Storytelling and the Pursuit of Virtue in Islam:

A Lecture on Rūmī and Ibn Ṭufayl

by

Cyrus Ali Zargar

Note: This is the text of a lecture given at the Hub Foundation, in Pleasanton, California,
in April, 2018. It offers reflections on and useful summaries of two chapters (Chapter
Four and Chapter Ten) of The Polished Mirror: Storytelling and the Pursuit of Virtue in
Islamic Philosophy and Sufism (London: Oneworld, 2017). One of those chapters,
Chapter Ten, presents an extended (and sometimes difficult) analysis and translation of
a passage from the final part of Rūmī’s masterpiece, the Mathnawī. I offer it here so that
readers might use this text as a guide for reading that chapter, which functions as the
book’s case study, applying discussions of Islamic virtue ethics to specific literary
passages.

Introduction

Try to imagine your life without storytelling. Imagine never having heard a story,
from the time of your infancy until today. How would your understanding of your
surroundings change, and would you be able to see yourself as having some
purposeful relationship to the world? The concepts of heroes, villains,
antiheroes, tragedy, and happy endings would all be foreign to you. Events
would be strung together in terms of cause and effect, but they would be
ultimately meaningless. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has argued that the
human being is “essentially a story-telling animal.”1 Our actions only become
intelligible to us in narrative.2 In fact, he says, it is when life’s narrative becomes
                                                                                                                       
1 rd
 Alasdair  MacIntyre,  After  Virtue:  A  Study  in  Moral  Theory,  3  ed.  (Notre  Dame,  IN:  University  of  Notre  
Dame  Press,  2007),  p.  216.    
 
2
 MacIntyre,  After  Virtue,  p.  210.  
 

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unintelligible to us, that we lament that life has become “meaningless.”3
Storytelling has been, MacIntyre argues, the most significant way we humans
have communicated our norms, values, and expectations. We have done so not
because stories simplify things, but because only narratives can represent the
interwoven complexity of human situatedness. Only narratives tell us how a
person came to need to make a decision. Only narratives tell us which character
traits led to that decision. Only narratives give meaning to the outcome of that
decision.

More specifically one can consider the importance of storytelling as a communal

activity—whether that community be a mother and child, a family, a tribe, or a
nation. Communities of people have traditionally passed down their identities
and values through storytelling, and even when traditions became written down
and ceased to be transmitted orally, the sense of shared communal interest
remained.

Storytelling in the Qur’an, for example, aims at creating a community united in

its appreciation of the lives and lessons of prophets, who are for the most part
Biblical prophets. Regarding the story of Joseph, for example, the Qur’an
declares: “We narrate the best of stories to you in this Qur’an that we have
communicated exclusively to you, even if before you were once among the
unaware” (Q 12:3). The Prophet has become God’s audience. As God tells him
these narratives, He communicates the moral standards and secrets that His
messengers have shared since the dawn of human existence. As Muhammad
communicates these stories to his community, he becomes to them what God
was to him: A narrator of universal, divine truths (Q 4:164). The earliest Muslim
audience’s participation in these narratives, their participation in the life of
Muhammad and reliving of prophetic paradigms, means that they too will be
immortalized, as later storytellers would construct the sīra of the Prophet and
include his family and companions. Others will be immortalized for their
disbelief. They will fail to appreciate the universal significance of these
narratives. For them, the revealed narratives are dismissed as stories among

                                                                                                                       
3
 MacIntyre,  After  Virtue,  p.  217.  
 

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stories, tales without divine authority, or “myths of the ancients,” as the Qur’an
describes it (Q 6:25, 8:31, et al). According to the Qur’an, one’s ability to discern
the meanings of its stories and its admonitions reflects that person’s receptivity
to the truth. Hard hearts—the parable goes—are like stones that cannot absorb
water, or, as the Qur’an tells us, are even harder than stones—since some stones
do indeed allow water to penetrate (Q 2:74).

This matters to us as moderns because what we expect from narratives has

changed so decisively as imagined communities have replaced real ones, and
as modernity has created more fragmented senses of identity. According to
Walter Benjamin, who wrote in the first half of the 20th century, the “secular
productive forces” of history will gradually diminish what he calls the “epic side
of truth” and “wisdom” to the point that storytelling will reach “its end.”4 As our
ironic distance to the world around us increases, Benjamin argued, our
appreciation for shared, oral traditions will disappear. We will become so
focused on the present moment and isolated bits of information that we will no
longer rely on the ancient art of storytelling for our sense of communal being.5
Whether Benjamin’s observations prove right or wrong, one cannot deny that
humans look to more traditional forms of storytelling for epic or even
transcendent meaning.

