The Mahdi and the Autodidact: Ibn Tufayl\u27s Hayy ibn Yaqẓān As a Challenge to Almohad Doctrine

The spread of Islam to the farthest west (Maghrib and Andalusia) was marked by the articulation of the faith into a non-Arabic milieu that was far removed from the intellectual centers of Baghdad and Mecca. As a civilizational force, the introduction of Islam to the wild west depended on charismatic strongmen boasting of either visionary or genetic links to the Prophet. One such man was Ibn Tūmart, the founder of the Almohad Dynasty, who claimed to be the Mahdi. Yet, as a man educated in Baghdad, he also justified his claim by the use of reason in determining the necessity of God and divine guidance, in part based on the philosophy of Al Ghazālī. The subtleties of Ghazālī\u27s illuminationist philosophy, however, questioned the need for a Mahdi, emphasizing instead a personal struggle for knowledge of the Divine in which God is both subject and guide. This dimension of Ghazālian thought was championed by Ibn Tufayl using the indirect discourse of an ostensible fantasy to argue that a quest for knowledge of the divine and natural orders is essential to human nature