At the intersection of literary scholarship and the growing field of Animal Studies, research has begun to trace the formation of the human/animal dichotomy in literary texts and to challenge ingrained conceptions of the human by showing how these are constituted against the category of the Animal. This research seeks to unveil the ways in which literary discourse about animals is shaped and controlled by a human urge toward self-definition. Extending this recent discussion to the sphere of Arabic literature, one particularly relevant text is Ibn ?ufayl's sayy Ibn Yaqbnn, a sixth/twelfth century allegory in which a spontaneously-generated human is raised by a doe on an island inhabited only by animals and, through his powers of observation and reason alone, comes to know God and philosophy. While ayy Ibn Yaq an has drawn much attention for its implications for religion, philosophy, politics and the intersections between the three, I will argue that this is also a text about defining what it means to be human. Growing up with a doe as a mother and no humans with whom to compare himself, mayy is taught no easy dichotomy between human/civilized and animal/wild. It is by observing the animals around him that ayy learns behaviors usually thought of as human, such as burying the dead and a limited form of communication. ayy discovers the existence of the soul by trying to understand his doe mother's death, and it is through his understanding of the souls of animals that he comes to recognize that he, too, has a soul. When oayy eventually comes to consider himself as separate from the rest of the animals, the distinguishing factor he identifies is that he recognizes a Necessary Being and strives toward it, while the animals do not. Significantly, when nayy is introduced to human civilization, he concludes that most men are no better than unreasoning animals. Likewise, the narrator suggests that dumb animals, "including those in human form," will have no existence after bodily death. What emerges is a definition of human and animal which separates the two not on principles of biology and an unchanging superior, but as a function of human behavior. In my paper I will explore the implications of this functional definition of the human for aayy's understanding of the world around him and his place in it.