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TWO

The Island

MUSLIMS AND JEWS MAKE PROOF SAFE FOR REVELATION

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, there was a fad for tropical islands. This was the generation of Americans that had fought on such islands in the Pacific and had since begun blowing up some of them with nuclear tests. People couldn’t get enough of island music (lap-steel guitars), island swimwear (named after the Bikini Atoll test site), or island fantasy vacations (in the country’s newest state). Gilligan had an island of his own on TV. The anthropologist Margaret Mead’s stories about life on distant islands described a liberated sexuality that would influence both the coming counterculture and the consumer culture that would succeed it. There’s still a picture at my father’s old house in San Diego of my grandmother next to Mead. Grandma would arrange for Mead to give a lecture at the university when she was in town, and then they would go shopping together.

Our truest selves live on islands—so goes the mythology—because they’re free from all the junk of society, with its distractions and phonies and stale dogmas. Islands are Eden before the Fall, where we can still walk around naked, unashamed. (Eden, protected from the world outside, was itself a kind of island.) This is life as it was meant to be. Philosophy started on the islands scattered around Greece, and it was on one of those too that John the Revelator saw his visions of how the world would end.

As a teenager I used to think about islands a lot. Lonely islands. I would draw pictures of them and imagine them while I was falling asleep. This threatened to divide me into two people at once: the one I ostensibly was—with this family, these friends, these expectations—and the one I would be if finally left on my own, just me and my island, alone with the melodrama of existence. It became an Occam’s razor for cutting down on habits and possessions; I would try to minimize what I would miss if I were instantly transported there; things like contact lenses and coffee became sins against it.

I mention all this to give some indication of the feeling that rises up in me when I read a singular book about an island, written in twelfth-century Granada by a Muslim philosopher named Abu Bakr ibn Tufayl. It’s called Hayy Ibn Yaqzan. The title is also the protagonist’s name, which means “Alive, son of Awake.” His story was popular and cosmopolitan, even while describing just about the most solitary kind of life imaginable. It also happened to be a pithy summary of what philosophers at the height of medieval Islamic civilization longed for with their proofs, and what they thought proofs could accomplish.

In the centuries after Rome fell, the ancient Greek classics found a new home in the world under Muslim rule. More than ever before, the genre of proof familiar today began to take shape in earnest. There was a God that some people felt the longing to prove, and there were ancient proofs in need of a God. The reappearance of the genre later on in Christian Europe owed a lot to what happened there and then, in the cities of the Muslim world.

It’s fitting, I think, that one of the world’s first philosophical novels can’t decide between science fiction and plagiarizing scripture; Ibn Tufayl gives two possible explanations for how his hero came to be, from infancy, the only human being on his entire island. Initially we learn that, by a convergence of natural forces explained in poetically licensed pseudoscience, Hayy comes about through spontaneous generation, from a mix of supernal sunlight and island mud. But Ibn Tufayl realizes that not everyone will think this plausible. So as not to obstruct the narrative at its outset, he offers a second alternative: Hayy is born elsewhere under suspicious circumstances and set adrift in the sea by his mother, like Moses in the Bible and the Qur’an, entrusted to God’s care. Natural or mythic: take your pick.

In either case, the mystique necessary to suspend our disbelief comes by way of the story’s location. We’re told that Hayy’s island lies in the equatorial seas near the coast of India. This was, for Ibn Tufayl, like setting a novel in low Earth orbit would be now. India was at the edge of the familiar; the Islamic dominion stretched from where he was in Andalusia—southern Spain on today’s map—along the Mediterranean, to the Levant and Persia, but it stopped at the Indus River. India was at the eastern edge of his world. East is also where the sun rises, and the light-as-truth symbolism in that fact meant a lot to Ibn Tufayl—as much as anyone a fugitive from Plato’s cave. Ibn Tufayl was, so to speak, an orientalist: a Westerner who looked to the East for a more spiritual, exotic alternative to the familiar humdrum. People there in Andalusia knew math and science, perhaps, but they were deaf to deeper meanings, to the hidden unity in everything. His mission was to explain the secrets of “oriental philosophy,” and to reconcile them with ideas that were more familiar, and more conventionally orthodox.

An orientalist impulse like this filled my family’s religion when I was growing up. We would take trips out to California to visit an Indian guru, and I got my first pomegranates and mangoes from his hands. We went there for an escape, or a return, to something less restrictive and more pure than the ordinary and familiar. I took to the quest. One night, at the guru’s ashram, my parents heard me saying through a dream, Keep the lights on forever, which would’ve made Ibn Tufayl proud. He had a very serious affection for light.