As Islamic intellectual history progressed, storytelling became a salient way in

which Muslims interpreted the meanings of their scriptures and the lives of their
saints. Early commentators on the Qur’an often attempted to explain allusions
to the lives of prophets using reports or stories, some of which ultimately came
from Jewish and Christian sources. Abu Jaʿfar Muḥammad al-Ṭabarī (d. 923) in
his exegesis and in his massive history offers narrative contexts for the lives of
prophets mentioned in the Qur’an, contexts that would be familiar to scholars of
the Bible and extra-biblical Jewish literature. Later, the rise of the Nīshāpūri
school of exegesis solidified the use of “tales of the prophets” as commentary
on the Qur’an. Ibn Ḥabīb (d. 1015), his student Aḥmad al-Thaʿlabī (d. 1035), and

                                                                                                                       
4
 McKeon,  Theory  of  the  Novel,  p.  79  
 
5
 McKeon,  p.  81.  

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Thaʿlabī’s student ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad al-Wāḥidī (d. 1076) changed the way Sunni
tafsir or exegesis would be written, focusing on an encyclopedic approach that
used hadith, among other sources, to interpret the Qur’an.

Micronarratives, whether about the Prophet Muhammad or previous prophets,

became tied to the various verses of the Qur’an. At the same time, writers in the
Sufi tradition—such as Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sulamī (d. 412/1021) and Abū al-
Qāsim Qushayrī (d. 465/1072)—were narrating the lives of bygone saints whom
they claimed as paragons of Sufism. In law as well, one of the roles of the earliest
qāḍī (or judge) was not only to administer law, but also to tell stories of those
who exemplified worthy character traits, most especially the Prophet
Muhammad. Many such judges held a second official position as “storyteller”
(qaṣṣ, plural quṣṣāṣ). The role that storytellers played in expanding the Hadith
corpus was later lamented by scholars of Hadith. Yet even collections of Hadith
verified as reputable can be treated as literary texts saturated with narrativity.

Virtue Ethics in Rūmī’s Mathnawī

This brings me, then, to our focus. I would like to explore two instances of
premodern Islamic storytelling that reveal ways in which Muslim thinkers
communicated ethics as part of a lived experience. The first and more detailed
discussion will be from Mawlānā Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī’s masterpiece, the Rhymed
Couplets of Spiritual Signification, or Mathnawī-i Maʿnawī. In what ways does
virtue ethics inform moral decisions? As we will see, Rūmī comes to grips with
this question in a story about a judge and a Sufi. Second will be the classical tale
of the young child raised on a desert island, the text that some have some called
the first novel in history—Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān. In this case, we will think
about ways in which philosophical conceptions of human perfection become
altered when seen in light of a personal narrative.

To begin with, I would like to share with you observations from the tenth chapter
of my book, which concerns Mawlānā Rūmī, but which also applies discussions
of Islamic virtue ethics in previous chapters to a long narrative passage in Rūmī’s
Mathnawī. Chapter Ten is, in other words, a case study. It is also a difficult
chapter, if you are not familiar with Rūmī’s distinctive style of storytelling, in

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which lessons are bracketed within lessons. There is structure to the many
seeming digressions in this long poem, as Seyed Ghahreman Safavi and Simon
Weightman have discussed in their book Rumi’s Mystical Design.

Nevertheless, Rūmī ties together so many various themes, observations, and

stories, that it might seem unstructured, and a reader new to his style can feel
lost. It is only once you begin to see the patterns and connections in his
narratives, and once you come to understand the theoretical backdrop of the
poem, that you can appreciate Rūmī’s Mathnawī as Islamic storytelling at its best.
My concern is to highlight ways in which Rūmī draws on the sciences of his day—
from medicine to Islamic law—in his discussion of the completion and perfection
of the human soul. The Qu’ran, the Hadith, philosophical concepts, Sufi terms
and theories, animal fables, and jokes form the tapestry from which he weaves
what might be called his version of virtue ethics. That Rūmī does all this through
storytelling compels us to change the very manner in which we perceive ethical
reasoning.

