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1 Reading the Divine: A User’s Guide to the Initiatory Tale ANYONE WHO APPROACHES TEXTS NECESSARILY BRINGS TO THEM CERTAIN questions and interests that, in turn, determine what of significance will be found. This is certainly the case with the H . ayy ibn Yaqz .ān cycle. Those who emphasize the Aristotelian component of medieval Neoplatonism tend to regard these texts as little more than simple allegories , a form of philosophy for the masses, or a type of philosophical primer. I have chosen, for heuristic purposes, to refer to this way of looking at these texts as the “minimalist” position. Occupying the opposite end of the continuum is a hermeneutical approach emphasizing the mystical dimensions of medieval Neoplatonism and that, in the process, downplays or marginalizes the philosophical component. According to the scholars who subscribe to this position, these texts become quasi-mystical treatises, texts in which the medieval philosophers were able to develop most fully their insights into the unfolding of the universe and the relationship of the individual soul to this process . For reasons that I hope are obvious I have called this approach the “maximalist.” In the present chapter, I attempt to walk the middle ground between these two hermeneutical strategies or approaches. My argument is that these texts are neither marginal nor at the center of medieval Islamic and Jewish thought. On the contrary, they are important philosophical treatises and, in order to understand them properly, it is necessary to connect them to some of the broader intellectual and cultural trajectories of medieval Islamicate civilization. Since these three texts share a similar set of literary, aesthetic, and philosophical assumptions, I argue that they are not ad hoc creations, but represent a distinct genre of medieval Islamicate philosophical literature. It is for this reason that I bring ibn Ezra’s H . ay ben Meqitz into 26001-01.qxd 10/8/03 16:12 Page 13 this study since, even though written in Hebrew, it nonetheless partakes of the dynamic intellectual milieu enjoyed by the other two philosophers . Consequently, unlike previous approaches that tend to view these texts as individual narrative units, I contend that there exist very good reasons for reading them together. This chapter paves the way for such a reading and, within this context, attempts to articulate a framework in which we can begin to re-examine and rethink the H . ayy ibn Yaqz .ān cycle. Significantly, each one of our authors did not necessarily know of the existence of the others. Obviously Avicenna, who was born about a generation before the other two and in the eastern Islamic world, could not have known of either ibn Ezra or ibn T . ufayl. Despite this, these two latter authors were intimately familiar with Avicenna’s work.1 As far as his H . ayy ibn Yaqz .ān is concerned, ibn Ezra’s H . ay ben Meqitz so closely follows its structure that it is obvious he knew Avicenna’s text well. In like manner, the stated goal of ibn T .ufayl’s H . ayy is to unlock the secrets of Avicenna’s work. Moreover, since ibn T . ufayl seems to have written his text between 1177 and 1182,2 obviously ibn Ezra (d. 1164) could not have read it. Similarly, even though ibn T . ufayl was an older contemporary and countryman of ibn Ezra, it is highly unlikely that he would have known Hebrew. My goal in bringing these three narratives into conversation with each other is not simply historical or to establish a series of influences between either the eastern and western Islamic worlds, or medieval Islam and Judaism. On the contrary, my analysis seeks to ground them in a particular historical moment, showing how they represent, on a small scale, the intersection of some of the various cultural, intellectual, and aesthetic features that were defining elements of medieval Islamicate civilization. Despite the fact that I envisage these texts as a genre, I have no desire to downplay their differences. Indeed, according to J. Z. Smith, comparison is much more productive and meaningful when it takes difference and complexity into consideration.3 For this reason, Smith stresses the importance of a “third-term” type of comparison over the more traditional “two-term” variety. For instance, the latter (e.g., x resembles y) is often based on extra-historical categories and is, therefore , often predicated on ideological or political concerns. A “third-term” type of comparison (x resembles y more than z with respect...

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