Ayşenur Narboğa
Like everyone who has read it, I have been struck by the question of why Hayy ibn Yaqzan, the narrative by Ibn Tufayl that influenced many Western thinkers such as Defoe, Bacon, Spinoza, Rousseau and More, has not received the attention it deserves among us. Yet Robinson Crusoe, written two centuries later and inspired by it, is a character known almost all over the world. Indeed, as Ian Watt argues in Myths of Modern Individualism, Robinson has strengthened his position as a modern myth. So why has Hayy ibn Yaqzan – regarded as the first of the robinsonades, the genre known as the island novel, and the forerunner of philosophical novels – not received the attention it deserves among us?
After the Greek tale of Salaman and Absal was translated into Arabic in the ninth century, scholars such as Avicenna and Suhrawardi used this narrative technique in their works. None of them, however, matched the success of Ibn Tufayl’s fiction. In this work, written in the twelfth century, the Andalusian thinker showed that human beings can reach the truth on their own by studying nature. He argued that knowledge acquired through observation and thought does not contradict revelation, and he assessed the philosophical and theological debates of his time through an allegorical text. The work was so successful that it was translated into many languages and influenced different cultures and ways of thinking. As an autodidactic text in which Hayy, growing up alone on an island, succeeds in reaching knowledge of the truth solely through thought and intuition, without any religious or social norm, it resonated strongly, especially in the Western world. For the Europe of the period in which the foundations of modern education and pedagogy were laid and natural law was debated, Hayy attracted the interest of many philosophers. (For details, see Avner Ben-Zaken’s Reading Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan.)
Although we share the same cultural and religious ground, Hayy ibn Yaqzan met Turkish readers rather late. Translated into Turkish in 1923 by the professor (müderris) Babanzade Reşid and serialised in the journal Mihrab, the work was forgotten when the journal closed. I believe that the estrangement from the East of the cultural policies pursued during the Westernisation process is one of the factors that deepened this neglect of the work.
Turkish readers’ best-known encounter with Hayy ibn Yaqzan is the edition prepared with the valuable contributions of N. Ahmet Özalp. Published by Yapı Kredi Yayınları, the book contains both Avicenna’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan, translated by M. Şerafettin Yaltkaya, and Ibn Tufayl’s, translated by Babanzade Reşid. Thanks to this study, which examines the texts of these two valuable philosophers – written at different times but confused because of their similar names – we become closely acquainted with Hayy ibn Yaqzan, one of our important classics. It should be noted, however, that the study “simplifies” Şerafettin Yaltkaya’s translation of Avicenna and Babanzade Reşid’s translation of Ibn Tufayl into present-day Turkish. In addition, because of the many concepts, allegories and debates in both Hayy narratives, by Avicenna and by Ibn Tufayl, the book contains numerous footnotes and explanations. Özalp states that he added many footnotes and explanations to the translation to make the text more comprehensible to readers, since knowing these twelfth-century debates and having the concepts in them explained is very important for the twenty-first-century reader. Having regained recognition with the YKY translation, first printed in 1996, the novel Hayy (we can now call it a novel) also encouraged subsequent Turkish translations. The “return of the hero” that Özalp hoped for in his study has now begun to be possible.
Despite all these developments, I realised that we have not been able to see Hayy ibn Yaqzan as a work of literature. Readings from the perspectives of Islamic philosophy, philosophy of mind, education, pedagogy and so on may be satisfying; but outside such reading goals, looking only at the text, what is the possibility of capturing a literary pleasure? How far is it possible to capture a literary pleasure from a work not translated from its original language, frequently interrupted by footnotes, and showing translation weaknesses here and there?
Then Mehmet Hakkı Suçin’s translation of Hayy ibn Yaqzan came to the rescue. With it we also gained the possibility of reading Hayy ibn Yaqzan with literary enjoyment. Moreover, the text is as plain as possible, that is, it does not contain many footnotes. One of the greatest gains of the text being published in this form is that every reader, from seven to seventy, may now read Hayy! As a teacher who has read Hayy ibn Yaqzan in Suçin’s translation with my reading group of young people, I must say that I obtained very good results.
