compositions at least as much as into syllogistic philosophical treatises, as unsystematic and dilettantish thinkers (Ibn Gabirol being an exception).Aaron Hughes's The Texture of the Divine: Imagination in Medieval Islamie and Jewuih Thought approaches such issues from a new perspective and presents the first attempt to discuss together three interrelated works: Avicenna 's Arabic Hayy Ibn Yaqzan (Alive, Son of Aware), the closely related Hebrew rewriting by Abraham Ibn Kzra, Hay Ben Meqitz (a literal translation of Avicenna's title), and Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ihn Yaqzan. The two Arabic works have been available in English for some time; m an appendix, Hughes offers the first English translation of the Hebrew from Israel Levin's critical edition. Scholars have often relegated the relationship between the two Arabic -works to one of name only. Ibn Ezra's -work has been discussed within the history of the Hebrew rhymed prose narrative (sometimes called the madama) and as a translation whose very existence testifies to the Jewish- Islamic symbiosis of medieval al-Andalus, but it has not been considered seriously as a philosophical -work that shared common but not identical concerns -with its Arabic parent text. Hughes 's attempt to discuss these three stylized, literary texts together as serious -works that convey perspectives on topics of philosophy - especially the nature of the imagination - is admirable and successful.Hughes terms all three texts tales in -which a protagonist (the narrator in Avicenna's and Ibn Ezra's texts, Hayy himself in Ibn Tufayl's) is ushered into a state of knowledge of the Divine. Hughes ge- netically traces the topos of initiation mediated by a celestial guide to the late antique Neoplatonic tradition. Each story is couclied in a meticulously constructed literary language rich in metaphor and intertextual allusion. It is the texts' employment of nondiscursive language, Hughes argues, that pushes the soul to a realm beyond discursive thought, thereby enabling its intimate encounter with the Divine. Hughes is particularly interested in elucidating the paradoxical role of visual images in the journey toward the Divine, for images are low-level derivatives of the otherworldly source from which they hail but are necessary and therefore valued footholds for the upward climb.Medieval Neoplatonism, as Hughes rightly points out, traversed and synthesized numerous intellectual disciplines including poetry and poetics, exegesis, astrology, and philosophy. Appropriately, Hughes employs an equal number of scholarly techniques in order to explicate the elusive texts under discussion: literary theory, religious studies, aesthetics, and intellectual history. Hughes reads as a scholar of religion as much as one trained in intellectual history. Hence we read of rites of initiation, mythopoesis, and the master-disciple relationship more than one often finds in works dealing with philosophical literature.The initiatory tale is understood according to the tripartite schema of separation/liminality/aggregation posited by van Gennep and in vogue in many areas of scholarship (including Arabic poetry). The pattern fits most smoothly with Ibn Ezra's text. In Avicenna's text, the aggregation stage is admittedly truncated while in Ibn Tufayl's it is extremely elongated and a partial failure (the model of the passage manque might be useful here). …

Aaron W. Hughes. The Texture of the Divine: Imagination in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Thought. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. x, 273 pp.

Three texts are scrutinized in this monograph: Hayy ibn Yaqzan (Alive son of Awake), the Epistle or philosophic “Recital” composed in Arabic prose by the Muslim sage ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980–1037); Hayy ben Meqitz, the closely related Hebrew poem composed by the Andalusian Jewish sage Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–1164); and Hayy ibn Yaqzan, the more loosely related Arabic treatise composed by the Andalusian Muslim sage Abu Bakr ibn Tufayl (1116–1185). Each of the texts is well known to specialists in medieval intellectual history. Editions and critical discussions abound, almost all of them listed in the bibliography (pp. 245-65). The Arabic texts have long been accessible in reliable English translations. Thanks to Aaron W. Hughes, the same can now be said for ibn Ezra's less familiar narrative poem. In the appendix (pp. 189–207), the poem is rendered into English based on the original Hebrew text published in 1983 by Israel Levin. The translation is enhanced by references to the biblical idioms employed by ibn Ezra who ingeniously transformed ibn Sina's profoundly Islamic original into an equally stunning Hebrew gem.

Arab Women's Words with New Vision

Arab Women's Words With New Vision Fedwa Malti-Douglas. Woman's Body, Woman's Word: Gender and Discourse in Arabo-Islamic Writing. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. xii + 206 pp. ISBN 0-691-06856-9 (cl); 0-69101488 -4 (pb); $37.50 (cl); $12.95 (pb). Evelyne Accad Much of the Uterature on Arab women by Arab women these days desperately tries to demonstrate that the "evidence" shows that Arabo-Islamic tradition was not misogynistic, if anything it was outright "liberating." Fedwa Malti-Douglas's Woman's Body, Women's Word is here to show us that this is not the case, and she does so in a brilUant, scholarly manner. Whüe I understand and sympathize with the other women writers' and inteUectuaIs' concerns and their sfrategy for bringing about change by reclaiming a past they so much want on their side, knowing it may be the only way to move people in Arab society to necessary reforms, I prefer the more truthful and thorough approach of Malti-Douglas. MaltiDouglas is no less concerned with the needed revolution resulting from Arab women's plight, but her approach is to look for subversive elements in the texts and Uves of Arab women. She forcefuUy demonsfrates that their roles have not undergone a major change since the Middle Ages. And she does this through an unusual method she designed, which I wül analyze further. I find this approach much more convincing. Malti-Douglas's work is revolutionary, both in form and content. She breaks out of the chronologicaUy critical divisions in Arabic letters that address the classical or medieval Arabic literature, on the one hand, and the modern literature, on the other, by analyzing texts from both periods. She also breaks out of the textual or generic boundaries by mixing and analyzing disparate fields—phüosophy, mysticism, geography, cosmography , biography,—thereby providing a wider multi-disciplinary scope to her analysis. She also goes against the canon by choosing profane texts as weU as less-known ones, thus valorizing aU of them. This methodology leads her to some of her most interesting conclusions. The Unking thread of her analysis is the connection between women's body and woman's word. She successfuUy confronts classical prose discourse by male authors who warn of the tricks of women and modern prose by female authors, who chaUenge them with tricks of their own. One of her conclusions is that "whether a woman must speak through the body (as in the classical) or in reaction to it (as in the modern)... for woman, the word remains anchored in the body" (p. 10). > 1992 Journal of Women's History, Vol 4 No. ι (Spring) 1992 Book Review: Evelyne AccAD 149 The fascinating ideas analyzed in this study are Shahrazad's tricks in The Thousand and One Nights. Although criticized by many writers in the Arab world and in the West as documented by Malti-Douglas, she adds a new dimension to the analysis by demonstrating how the two sisters in these tales actuaUy use sex instead of being used by it. She also shows how verbal games and wit are part oiadab (Uterary) discourse and how they can be used to change situations. She also interprets various stories in the Qur'an, found also in the Bible, and points out their differences: the story of Adam and Eve, who, in the Qur'an, both share the blame for expulsion from Paradise; and of Joseph, who, in Arabo-Islamic tradition, links "woman's verbal meddting and the crime of sexual aggressiveness" (p. 52). With these stories, "the idea of women's trickery, with aU its sexual overtones , enters the Muslim unconscious" (p. 53). The lbn al-Batanuni's Makayid (an adab coUection on the tricks of women, ninth century A.H./fifteenth century A.D.) is a kind of exhortation about women in which their bodies are portrayed as powerful and dangerous. An attempt is made to create a male utopia freed from these uncontroUed bodies. This vision is analyzed in a masterpiece of medieval Arabic prose, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, by the Andalusian phüosopher-physician lbn Tufayl. The discussion provides some of the most interesting, innovative...