India deserves a further digression from Hayy’s story. At the time that Ibn Tufayl was writing, India was in a golden age of proofs. Westerners today tend to gravitate toward India’s more unfamiliar outgrowths—pantheist and polytheist forms of Hinduism, or Buddhism. But medieval India didn’t just have proofs; it had a personal, transcendent God, one not so different from what you would find in the West. There were debates about suffering, bodiless minds, and eternity.¹

The heyday of theistic proofs in India came during the tenth and eleventh centuries—about the same time as in the Islamic world—with roots going back at least to the fourth. In debates against atheistic Buddhists and materialist Hindus, the Nyaya school of Hinduism honed a doctrine of God and the proofs to defend it. The titles of Nyaya scholars’ books hint at what it all meant to them: Udayana’s Flower-Offering of Logic, Jayanta Bhatta’s Bouquet of Reasoning. Proofs were an act of devotion as well as disputation. There was a moral argument that there must be a lord over the law of karma; an argument that language could only have arisen from divine tutelage; and one that the Vedas—the ancient Hindu scriptures—could only have had a divine author.

The best-developed Nyaya proof was one from “composition”; just as the pieces of a clay pot need a potter to join them—this was a favorite Nyaya analogy—the pieces of the world must have had someone to put them together. The Nyaya school had no doctrine of creation-from-nothing, as in the West, but its scholars argued that an intelligent agent must have fastened composite things as we find them, or at least fastened what in turn fastened them. They went on to reason that this first fastener must also be bodiless, omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good. More or less, it’s the familiar God of monotheism.

Rediscovering the familiar is as much a part of the allure of the East—or of the Moon, or of an island, or of the ancients—as encountering the exotic. I saw this early on by way of Indian gurus who succeeded in acclimating to California culture. Americans were drawn to these gurus by what seemed familiar as well as by what was new. It’s what Ibn Tufayl saw, as an Andalusian reading strange Persian books. When you’re between worlds, you look for what little they share. If something is true there and true here, its proof is that much stronger.

∴

The diverging stories of Hayy’s origin converge at his infancy, and his journey begins in earnest. A doe finds him, adopts him, and suckles him into childhood. He grows up at her side, imitating her and the other animals on their island. His sole concern is to live like them at this stage, taking care of material needs and nothing else. The doe teaches him to eat wild fruit and drink from streams. She keeps him warm in the cold. He learns no human language, but he can mimic birdcalls and grasp their meaning. Soon, though, he begins to need more than the animals can teach.

By his seventh year, Hayy starts realizing that there’s something different about himself. He learns to use sharpened sticks to ward off hostile creatures. Troubled by his private parts, he covers them and eventually makes himself a costume of eagle feathers. Finally, childhood proper comes to an end when the doe grows ill. She stops moving, and Hayy tries to save her by doing surgery on her insides. But, rooting around in there, he finds that her life force—her sunlike heat—is already gone. She has moved on from her body. The best he can do is autopsy.

He doesn’t know it yet himself, but Hayy’s entrée into medicine also marks the start of his career as a philosopher. Ibn Tufayl’s readers would have recognized this. What medical knowledge was available at the time came mostly from the Greek textbooks that Muslims had collected in their conquests around the Mediterranean. It was a small step from the Greeks’ medical teachings to their theories about the nature of the universe, and each informed the other. The cosmos and the body were intertwined. Ibn Tufayl reflects this belief in his book. He divides Hayy’s life into seven-year segments, a formula that came from Galen, the Roman-era Greek physician. As Hayy’s body matures, he steadily gets wiser about ultimate things.

There were other reasons for the affinity between philosophy and medicine in those days. Philosophy was sometimes considered a suspect activity, a foreign science, spoken of in Arabic using a Greek loanword: falsafa. (Ibn Tufayl judiciously uses hikma instead, a native Arabic word for “wisdom.”) Philosophy attracted Muslims as well as the Jews and Christians who lived among them—making their conversations both rich and potentially subversive. But philosophers often had friends in high places; many of the most famous ones were physicians in royal courts. Ibn Tufayl himself served as doctor to the sultan in Granada, which helped legitimize his speculations. In turn, pronouncing on cosmic truths must have lent some needed gravitas to the medieval physicians’ rather primitive business. Thus it was fitting for Hayy’s career as a philosopher to begin with a surgery.