The Judge and the Sufi: The Narrative

Allow me to summarize briefly the story of the judge and the Sufi. The tale begins
when an elderly, sick man visits the doctor. The doctor takes the man’s pulse and
realizes that he is deathly ill. He feels sorry for the man and, instead of breaking
the news to him, lies, telling him that his cure can be found in doing whatever
brings him pleasure. He wants the old man to enjoy his last few days. The old
man takes this advice literally and imagines that he must act on any impulse that
he has, for his health to be sustained. He rushes the doctor out of his house and
decides to take a walk by the water—or, rather, his impulses tell him to do that.
On his walk, he notices a Sufi making wuḍūʾ, that is, ritual ablutions, at the
riverbank. So meticulous is the Sufi in his washings that the old, sick man
suddenly has an urge to slap him on his neck. Of course, for him that urge is a
matter of life or death, for if he does not act upon it—he imagines—he will never
find his cure. Thus, he approaches the Sufi and slaps him forcefully on the back
of the neck. As Rumi says:

A thunderclap erupted when [the sick man] slapped him.

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 The Sufi said—Hey, Hey, you mother-disowned pimp!
The Sufi wanted to punch him twice, three times,
yank out each mustache and beard hair separately.
People are ill from squabbling and are incurable,
behind ramparts of slaps trapped, through the deceit of Satan,
ravenous for torturing the guiltless, they all are,
searching for weaknesses in the napes of one another…

The Sufi screams out, and himself has the urge to retaliate with blows. Even so,
noticing the frailty of this sickly man, the Sufi holds back. He worries that the old
man’s infirm body will expire even after one punch. The Sufi does not want to
kill the old man by accident and lose his own head, literally, facing execution just
for a moment’s taste of vengeance. Instead, he drags the old man to the judge
and explains everything that has happened. The judge listens carefully, until the
Sufi demands punishment in accordance with what has been written in books of
Islamic law. He wants the elderly man to be struck or marched through town in
shame.

The judge, however, sees matters differently. Were he to take such measures,
the decrepit man would die—and certainly a slap does not merit a life. Instead,
the judge asks the old man how much money he has to give as compensation.
The old man has only six dirhams. The judge rules that three should be given to
the Sufi and that the old man should keep three for himself. After all, even a
criminal must be able to buy food and other necessities. The Sufi is enraged at
this injustice. The elderly man, however, relishes in getting away with assault for
so light a sentence. Seeing the back of the judge’s neck, he has the urge now to
slap it and does exactly that. He gives the remaining three dirhams to the judge
and leaves, proclaiming that he is now cured of all illness. The Sufi expresses his
schadenfreude at the justice served in this act. After all, the judge made light of
the Sufi’s pain and was subjected to the very same injury. A fitting turn of events.
Rumi says:

O scholar of religion, That which you hate for yourself

why don’t you also hate for your brother, trusted one?

  6  
 Don’t you know the pitfall you dig for me
you’re also digging for your own finale?
Haven’t you read He who digs a pitfall in narrations?
Act upon that which you’ve read, my dearest son,
This one decision of yours was such a judgment
that it brought a slap for you upon the neck,
Woe to you for your other adjudications,
who knows what will befall you, head to foot,
You show mercy to an oppressor, out of generosity?
Saying—For spending, three dirhams for yourself?
Chop off the oppressor’s hand! What makes it apt
to place within his hand the rule and reins?
You resemble that goat, oh stranger to justice,
who nursed with her own milk the wolf’s cub.

Yet it is here that the judge’s wisdom shines perhaps most brightly. The judge
explains that the grimace on his face was a natural reaction to being slapped.
Within, however, deep in his heart, he bears such suffering happily. Since all
events originate with God, even this blow was a welcome sign of the divine
beloved, who cared enough to cause him pain. Rumi says:

Relinquished desire no doubt brings bitter taste,

but less bitter than separation from the Real.
Though struggling and fasting are difficult, harsh,
still, it’s better than a distance that tests you.
How could pain remain that instant when the Kindly Bestower
would say—How are you holding up, My sick one?

