In a previous blog post, I discussed the medieval Sufi text Hayy Ibn Yaqthan and its impact on the Royal Society. Hayy Ibn Yaqthan, a tale about a baby by the name of Hayy ibn Yaqthan that grows up and reaches maturity in isolation on an uninhabited island, learning about both the world and about God using observation, experimentation and reflection. The text provided the Royal Society with an example of the natural philosopher par excellence and a vindication of their experimental scientific method. In this post I wanted to explore another aspect of Hayy’s influence on early modern thought- its depiction of mystical experience. In the story, Hayy’s self-styled religious practices culminate in attaining a union with God, and visions of Heaven and Hell. The Quakers lauded the text as an example of the possibility of religious experience without the intermediaries of revealed religion and clergy. Those within the mainstream established Church in England were also intrigued by the text and Hayy was translated from Arabic to English by the arabist and Anglican vicar Simon Ockley in 1708 with his own additional commentary. His response to the text was far more ambivalent and revealed both the fraught relationship between Anglicanism and mysticism in the aftermath of the civil war, and suspicion towards Christian sects such as the Quakers who embraced mysticism. Interestingly, he used arguments provided by authorities of the Islamic tradition to argue against Christian mysticism.

Ockley believed that the text, although interesting and full of ‘a great many lively Stroaks’, was potentially dangerous and may lead men to embrace erroneous, ‘Enthusiastick’ (i.e. excessively mystical or spiritual; unorthodox) ideas on religion. Ockley’s proposed protection against the dangerous and ultimately false mysticism of Hayy is an extensive appendix, where he rejects the belief that it is possible for any person, regardless of holiness, to attain a vision of, or union with, God. Curiously, in addition to providing Biblical scriptural evidence to show that no prophet ever had a direct vision or union with God, and therefore it would be impossible for ordinary humans to do so, he uses the arguments provided by the Islamic jurist Imam Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali (c.1058-1111) to emphasise this point. Ockley thus employs an orthodox Islamic scholar’s objections to medieval Islamic mysticism to warn the Christian reader about the dangers of seventeenth century Christian mysticism. He quotes Al-Ghazali’s condemnation of those who ‘pretend to a Union with God’ and use such pretences to lead men astray by giving them ‘liberty to neglect their business, and withal promise them purity of Mind, and the attainment of strange degrees and proprieties’. Al- Ghazali complains that if confronted, such people

‘immediately tell you, that this unbelief of yours proceeds from Learning and Logick: and that Learning is a Veil, and Logick, Labour of the brain, but that these things which they affirm, are discovered only inwardly by the Light of the TRUTH. And this which they affirm, has spread it self through a great many Countries, and produc’d a great deal of Mischief’.¹

For Ockley, the parallels between the Islamic mystics of the 11^th century and the English Christian ‘enthusiasts’ of the 17^th are undeniable. He warns ‘our Enthusiasts’ to refrain from repeating the mistakes of the ‘Persons among the Mahometans gone before them’. He goes on to explain that ‘as true Piety is the same in all Ages and Climates, and good solid Sense too, so also is Enthusiasm’.² This is quite a remarkable statement from Ockley. He is stating that Muslims are capable of ‘true Piety’, such as the type outlined by Al-Ghazali. And just as it is possible to go astray from true Christianity, it is possible to go astray from true piety in the form of orthodox Islam. Ockley’s recognition of the tensions between religious orthodoxy and mysticism in both the Islamic and Christian traditions leads him to describe an equivalence between the two religious traditions, overriding the usual Christian assertion that orthodox Islam is false or heretical.

Ockley’s use of Hayy as an instrument with which to disparage mystics in Christianity is further explored in his footnote describing the Sufis. He describes the ‘Suphians’ as an ‘Enthusiastick Sect amongst the Mahometans sometime like Quietists and Quakers; these set up a stricter sort of Discipline and pretended to great Abstinence and Contempt of the World, and also to a greater Familiarity and stricter Union with God than other sects’.³ Again, he draws explicit parallels, not between ‘Quietists and Quakers’ and ‘Mahometans’ in general, but specifically between ‘Quietists and Quakers’ and ‘Suphians’, in the process suggesting the validity of orthodox Islam in the face of their mystical ‘Suphian’ opponents.

Although Ockley argues that in Hayy there is little of spiritual worth for the English Christian reader, because the writer is a ‘Mahometan’ and therefore must necessarily be incorrect in his divinity⁴, his extensive quoting of Al- Ghazali on the Sufis would suggest that he did find in Al- Ghazali a ‘correct’ response to the mystics both of the Islamic medieval age and of seventeenth century England. His objection to Hayy, it appears, was more in the mysticism than the Islam. The comparisons made by Ockley between the religious and mystical phenomena found in both the Islamic world of Hayy ibn Yaqthan and the Christian world of his translation indicates a certain comfortableness with the notion that Islam and Christianity, with its mirrored tensions between orthodoxy and mysticism, authority and deviation, were in reality similar. That Hayy could be warned against as a guidebook to religious experience, regardless of the religion of the reader, suggests a diminishing of strict boundaries of orthodoxy and heresy in thinking about Christianity and Islam, and an increased willingness to consider Islam not as a heresy but a valid religious tradition in which piety can exist and be recognised as such even by the very pillars of the Church of England.

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[1] Footnote to ‘Introduction to the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdan’ in The Improvement of Human Reason, pp.4-5.

[2] ‘Appendix’ in The Improvement of Human Reason,  p.192.

[3] Footnote to ‘Introduction to the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdan’ in The Improvement of Human Reason p.18.

[4] “There are a great many Errors both in his Philosophy and Divinity: And it was impossible it should be otherwise, the one being altogether Aristotelian, the other Mahometan” from ‘Appendix’ p. 168.