ROBINSON CRUSOE, SUFI MYSTIC

Peter Adamson's aforementioned History of Philosophy podcast just introduced me to a particularly delightful gem: Ibn Tufail's Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, a sort of 12th century Islamic gospel of sufist autodidactism.

It apparently involves a feral child (either released in a basket à la Moses or "spontaneously generated" from the earth, the story allows for either) growing up on a deserted island under the tutelage of a recently bereaved mother gazelle. After learning rudimentary anatomy in an ill-fated attempt to cure his ailing gazelle mother with open-chest surgery, the child (Hayy) derives a number of complicated Aristotelian principles from his everyday observations. He explores the island just  long enough for Tufail to propound philosophical theories filched from Avicenna, then retreats to a cave, contemplates, and eventually emerges to experience a vaguely-described ecstatic union with God.

So basically, it's the Jungle Book as Sufi mystical tract and Aristotelian treatise. Prime Choplogic material.

The first Latin translation — entitled Philosophus autodidactus — caused something of a sensation when it appeared in the 17th century. Besides presaging a number of later isolation narratives (most famously Defoe's Crusoe and Kipling's Jungle Book), the text informed Locke's tabula rasa concept and laid the groundwork for much of the "nurture"-oriented epistemology of the Enlightenment. It also makes me wonder if Hesse was purely inspired by Buddhist imagery when he wrote Siddhartha.

The only other Sufi text I've read is Farid ud-Din Attar's enchanting narrative poem the Conference of the Birds. The only real parallel that I can identify here (not having actually read Tufail's little exercise in proto-bildungsroman, mind) is the eventual ecstatic union with God.