The story ends with an extended consideration of the meaning of human

suffering. The Sufi begins to focus more on his own particular pain, asking the
wise judge why suffering occurs—everything from a slap to death itself. The
Judge’s answer is that the vicissitudes of good and bad in life have no worth
when one considers their purpose. Life exists merely as a means to know and

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come to love God, so one should not seek pleasure in this life. After all, worldly
pleasure is merely a diversion from the very purpose of the world. God has
created humans for the sort of life in which is both pleasure and pain, good and
evil, guidance and temptation, so that people might choose morally. Otherwise
human achievement—“courage,” “wisdom,” “patience,” “honesty,” and
“liberality”—would be meaningless, says the Judge.

Role Reversal: Narrative Justice

Perhaps the most interesting conceit of the story is its role reversal. The judge
should represent Sharia—that is, God’s legislated commands. The Sufi, as a
wayfarer on the select path to God, should represent futuwwa—that is, a virtue
that might be called “chivalry” or, as I prefer, “youngmanliness.” Qualities of
youngmanliness lacking in our Sufi are self-sacrifice, generosity of spirit, a lack
of pettiness, and, generally, placing the needs of others over one’s own and
overlooking one’s due. Indeed, the actions of the Sufi directly contradict a
description of youngmanliness by an anonymous Sufi writer of the late 10th or
early 11th century: A possessor-of-youngmanliness should, first, care for the
indigent, while Rūmī’s character, the Sufi, is indifferent toward his aggressor’s
poverty and physical weakness. The possessor-of-youngmanliness should,
second, remember his own blessings, while the Sufi is forgetful of his own
wellbeing. After all, the slap leaves no lingering physical effects. Third and last,
the possessor-of-youngmanliness should forget his misfortunes, and yet the Sufi
is unable to forget the wrong done against him.

The Sufi’s failure in youngmanliness can be understood best by seeing his

actions in light of an explanation of the relationship between youngmanliness
and Sharia by Abū Ḥafs Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī, not to be confused with the
philosopher, a major Sufi figure who might have met with Rūmī’s father.
Suhrawardī comments that the requirements of youngmanliness are more
stringent than Sharia. Thus, for example, a person possessing youngmanliness
would “do a good deed in exchange” when someone “commits evil against
them,” even if Sharia allows for retaliation. The Sufi in Rūmī’s story acts in
opposition to Suhrawardī’s words, abandoning youngmanliness and
demanding the harshest limits and retribution of Sharia. On the other hand, the

  8  
judge reveals to everyone the way in which Sharia and youngmanliness are
actually in harmony.

The justice of the judge—as opposed to the retributive justice sought by the Sufi—
might be called “narrative” justice, a justice that takes individual narratives and
real circumstances into question. In this case, the Judge has no spot (maḥall) to
punish, because the sick man’s body has wasted away and left no invulnerable
places to receive blows of corporal punishment. Only the living body is the
Judge’s jurisdiction, while the soul is punished in the afterlife. Moreover, the
sick man is poor and cannot be asked to pay a compensation for his crime. Even
if he has committed an injustice, the sick man’s wellbeing and livelihood matter.

The Sufi sees justice as black and white. He avoids exacting retaliation because
he fears punishment from the king, but he has no doubt that a strike merits a
strike. Even in that, we see that his lower self calls him to more than one slap—
yanking out every hair and punching the sick man numerous times. The Sufi has
mastered self-control, so he refrains from taking such action. Rūmī makes clear,
moreover, that such self-restraint is on account of habituation through Sufi
practices. What the Sufi has not mastered, however, is a magnanimous
foregoing of one’s due that might be necessary in the case of a dying, poor man.
This ability to have a panoramic view of the needs of everyone, both self and
others, and make judgments that suit perfectly the circumstances of the moment
is called, in Aristotelian virtue ethics, “practical wisdom.” It is defined by the
Muslim philosopher Miskawayh as “preferring that which is most virtuous and
acting upon it with habituated constancy.” Thus, the Judge, who is also slapped,
is able to restrain his anger because he, like the Sufi, has practiced managing
the source of his anger, or what is called in philosophical ethics, “the irascible
faculty.” But, very much unlike the Sufi, he has practical wisdom and can prefer
the most virtuous course of action without effort. He can have mercy in this case,
because this particular person’s affliction merits mercy. Justice is not the blind
application of tit-for-tat retribution, but a consideration of each person’s specific
situation.

