The models for allegorical writings and allegorizing of traditional texts (allegoresis) come to the Middle Ages through Neoplatonic sources and, for Jewish and Arabic thinkers, from traditions of biblical commentary and the Qur'an itself (Shatz 2003; Ivry 2000). As Ivry puts it, the Qur'an effects “a significant change in the Biblical legacy, treating individual persons and events as universal types and symbols. This approach turns the Qur'anic presentations of Biblical stories into allegories, the persons involved into emblems of virtue or vice” (Ivry 2000, 155). Jewish philosophers themselves read the Hebrew bible and rabbinic literature philosophically, interpreting its stories as having another, esoteric meaning behind the literal one. The Jewish philosopher, Philo, is the most important figure in the development of this kind of philosophical allegorization, though his influence is accepted to be greater on Christian than Jewish thinkers, most significantly on Augustine. Nonetheless, Jewish philosophers regularly allegorize scripture and are also influenced by allegorical readings given in rabbinic and midrashic literature (Shatz 2003). Neoplatonic writers developed allegorical readings of both Plato and classical literature, finding in these diverse texts figures of the spiritual journey from this world to the next. They also composed their own allegories on similar themes.
The underlying presupposition of allegory is that things can come to stand for something else. For the Neoplatonists this possibility is based on the relationship of material things to the One from which they have emanated. Because things come from the One, they are fragmentary reflections of the fullness of that goodness. For those within the religious traditions of Judaism, Islam, or Christianity, allegory is based on the inspired character of scripture into which God has inserted many layers of meaning. Though Islamic philosophers had an independent religious tradition of allegorical literature from which they could draw, the allegories from medieval Islamic thinkers tend to concern the same Neoplatonic themes of the ascent of the soul and the Neoplatonic structure of the cosmos, allegorizing the stages of emanation from and return to the One. The most common form of Islamic philosophical allegory is on the theme of the heavenly ascent or journey, a philosophical rather than prophetic rewriting of the spiritual journey of the prophet Mohammed. Avicenna wrote two allegories of this type, Risâlat at-tair (Treatise of the Bird) and Hayy ibn Yaqzân. (Heath 1992, has also translated from Persian an allegory of Avicenna's, Mi'râj Nâma, The Book of the Prophet Muhammad's Ascent to Heaven.) In the Treatise of the Bird, a group of birds fly on a long journey in search of truth over nine mountain ranges, each a dangerous and a tempting resting place; in the second, the narrator, consulting Hayy, a sage, makes a cosmic journey from west to east, ending in a vision of God (Avicenna 1980). Ibn Tufayl's Hayy ibn Yaqzân takes its name from Avicenna's allegory and claims to reveal in it the secrets of Avicenna's “Oriental philosophy” (Avicenna 1980; Ibn Tufayl 2009). Ibn Tufayl's version may have been one of the models for Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. This story of a boy abandoned on an island and raised by a gazelle recounts the boy's survival and progress in understanding from what is necessary for survival, to a grasp of the laws of the universe, culminating in a mystical experience. The boy's progress symbolizes the path and powers of unaided human reason, able to advance from complete ignorance to union with the divine.
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