Ibn Tufayl was the principal Almohad-era philosopher and the author of Hayy ibn Yaqzan, "The Self-Taught Philosopher" — the philosophical novel widely treated as the first work of its kind in any literary tradition. He was born around 1105 in Guadix in al-Andalus, served as physician and vizier to the Almohad caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf in Marrakesh from 1163, and recommended his successor and student Ibn Rushd (Averroes) to the same court.
Hayy ibn Yaqzan, composed in Marrakesh in the 1160s or 1170s, follows a child raised in isolation on a desert island who, through unaided rational inquiry, arrives at the principles of natural philosophy, of ethics, and ultimately of the unity of God. The work is a sustained argument for the harmony of revealed religion and philosophical reason, in line with the broader Andalusi-Maghrebi peripatetic tradition of Ibn Bajja, Ibn Rushd, and Maimonides.
The book had a substantial reception in early modern Europe through its 1671 Latin translation by Edward Pococke as Philosophus Autodidactus, and through the subsequent English translation by Simon Ockley (1708). Daniel Defoe, John Locke, Spinoza, and Leibniz read it; its influence on the European Enlightenment treatment of the rational individual is the subject of a substantial scholarly literature.
Ibn Tufayl's other works — on natural philosophy and on medicine — survive only in fragments. His tomb at Marrakesh has been lost. He is read today principally as the author of Hayy ibn Yaqzan and as a representative of the Andalusi-Maghrebi rationalist tradition that flourished briefly under Almohad patronage and was definitively interrupted by the breakdown of the caliphate in the early thirteenth century.