Rūmī’s commentary parallels insights from virtue ethics, but also highlights an
expectation that he and other Muslims had of judges. Wael Hallaq discusses

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ways in which premodern Sharia was not “law” in the modern sense, that is, in
the sense that law must be fixed and based on precedents, because it was
considered as malleable as the social and personal circumstances to which it
responded. Moreover, Sharia was not “blind,” because those who were weak,
sick, or poor—like the misguided slapper in Rūmī’s story—should be given
preference over those who are privileged, healthy, and self-sufficient. The “law”
of Sharia was what Hallaq calls an “ijtihadic process,” a constantly renewing and
contextualized reinterpretation within the constant framework of scripture,
jurisprudential principles, and community consensus. The notion of Sharia as
state law, a legalized code with universal implications, was a product of
colonization that actually began in the British dominance of India, especially in
the late 1700s, when the British determined that indigenous law should be as
codified as English law.

Before this period, it would have seemed ridiculous to imagine law as divorced
from “social and spiritual morality” or as a prerogative of legislators. Based on
the contrast Hallaq describes between the fluidity of premodern interpretations
of Sharia and the rigidity of modern state law, we might read the Sufi’s
interpretation of Sharia as an unforgiving code as a critique of universal
applications of law. It is also evidence that the misunderstanding of Sharia as a
blind code of conduct and retribution has existed for some time.

Jurisprudential books tend to discuss punishment in precisely the same matter-

of-fact, nonchalant manner as Rūmī’s Sufi does. Yet Rūmī is able to transform a
legal discussion into a discussion of virtue, showing us that the practice of law
did indeed rely on virtue, especially the virtues of the Judges who applied the
law. Temperance is seen as comically lacking in the sick man, but possessed by
both the Sufi and the Judge, who are both able to hold themselves back from
returning a slap. Yet each of those two—the Sufi and the Judge—has varying
motivations. For the Sufi, those motivations are external. The Sufi fears the king.
For the judge, motivations are internal. The Judge has wisdom, which brings
him to come as close to excusing the sick man as the boundaries of the law will
allow.

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The Difference in Storytelling

Here is where we must consider what, exactly, makes ethics in storytelling

different from ethics in treatises, manuals, and books of philosophy. The
narrative of a deluded sick man with an urge to slap Sufis seems to necessitate
context in a way that abstract writing—such as in philosophical or Sufi treatises—
does not. An ethical stance becomes more than a matter of contending moral
theories; everything has situatedness and subjectivity.

The sick man must slap to save his life. The Sufi, indignant at the harm done to
him, holds himself back in order to seek a legal form of retributive justice. The
Judge adjudicates from a distance. Unbiased and informed, he functions much
like the “ideal observer” imagined by the Scottish philosopher David Hume (d.
1776). Yet the narrative throws subjectivity onto the Judge by having the sick
man slap him as well. This allows us to see how the Sufi might have reacted,
were he more knowledgeable and hence virtuous. That is, it forces the Judge
to become a moral actor and not simply a judge of the moral actor. An extended
dialogue between the Sufi and the Judge proves the Sufi to be good, the judge
to be beyond good; the Sufi to be law-abiding, and the judge to be just.

Whether in the study of Islamic law or in Islamic wisdom literature, context has
often mattered greatly. Concepts such as dafʿ al-ḥaraj (which can be called,
“preventing undue hardship”) and al-ʿurf (or “convention”) have allowed legal
scholars to bring a person’s or a people’s situation into consideration. In
storytelling, the focus is even more squarely on such situatedness. Mere
reflection on the human condition, furthermore, reveals the need to know the
moral agent’s context: Somewhere between spirit and clay, between angel and
animal, the human being finds herself perpetually pulled in contradicting
directions, and, even as she strives to be good, she is met at every turn with a
challenge peculiar to her set of circumstances. One might say that the conflict
that exists in each of our challenges, particular to each individual, who comes to
the challenge with a unique life-story, encapsulates what it means to be human.
This too might explain why we delight in storytelling.

