ابن حزم

الأعمال

• نحو 1022طوق الحمامة في الألفة والألّاف

  رسالة في الحب كُتبت في شاطبة ومزيَّنة بأشعار وتجارب من قرطبة: علامات الحب وأسبابه وأنواعه، من النظرة الأولى إلى الوفاء والفراق والموت، وتختتم بمدح العفاف؛ وهي من أشهر أعمال الأدب الأندلسي.

• نحو 1025التقريب لحد المنطق

  مدخل إلى منطق أرسطو يستبدل بالأمثلة المعتادة أمثلة من الفقه والكلام: المنطق نافع لكل علم، ومنها العلوم الدينية.

• نحو 1040الفصل في الملل والأهواء والنحل

  عرض وتفنيد للمواقف الفلسفية والدينية – السوفسطائيون وأصحاب قدم العالم والثنوية واليهود والنصارى، الذين يفحص ابن حزم كتبهم نقديًا، والفرق الإسلامية، ومنها الأشاعرة؛ ويحتج بالعقل وبظاهر الوحي.

الموقف

Ibn Hazm is on the map as the systematic thinker of the Zahiri school, which holds that law and doctrine must be taken from the apparent (ẓāhir) meaning of the Qur’an and of sound hadith, and as one of the most wide-ranging authors of al-Andalus. He rejected analogical reasoning (qiyās), juristic discretion and the uncritical following of authorities (taqlīd): what revelation neither commands nor forbids is permitted, and human reason may not invent causes for God’s commands. Yet he gave reason and sense perception a firm place as sources of certain knowledge beside revelation, and in the “Approach to the Limits of Logic” he defended Aristotle’s logic, with examples from law and grammar, as a tool for every science. The Book of Distinctions surveys the philosophers, sceptics, dualists, Jews, Christians and the Muslim schools and disputes them in turn; its detailed critique of the Bible, which he held to be corrupted, made it a source for Christian–Muslim polemics in later centuries. Against the Ashʿarites he argued, among other points, that faith comprises deeds and words and not only inner assent. “The Ring of the Dove” analyses love – its signs, causes and kinds – with poems and stories from his own life in Cordoba, and in the short “Character and Conduct” he observed, in the manner of a moral notebook, that all human striving aims at dispelling anxiety. Ibn Taymiyya criticised his Ranks of Consensus; Ibn Arabi studied his works with ʿAbd al-Haqq al-Ishbili, a scholar of his tradition, and described a vision in which the Prophet embraced him. Ignaz Goldziher’s study of the Zahiris (1884) and translations of the Ring of the Dove made him widely known in Europe.

الحياة والسياق

Abu Muhammad ʿAli ibn Ahmad ibn Saʿid ibn Hazm was born in Cordoba on 7 November 994, the son of a vizier of the ʿAmirid regents of the Umayyad caliphate. He grew up in the palace quarter among the women of the household, who, as he later wrote, taught him the Qur’an, poetry and writing. The civil war (fitna) that broke up the caliphate from 1009 destroyed his family’s position: he went into exile, was imprisoned several times and served briefly as vizier to Umayyad claimants in the 1020s. He then withdrew from politics to scholarship; first a Maliki and then a Shafiʿi, he became the leading representative of the Zahiri school. His polemics made him enemies among the Maliki jurists, and in Seville his books were publicly burned. He spent his last years on the family estate at Manta Lisham near Niebla, where he died on 15 August 1064; his son reported that he left some four hundred works.

أعمال رئيسة أخرى

• The Ring of the Dove (Ṭawq al-ḥamāma, c. 1022)
• Approach to the Limits of Logic (al-Taqrīb li-ḥadd al-manṭiq)
• The Book of Distinctions in Religions, Heresies and Sects (al-Fiṣal fī l-milal wa-l-ahwāʾ wa-l-niḥal)
• The Adorned (al-Muḥallā), on law
• Judgement on the Principles of Law (al-Iḥkām fī uṣūl al-aḥkām)
• Character and Conduct (al-Akhlāq wa-l-siyar)
• Ranks of Consensus (Marātib al-ijmāʿ)