An Intertextual and Intercultural Re-presentation of Western Childhood through Ibn Tufayl's <i>Hayy Ibn Yaqzan</i>

Representations of childhood undergird child rights claims. Depending on how childhood is characterised, children have been denied or afforded legal personhood and agency in the Western legal tradition. The Western liberal origins of human rights have been contested through debates on universalism, for example. This paper problematises ‘Western’ constructions of childhood that ground modern conceptions of children as rights bearers. These constructions are based on child developmental and educational theory articulated in the works of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: that children are a blank slate (blank slate theory) and they should be educated in ways that align with their cognitive development (stage theory). These liberal, Western constructions are embedded earlier in historical time than their well-known 17th-century Enlightenment manifestations. Ibn Tufayl's influential 12th-century treatise, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, which saw itself as bringing Eastern philosophy to the ‘West’, bears the hallmarks of modern Western conceptions of childhood education and cognitive development more closely than its Enlightenment successors. Thus, Phillipe Ariès’ canonical work on the history of Western childhood is countered with the argument that Western childhood should be viewed not as a product of spontaneous development in the European Enlightenment and consequently as an imperialist 20th-century project, but as a product of a cosmopolitan cross-cultural encounter.