The best short story in Arabic was written in the
middle of the twelfth century in Southern Spain by Ibn Tufail, the Wazir of the Moslem Lord of the West, Caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf. It is the account of a man-child alone like Crusoe upon an island, who was suckled by a fawn, and who, upon the death of his foster-mother, built up a philosophy of life from observation of his animate and inanimate surroundings : a dramatization, as Mr. Fulton says in his preface, of " the process of continuous 'development from sense-perception up to the beatific vision of the One." The History of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan (" the Alive Son of Awake ") will be read by Orientalists and students of mysticism with the deepest interest : by the former in order to note the stumbling-blocks which the mediaeval scholars of Islam found in the philosophy of the Koran ; and by the latter for the sake of the extraordin- arily vivid description of the dawning of that " awareness " (in the Plotinian sense) by which the author brings his hero to the Throne of Allah. Sir E. Denison Ross, the General Editor of the series and Messrs. Chapman and Hall are to be con gratulated on this latest addition to " The Treasure House of Eastern Story," no less than Mr. A. S. Fulton, the learned and witty editor of the text. The price is 21s.
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