Tenth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

Ḥayy ibn Yaqzān is a 12th-century text written by Ibn Tufayl and a blueprint for many later works such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. These renditions carry a similar motif of a feral child who grows up in the wilderness. Interestingly, in Ibn Tufayl’s version, this character named Ḥayy achieves the highest form of spiritual enlightenment without any aid to revelation. This paper compares Ḥayy’s spiritual quest with that of a prominent Muslim intellectual of the 12th century- al-Ghazālī, who recorded his spiritual journey in his autobiographical work al-Munqidh min aḍ-Ḍalāl translated as Deliverance from Error. This paper traces the spiritual journeys of both Ḥayy and Ghazālī and raises, amongst others, questions related to the 1) possibility of a deeply religious experience independent of revelation and prophetic guidance; 2) the placement and utility of the physical world in relation to the spiritual realm; and 3) the dynamics of an individual seeking spiritual enlightenment vis-à-vis the communal world that he is a part of.