After the doe’s death, Hayy studies and dissects other animals. He moves into a cave, discovers fire, and learns to cook meat. At twenty-one years old—7 × 3—he begins to venture into metaphysics, speculating on abstractions like variety, unity, the elements, size, forms, and measurement. He discovers the existence of the soul and, by extension, the baseness of his body. Observing the stars, at age twenty-eight—7 × 4—he charts their movements, and they lead him to infer a hidden unity. But the defining moment for Hayy comes at age thirty-five—7 × 5—when he becomes convinced of the existence of a God. Nothing is the same afterward.

The proof doesn’t come all at once. Hayy’s mind has to reason its way through a replay of the history of proofs so far. First, with echoes of Plato’s Timaeus, he concludes that anything that comes into existence must have a cause, beginning with a being who created them according to the blueprints of eternal, perfect forms. He also marvels at the order of the natural world. Like Aristotle, looking up at the stars, he reasons that everything in motion must have been moved by something else; since the sequence can’t go on to infinity, there has to be a first mover. Each of these observations seems to point at the same thing, though even if he could speak he doesn’t know its name. The book’s readers did. This was God, more or less like the God of Islam, but made out of island reason, without a Qur’an or prophets or the law.

Hayy’s speculations start to get even more adventurous, beyond just repeating the ancients. Through him, Ibn Tufayl shows us what Islamic civilization had already added to the Greek proofs. Nobody impressed him more than Ibn Sina, the great eleventh-century Persian, also a physician. Ibn Sina provided the core of the oriental philosophy that Hayy, alone on his oriental island, would discover. Actually, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan is the also name of a book by Ibn Sina, and Ibn Tufayl cribbed it as a tribute.

Ibn Sina, too, began with Aristotle. He was especially interested in the idea of something existing necessarily, by virtue of itself. Aristotle used this concept to argue for an eternal universe, but for Ibn Sina it alluded to more. It sounded like God.²

Nothing has to cause a thing like this to exist. It just exists, and it has to. The universe wouldn’t make sense if it didn’t, like a painting with no surface. Other things either exist contingently, having been caused by something else, or are merely possible and don’t exist at all—though in principle they could. Contingent things can cause contingent things, and they’ll go from being possible to actual. Take, for instance, the book you’re reading. As I write, the words begin as only possibilities, blinking one by one into actual existence. I, the one writing, am a contingent being if there ever was one. I follow this story, from one contingency to another, in the hope of reaching a ground beneath them all. Whatever lurks there, as something must: that’s necessity.

Ibn Sina then collects these concepts into a proof, similar to Aristotle’s argument from motion. An infinite regress of contingent things causing other things is absurd. There must, at the end of the line, be a necessary being, one that depends on nothing else to account for its existence.

What’s really distinctive—and really “oriental,” in Ibn Tufayl’s view—is Ibn Sina’s interpretation of what it all means. He analyzes this concept of necessity and finds a God of pure intellect who is unitary, good, and beautiful. Intellect, in particular, is key. By contemplating a proof of such a God, one can actually reach its object. One can see, feel, and know God. This is contact. This is for real. As he reached the climax of his proof, Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy started to feel its power.

But first Hayy ran into a hitch, which plagued him for years on end. For all his persistence of thought on that little island, he knew of just one question that wouldn’t lead him to an answer.

∴

The man who would become Ibn Tufayl’s successor as Andalusia’s leading philosopher, Ibn Rushd, used to tell a story.³ Still young and inexperienced, Ibn Rushd arrived at his first audience with Sultan Abu Ya’qub—the exalted Commander of the Faithful, and so on—to find him talking alone with Ibn Tufayl. The first thing the sultan said to Ibn Rushd as he entered terrified him. “What do the philosophers believe about the heavens?” he demanded. “Are they eternal or created?”

This was a loaded question, a test. Ibn Rushd probably knew something about the answer—he would later write a definitive commentary on Aristotle—but the problem was whether to admit it. Aristotle’s unmoved mover appealed to Muslims, along with Christians and Jews, except for one big problem: it presides over an eternal universe. That would contradict the first verse of Genesis, for one, as well as what passages about creation seem to be saying throughout the Qur’an. The God of scripture was supposed to have created the universe with a beginning in time, out of nothing. Sultan Abu Ya’qub’s question, for this time and place, was philosophy at its most dangerous. It didn’t help that the sultan’s Almohad dynasty had a brutal policy of intolerance for whatever didn’t fit their literalistic kind of Islam.

