حي بن يقظان Quotes

“فأصخ الآن بسمع قلبك وحدق ببصر عقلك إلى ما أشير به إليه لعلك أن تجد منه هدياً يلقيك على جادة الطريق وشرطي عليك أن لا تطالب مني في هذا الوقت مزيد بيان بالمشافهة على ما أودعه هذه الأوراق، فإن المجال ضيق والتحكم بالألفاظ على أمر ليس من شأنه أن يلفظ به خطر.”
― ابن طفيل, حي بن يقظان

“فلما فهم أحوال الناس وأن أكثرهم بمنزلة الحيوان غير الناطق، علم أن الحكمة كلها والهداية والتوفيق فيما نطقت به الرسل ووردت به الشريعة، لا يمكن غير ذلك! ولا يحتمل المزيد عليه، فلكل عمل رجال، وكلٌ ميسرٌ لما خُلِقَ له (سنة الله في الذين خلوا من قبل ولن تجد لسنة الله تبديلا) فانصرف إلى "سلامان" وأصحابه به فاعتذر عما تكلم به معهم وتبرأ إليهم منه، وأعلمهم أنه قد رأى مثل رأيهم واهتدى بمثل هديهم، وأوصاهم بملازمة ما هم عليه من التزام حدود الشرع والأعمال الظاهرة، وقلة الخوض فيما لا يعنيهم، والإيمان بالمتشابهات والتسليم لها والإعراض عن البدع والأهواء، والاقتداء بالسلف الصالح والترك لمحدثات الأمور، وأمرهم بمجانبة ما عليه جمهور العوام من إهمال الشريعة والإقبال على الدنيا، وحذرهم عن غاية التحذير. وعلم هو وصاحبه "أبسال" أن هذه الطائفة المريدة القاصرة لا نجاة لها إلا بهذا الطريق، وأنها إنْ رُفِعَتْ عنه إلى بقاع الاستبصار، اختل ما هي عليه، ولم يمكنها أن تلحق بدرجة السعداء، وتذبذبت وانتكست وساءت عاقبتها. وإن هي دامت على ما هي عليه حتى يوافيها اليقين، فازت بالأمن وكانت من أصحاب اليمين، وأما السابقون السابقون فأولئك هم المقربون. فَوَدَّعَاهُم وانفصلا عنهم وتلطفا في العود إلى جزيرتهما حتى يسر الله عز وجل عليهما العبور إليها، وطلب حي بن يقظان مقامه الكريم بالنحو الذي طلبه أولا حتى عاد إليه، واقتدى به "أبسال" حتى قرب منه أو كاد وعبدا الله بتلك الجزيرة حتى أتاهما اليقين.”
― ابن طفيل, حي بن يقظان

“وأما أشرف جزأيه (الروح) فهو الشيء الذي به عرف الموجود الواجب الوجود وهذا الشيء العارف أمر رباني إلهي لا يستحيل ولا يلحقه الفساد ولا يوصف بشيء مما توصف به الأجسام ولا يدرك بشيء من الحواس ولا يتخيل ولا يتوصل إلى معرفته بآلة سواه بل يتوصل إليه به العارف والمعروف والمعرفة وهو العالم والمعلوم والعلم لا يتباين في شيء من ذلك إذ التباين والانفصال من صفات الأجسام ولواحقها ولا جسم هنالك ولا صفة جسم ولا لا حق بحسم.”
― ابن طفيل, حي بن يقظان

“Now do not set your heart on a description of what has never been represented in a human heart. For many things that are articulate in the heart cannot be described. How then can I formularize something that cannot possibly be projected in the heart, belonging to a different world, a different order of being?”
― Ibn Tufail, Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale

“Yet [134] even though the sense world mimics the divine like a shadow,
and the divine world is self-sufficient and totally independent, still it is
impossible to postulate complete nonexistence for the sensory world, for
the very reason that it does reflect the world of the divine. The destruction
of the world, then, can mean only that it is transformed, not that it goes
out of existence altogether. The Holy Book speaks clearly to this effect in
describing how the mountains will be set in motion and become like tufts
of wool, and men like moths, the sun and moon cast down, the seas split open and spilled out, on the Day when the earth turns to what is no longer
earth, and the heavens to what is no longer heaven.”
― Lenn Evan Goodman, حي بن يقظان

“If there is a Being Whose perfection is infinite, Whose splendor [95] and
goodness know no bounds, Who is beyond perfection, goodness, and
beauty, a Being such that no perfection, no goodness, no beauty, no
splendor does not flow from Him, then to lose hold of such a Being, and
having known Him to be unable to find Him must mean infinite torture as
long as He is not found. Likewise to preserve constant awareness of Him
is to know joy without lapse, unending bliss, infinite rapture and delight.”
― Lenn Evan Goodman, حي بن يقظان

“It is because he is so aware of the impact of social forces that he seeks to
abstract from them, in search of the inner core of human identity and the truths
one would discover, given the freedom to explore and the capacity to penetrate na-
ture’s workings and the meanings of the messages nature seems silently but insis-
tently to signal.”
― Lenn Evan Goodman, حي بن يقظان