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Rūmī and Philosophy

In my attempt to summarize this long narrative from Book Six of Rūmī’s

Mathnawī, there has been, of course, much I have not been able to include. For
example, while Rūmī’s account of the judge and the Sufi draws from Sufi
literature, it also makes use of philosophical virtue ethics. This is especially
interesting when one considers Rūmī’s baldly-stated opposition to philosophy.
Rūmī has become somewhat legendary for his antagonism toward
philosophers. He famously describes adherents to rational arguments, such as
philosophers, as walking on stilts. In his Mathnawī, philosophers appear as
spokespersons of fanciful thought, disbelief, corruption, and skepticism, who
deny the existence of demons (dīw) while actually being demonic in form.

Yet—in the very passage I’ve discussed—Rūmī uses branches of knowledge

pursued by the philosophers. In many places throughout the Mathnawī
characters behave in a manner that shows Rūmī’s awareness of premodern
Arabic medical psychology. Medicine in Rūmī’s day was often associated with
philosophers, whose research built on Greek models of medicine, especially
that of Galen. That medical psychology, by the way, as I discuss, was the basis of
Islamic philosophical virtue ethics. We can say, then, that if Rūmī’s poetry is a
slice of a much larger intellectual, thirteenth-century pie, it is instructive to see
that philosophical virtue ethics and humoral medicine do at times appear as an
ingredient—especially humoral medicine, which was perhaps simply too
practical to shun.

Storytelling as a Model for Interpreting the Universe in Ibn Ṭufayl

This brings me to the story of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān as related by the Spanish
philosopher Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Ṭufayl. What interests me about this
story—especially in the context of Rūmī—is that in many ways its ethical themes
intersect with those conveyed by Rūmī in his story of “the Judge and the Sufi.”
This is despite the fact that the larger framework for these tales could not, in
some ways, be in greater opposition. After all, Ibn Ṭufayl advocates the triumph
of reason over all else, while Rūmī emphasizes over and over again the limits of
reason. Ibn Ṭufayl argues that religion is limited when it comes to

  12  
communicating philosophical realities. Myths and references to Paradise and
Hell are symbols that apply to the masses, while those gifted with an exceptional
reasoning capacity will soar beyond religious stories and symbols to know the
Real directly. Rūmī, on the other hand, like Abū Ḥāmid Ghazālī before him,
consistently points to the hidden meanings that cannot be accessed without
going through scripture, metaphors, and ritual. Yet, in terms of storytelling, both
writers circumvent our usual way of seeing things by providing a narrative of
unusual circumstances. If a student of Islamic law were asked: What should be
done in the case of a person who, unprompted, slaps another person? He or she
might reply with a discussion about retribution and the possibility of forgiveness.
Rūmī, however, shows us that in a lived context, there is far more complexity, a
complexity that premodern judges must take into account when adjudicating.
As far as we know, this more narrative form of justice was the way that judges in
Rūmī’s day practiced ethical reasoning in arenas of contention, such as court
cases. Only a story about real-life situations could convey such complexity.

Ibn Ṭufayl circumvents our usual way of seeing things by creating a thought
experiment scenario: Is it possible for a person, cultivated in the perfect clime
and with the perfect complement of bodily constitution and rational faculties, to
uncover the secrets of existence without the aid of society or revealed religion?

In other words, is it possible to achieve the pinnacle of knowing God and the
secrets of the universe without prophets or revelation, without anything but
one’s rational faculties and the natural world around a person? The answer turns
out to be yes, according to Ibn Ṭufayl. It’s not surprising, then, that this story—
originally in Arabic—turned out to be a major source of inspiration for European
intellectuals in the 17th and 18th centuries. The book was translated into Hebrew,
Latin, Dutch, French, German, and English, sometimes with multiple translations
in one language. It garnered such admirers as Baruch Spinoza (d. 1677),
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (d. 1716), and Alexander Pope (d. 1744). Daniel
Defoe’s (d. 1731) Robinson Crusoe—considered by some the first novel in
English—might have received inspiration from Ibn Ṭufayl’s text. The possibility
has also been raised that John Locke’s (d. 1704) momentous shift toward an
empirical epistemology sprung from his exposure to a Latin translation of Ḥayy

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and to his close friendship with the translator, Edward Pococke, and his father.
All of this makes sense to those who know this story of a self-taught genius, which
resonated with Enlightenment ideals of individualism, rationality, and even
empiricism.

