Ibn Hazm

Ibn Hazm was an Andalusian poet, theologian, jurist and historian of religions, born in Córdoba during the last decades of the Umayyad caliphate. A leading exponent of the literalist Ẓāhirī school of law, he also wrote one of the earliest systematic comparative studies of religions. He is best remembered for The Ring of the Dove, a prose-and-verse treatise on love that analyses its causes, signs and stages with close attention to lived experience.

Key ideas

• Love is a union between souls that were akin in their origin, recognising each other in the world.
• Love can be described precisely through its signs, causes, circumstances and misfortunes.
• Religious law should be derived from the plain sense of revealed texts, rejecting analogical reasoning (qiyās).
• Religions and sects can be examined and compared systematically by argument.

Major works

• Ṭawq al-Ḥamāma (The Ring of the Dove, c. 1022)
• Kitāb al-Fiṣal fī al-Milal wa-l-Ahwāʾ wa-l-Niḥal (on religions, heresies and sects)
• al-Muḥallā (legal compendium)
• Kitāb al-Akhlāq wa-l-Siyar (on morals and conduct)

In the conversation

• Reading group Reading group: Ibn Hazm’s The Ring of the Dove, four weeks through al-Andalus Rafael Lucena Prieto · 5 replies