Vital Roots of European Enlightenment

The Vital Roots of European Enlightenment is a collection of essays which deal with the influence of Ibn Tufayl, a 12th-century Arab philosopher from Spain, on major European thinkers. His philosophical novel, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, could be considered one of the most important books that heralded the Scientific Revolution. Its thoughts are found in different variations and to different degrees in the books of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Kant. But if Ibn Tufayl's fundamental values, such as equality, freedom and toleration, which the thinkers of the European Enlightenment had adopted as theirs, paved the way to the French Revolution, they certainly marked the end of the age of reason in southern Spain and the rest of the Islamic world. Ibn Tufayl's philosophy was appropriated, subverted, or reinvented for many centuries. But the memory of the man who wrote such an influential book was buried in the dust of history. The Vital Roots of European Enlightenment reexamines Ibn Tufayl's momentous book and its continued influence over contemporary philosophy. This intriguing book will appeal to those interested in comparative literature and religion.

This is not only a scholarly book which fills a serious gap in classical Arabic studies, it is also a timely foray into the ever intensifying east-west debate. . . . Attar managed to bring together a wealth of information based on her grasp of Western and Arab intellectual history, in order to re-establish the lost connection between the thought of Western enlightenment and the Arab and Islamic rationalist and philosophical tradition. This is a tour de force, a must reading for all those who have despaired over the irrationalist attack on Muslim civilization and its adherents in recent years. Attar's work is in the finest tradition of comparative literary criticism and a painstakingly careful study which finally answers many questions left obscured by the fog of ideological works, medieval and modern., Attar's focused study... remains indispensable in a world where the leader of the current super power has to remind us all about these longstanding— and ultimately mutually sustaining—connections, which we ignore at our peril., Samar Attar's Hayy ibn Yaqzan is a man for our times, a teacher of toleration and even a relativist of sorts. That will be hard to accept for those brought up to think of Ibn Tufayl's book as somehow unfolding 'the secrets of the Oriental wisdom mentioned' by Avicenna. But Attar has answers for such cavils and is adept at pointing to the many authors in the early modern Western tradition who may have drawn, wittingly or not, upon Ibn Tufayl's philosophical novel.

Samar Attar has published widely in both English and Arabic in the fields of literary criticism, philosophy, migration, and gender studies.