“Philosophical robinsonade” of Ibn al-Nafis

Abstract

The present article reviews the philosophical and religious teaching by Ibn al-Nafis – a prominent doctor and thinker of the 13th century. The study was carried out on the basis of his treatise ‘Kamil’s Message in Prophet’s Sirah’ which is the last classical work written in the genre of a ‘philosophical robinsonade’. The author analyzes the content of the aforementioned work and carries out a detailed research of the connection of ‘Kamil’s Message’ with earlier traditions within the Arabic Muslim thought as well as with the theory of the ‘father of sociology’ Ibn Khaldun, which appeared several decades later. It is shown that Ibn Nafis’s theology matches, on the whole, the traditional Maturidi theo­logical doctrine, while its natural, philosophical, and anthropologic views are a deve­lopment of the legacy of Mutazilite Mutakallimes and Arabic peripathetics (especially, Ibn Tufayl). Ibn Nafis’s conception of society and the sense of social processes forestalls the concepts by Ibn Khaldun. In particular, Ibn al-Nafis develops the dichotomy of ‘city inhabitants’ and ‘desert inhabitants’, the category of ‘livelihood’ and a theory of the influ­ence that geographical and climate factors have on peoples. Ibn Nafis also explores pat­terns in historical process and the impact that tyrannical governors and economic rela­tions have on it. The author also discusses Ibn al-Nafis’s eschatological ‘futurology’ ac­cording to which the end of the world is approaching in virtue of natural reasons that, in their turn, will come about as the result of the peculiarities of the course of human history.