Ibn Hazm

Works

• c. 1022The Ring of the Dove

  Treatise on love written in Xàtiva and illustrated with poems and experiences from Cordoba: the signs, causes and kinds of love, from the first glance to faithfulness, separation and death, closing with a praise of chastity; it is one of the best-known works of Andalusian literature.

• c. 1025Approach to the Limits of Logic

  Introduction to Aristotle’s logic that replaces the customary examples with examples from law and theology: logic is useful for every science, the religious ones included.

• c. 1040The Book of Distinctions in Religions, Heresies and Sects

  Survey and refutation of philosophical and religious positions – sceptics, those who hold the world eternal, dualists, Jews and Christians, whose scriptures Ibn Hazm examines critically, and the Muslim schools, among them the Ashʿarites; he argues from reason and from the apparent sense of revelation.

Position

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.

Life & context

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.

Further main works

• 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)