by Robert Irwin
Since he is master of his gross body and of his subtle soul, some of him is corporeal and some of him incorporeal. The incorporeal part is alive, while the corporeal part is dead. Half of him is in movement, while the other half is motionless. Half of him is perfectly chiselled while the other is damaged. Part of him is light, part dark. Part of him is interior, part exterior …
Trans. Robert Irwin from the Arabic text published as Pseudo-Magriti,
Das Ziel des Weisen, ed. Helmut Ritter (Leipzig, 1933), pp. 42.-3
COMMENTARY
This chapter goes on to argue, among other things, that a man’s head is shaped to correspond to the dome of the heavens, before going on to speak obscurely of the importance of hidden knowledge.
Although the unknown author’s presentation of man’s capacities and near-godlike status is set out in a higgledy-piggledy fashion, I do not think it fanciful to see this meditation as a precursor of the famous oration De hominis dignitate (‘On the Dignity of Man’) by a leading author of the Italian Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola (1463-94). Pico, after remarking that he had ‘read in the records of the Arabians, reverend Fathers, that Abdela the Saracen, when questioned as to what on the stage of this world, as it were, could be seen most worthy of wonder, replied: “There is nothing to be seen more worthy of wonder than man.” ’ Pico went on to set out man’s special status in the universe, and his role as God’s intermediary and as a ruler of the lower creation. Later, of course, Pico’s themes were picked up by Shakespeare in the famous soliloquy in Hamlet, beginning ‘What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!’
However, there is a dark side to the curious specimen of eleventh-century Andalusian humanism translated above, for its high-flown rhetoric was used as part of a theoretical justification for using hair, excreta and other substances in magical spells.
Although I have translated hikma as ‘wisdom’, it sometimes has the special sense of esoteric wisdom.
The notion of the ‘Perfect Man’, or al-lnsan al-Kamil, who combines the powers of nature with divine powers, also plays a leading role in the thought of the Ikhwan al-Safa’ and of numerous philosophers and Sufis.
The ‘six movements’ are presumably forwards, sideways, left, right, up and down. But why the author wishes to stress this attribute is not clear – among much else.
After Alfonso VI of Castile captured Toledo from the poet-king of Seville in 1085, the Ta'ifa kings, led by Mu'tamid, panicked, and sought the help of the Almoravids in resisting the Christian Reconquista. In so doing, they sealed the doom of their dynasties. The Almoravids (or, more correctly, the al-Murabitun) were adherents of militant, literalist Islam, and by the late eleventh century they had taken control of a large part of the Maghreb. Summoned by the temporarily united Ta'ifa kings, and led by Yusuf ibn Tashfin, they crossed over into Spain and in 1086 won a great victory over Alfonso VI at the Battle of Zallaqa. However, in the years that followed, the Almoravids showed themselves to be more active in annexing the territories of the remaining Ta'ifa kings than they were in resisting the Christian advance. (As has already been noted, Mu'tamid was to die in a North African prison in 1095.) The Almoravids were Berber puritans who had no interest in the courtly games and literary heritage of Muslim Spain, and civilizing them proved to be a slow process. Nevertheless, despite the Almoravids’ lack of interest in literature, poets continued to address panegyrics to them in the hope of securing their attention and their money.
Even before the coming of the Almoravids, there had been a perceptible turning away from a literature that embodied the luxurious values of the Cordovan court and, in reaction to the old ways, many turned to religion and adopted more austere fashions. Some poets rejected the fairy-tale elegance of the court and chose instead to devote themselves to the beauties of nature. Abu Ishaq Ibrahim IBN KHAFAIA (1058-1138/9), nicknamed ‘the Gardener’, was one of those who composed poetry in praise of the Almoravids and in particular of Ibn Tashfin, who had reconquered Ibn Khafaja’s native city, Valencia, from the Christians. But as his nickname suggests, Ibn Khafaja was much more famous for his compositions about gardens and flowers. Although he chose his subject matter from the natural world, this does not mean that there was anything particularly ‘natural’ about his poetry. He was fond of rare words and paradoxes, and his poems are ornate and make great play with antitheses. His landscapes and flowers are subject to human emotions. His poetry was immensely popular and much anthologized. Ibn Khafaja appears to have been an eccentric and solitary figure. In old age, he used to walk out of his village of Shuqr until he reached the solitude of a ravine. There he would stand and shout repeatedly at the top of his voice ‘Ibrahim, you will die!’ until he fell unconscious.
