Ibn Tufail

Ibn Tufail

Ibn Ṭufail (full Arabic name: أبو بكر محمد بن عبد الملك بن محمد بن طفيل القيسي الأندلسي ʾAbū Bakr Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al-Malik bin Muḥammad bin Ṭufayl al-Qaysiyy al-ʾAndalusiyy; Latinized form: Abubacer Aben Tofail; Anglicized form: Abubekar or Abu Jaafar Ebn Tophail; c. 1105 – 1185) was an Arab Andalusian Muslim polymath: a writer, Islamic philosopher, Islamic theologian, physician, astronomer, and vizier.As a philosopher and novelist, he is most famous for writing the first philosophical novel, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan (The Living Son of the Vigilant), considered a major work of Arabic literature emerging from Al-Andalus. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Ibn Tufail has received more than 325,579 page views. His biography is available in 42 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 40 in 2019). Ibn Tufail is the 215th most popular philosopher (down from 205th in 2019), the 117th most popular biography from Spain (down from 104th in 2019) and the 8th most popular Spanish Philosopher.

Ibn Tufail is most famous for his philosophical novel, "Hayy ibn Yaqzan" (meaning "Alive, son of Awake"). The book, written in Arabic, tells the story of a man who is raised in isolation on an island and discovers the world through his own observations and reasoning. The book was an early example of philosophical fiction and had a major influence on later European thinkers, including Gottfried Leibniz, Baruch Spinoza, and George Berkeley.