This is the second part of a four-part blog post on Ḥayy ibn Yaqdhān and the Disappearing Qur’ān. You can find Part One here.

It must be remembered that by the time Pococke was translating Ḥayy ibn Yaqdhān, namely around the year 1645, the Bodleian library had already acquired, through donations or purchases, a good number of manuscripts of the Qur’ān. Most of them were only partial Qur’āns, i.e. just one volume out of multi-volume manuscripts or a volume containing only a limited number of sūrāt. Usually, prayers in Turkish were added at the end of these short portions of the Qur’ān and would have been used in Ottoman lands for devotional purposes.

The library also possessed a few copies of entire Qur’āns, which could have been consulted by Pococke in 1645 as he was working on the English translation, reading and annotating ‘Risālah Ḥayy ibn Yaqzān’. These were MS. Digby Or. 2 (presented to the Bodleian Library in 1640 along with the Laudian Collections), MS. Greaves 7, 23, 32 (purchased by the Bodleian Library in 1678; Pococke and Greaves having travelled together to Aleppo and Istanbul, it is possible for Pococke to have consulted his manuscripts although they entered the Bodleian much later), MS. Laud Or. Rolls g. 2, MS. Laud Or. 109, 225, 246, 277 (donated to the Bodleian Library by Archbishop William Laud, between 1635 and 1641), MS. Selden superius 53 (presented to the Bodleian Library by Selden's estate in 1659), MS. Thurston 25, 31 and 36 (presented to the Bodleian Library in 1604 by Sir Henry Wotton, d. 1639).

Last but not least, Pococke had collected parts of the Qur’ān but also a complete Qur’ān (MS. Pococke 321). Pococke was unlikely to have seen all these volumes. But it is fair to assume that his copy of the full Qur’ān would have been consulted when scanning the ‘Risālah Ḥayy ibn Yaqzān’, alongside perhaps those of Archbishop Laud for whom he had collected manuscripts when in Istanbul and Aleppo and those of Greaves with whom he had made the journey. And indeed, Pococke was not the only orientalist carefully reading the Qur’ān at the time. As it has been established by Jan Loop for instance, the Qur’ān was most importantly studied for philological purposes namely, to learn classical Arabic. This is attested for instance in the copy of the Qur’ān in excerpts (MS. Greaves 32), which is partly annotated in the hand of John Greaves and with a Latin interlinear translation by him.

 Image 7. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Greaves 32, f.5v : https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/efeb10ed-2ecc-465b-b7a8-780f28686cb6/

Image 8. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Greaves 32, f.6r : https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/efeb10ed-2ecc-465b-b7a8-780f28686cb6/

A sign of orientalist scholarship in the early seventeenth century was scriptural researching. This, I contend, accounts for Pococke extracting the passages of the Qur’ān he saw and taking notes of their presence in the margins of his Arabic manuscript of the tale. The Latin translation completed by his son was based on this annotated Arabic original. Since it was directed to an orientalist scholarly milieu predominantly interested in scriptural research, it makes sense to observe how the manuscript annotations of the father were reproduced in the published Latin translation.

Since it was directed to an orientalist scholarly milieu predominantly interested in scriptural research, it makes sense to observe how the manuscript annotations of the father were reproduced in the published Latin translation. This is precisely what we will start to show in the third installment- 'From Manuscript to Print'- of this running blog post.

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 2 – Reading Ḥayy & the Qur’ān Simultaneously,” MEMOrients Blog, June 19, 2023 <https://memorients.com/articles/%E1%B8%A5ayy-ibn-yaqdh%C4%81n-and-the-disappearing-qur%C4%81n-part-2-%E2%80%93-reading-%E1%B8%A5ayy-and-the-qur%C4%81n-simultaneously>

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.