Ibn Tufayl
Andalusi philosopher, physician and statesman (c. 1105–1185), born in Guadix, near Granada, trained in medicine, mathematics and philosophy, he served as personal physician and vizier to the Almohad rulers in Marrakesh, where he enjoyed a position of enormous intellectual and political influence that allowed him, among other things, to introduce the young Averroes to Caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf, a commission that gave rise to the great Averroist commentaries on Aristotle. His philosophical fame rests almost exclusively on a single masterwork, Hayy ibn Yaqzan (Alive, Son of Awake), a philosophical novel narrating the story of a child who grows up entirely alone on a desert island, raised by a gazelle, with no human contact, language or religious instruction, and who, through the sole rational observation of nature and methodical reflection, progressively arrives, in successive stages, at discovering for himself the fundamental truths of physics, psychology, metaphysics and finally mystical union with the divine, replicating unaided the complete intellectual journey of human philosophy. The work poses with narrative ingenuity a question central to medieval Islamic thought: whether unassisted human reason, exercised in total isolation, can on its own reach the same ultimate truths revealed by religion, and Ibn Tufayl suggests that it can, though with qualifications regarding the social and practical function retained by revealed law for the majority of men incapable of this solitary philosophical ascent. Hayy ibn Yaqzan had a direct and documented influence on later European thought, translated into Latin and subsequently into English as The Improvement of Human Reason, where it exerted a recognised impact on philosophers such as Locke and on the literary genre of the Robinsonade novel, including Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, making this medieval Andalusi work one of the most notable cultural bridges between classical Islamic philosophy and European philosophical and literary modernity.