Ibn Hazm
994–1064
Biography
Abu Muhammad Ali ibn Ahmad ibn Hazm (994–1064) was born in Córdoba and lived most of his life in al-Andalus, the Muslim-ruled part of the Iberian peninsula. His father was a senior official at the court of the Amirid rulers, and Ibn Hazm grew up in a wealthy household with a large library. Political upheaval in the Córdoba of his day brought him trouble: he backed rival Umayyad claimants, was imprisoned and exiled, and his last years were spent on the family estate in the Huelva region, where he died.
He was the leading codifier of the Zahiri school of law, which reads scripture by its plain, outward meaning and rejects analogy and personal opinion as grounds for rulings. He wrote on law, hadith, theology, history, genealogy, grammar and logic. He is reputed to have written some four hundred works, of which only a few dozen survive. His Kitab al-Fisal, a study of religions and sects, is a major early work of comparative religion.
The book on this site is Tawq al-hamama (The Ring of the Dove), his treatise on love, which he wrote in the 1020s while living at Játiva. It sets out the causes and signs of love, the conduct of lovers and the pain of separation, and it is illustrated with anecdotes and verse drawn from the lives of Andalusian men and women. It is among the most widely read of his works outside specialist circles, and it shows that the scholar who argued over law and theology was also a close observer of human feeling.
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Books
طوق الحمامة
by ابن حزم
Written about 1022 by the Andalusian scholar Ibn Hazm of Cordoba, the Ring of the Dove is a treatise on love and lovers, set out in thirty chapters from the nature of love and its signs to meeting, separation, betrayal and death, and closing with the ugliness of sin and the…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.