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Robinson Crusoe, one of the world’s most translated texts, has generated numerous successors as well as unending commentaries. The story has reached the level of a modern myth, allowing its origins and meaning to be forgotten. It is therefore useful to compare it to an unspoken model, IbnTufayl’s Philosophus autodidactus, in order to restore its religious dimension (erased by Rousseau’s foray on Robinson’s island), which directs the reader’s progress and commands the subject’s self-education and that was far more radical in the Arabic text.