This blog post is the third part of a four-part series on Ḥayy ibn Yaqdhān. Click to read Part One and Part Two.

The early modern reception of Ḥayy in England took various directions. It was reused in Christian theology and polemics between Quakers and Anglicans, in modern science as epistemic justification for experimentalism, in pedagogy, in discussion about human relations to other animal and vegetal worlds, and in fiction writing. These translations of a text initially anchored in an Islamic scientific milieu resulted in the repurposing of Islamic and Quranic references. Given these reappropriations, the question I asked myself when seeing the manuscript marginalia (see Part 1 of the blog series) was why had the Qur’ān been specifically marked out? And at what point were Islamic and Quranic references excised or redirected? What were the reasons and objectives pursued and the methodologies employed? A close comparison between the four translations is in order so as to be able to answer these questions.

Edward Pococke (the younger) prepared a bi-lingual Arabic-Latin translation titled Philosophus autodidactus, sive Epistola Abi Jaafar Ebn Tophail de Hai Ebn Yokdhan published in 1671, and a second edition appeared in 1700. Pococke kept Ibn Ṭufayl’s preface, in which the author had exposed the theological and philosophical underpinnings of his tale, in relation with the schools of al-Farābī, Ibn Sīnā, al-Ghazālī and Ibn Rushd in particular. Pococke also reproduced the references of the Qur’ān which his father had left in the margins of ‘Risālah Ḥayy ibn Yaqzān’ (MS Pococke 263).

 Image 9. Edward Pococke Philosophus autodidactus (1671), example of a marginal annotation indicating the reference to the Qur’ān and which the son had taken from the Arabic manuscript of the father.

On Image 9, the reference to sūra al-Anfāl (*Cap. Al-Anphal) is clearly visible in the margin, with the addition in the main text of ‘in Textu * Alcorani’, which does not appear in the Arabic original. Such marginal notes are visible in other places in the book, namely:

♦   Alc. c. Ghafer [sūra al-Ghāfir] (p. 115, p. 156)

♦   Alc. c. AlKesas [sūra al-Qaṣaṣ] (p. 116)

♦   Alc. c. Altacwir &, c. Alkareah [sūra al-Takwīr & al-Qāri‘a] (p. 172)

♦   Alc. c. 83, fc. al-Tafif & c 2’ [sūra al-Muṭaffifīn] (p. 195)

♦   Alc. c. AlNur & c. Miriam [sūra al-Nūr and sūra Marīam] (p. 196).

This list of Quranic references is far from being complete. However, it served as a canvas from which subsequent translators would work. The passages quoted from the Qur’ān and translated into Latin are as follows:

♦   *Cap. Al-Anphal [sūra al-Anfāl] (p. 96): Ego sum auditus ejus per quem audit, & visus ejus per quem videt, & in Textu Alcorani, Vos non interemistis cos sed Deus interemit, & Tu non projecisti, sed Deus projecit

♦   Alc. c. Ghafer [sūra al-Ghāfir] (p. 115): Esto & est

♦   Alc. c. AlKesas [sūra al-Qaṣaṣ] (p. 116): omnia percunt prater cum

♦   Alc. c. Ghafer [sūra al-Ghāfir] (p. 156): Cui nunc est regnu? Uni Omnipotenti Deo

♦   Alc. c. Altacwir &, c. Alkareah [sūra al-Takwīr & al-Qāri’a] (p. 172): & de movedis montibus, ut fiant instar lanae, & homies [fiant] tanquam pyrallides, & de obscuratione Solis & Lunae, & eruptione marium die illo quo terra in iliam terram nutabitu, & coeli, fimiliter

♦   Alc. c. 83, fc. al-Tafif & c 2’ [sūra al-Muṭaffifīn] (p. 195): Obruit cos stultitta, & quod quarebant ipsorum corda instar rubiginis occupavit; Deus corda auresa ipsorum obsignavit, oculisa coru obversatur caligo & manet cos poena magna

♦   Alc. c. AlNur & c. Miriam [sūra al-Nūr and sūra Marīam] (p. 196): & hac omni tenebra sunt alia super aliis in profundo mari, nec quisquam vestrum est, qui illuc non ingreditur, nam ita fiat fixum Domini decretum

This elementary reference system makes the Qur’ān more conspicuous than it would have been in the original. Such signposting is all the more surprising since the translator acknowledged at the end of his preface:

Supervacaneum est ut moneam verba quælibet ex Alcorano desumpta , licet sensum aliquando & orationis seriem perturbent, elegantiæ loco haberi apud Mohammedanos , ut & apud Judæos è textu Biblico aut Talmude adducta. Aliqua hujusmodi citatis locis in margine notavimus, alia facilè percipiet Lector. (n.p.)

[It is needless to warn you that any words taken from the Koran, although they sometimes disturb the sense and sequence of the narrative, are held as elegant intrusions among the Mohammedans, as the Jews would do with the Bible or the Talmud. Some of the quoted passages we have indicated in the margins, others will be easily perceived by the reader]

If the scholar reading in Latin is expected to be able to recognise a passage taken from the Qur’ān when he sees one, why have these references been inserted, even more so since the Qur’ān had just been described as disruptive of the meaning and development of the diegesis? The reason for signposting the Qur’ān cannot therefore be intra-diegetic but must be extra-diegetic, namely having to do with something other than the text itself. One of the potential extra-diegetic reasons could be a theological interest in the Qur’ān and more generally an indication of the scripturally-based nature of orientalist research in seventeenth-century England.