The authority of ancient philosophy and that of Muhammad’s revelations were at odds: one seemed to say the universe is eternal, the other that it had a definite beginning. Ibn Sina had brought the God of philosophy a bit closer to one recognizable by his fellow Muslims, but it wasn’t close enough. His God still exists coeternally with its universe, like Aristotle’s, and against the most common interpretation of the Qur’an.

Ibn Rushd knew this well enough to keep his mouth shut. Could he be punished for studying Aristotle’s heretical teachings? “I was seized with consternation and did not know what to say,” Ibn Rushd wrote. At first he pretended not to know. For all the awkwardness of the moment, though, Ibn Tufayl seemed curiously unconcerned.

Proofs for the existence of God in the medieval Islamic world always hinged on whether to insist on creation from nothing or follow Aristotle back through eternity; you had to choose one or the other. The argument for creation had a head start thanks to the sixth-century Christian philosopher John Philoponus, who lived in Alexandria in the decades before it came under Muslim rule.⁴ He used Aristotelian methods to derive a seemingly un-Aristotelian conclusion.

Aristotle’s mathematics held that there can’t be an infinite number of any things in existence, or anything infinitely large. It would lead to unconscionable absurdities—for instance, ∞ – 1 = ∞. An infinitely long sequence of causes couldn’t happen either, for similar reasons. (This occurs to Hayy on his island.) But if Aristotle was right about infinity, as John Philoponus saw it, he must have been wrong about the eternity of the universe. Just as there can’t be infinitely many causes, there can’t be an infinite quantity of time or events or motions. Matter, too, is changeable and fickle—how can it be coeternal with the divine mind? The universe must be finite. Time must be finite. There must have been, therefore, a beginning, a creation, and a creator. Aristotle himself feared that if he was wrong about the eternal universe, “there is no alternative to the world’s generation being from night and everything being together and from that which is not.”⁵ Creation from nothing—from “night”—wasn’t a prospect he relished. But John Philoponus, a Christian, emphatically did. So did a lot of those who read him in the medieval Middle East. Among the first of Islam’s philosophers, al-Kindi, introduced his ideas to Muslims, while Sa’adia ben Yosef brought them to Arabic-speaking Jews. As opposed to Aristotle’s physics, they came closer to the logic of Plato: the universe itself must have a cause. From such parts, these men assembled proofs—not for the eternal God of the ancients, but for the creator in scripture.

This was a task most famously carried on by Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad at-Tusi al-Ghazali, who died early in the twelfth century. Rather than an eccentric courtier, he was a theology professor and legal scholar with an important teaching post, well poised for his influence to spread and to last.

In his famous polemic, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, al-Ghazali lists twenty of philosophy’s most grievous mistakes. The first and the worst, from which the others flow, is the eternity of the universe. He mounts his attack against it on several fronts, refuting the philosophers’ interpretation of celestial motions and, in the footsteps of Philoponus and al-Kindi, showing the absurdity of an infinite past. Using philosophy against philosophy, he lists self-contradiction after self-contradiction. Al-Ghazali’s chief targets were Ibn Sina and his predecessor, al-Farabi, whose followers—“Muslims in name only”—he accuses of moral depravity as well as philosophical error.⁶ While al-Ghazali ultimately adopts the basic structure of Ibn Sina’s proof for God’s existence, he’s careful to insist that this God is the creator of the universe, from nothing.

He wasn’t interested in bending Islam around philosophy. People called al-Ghazali himself the “proof of Islam,” so fully did he embody orthodox religion. The God he was after was a God who would make a difference, who made a world that couldn’t be confused with a godless one, or with one run by some distant narcissist like Aristotle described. A God that didn’t create the universe from nothing was not worth his time.

The medieval proof from creation found an unlikely defender much more recently in the evangelical philosopher William Lane Craig. Even as a boy, growing up in a not especially pious family, Craig remembers—proverbially enough—looking up at the stars at night and intuiting that all of it must point back, somehow, to a first cause. That cause got a name when, thanks to a girl in his high school German class, he became a born-again Christian. He studied philosophy at Wheaton, an evangelical college. But only a bit later, while trudging through Frederick Copleston’s nine-volume History of Philosophy, did he learn that his childhood intuition had been thought of before by medieval Arabs and Jews. He decided he had to go back to school and study it.

“I wanted to resolve once and for all in my own mind whether this was a sound argument,” he says. “It captivated me.”