The Tale of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān

Here a brief summary of Ibn Ṭufayl’s narrative would be useful. According to Ibn
Ṭufayl, an island exists near the equator and close to India where the sun strikes
the ground in just the right way for a pocket of earth to become so perfectly
balanced in terms of heat, cold, wetness, and dryness, that it contains—in its
middle section—a lump resembling the balanced human constitution. When the
divine spirit, which is everywhere, attaches itself to that clay, the body begins to
form, beginning from the heart. From this lump of clay, the infant Ḥayy comes
to be. For those who cannot accept the idea of spontaneous generation, Ibn
Ṭufayl offers an alternative, but the central point is the same. A child comes to
be on an island, where there are no other human beings. He is raised by a deer
who cares for him by feeding him her milk. As Ḥayy grows, he notices that he is
different from other animals on the island. He has no natural form of defense
and, unlike them, his private parts are exposed. This causes him great
embarrassment, so eventually he takes to covering himself with the remains of a
dead eagle. Later, his mother—the doe—passes away, which causes Ḥayy a great
deal of grief.

This is a masterfully written part of the narrative, because—as those of us

interested in drama know—a character needs motivation to act in a way that will
convince the audience. Ḥayy becomes motivated by his foster mother’s death to
try to bring her back to life. He searches within her body for the source of life,
and comes only as close as realizing that there is a certain heat that comes from
the heart that keeps the body alive. Still, the major realization he has is that his
mother was not that body that would decompose and cause him disgust.

Rather, his mother was whatever intangible thing that once served as a source
of life for that body and has now disappeared. This will cause Ḥayy eventually to
look elsewhere, to look higher than the material realm for that which deserves

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his attention. As Ḥayy grows, he uses his intellect to master life on the island. At
first, he constructs weapons to hunt and learns to ride certain animals as he
chases others. The animals that once did not take him seriously learn to fear him.
In his pursuit of the truth, Ḥayy dissects animal after animal. It is here, I think, that
Ḥayy mostly resembles the Enlightenment version of the scientist, who sees
nature as brutish and entirely at the disposal of the human being.

Fascinatingly, however, Ḥayy’s intellectual journey progresses beyond that. He

looks to the heavens and notes that heavenly bodies are the most perfect of all
existent things. He decides to imitate them. They rotate, and so Ḥayy begins to
rotate around the island and around himself. Here his actions would—to the
Muslim reader—resemble those of pilgrims to Mecca, who circumambulate the
Kaʿba. They would also resemble those of Sufis who rotate around themselves
in ecstatic dance. Ḥayy finds that these actions help him separate himself from
sensory perception, and thus focus more clearly on the cause of all things, that
is, what Ibn Ṭufayl calls “the Necessary Existent,” but we might call “God.” Also
like the heavens, Ḥayy decides to be benevolent to everything on the island. He
gives up eating meat, and eventually decides that even plucking plants is too
harmful, choosing instead to consume fruits that fall to the ground. This diet also
enables him to focus less on the body and more on the Necessary Existent.
Eventually, Ḥayy takes to a cave and spends his time almost entirely in
contemplation. Using observations from life on the island, Ḥayy reasons that he
resembles animals in his body. He resembles the heavenly orbs in his soul. But
deep within him is a secret that resembles none other than the Necessary
Existent. It is this part of himself that Ḥayy works to cultivate while in meditation.
He achieves a state of realization that allows him to become almost completely
unaware of himself and almost completely focused on that Necessary Existent.

This is where, as they say, things get interesting. On an island close to Ḥayy’s live
two friends named Salāmān and Absāl. Salāmān loves humanity, and sees
religion as primarily about helping and serving others. He becomes a major
political figure on that island. Absāl, on the other hand, sees religion as mainly
there to redirect one’s attention to higher truths—which involves isolating
oneself. He decides to leave his island so that he can ruminate those truths

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undisturbed. He ends up on Ḥayy’s island. For some time, because of Ḥayy’s self-
cloistering in the cave, Absāl imagines he is alone. Even when he sees Ḥayy, he
supposes that Ḥayy has come to the island for the same reason as himself, that
is, seclusion, and so avoids him.

Their meeting is a masterfully written scene: Ḥayy has a difficult time

recognizing another human being. Absāl—who tries to flee from the curious
Ḥayy—is amazed by Ḥayy’s strength when Ḥayy grabs him, a result of Ḥayy’s
supreme constitution and life on the island. Absāl teaches Ḥayy his human
language, beginning with naming simple objects. He does this in order to guide
him, by means of proper learning, to his religion.

