Ibn Tufayl

Ibn Tufayl was a physician, philosopher and vizier at the Almohad court in Marrakesh in the twelfth century, who introduced the young Averroes to the caliph and encouraged him to write his commentaries on Aristotle. Hayy ibn Yaqzan is his one surviving work, the story of a child raised by a gazelle on an uninhabited island who by reason alone rises through the sciences to the knowledge of God and then, meeting a man from a neighbouring island, discovers that revealed religion teaches the same truths in symbols. It was translated into Latin and English in the seventeenth century and it has been argued that Locke and Defoe read it.