Ibn Hazm

Abu Muhammad Ali ibn Ahmad ibn Said ibn Hazm, known as Ibn Hazm, was an Andalusi polymath born in Córdoba in 994 and died in Montíjar, near Huelva, in 1064. A philosopher, theologian, historian, jurist and poet, he is regarded as one of the leading thinkers of the Muslim world and as one of the founders of comparative religion. He lived at the end of the Caliphate of Córdoba, just before the crisis that ended it for good, and his writings, of which about forty of some four hundred attributed works survive, reflect both the scholarship of his age and the political turmoil he witnessed.

His family was of Hispanic origin and had converted to Islam, although the Persian ancestry he himself claimed is disputed by modern historians. His father, Ahmad, rose to become vizier under al-Mansur and his son al-Muzaffar, which gave the young Ibn Hazm a comfortable upbringing at court, largely among women, whose influence on him he later viewed with mixed feelings. The civil war that broke out after 1008 ruined his family's position: his father lost his office and fortune, and the family home was sacked in 1013. Ibn Hazm spent years as an exile moving through the south of the peninsula, through Almería, Málaga and Valencia, and took part in a failed attempt to back an Umayyad pretender, a defeat that led to his imprisonment.

After his release he settled in Játiva, where he wrote The Ring of the Dove around 1022 or 1023, a treatise on love that mixes Neoplatonic reflection, personal memories and an anthology of love poetry. He briefly served as vizier in 1023 under Caliph Abd al-Rahman V, but soon left politics for the study of law and theology. He embraced the Zahiri school, which read the sacred sources literally and rejected reasoning by analogy, and in 1027 he was denounced and barred from teaching. From then on he lived as a wandering scholar, engaged in disputes with scholars and rulers of the taifa kingdoms, and his quarrels with one of them led to his books being burned in Seville.

His religious thought affirmed faith in God and Islam as the true religion, while holding that reason cannot reach the divine essence. His philosophy, rooted in Aristotle, sought to separate truth from falsehood and to reconcile that truth with theology, which brings him close to Thomas Aquinas on some points. His most personal contribution may be his account of human conduct: people act, he argued, to escape anxiety and distract themselves, and what they are ultimately distracting themselves from is death.

His influence lasted. His historical writings and his study of religions and sects were read for centuries, and his comparative approach places him among the precursors of the history of religions. The Ring of the Dove became one of the classic texts on love in Arabic literature.