This is ironic because Absāl will soon discover that the self-taught, illiterate Ḥayy
has an enviable expertise of the mysteries of the universe. Ḥayy’s conceptions
seem to possess an element of perfection. Ḥayy’s ideas are based upon images,
that is, direct vision, and were developed in abstraction from human language,
which is based on metaphor. Indeed, Ḥayy’s knowledge is so superior, that
Absāl soon longs to become a pupil of Ḥayy. Ḥayy learns about Absāl’s religion—
which might be Islam, but is presented generically as any monotheistic religion
based in scripture. He admires it and accepts it, but is disappointed that Absāl’s
prophet relied on stories, metaphors, and laws. Stories and metaphors convey
the truth in a way that is less direct than philosophical reasoning. Laws seem to
assume the worst about people. They mainly serve to keep people’s lower
desires in check and to protect property. Ḥayy believes that everyone, like him,
should rise above their lower desires and relinquish property entirely. They
decide to go to Absāl’s island to teach its inhabitants about Ḥayy’s philosophical
discoveries. What they discover, however, is that even the most intelligent reject
Ḥayy’s teachings. They cannot handle the truth when stripped of human contexts
such as story and metaphor. Ḥayy leaves them to their simplistic understanding
of things and returns, with Absāl, to his island.

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Conclusions

A straightforward reading of this story would be one that highlights the

superiority of philosophical reasoning to stories, myths, and metaphors. Yet
there is another point made in the very ironic fact that Ibn Ṭufayl himself has
engaged in storytelling to convey higher principles. It is not that stories
themselves lack truth, or that they should be rejected entirely. As Ḥayy discovers,
our need for human contexts is shared by most—except perhaps for very rare
individuals. We need truths to be presented to us in lived human contexts
because, otherwise, we find it difficult to see the relevance and even beauty of
those truths. Yet, as this tale teaches, we should not simply accept stories as
stories. We should perform taʿbīr, or interpretation, a word that etymologically
signifies “causing someone to cross over.” It is a term most often used for dream
interpretation, but given special attention in Sufism.

Taʿbīr or interpretation allows us to cross over from the form or facts of a story
to the more profound meanings within it. It allows us to cross over, in that, when
we learn from the experiences and situations of others, we are spared the pains
of having to experience them ourselves. Absāl, for example, who becomes
Ḥayy’s pupil and reaches the pinnacles of intellectual perfection under Ḥayy’s
tutelage is described as being “enamored by the science of esoteric
interpretation,” or taʾwīl.6 There is an indication that only those who incline
toward interpretation and contemplating stories and events will make real
intellectual discoveries about their place in the universe.

Let me remind you that the Qurʾan also presents those who listen to its narratives
in two different ways. One group hears these stories and quickly perceives the
reality within them, using them to reflect on themselves and discover God and
His attributes. Another group simply hears stories. Unable to go beyond
externalities, they reject them as “legends” or “myths of the ancients.” To them,
stories are as meaningless as they might be to those who see history, religion,
and literature as social constructs through and through. To see beyond the story

                                                                                                                       
6
 Ḥayy  ibn  Yaqẓān  (ed.  Asʿad  al-­‐Saḥmarānī),  p.  144.  
 

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is as inconceivable for them as, to put it in Qur’anic terms, it would be for a
person submerged in “layers of darkness, in a limitless ocean, covered by wave
upon wave, with clouds above them, layers of darkness one over the other, so
that when one pulls one’s hand out, one can hardly see it” (Q 24:40). Indeed,
this very reference appears in Ibn Ṭufayl’s account of Ḥayy.7

On the other hand, there are those whose intuition, while not as keen as Ḥayy’s,
perceive universal truths within narratives and within the signs that surround
them, merely by using the perceptive faculties that become attuned to
understanding by living a good life, being grateful, and contemplating the
sources of things. Their hearts are like a wick, which, as the Qur’an describes, is
steeped in an oil that “almost lights up on its own without even being touched
by fire” (Q 24:35). It is in that way that storytelling can transcend knowledge of
human events and become a means for knowing the loftiest spiritual realities.

                                                                                                                       
7
 Ḥayy  ibn  Yaqẓān  (ed.  Asʿad  al-­‐Saḥmarānī),  p.  152.  

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