The two very different poems which follow give some idea of Ibn Khafaja’s range.
This is the crow of your dusk screeching, chase it away.
This is the turbulent sea of your night seething, cross over.
On your night journey take nourishment
from drops of the pure light of stars;
wrap yourself in the green leaves of darkness;
wear the robe of the sword, embroidered with
drops of blood under swirling smoke;
throw good deeds against bad and sip
the purity of life from turbulent clouds of dust.
Salma Khadra Jayussi (trans.), in Jayussi (ed.),
The Legacy of Muslim Spain, pp. 383–4
With gazelle glances, with her antelope neck, with lips of wine and teeth like bubbles,
She glided along in her gown embroidered with gold like shining stars entwined around the moon;
The hand of love enveloped us by night in a robe of embraces which was torn away by the hand of dawn.
Bellamy and Steiner, Ibn Said al-Maghribi’s ‘The
Banners of the Champions’, p. 181
In the course of the early twelfth century, the Almoravids’ power base in North Africa was eroded by a new militant religious movement. In 1125 IBN TUMART raised the standard of revolt and declared himself to be the Mahdi, the Expected One, whose coming heralded the end of the world. Ibn Tumart expressed his claim to be the Mahdi in language which is possessed of a menacing rhythmical eloquence:
As for whim and prevarication, it is not licit to prefer it over truth, nor is it licit to prefer this world to the next, nor what is invalidated to what invalidates it, nor should atheism be set over piety. Truth should not be adulterated with falsehood. If knowledge is eliminated, ignorance will prevail. If guidance is eliminated, then error will prevail, and if justice is eliminated, tyranny will prevail. If the ignorant rulers take over the world, and if the deaf and dumb kings take over the world, and if the dajjalun[antichrists] take over the world, then only the Mahdi will get rid of falsehood, and only the Mahdi will carry out truth. And the Mahdi is known among the Arabs and the non-Arabs and the bedouins and the settled people. And the knowledge concerning him is confirmed in every place and in every collection of documents. And what is known by the necessity of information before he appears is known by the necessity of witness after his appearance. And faith in the Mahdi is a religious obligation, and he who doubts it is an unbeliever. And he is protected from error in the matters of faith which he invokes. No error is conceivable in him. He is not to be contended with, or opposed, or resisted, or contradicted, or fought, and he is unique in his time and truthful in his words. He will sunder the oppressors and impostors, and he will conquer the world both East and West, and fill it with justice as it had been filled with injustice, and his rule will last until the end of the world.
Madeleine Fletcher (trans.), in Jayussi (ed.),
The Legacy of Muslim Spain, pp. 241–2
Ibn Tumart’s followers were known as the Almohads (or, more correctly, al-Muwahhidun, ‘the proclaimers of the unity of God’). The Almohad movement was, like its Almoravid p
recursor, a militantly puritanical Berber religious movement which sought to return to a more pristine form of Islam. However, the Almohads drew most of their support from a different Berber confederacy and their puritanism had a somewhat different stamp from that of the Almoravids. For example, whereas the Almoravids had persecuted Sufis, the Almohads were fierce partisans of the sort of Sufism expounded by al-Ghazzali (see Chapter 7). By 1147 the Almoravids were in effective control of Morocco. (Ibn Tumart had died in n 30 and his deputy, ‘Abd al-Mu’min, had assumed the leadership.) In 1145 an Almohad army had entered Spain, and in the course of the next decade the Almohads took control of most of the remaining Muslim territory and established their capital at Seville.
