Abubacer (Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Abd al-Malik ibn Muhammad ibn Tufail)

ABUBACER (Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Abd al-Malik ibn Muhammad ibn Tufail). - An Arab-Spanish physician, mathematician, and philosopher of the Islamic religion, b. about 1100, d. in Morocco in 1185. He is known especially for his Risālat Hayy ibn Yaqzān, in which he seeks to demonstrate that philosophy and religion are in perfect agreement, since the former, the fruit of discursive rational speculation, is reserved for superior minds, whereas the latter, consisting of images and parables, is suited to the people. Mysticism is reserved for elect spirits and must not be offered up to the vulgar crowd: it is a source of ineffable delights, and to man it is possible only to indicate the method that leads to II.
A. describes the way in which Hayy, abandoned as a child on a desert island, arrives on his own, by degrees, at philosophy, that is, at the Aristotelian system as it had been expounded by the Arab philosophers. Hayy then rises to the ascetic and mystical life. A certain Asāl, a Muslim religious, teaches him the doctrines of the Muslim creed, in which Hayy finds no contradiction with the philosophical doctrines he has reached, but does find a number of images, parables, and rules of practical life. The two then go to the island inhabited by Asāl and other Muslims, but the exposition of Hayy's doctrines does not find a favorable reception among the population. He therefore returns to his island and devotes himself entirely to the mystical life. In this work A. echoes ideas concerning the relations between philosophy and religion that were also professed by other Muslim Arab philosophers.

Giuseppe Furlani