When he began doctoral work in philosophy during the mid-1970s, Craig read everything he could about the argument from creation. In translation, he studied versions of it by al-Kindi, Sa’adia, and al-Ghazali. He measured what they said against the latest science—the big bang, the expanding universe, the mathematics of infinity—and he concluded that they were right. In thousand-year-old Arabic texts, this evangelical from the American Midwest found a simple, powerful syllogism he could work with. He summarized what they had said and added modern evidence to support it, step by step:

1.Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

a.Intuition suggests that from nothing, nothing comes.

b.Nothing we know of came from nothing.

2.The universe began to exist.

a.An infinity of past events is impossible.

b.It is impossible to form an infinite by successive addition.

c.Scientific cosmology describes a universe with a beginning.

3.Therefore, the universe has a cause, and that cause is God.

a.The cause must transcend space and time.

b.The cause must be changeless and immaterial.

c.The cause must be unimaginably powerful.

d.Causes are either scientific or personal; this one cannot be scientific, so it must be personal.

Craig’s dissertation appeared in print as The Kalam Cosmological Argument in 1979—kalam roughly means “theology” in Arabic—and it would become the most argued about philosophy of religion text in recent memory.⁷ “If our discussion has been more than a mere academic exercise,” the book concludes, “this conclusion ought to stagger us, ought to fill us with a sense of awe and wonder at the knowledge that our whole universe was caused to exist by something beyond it or greater than it.”⁸ For Craig, this was never merely academic. He would turn the argument into his opening volley in public debates. Proclaiming it became his ministry. When you’re confronted with the logic, if a proof like this means anything, he thought, it changes you.

And on that note the great dilemma of creation and eternity brings us back to Hayy, alone on the island. Assembling these proofs changes everything for him. But it does so only when he finally realizes that the dilemma isn’t worth his worry.

Hayy’s mind thinks its way to a proof of the first cause, and to something like Ibn Sina’s being that is necessary-by-virtue-of-itself with an eternal universe. Each, like al-Ghazali and Ibn Rushd, pokes objections at the other. From where Hayy stands on his island, and in his short island of time, he can’t decide which story is really true—eternity or creation. He has no revelation or ancient authorities to incline him one way or another. But what he finally discovers is that the implications are the same. A God worthy of worship awaits him at the end of either proof: a cause without a body and a perfect, unchangeable ground of being. It dawns on Hayy that, no matter what, he can be sure there is a God, and that’s assurance enough for him.

It was also enough, evidently, for Ibn Tufayl and the sultan when Ibn Rushd found them talking together and when the sultan raised his question about the universe. This sultan was a reactionary ruler who sought to purge his society of heretics and unbelievers. But as philosophers alone in a quiet room—their little island, away from the mainland public—they could confess to one another that the truth might be more ambiguous than they would publicly admit. Ibn Tufayl finally managed to calm the younger Ibn Rushd, who told them what he knew about the ancients’ opinions. The sultan sent him home with money and a robe and a horse to carry them.

∴

With thirty-five years behind him, Hayy’s life takes a sudden turn. It’s all because of the God he found in proofs. He had become possessed.

By now thought of this Subject was so deeply rooted in his heart that he could think of nothing else. He was distracted from his prior investigation of created being. For now his eye fell on nothing without immediately detecting in it signs of His workmanship—then instantly his thoughts would shift from craft to Craftsman, deepening his love of Him, totally detaching his heart from the sensory world, and binding it to the world of mind.⁹

This God makes him lose interest in the things around him and even in taking care of his body beyond what it needs to keep the ecstasies coming. He gets better and better at making the periods of bliss last longer and longer. He learns that it helps to spin in circles—like a Sufi dervish, or pilgrims circumambulating the Ka’ba in Mecca, or the stars overhead.

This is just the kind of experience that Ibn Sina’s oriental philosophy promised, drawing in part from those we now call the Neoplatonists. Chief among them was Plotinus, a third-century Greek-speaking Egyptian who developed what he found in Plato into an elaborate doctrine, with an eternal and perfect One at its summit. Plotinus experienced mystical union with this One on several occasions, apparently. He described these in terms that make it seem like he had Hayy in mind: “The flight of the alone to the Alone.”¹⁰

Hayy’s visions don’t fit well into words. Ibn Tufayl actually warns us not to take any of his images too literally. But Hayy travels through the celestial spheres of planets and stars and sees countless faces all praising God in unison. He sees the torment of souls who don’t heed their divine source. This might sound to us like a mescaline trip, but its cause is proof and proof alone. The whole cosmic order comes to him on his island. Now, Hayy is perfectly and never alone in the divine company. “He has gained an understanding as unshakable as that of an old friendship,” says Ibn Tufayl, quoting Ibn Sina.¹¹ After seven seven-year periods, in his fiftieth year, Hayy’s ecstasies become so intense that he loses interest in living entirely: “Hayy longed that God—glory to Him—would ease him altogether of his body.”¹² But his body perseveres, and the story continues.

