Work · Philosophy in the Islamic World
The 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.
Introduction
Ibn Hazm wrote “The Ring of the Dove” (Ṭawq al-ḥamāma) in Xàtiva around 1022, at the request of a friend, during the years of exile after the collapse of the caliphate of Cordoba. In thirty chapters it treats the nature of love – which he describes as a union of souls that were parted in the higher world – its signs, its causes, the kinds of falling in love, the roles of messengers, helpers and slanderers, faithfulness and betrayal, separation, forgetting and death, and closes with chapters on the ugliness of sin and the virtue of continence. The prose is interspersed with his own poems and illustrated with stories of people he had known in Cordoba, which make the book also a portrait of Andalusian society before the civil war. It survives in a single manuscript in Leiden. Translated into many languages since the nineteenth century, it is one of the best-known works of Arabic literature from al-Andalus.
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