The Awakening of the Soul

Ibn Tufail (c. 1105-1185) (full name Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Abd al-Malik ibn Muhammad ibn Tufail al-Qaisi al-Andalusi; Latinized form: Abubacer Aben Tofail; Anglicized form: Abubekar or Abu Jaafar Ebn Tophail) was an Andalusian-Arab Muslim polymath: an Arabic writer, novelist, Islamic philosopher, Islamic theologian, physician, vizier, and court official. As a physician, he was an early supporter of dissection and autopsy, which was expressed in his novel. Ibn Tufail was the author of Hai Ebn Yokdhan, also known as Philosophus Autodidactus in the West, a philosophical romance and allegorical novel inspired by Avicennism and Sufism, and which tells the story of an autodidactic feral child, raised by a gazelle and living alone on a desert island, who, without contact with other human beings, discovers ultimate truth through a systematic process of reasoned inquiry.