Hayy then observes the island's plants and animals.
Hayy realises that they are incapable of understanding.
But soon Hayy's constant attempts to preach irritate them.
But Hayy's first encounter with fear of death is when
his doe-mother dies.
In contrast to Thomas Hobbes's
view that‘man is a wolf to man', Hayy's island has no wolves.
In the end, Hayy returns to his island with Absal,
where they enjoy a life of ecstatic contemplation unto death.
The two men determine that
the islanders' religion is a lesser version of the Truth that Hayy discovered, shrouded in symbols and parables.
Whether Hayy was placed in a basket by his mother to sail
through the waters of life(like Moses) or born by spontaneous generation on the island is irrelevant, Ibn Tufayl says.
Ibn Tufail wrote the first fictional Arabic novel Hayy ibn Yaqdhan(Philosophus Autodidactus)
as a response to al-Ghazali's The Incoherence of the Philosophers, and then Ibn al-Nafis also wrote a fictional novel Theologus Autodidactus as a response to Ibn Tufail's Philosophus Autodidactus.