Yet, given the sparsity of notes in total it would be surprising to imagine that orientalists would turn to the tale in order to gain knowledge of the Qur’ān. We may imagine two scenarios. First scenario, Ḥayy ibn Yaqdhān is used by orientalists as a reading exercise in classical Arabic and one part of the exercise was to recognise and reference Quranic passages inserted in the tale. As such, interest in the Qur’ān would be here purely philological.

The second scenario is to imagine, given that these Quranic passages were declared unfitting adornments, therefore not only unnecessary but also unbecoming, these underlined passages constitute an intermediary stage before their excisions. Excising the Qur’ān was a way to separate genres which, according to the orientalist, had been unduly mixed, and domesticating/familiarising the tale (to borrow from Lawrence Venuti’s terminology) by divesting it of its Islamic contents. The ambition would have been to de-Islamicise the text so as to be able to reuse it more easily in any of the directions mentioned before – as a work of fantasy, as a work in natural sciences, and so on. And this is precisely what this Latin translation allows with the subsequent translations from Latin into English by George Keith and George Ashwell. Simon Ockley, I would argue, returns the Qur’ān and Islamic theology to the tale but not as an element to be theologically engaged with, rather as a phenomenon to be anthropologically observed and investigated. All this to be further investigated in the fourth and final post of this blog series.

 Further reading

Attar, Samar. 2007. The Vital Roots of European Enlightenment: Ibn Tufayl’s Influence on Modern Western Thought. Lanham, MD.: Lexington Books.

Ben-Zaken, Avner. Reading Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān. A Cross-Cultural Reading of Autodidacticism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.

Conrad, Lawrence I., ed. The World of Ibn Ṭufayl. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān, Leiden: Brill, 1996.

Daiber, Hans. ‘The Reception of Islamic Philosophy at Oxford in the 17th Century. The Pococks’ (father and son) Contribution to the Understanding of Islamic Philosophy in Europe’, in The Introduction of Arabic Philosophy into Europe, edited by Charles E. Butterworth and B. A. Kesel, 65-82. Leiden: Brill, 1994.

Elmarsafy, Ziad. The Enlightenment Qur’an. The Politics of Translation and the Construction of Islam. Oxford: Oneworld, 2009.

Elmarsafy, Ziad. ‘Philosophy Self-Taught: Reason, Mysticism, and the Uses of Islam in the Early Enlightenment’, in L’Islam visto da Occidente: Cultura e religione del Seicento europeo di fronte all’Islam, edited by Bernard Heyberger et al. Genoa: Marietti, 2009.

Gallien, Claire and Louisiane Ferlier, ‘”Enthusiastick” Uses of an Oriental Tale: The English Translations of Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqdhan in the Eighteenth Century’, in Eastern Resonances in Early-Modern England, edited by Claire Gallien and Ladan Niayesh. New
York: Palgrave, 2019, p. 93-114.

Gallien, Claire, ‘Orientalist Pococke: Brokering Across Borders, Disciplines and Genres’, in The Internationalization of Cultural Exchange in a Globalizing Europe, 1636-1780, edited by Robert Mankin. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2017, p. 1-30.

Gallien, Claire, From Corpus to Canon: Appropriations and Reconfigurations of Eastern Literary Traditions in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain (contracted with Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Gutas, Dimitri. ‘Ibn Ṭufayl on Ibn Sīnā’s Eastern philosophy’, Oriens 34 (1994): 222-241.

Kukkonen, Taneli. ‘No Man is an Island. Nature and Neo-Platonic Ethics in Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 46.2 (2008): 187–204.

Hasanali, Parveen. ‘Texts, Translators, Transmission: “Hayy Ibn Yaqzan” and its Reception in Muslim, Judaic and Christian Milieux’. PhD diss., McGill University, 1995.

Kershner, Jon R. Quakers and Mysticism: Comparative and Syncretic Approaches. New York: Palgrave, 2019.

Kukkonen, Taneli. ‘Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān’, in Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy, edited by Sabine Schmidtke and Khaled El Rouayheb, 233-254. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Loop, Jan. ‘Divine Poetry? Early Modern European Orientalists on the Beauty of the Koran’, Church History and Religious Culture 89.4 (2009): 455-488.

Randazzo, Christy and David Russell. ‘The Unifying Light of Allah: Ibn Tufayl and Rufus Jones in Dialogue’, in Quakers and Mysticism: Comparative and Syncretic Approaches, edited by Jon R. Kershner. New York: Palgrave, 2019, p. 161-180.

Russell, G. A. ‘The Impact of the Philosophus Autodidacus: Pococke, John Locke and the Society of Friends’. in The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England, edited by G. A. Russell, 224-265. Leiden: Brill, 1993.

Suggested Chicago Style Citation: Claire Gallien, "Ḥayy ibn Yaqdhān and the Disappearing Qur’ān - Part 3 – From Manuscript to Print," MEMOrients Blog, June 26, 2023 <https://memorients.com/articles/%E1%B8%A5ayy-ibn-yaqdh%C4%81n-and-the-disappearing-qur%C4%81n-part-3-%E2%80%93-from-manuscript-to-print>

The research conducted by the author in the Islamic Collections of the Bodleian Library was generously funded by the Bahari Visiting Fellowship in the Persian Arts of the Book.

The author is currently working on an article to be submitted to the international academic journal Philological Encounters (Brill) on the same topic.