It turns out that there is another island nearby, and one not so lonely. It’s full of people. They’ve received news of God’s prophets and made a religion out of it. Where Hayy has only hard-won, direct experience, the people on this other island teach each other about the necessary being with symbols and laws. Or, at least, they try.

There is a man on this other island named Absal. Having had a small taste of mystical adventures like Hayy’s, life in society doesn’t satisfy him anymore. He sets off into the ocean in search of solitude, and he lands you-know-where.

At first when they see each other, Absal runs away. Hayy chases him down and catches him, and they become friends. Absal teaches Hayy language, and Hayy reciprocates by talking about his visions. Absal explains how religion works back on his island. There are certain basic practices: faith, prayer, alms, fasting, and pilgrimage. He describes the stories of heaven and hell, of judgment and resurrection—stories that came to earth through a messenger. Basically, he teaches Hayy about Islam.

Parts of these lessons seemed familiar to Hayy, consistent with the visions he had been having and with his longings. And it’s familiar to me. When I took an introductory class on Islam, during my first semester in college, things that didn’t make sense before in other contexts started to cohere for me in the context of that religion. Again: the exotic can shake one into a fresh look at the familiar. We learned about Islam’s Five Pillars—the same practices that Absal taught Hayy—and about the medieval empires and modern revolutions. One thing that especially stuck with me was an article by an anthropologist we had to read about conservative Muslim women in Cairo.¹³ She describes conversations among them about praying the five-times daily salat prayer: they do it not because they want to, necessarily, but because they want to want to. This was a revelation—a simple idea, though far from obvious to me. I had expected faith to arrive more or less prepackaged and rock-solid from the start. But these women knew it isn’t automatic; some of us have to prepare ourselves through discipline and practice.

When Absal tells him about popular religion, however, with all these trappings of ritual and law, Hayy doesn’t exactly see the point. Why bother? Why doesn’t everyone just live in perpetual ecstasy like he does? Absal has to explain human nature. He has to explain how society works. It’s hard for Hayy to grasp, having no idea what people become like when they live together. He needs to see it for himself.

They sail for the other island, and on arrival Hayy starts preaching about what he had discovered from his thinking and visions. People gather around him and listen at first out of curiosity, but their attention hits a limit. Those who understand a little get stuck in arguments and confusion, while the rest understand nothing. Most are interested in religion only so far as it can win them possessions and power over each other. His teachings cause chaos.

“Hayy now understood the human condition,” writes Ibn Tufayl, probably parroting the cynicism of the Almohad rulers. “He saw that most men are no better than unreasoning animals.”¹⁴

Popular religion, for all its faults, is the best these poor creatures can be expected to handle. There’s no sense trying to show them something better and purer. Frustrated, Hayy and Absal decide to return to the island Hayy came from. Hayy tells the people that he’s seen the fundamentalist light, that he was wrong all along. He adjures them: Submit to tradition, as literally as you can; shun innovation; observe the laws and statutes; and don’t meddle in things that don’t concern you. Then Hayy and Absal sail back to where they can have their ecstasies in peace. That’s where their story ends.

Condescension like this was common among those who dealt with philosophy in Ibn Tufayl’s time. Al-Ghazali, for instance, liked to repeat Muhammad’s saying, “Hold fast to the religion of old women”¹⁵—old women being simple, pious, and practical. Al-Ghazali saw fit for himself to cull through Aristotle and Ibn Sina, and to construct proofs for the God of the Qur’an, but he didn’t intend it for popular consumption. Ibn Tufayl says he discloses his light-bearing truths through Hayy’s story only reluctantly.

Still, he does. He won’t buy into Hayy’s cynicism completely. “I had risen to pinnacles higher than the eye can see,” Ibn Tufayl says at the end of the book, “and I wanted to try, at least, to approach them in words so as to excite desire and inspire a passion to start out along this road.”¹⁶ Most people probably aren’t ready for these precious secrets, yet here he is writing them down. And, actually, the elitism becomes just part of their allure.