With a design that makes itself felt from the cover onwards, illustrations on the inside pages and subheadings that make it easy to read, the book proclaims its appeal. In today’s world, where the book has become identified with its design, the importance of this work will be better understood, I think, especially considering young readers’ approach to books. If we can once again see a nearly forgotten Islamic classic in the hands of high-school students, our hope for the “return of the hero” that Özalp wished for is growing.
Comparing the two translations, I reached certain conclusions. They may explain why, despite all the translation activity, Hayy still cannot reach more readers. We might also call this a search for speeding up the “return of the hero”.
What I find most successful in Mehmet Hakkı Suçin’s translation of Hayy ibn Yaqzan is the preservation of Ibn Tufayl’s “religious language”. I have always thought that the excessive Turkification in Özalp’s translation, the one that comes to mind when Hayy is mentioned, casts a shadow over the text. Because of choices such as “Tanrı” (God) instead of “Allah”, “tapacak yoktur” (there is none to worship) instead of “ilah yoktur” (there is no god), and “Tanrı adıyla başlarım” (I begin in the name of God) instead of “Rahman ve Rahim olan Allah’ın adıyla” (In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful), the equivalent of the basmala, a tone retrofitted onto the text dominates. Even if the use of the word “Tanrı” may be considered normal for the passages in Hayy’s story where a person arrives on his own at the idea of a Creating Subject, the absence of the word “Allah” in a text written by a Muslim author in the twelfth century – even in the sections where he himself explains his work – supports my claim. Even in the religion that Absal teaches Hayy, the word Allah does not appear; “Tanrı” is always preferred. While in Özalp’s translations God appears under a single name, Mehmet Hakkı Suçin’s translation also includes other names belonging to God, such as Rab, İlah, Cenab-ı Hakk and Hakk.
Another point is that in Özalp’s translation certain concepts belonging to the twelfth-century tradition of Islamic philosophy are subjected to excessive Turkification. Although the concepts Ibn Tufayl opens to debate are sometimes given in parentheses, as they should be, the direct translations not explained in parentheses suffer from excessive Turkification. For example, the term quwwa (“kuvvet”), meaning that something exists potentially in a person, is translated as “güç” (power). Instead of “nazari ilim” (theoretical knowledge), “düşünme yolu” (way of thinking) is preferred, and instead of “inkişaf” (unveiling), “durumu görmeye özgü bir araç” (a tool specific to seeing the situation). Suçin, on the other hand, mostly gives the concepts of Islamic philosophy as they are, and so needs very few explanations in parentheses.
I believe some of the translation choices in the edition prepared by Özalp make the text harder to understand. It is clear that expressions such as “özdekten arınmak, yüce bağıntılar, Tanrı’nın görünme yeri, ikircim, kahredici ünlü kılıç Muhammed, gönendirici bilgi” appeal to a more advanced readership rather than to the average reader. Because of similar word choices in the book, reading Hayy ibn Yaqzan has come to be defined as a very “sophisticated” act.
As a high-school teacher, I am very pleased to see an Islamic classic like Hayy ibn Yaqzan, whose influence spans centuries, in the hands of my students. Although the Hayy narrative prepared by Özalp found us after emerging from the dusty pages of history, I think we have not been able to stop seeing it as a kind of “textbook”. Yet accepting Hayy ibn Yaqzan first of all as a literary text, and thinking about the relationship between human beings, nature and God while alone with the text, will allow those who hope for the “return of the hero” to move faster.
As Roger Garaudy put it in Promesses de l’Islam, “while Ibn Tufayl’s philosophical novel returns to the West, in all its dimensions, what it had lost for sixteen centuries”, it will also remind us of what we have lost.
We can begin first by looking for the “y” lost from the word Hayy.
First published in Parşömen Fanzin, 19 February 2022. Translated from the Turkish for this site.