The Muslims Who Inspired Spinoza, Locke and Defoe

The Muslims Who Inspired Spinoza, Locke and Defoe

By Mustafa Akyol

April 5, 2021, The New York Times

 

"Writing about the influence of Ibn Tufayl’s novel [“Hayy ibn

Yaqzan,” or “Alive, the Son of Awake”] on Defoe’s “Robinson

Crusoe,” Martin Wainwright, a former Guardian editor, remarked,

'Tufayl’s footprints mark the great classic.'

 

"The translations of “Hayy ibn Yaqzan” in early modern Europe ...

sold widely. Among the admirers of Ibn Tufayl’s work were the

Enlightenment philosophers Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm

Leibniz and John Locke, who were trying to advance a sense of

human dignity in a Christendom long tormented by religious

wars and sectarian persecutions.

 

"The insights in Ibn Tufayl’s work that inspired the Quakers also

shined in the works of Abul-Walid Muhammad Ibn Rushd, also

known as Averroes. Ibn Tufayl ... commissioned Ibn Rushd, to

write commentaries on ancient Greek philosophy, which became

the main source for the European rediscovery of the Greeks,

earning him great reverence in Western intellectual history.

 

"What is less known is that Ibn Rushd also sought to harmonize

his philosophical insights with Islamic law — the Shariah. At the

core of Ibn Rushd’s effort was the vision of Ibn Tufayl’s

philosophical novel: Religion and reason were both independent

sources of wisdom. 

 

"The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, a towering intellectual we lost

last year, had traced how Ibn Rushd’s insight was picked up by

the 17th-century Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, John Milton and

John Stuart Mill.

 

 

 

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