From Pierre Cachia’s Exploring Arab Folk Literature, which focuses far more on poetry than prose, but whatever. From an essay on the formation of the elite:

Even more extreme and more difficult to ignore in this respect is Abu-Bakr Muhammad ibn-Tufayl’s (c. 1100-85) Hayy ibn Yaqzan. Cast in the form of a long narrative about a child who grows up on an island where he has no contact with any human being and who solely by exercise of his cognitive powers gets to know all that sensory experience, scientific observation, philosophic reasoning and mystical experience can teach. When at last he comes into contact with a Muslim community, he finds that the conclusions he has reached are congruent with what has been revealed to them as it is understood by the most perceptive of them, [italics in the original—jess] but trying to take others beyond the literal meaning of the teachings they previously received merely irritates and antagonises them. he realises that ‘the sole benefit most people could derive from religion was for this world, in that it helped them lead decent lives without others encroaching on what belonged to them.’ Concluding that most men are ‘no better than unreasoning animals’, he does not merely leave them in their inadequate understanding but confirms them in it. ‘He told them that he had seen the light and realised that they were right. He urged them to hold fast to their observance of all the statutes regulating outward behaviour…[and] submissively to accept all the most problematical elements of the tradition.’