“فما زال يتتبع صفات الكمال كلها فيراها له وصادرة عنه ويرى أنه أحق بها من كل ما يوصف بها دونه.”
― Ibn Tufail, ‫حي بن يقظان‬

“وفي محكم التنزيل: فلم تقتلوهم ولكن الله قتلهم وما رميت إذ رميت ولكن الله رمى.”
― Ibn Tufail, ‫حي بن يقظان‬

“It has been proved with scientific certainty that the sun is spherical, as is the earth, and that the sun is much bigger than the earth. Thus somewhat more than half the earth’s surface is perpetually lit by the sun, and of the sector of the earth illuminated at any given moment, the most brilliantly lit portion [23] is the center, since it is furthest from the darkness and faces most directly into the sun.”
― Ibn Tufail, Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale

“Hayy now understood the human condition. He saw that most men are
no better than unreasoning animals, and realized that all wisdom and
guidance, all that could possibly help them was contained already in the
words of the prophets and the religious traditions. None of this could be
different. There was nothing to be added.²⁷⁹ There is a man for every
task²⁸⁰ and everyone belongs to the life for which he was created. “This
was God’s way with those who came before, and never will you find a
change in the ways of God.”
― Lenn Evan Goodman, حي بن يقظان

“The sole benefit most people could derive from religion was for this
world, in that it helped them lead decent lives without others encroaching
on what belonged to them. Hayy now knew that only a very few win the
true happiness of the man who “desires the world to come, strives for it
and is faithful.”²⁷⁴ But “for the insolent who prefer this life—Hell will be
their refuge!”
― Lenn Evan Goodman, حي بن يقظان

“Preaching is no help, fine words
have no effect on them. Arguing only makes them more pig-headed. Wis-
dom, they have no means of reaching; they were allotted no share of it.²⁶⁷
They are engulfed in ignorance. Their hearts are corroded by their
possessions.²⁶⁸ God has sealed their hearts and shrouded their eyes and
ears. Theirs will be an awesome punishment.”
― Lenn Evan Goodman, حي بن يقظان

“Then, class by class, he studied
mankind. He saw “every faction delighted with its own.”²⁶⁴ They had made
their passions their god,²⁶⁵ and desire the object of their worship. They de-
stroyed each other to collect the trash of this world, “distracted by greed
’til they went down to their graves.”
― Lenn Evan Goodman, حي بن يقظان

“Hayy had already realized that while He transcends all privations, every
attribute of perfection can be applied to the Necessarily Existent. He also
knew that what in him had allowed him to apprehend this Being was un-
like bodies and would not decay as they did. From this he saw that, leaving
the body at death, anyone with an identity like his own, capable of aware-
ness such as he possessed, must undergo one of these three fates: If, while in command of the body, he has not known the Necessarily Existent,
never confronted Him or heard of Him, then on leaving the body he will
neither long for this Being nor mourn His loss. His bodily powers will go
to ruin with the body, and thus make no more demands or miss the ob-
jects of their cravings now that they are gone. This is the fate of all dumb
animals—even those of human form. If, while in charge of the body, he
has encountered this Being and learned of His goodness but turned away
to follow his own passions, until death overtook [96] him in the midst of
such a life, depriving him of the experience he has learned to long for, he
will endure prolonged agony and infinite pain, either escaping the torture
at last, after an immense struggle, to witness once again what he yearned
for, or remaining forever in torment, depending on which direction he
tended toward in his bodily life. If he knows the Necessarily Existent be-
fore departing the body, and turns to Him with his whole being, fastens
his thoughts on His goodness, beauty, and majesty, never turning away
until death overtakes him, turned toward Him in the midst of actual
experience, then on leaving the body, he will live on in infinite joy, bliss,
and delight, happiness unbroken because his experience of the Neces-
sarily Existent will be unbroken and no longer marred by the demands of
the bodily powers for sensory things—which alongside this ecstasy are
encumbrances, irritants and evils.”
― Lenn Evan Goodman, حي بن يقظان

“Muhammad (P.B.U.H.) was keenly aware of the presence of God as a motive force in every human action and event. But for Muhammad (P.B.U.H.) God infused the moral sphere as well, and the felt weight of moral responsibility imposed by God's constant presence was too great to allow Muhammad (P.B.U.H.) to ignore the special burden of freedom imposed by the very fact that man is a moral agent. Muhammad (P.B.U.H.) was no more a fatalist than Ibn Tufayl, for Muhammad (P.B.U.H.) was no less a participant of that extraordinary transference of purpose that marks the life of the ecstatic radical monotheist.”
― Lenn Evan Goodman, حي بن يقظان

“For Ibn Tufayl, as for the Platonist, to know oneself was to see in oneself the affinities to the divine and to accept the obligation implied by such recognition to develop these affinities-to become, in as much as was in human power, like God.”
― Lenn Evan Goodman, حي بن يقظان

