Reading group: Ibn Hazm’s The Ring of the Dove, four weeks through al-Andalus
Córdoba is the city where Ibn Hazm was born in 994 and which he watched being torn apart in the civil wars of his youth. Visitors know Ibn Rushd and Maimonides; almost nobody knows that the same city produced one of the most careful books about love ever written.
Ṭawq al-ḥamāma, The Ring of the Dove, was written while Ibn Hazm was still a young man. He was also a formidable jurist and theologian, which makes the book more surprising. It is short, made of about thirty brief chapters, full of his own poems and of stories about people he knew. What makes it philosophy rather than only literature is the method: he describes love from the inside, its signs, its causes, its varieties, with the patience of someone cataloguing a natural phenomenon.
Translation: A. J. Arberry's English (1953) is the most widely available. If you read Spanish, Emilio García Gómez's translation is beautiful.
Plan
- Week 1. The preface and the opening chapters: what love is and the signs by which it shows itself.
- Week 2. How love arises: in dreams, from description alone, at first sight, slowly through long acquaintance.
- Week 3. The supporting cast: the messenger, the keeping of secrets, the slanderer, the watcher, the helpful friend.
- Week 4. Separation, forgetting and death, and the closing chapters on sin and continence, where the tone changes.
Questions to carry: Is Ibn Hazm giving a theory of love or a phenomenology of it? Does he think love responds to the beloved's qualities, or to something else? And how does the young lover square with the strict jurist?