Abu Bakr ibn ‘Abd al-Malik IBN TUFAYL (C. 1116-85) served the Almohad ruler Yusuf ibn ‘Abd al-Mu’min (reigned 1163-84) both as physician and vizier. He also served as a propagandist for their jihad. After attending the Almohad court in Granada, he subsequently moved to Morocco, where he died. Ibn Tufayl wrote on medicine as well as practising it. However, he is most famous for his philosophical fable about a man stranded on a desert island, Hayy ibn Yaqzan. Ibn Sina had previously written a philosophical fable with the same title (see Chapter 5), but Ibn Tufayl develops his story in quite a different way. Hayy ibn Yaqzan (his name means ‘Living Man, Son of the Vigilant’) was abandoned at birth and cast ashore on an uninhabited desert island. There he was suckled and looked after by a doe. In Ibn Tufayl’s fable, Hayy, since he has no contact with human beings, has to teach himself about the world through observation, experiment and reason. Not only does he learn how to survive and even to discover how the universe works, but he also attains to a vision of the Divine.
Only after Hayy has completed his intellectual and spiritual self-education is the island visited by another man, Absal, a devout person who is seeking a spiritual truth within himself. Absal’s and Hayy’s views on religion and the world turn out to agree perfectly and together they set off on a joint mission to the civilized island where Absal grew up. Their aim is to convert the islanders to their spiritually enlightened perception of the Truth. However, they soon come to realize that such a perception can only be shared by a spiritual elite, while ordinary men must be content with esoteric truths of Islam as they are revealed by the Prophet Muhammad. Hayy and Absal returned to the desert island to meditate on the higher mysteries of the Divine. The surface sense of this subtle text – that it is possible to understand this world and the next through the unaided powers of reason – is not its real meaning. Ibn Tufayl boasted that an esoteric veil concealed the true meaning of his book. He was actually concerned to stress the need for men both to study books and to seek instruction from spiritual masters. (Simon Ockley published an English translation of Hayy ibn Yaqzan in 1708, and it may be that Ibn Tufayl’s spiritual fable was one of the sources of inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s more earthy adventure yarn, Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719.)
They agree that the doe that cared for him was richly pastured, so she was fat and had plenty of milk, to give the baby the best possible nourishment. She stayed with him, leaving only when necessary to graze. The baby grew so fond of her he would cry if she were late, and then she would come rushing back. There were no beasts of prey on the island.
So the child grew, nourished by its mother-doe’s milk, until he was two years old. By then he’d learned to walk; and, having his teeth, he took to following the doe on her foraging expeditions. She treated him gently and tenderly, taking him where fruit trees grew and feeding him the sweet, ripe fruits that fell from them. The hard-shelled ones she cracked between her teeth, or if he wanted to go back for a while to milk she let him. She brought him to water when he was thirsty; and when the sun beat down she shaded him. When he was cold she warmed him, and at nightfall she would bring him back to the spot where she had found him, nestling him to herself among the feathers with which the little ark had been cushioned.
When they went out to forage and came back to rest they were accompanied by a troop of deer that went along to graze and stayed the night near where they slept. Thus the child lived among the deer, imitating their calls so well that eventually his voice and theirs could hardly be distinguished. In the same way he imitated all the bird calls and animal cries he heard with amazing accuracy, but most often he would mimic the calls of the deer for alarm, courtship, summons or defense – for animals have different cries for these different contingencies. The animals were used to him and he was used to them, so they were not afraid of each other.