“In place of the confinement of the infinitesimal, beneath the weight of the Infinite is found the limitlessness or a humanly bearable share in the limitlessness which is the freedom of God. For Ibn Tufayl, at least, this was the meaning of Islam: the progressive assimilation of self to God (so far as lies in human power). This entails acceptance of the divine will, but not as something alien. The transmuting of selfish purpose to the will of God need not imply a surrender of will because the assimilation of self to God does not imply a surrender of self. On the contrary, as Plato and Ibn Tufayl are agreed, this assimilation is the meaning of man's fulfillment qua man, the substance of Plato's answer to the cryptic challenge of the oracle, "Know thyself!”
― Lenn Evan Goodman, حي بن يقظان

“Islam may be interpreted to mean resignation to the will of God; but if that will remains no longer other, but is accepted by the consciousness as self, then the I can expect of itself the ability to move mountains.”
― Lenn Evan Goodman, حي بن يقظان

“God does not "depart" from man once man has been created, does not "detach" man, as in the splendid, frightening image on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but "answers" a mother's prayer for mercy and protection, as He answers Hayy's real mother's prayer in the story-by infusion of His essence into the soul of man.”
― Lenn Evan Goodman, حي بن يقظان

“The story of Hayy Ibn Yaqzān is a history of the progressive development, alone,
on an equatorial island of an individual human soul. What is the purpose of telling
such a story? Close to the surface as subject-problems posed by the premiss of Ibn
Tufayl’s book are the problems of educational philosophy: ‘What is education?’
‘What is personal development?’ ‘How does human growth take place?’ ‘How can
a man attain fulfillment?”
― Lenn Evan Goodman, حي بن يقظان

“I join Ibn Tufayl in the
wish that it may help you along the road that his philosophy traversed and that you
may reach and surpass the limits set by his understanding or my own”
― Lenn Evan Goodman, حي بن يقظان

“Beyond the bourne of thought experiments, children do not grow like
weeds. The sunlight that opens up the mind and heart is focused most clearly in
the care and love that parents give.”
― Lenn Evan Goodman, حي بن يقظان

“I remain
convinced as well by what I called the point zero argument: Those who would dis-
miss our human power to initiate actions have denied many of the very actions and
effects to which they appeal when seeking to lay individual responsibility at the feet
of others. They both assume and deny personal agency.”
― Lenn Evan Goodman, حي بن يقظان

“The Muslim philosopher’s limpid faith in reason as the guide to and through the
highest apprehensions of the soul strikingly contrasts with his darker view of all
human activities that do not aim toward our perfection, the realization of our deep
inner affinity with God.”
― Lenn Evan Goodman, حي بن يقظان

“To all these
loved ones I dedicate this new appearance of my first book. They give me confi-
dence that Plotinus was wrong about at least one thing: Our lives are not a “flight
of the alone to the Alone.”
― Lenn Evan Goodman, حي بن يقظان

“And there is still value in
Ibn Tufayl’s thought experiment, the story of Hayy Ibn Yaqzān, one philosopher’s
effort to conceive the tenor of human thinking free of the constraints of tradition.”
― Lenn Evan Goodman, حي بن يقظان

“Incompatible with one another (and often at odds with themselves), the three
were widely seen as plotting the course of modernity toward a future without reli-
gion and indeed without normative ethics. Today these threats, if not vanished, are
diminished, almost to mockeries of their former magnitude and hubris. The Soviet
embodiment of the Marxist idea has collapsed, as untenable politically and
economically as apartheid proved to be. Logical positivism is now a historical cu-
riosity. Philosophers who want to dig up the roots of our current philosophical
plantings often find it necessary to explain just what positivism was and tell the
story of the rival ideas that motivated otherwise intelligent thinkers to suppose that
verificationism circumscribed the possibilities of meaning. And, of course, the
doctrinaire behaviorism of Watson and Skinner that once proposed to do psy-
chology without any idea of minds or thoughts, intentions or even dispositions,
and dismissed as outmoded the ideals of human freedom and dignity, is itself a thing of the past, quaint as the brass microscopes that might decorate an antique
shop window, no longer proposed for serious scientific use.”
― Lenn Evan Goodman, حي بن يقظان

“The great intellectual threats to the ideals of the human individual and the free-
dom of the human mind at that time came from the logicism of the positivists and
the conformism that underwrote or underscored the ethology of the behaviorists.
The great practical threats came from the false promises of Marxist-Leninism. All
three movements—positivism, behaviorism, and Marxism—were tricked out in the
garb of science. All three were deterministic, although not without their prescriptive
programs. And all three made self-serving claims to moral and intellectual insuper-
ability, historic inevitability, and permanence.”
― Lenn Evan Goodman, حي بن يقظان

“His strategy for survival was a kind of spiritual withdrawal, similar to what his hero,
Hayy Ibn Yaqzān, chooses once he understands the limitations of ordinary society.
Ibn Tufayl’s choice was not heroic. In a way, it was escapist. But a more outspoken
philosopher might never have lived to write a book at all. Ibn Tufayl’s modus viven-
di was neither isolation nor self-immolation, but accommodation. He could not
take many others with him, but he did not travel entirely alone, and the book he left
behind was his invitation to others, including many whom he never met, to join
him on the flights that took him beyond the realm Plotinus so tellingly had called
“this blood-drenched life.”
― Lenn Evan Goodman, حي بن يقظان