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12 results

  • Aaron W. Hughes. The Texture of the Divine: Imagination in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Thought. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. x, 273 pp.
  • Kalman P. Bland
  • Journal: AJS Review / Volume 29 / Issue 1 / April 2005
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2005, pp. 167-169
  • Print publication: April 2005
  • View extract

    Three texts are scrutinized in this monograph: Hayy ibn Yaqzan (Alive son of Awake), the Epistle or philosophic “Recital” composed in Arabic prose by the Muslim sage ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980–1037); Hayy ben Meqitz, the closely related Hebrew poem composed by the Andalusian Jewish sage Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–1164); and Hayy ibn Yaqzan, the more loosely related Arabic treatise composed by the Andalusian Muslim sage Abu Bakr ibn Tufayl (1116–1185). Each of the texts is well known to specialists in medieval intellectual history. Editions and critical discussions abound, almost all of them listed in the bibliography (pp. 245-65). The Arabic texts have long been accessible in reliable English translations. Thanks to Aaron W. Hughes, the same can now be said for ibn Ezra's less familiar narrative poem. In the appendix (pp. 189–207), the poem is rendered into English based on the original Hebrew text published in 1983 by Israel Levin. The translation is enhanced by references to the biblical idioms employed by ibn Ezra who ingeniously transformed ibn Sina's profoundly Islamic original into an equally stunning Hebrew gem.