Hayy discovered in himself an aversion toward some things and an attraction to others even after the things themselves were no longer objects of his immediate experience, for their images were fixed in his mind. He observed the animals from this perspective and saw how they were clothed in fur, hair or feathers, how swiftly they could run, how fiercely they could fight, and what apt weapons they had for defense against any attacker – horns, tusks, hooves, spurs and claws. Then he looked back at himself and realized how naked and defenseless he was. He was a weak runner and not a good fighter. When the animals grappled with him for a piece of fruit they usually wrested it from him and got away with it. He could not defend himself or even run away.
Hayy saw the fawns his age sprout horns from nowhere and grow strong and swift. But in himself he could discover no such change. He wondered about this but could not fathom the cause. No maimed or deformed animal he could find was at all like himself. All other animals, he observed, had covered outlets for their bodily wastes – the solid by a tail, the liquid by fur or the like. And the fact that the private parts of an animal were better concealed than his own disturbed him greatly and made him very unhappy.
When he was nearly seven and had finally lost hope of making up the deficiencies which so disturbed him he took some broad leaves from a tree and put them on, front and back. Then out of plaits of palms and grass he made something like a belt about his middle and fastened his leaves to it. But he had hardly worn it at all when the leaves withered and dried and, one by one, fell out. So he had constantly to get new ones and work them in with the old in bundles. This might make it hold up a while longer, but still it lasted only a very short time.
He got some good sticks from a tree, balanced the shafts and sharpened the points. These he would brandish at the animals that menaced him. He could now attack the weaker ones and hold his own against the stronger. His self-esteem rose a bit as he observed how superior his hands were to those of an animal. They enabled him to cover his nakedness and to make sticks for self-defense, so he no longer needed natural weapons or the tail he had longed for.
All the while, he was growing, and soon he was seven. The chore of getting new leaves to cover himself was taking too long, and he had an urge to get the tail of some dead animal and fasten that on instead. But he had noticed that the living wildlife shunned the bodies of the dead and fled from them. So he could not go ahead with his plan, until one day he came upon a dead eagle. Seeing that the animals had no aversion to it, he snatched the opportunity to put his idea into effect. Boldly taking hold of the eagle, Hayy cut off the wings and tail just as they were, all in one piece. He stretched out the wings and smoothed down the feathers, stripped off the remaining skin and split it in half, tying it about his middle, hanging down, half in front and half behind. The tail, he threw across his back; and he fastened the wings to his arms. Thus he got a fine covering that not only kept him warm but also so terrified the animals that not one of them would fight with him or get in his way. In fact, none would come near him except the doe that had nursed and raised him.
She was inseparable from him and he from her. When she grew old and weak he would lead her to rich pastures and gather sweet fruits to feed her. Even so, weakness and emaciation gradually tightened their hold, and finally death overtook her. All her movements and bodily functions came to a standstill. When the boy saw her in such a state, he was beside himself with grief. His soul seemed to overflow with sorrow. He tried to call h
er with the call she always answered, shouted as loud as he could, but saw not the faintest flicker of life. He peered into her eyes and ears, but no damage was apparent. In the same way he examined all her parts but could find nothing wrong with any of them. He hoped to discover the place where she was hurt so he could take away the hurt and allow her to recover – but he could not even make a start; he was powerless.
What made him think there was something he could ‘take away’ was his own past experience. He knew that when he shut his eyes or covered them, he saw nothing until the obstruction was removed; if he stopped his ears with his fingers he could not hear until the obstacle was gone; and if he held his nose he would smell nothing until the passageway was clear again.
These observations led him to believe that not only his senses, but every one of his other bodily functions was liable to obstructions that might block its work. When the block was removed it would return to its normal functioning. But when he had examined all her external organs and found no visible wound or damage, considering meanwhile that her inactivity was not confined to one part but spread throughout the body, it dawned on him that the hurt must be in some organ unseen within the body, without which none of the external parts could function. No part of the body could carry on its work. Hayy hoped that if he could find that organ and remove whatever had lodged in it, it would revert to normal, its benefits would once more flow to the rest of the body and all the bodily functions would resume.