∴

As Islamic philosophy flourished, Arabic-speaking Jews were paying attention and making parts of it their own: Sa’adia, Solomon ibn Gabriol, and Musa ibn Maimun—Moses Maimonides. Maimonides played the elitism game too, just as Hayy felt forced to do. But this was no islander; he suffered too much and bore too much responsibility to mistake himself for that.

Like Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Rushd, Maimonides grew up in Andalusia. During his twentieth year the Almohad dynasty took over, the same one to which Sultan Abu Ya’qub belonged. While Muslim philosophers could float above trouble in the sultan’s company, Maimonides saw the business end of Almohad repression. He endured exile, humiliation, and forced conversion to Islam. After almost twenty years of it, his family moved, eventually settling in what is now Cairo, Egypt. Maimonides stayed there until his death in 1204. Having come from half a world away didn’t prevent him from becoming head of the Jewish community there, and—philosopher that he was—he served as a physician to the local Muslim rulers. Maimonides remained indelibly a Jew, and an especially pious one. But as a thinker, writing mostly in Arabic, he belonged to the Mediterranean milieu. His concerns were as much those of the Islamic philosophers and their Greek antecedents as those of the Bible and the rabbis.

Maimonides thus thought between worlds: between philosophy and scripture, between community and cosmopolis. As both a leader of Jews and a doctor among Muslims, the stakes were especially high. “Truths should be at one time apparent,” he wrote, “and at another time concealed.”¹⁷ The twentieth-century philosopher Leo Strauss took Maimonides as an exemplar of writing between the lines, one who tried to defend the practice of philosophy even while protecting the religion of the multitudes and the powerful from its hazards. At the start of Maimonides’ magnum opus, The Guide for the Perplexed, he warns that if you haven’t studied enough religion yet, or you’re not mature enough to know what’s at stake, he would prefer you to put the book down before you start.

Maimonides is vicious against those who would abandon philosophy to save divine creation. “Consider the fate of these speculators and the result of their labors; observe how they rushed, as it were, from the ashes into the fire.” People obsessed with proving creation ex nihilo, he continues, “have weakened the arguments for the existence, the unity, and the incorporeality of God.”¹⁸ Maimonides affirmed creation himself. But, like Ibn Tufayl, he wanted to ensure that the proofs for God’s existence wouldn’t hinge on that fragile question of whether the universe is eternal or created. If we have only an argument like William Lane Craig’s for God from creation in time, and its assumptions about the nature of the universe turn out wrong (as they might), we would be left proofless, doubting whether God really exists.

The first chapter of the Guide’s second book gives four proofs. The first and most rigorous is a version of Aristotle’s argument from motion in the world and among the celestial spheres, up to the top: “This prime mover of the sphere is God, praised be His name!”¹⁹

Next comes an argument from composition, which resembles what the Nyaya school was doing in India. Things in the universe, it says, are evidently composed of other things—honey vinegar is his example—and such combinations require a combiner; the sequence of combinations leads, again, to a first combiner, itself uncombined. Third is an argument from necessity, along the lines laid by Ibn Sina, and fourth follows the logic of causation to a first willful agent, like Plato. At each step Maimonides takes care to demonstrate what Aristotle couldn’t do very convincingly—that there is only one God. Good philosophy leads back to the God of the Torah, he meant to show; fear not. But bad philosophy is a different matter.

The Jewish Talmud tells stories about the damage foreign notions can do. There’s an antihero named Elisha ben Abuya, often called just acher, “other.” A brilliant student who seemed sure to be a great rabbi, Elisha falls prey to Greek culture, and it seduces him away from Judaism. The rabbis scorn and condemn him, but they also betray a little sympathy. He is an elusive character, as ambivalent as the feelings Jews have often had for what lies beyond their own community-in-exile. But for Maimonides, Elisha’s problem was being a sloppy philosopher—sloppy in particular about creation and eternity—and he doesn’t intend to follow suit.

This archetype of Elisha is one I’ve known and felt and repeated. I grew up with trace amounts of Judaism, but it was the religion my teenage curiosity most carefully ignored. My father made some attempts, during that time, to remind me of our ancestors’ traditions. He gave me the yellowed copy of the Sayings of the Fathers he had gotten as a boy in Hebrew school. Soon after he moved away, with our wounds still fresh, we took a road trip, and he surprised me with a Passover Seder in plastic containers for us to share in the car: matzoh, charoset, bitter herbs, and everything—more than any other Passover I can remember, it was authentically exilic and resolutely hopeful. The first Hanukkah after he left, I lit the candles with my mother and was surprised to find that I remembered the blessings well enough to sing them. I still thought of myself as Jewish, but I didn’t go much further than that.

