Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, “The Self-taught Philosopher”: a bilingual Arabic-Latin digital edition proposal.

Within the scope of Arabic and Islamic studies scholarship, Digital Humanities have already taken shape and irrupted as a powerful tool, playing an essential role in a current and vast number of methodological research proposals.

As a result, during the last decade, we can find a significant amount of digitisation projects related to Arabic-Islamic manuscripts, textual databases and linguistic corpora. Current practice is also evidenced in geo-referencing, text mining, mapping, graphic visualization and other topics, referred to the study of large scale archives in the Arabic and Islamic intellectual production.

However, with regard to encoding and marked-up texts, examples of digital scholarly editions of classical Arabic literature following the TEI guidelines are scarce to find. This can be traced back to the longstanding tradition of Arabic multivolume works, now merged with the growing interest of linking such corpora (as that of jurisprudent collections, Islamic hermeneutics, biographical dictionaries, amongst many others) to databases and query purposes and standards.

Thus, taking this current methodological framework into account as that of providing a broader digital audience for Arabic-Islamic texts of smaller proportions, my research proposal aims to deliver a digital bilingual edition of the famous work Risāla Hayy ibn Yaqẓan fī al-Asrār al-Ḥikma mašriqiyya (“Philosophus Autodidactus” or “The Self-taught Philosopher”), well known for its first translator Edward Pococke. Written by Ibn Tufayl in the twelfth century, this literary piece can be considered one of the most reproduced, transmitted and translated text in classical Arabic literature, only behind One Thousand and One Nights.

Regarding its digital format, we can find the Arabic text of The Self-taught Philosopher and its multiple translations in many digital repositories and textual databases, be it an XML-ised form or scanned in its entirety. However, we lack a bilingual parallel TEI-XML edition of this first translation of the text, to generate a critical search engine that may retrieve and view, side by side, the significant information and semantics of the text, one the most influential in the field of Philosophy of al-Andalus and Epistemology in Western scientific knowledge.

My edition will focus on the first Arabic-Latin translation made by Edward Pococke, a 1671 printed work available in the British Library. A digitised microfilm of the text can also be consulted via Early English Online Books.

I will present the edition in a parallel Arabic-Latin bilingual version, as portrayed in the original printed work and proceed to tag and mark the text following the TEI Guidelines and using modules, such as <msdescription> and <transcrt>, amongst others.

Other semantic elements to be highlighted will be grammatical annotations, abbreviations, notes, names, as well as calligraphic or paleographic descriptions, ornamental bodies, or any other relevant information about the text.

The digital mark up as in the case of Arabic using the TEI guidelines presents multiple challenges and complexities (e.g. transliteration conventions, Arabic genealogies and family names,…) resulting however, in a unique platform to explore the possibilities of XML text encoding in a non-monolingual area.

Other approaches to discuss within this research proposal are end user targeting, the online publication platform and its presentation in form of digital objects (Fedora vs. Islandora), cross-reference functionality and textual comparison to meet research needs, amongst many other topics.

Reference projects in Digital Arabic-Islamic Humanities that have taken and developed similar approaches before will be addressed and introduced.

Other future developments and discussion within Digital Arabic-Islamic Humanities include what I regard as the possibility of falling into a new Digital Orientalism, and the differentiation between institutional high learning (academic) initiatives output and g-local individual research contributions.

A long-term goal is to develop a platform to research and target academic, digital and multilingual editions of the wide Andalusi corpus in Spain to be queried in an online, academic user-friendly approach.