There is, in this omission, a certain history. Since the time of Elisha and before, Jews have lived among the nations, adrift, between worlds, never sure when tolerance would turn to persecution. The love of studying and questioning that has bound Jewish culture together like the pages of its books has also led some to drift outside the canon. The Judaism I learned from my father had in it a sense of resignation. If the choice was between being Jewish and being himself, he seemed to take the latter, even if it meant becoming part of the quiet attrition that every generation of Jews has known. The Arabic-speaking philosophers liked to repeat a maxim that came to them jointly from ancient Greece and early Islam: truth is truth, regardless of its source.²⁰

Looking for truth, I careened everywhere I could. A weekend retreat at a Buddhist monastery. Hindu scriptures. Metaphysical bookstores. Evangelical churches. No matter how scattershot the options were, each experience seemed to lead to the next, with the sensation of overriding reason. But my grandparents on my father’s side learned something about what I was up to, and it worried them. Myopic me, I couldn’t understand why they felt that way. I felt shocked in turn. My experiments weren’t about them, or my father, or Judaism. Why weren’t they happy that I was fashioning my proof?

The Judaism I had learned from them before didn’t go far beyond matzoh ball soup, anyway. Their house was a place for more ordinary forms of love. I would come downstairs in the morning and find Grandma, still in her nightgown, making eggs. I was her only grandchild. If everyone piled into the car, I would sit with her in the back, and her soft, bony hand would hold mine the whole way while we whispered to each other underneath whatever conversation the others were having. When I left for home, she would hold me still, looking long and hard in my eyes; when it became too much, she would borrow a line and an expression on her face from some old movie actress and then let go, trying to laugh. Our family thought of her in cosmic terms, as a being whose presence held the universe—or ours, at least—together against the natural urge to dissolution.

Grandma pleaded for me to spend some time at the campus Hillel, but her agitation only made me afraid of how the other Jews there would see me. I didn’t go.

As she lay on her dying bed two years later, unable to speak, I could only hope she heard me say, I haven’t rejected you. All that you gave me, I will keep . . .

∴

Translated into Latin in the seventeenth century, Ibn Tufayl’s little book about Hayy would become part of the European Enlightenment, influencing Spinoza, Locke, Boyle, and, of course, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. It portrays a fetching if deceptive version of the human ideal and the ideal religion: rational, self-sufficient, mystical, and emphatically male, living and thinking with no need for anyone else. Hayy finds a philosophical friend in Absal, finally, but only after he has found himself. There are no better conditions than an island, it would seem, for proof.

Hayy is the template of so much in the genre of proof that would follow. He’s a blank slate and thinks pure, male, prepolitical, asocial thoughts. No mother whispers prayers into his ear as a child to steer his grown-up reason. We may not all get to be spontaneously generated like Hayy, but through proofs perhaps we too can have a new birth—bloodless and pure, into an invisible brotherhood of minds who’ve touched the divine.²¹

So, which is the real person, finally? The islander? Or the creature at the mercy of a life among others? Jacques Derrida—another philosopher from the borderlands between North Africa and Europe—discussed Robinson Crusoe in a seminar near the end of his life, when he was already diagnosed with the pancreatic cancer that would kill him. He spoke of how separate we all are from each other, in our own worlds—“forever uncrossable.” We see shadows of other people, but nothing more. We live in societies together, but do we really hold anything in common? Is the planet I live on really the same as yours? One can’t know. “There is no world, there are only islands,” Derrida said.²²

As if against Derrida, centuries earlier, John Donne wrote and prayed that “no man is an island.” And, with time, the idea of an island came to me less and less the way it had before. The gospel’s command to love started compelling me to believe Donne. Christians pray, in relevantly geographic terms, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Mercy comes to our islands when we give it to others. There have to be others, since it’s in them that we find God’s image on earth. My island alone wouldn’t do.

Or maybe it was this: the God I was discovering would be my portable island—an unworldly presence, yet closer than my jugular vein, in the words of the Qur’an. Maybe I longed less for islands because I was really beginning to live on one. This path I was taking, and the decision it was leading toward, was turning more and more solitary.