Imam Ibn Hazm of Andalusia

Imam Ibn Hazm: what the sources say

• Full name: Abu Muhammad Ali ibn Ahmad ibn Sa'id ibn Hazm al-Andalusi al-Qurtubi (ابن حزم الأندلسي).
• Birth: on 30 Ramadan 384 AH, corresponding to 7 November 994, in Cordoba, into a wealthy and influential family.
• Father: vizier to al-Mansur ibn Abi Amir and then to his son al-Muzaffar. The child grew up in the family palace and received his first instruction from the women of the household, then from teachers.
• Career: a vizier himself, in a Cordoba torn by civil war, before giving up politics for study.
• School: Zahiri. At first a Shafi'i, he adopted the literalist school of Dawud, by then extinct in the East, and revived it through his writings.
• Persecution: banned from teaching, driven from town to town, he saw his property confiscated and his books burned in public in Seville on the orders of the emir al-Mu'tadid, and was then confined to his ancestral village.
• Output: close to four hundred titles according to the biographers, who rank him as the most prolific of Muslim scholars after al-Tabari. Most of it has been lost.
• Death: on 28 Sha'ban 456, corresponding to 15 August 1064, at Manta Lisham near Niebla, aged seventy-two.

From the palace to the village

Few scholars' biographies begin in such comfort and end in such deprivation. Ali ibn Hazm was born in 384 in a vizier's palace in Cordoba, then one of the most brilliant cities in the world. There he received a prince's education: letters, poetry, memorisation of the Quran, history. He became a vizier in his turn, briefly, in the years when Umayyad Cordoba was collapsing into civil war.

Then he chose study, and with it a way of saying what he thought that would cost him a lifetime of wandering. His tongue was known for its edge: a later historian compared his pen to the sword of al-Hajjaj. He challenged the Maliki jurists, the majority in al-Andalus, with a vehemence that united them against him. He was banned from teaching, left Cordoba, passed through Almería, Majorca, Denia and Seville, debated everywhere, made enemies everywhere.

In Seville, the emir al-Mu'tadid finally ordered his houses demolished, his property confiscated, his books burned in public, and confined him to his ancestral village, forbidding anyone to consult him. Ibn Hazm replied in verse. Burn the paper, he said in substance, you will not burn what it contains, for that is in my breast. He died in that village in 456, aged seventy-two, having continued to write and to teach whoever dared to come.

The fifth madhhab, and what it changes for the reader

Here is the point you need to understand in order to know what you are buying.

Ibn Hazm belongs to none of the four legal schools you know. He revived a fifth, the Zahiri school, founded two centuries earlier in Iraq by Dawud al-Isfahani and extinct in the East. Its principle can be stated in a phrase: hold to the apparent meaning of the texts, without reasoning by analogy or searching for the hidden intentions of the law. Where the four schools deduce, the Zahiri reads.

This position places him outside the consensus of the schools, and many of his conclusions have remained minority views. But it produced a paradoxical effect on his great work of fiqh, المحلى. In order to establish his own position on each question, Ibn Hazm first reports those of all the schools with their proofs, then discusses them one by one. The result is one of the most complete surveys of legal disagreement in existence, and that is why jurists of every school have been opening it for nine centuries.

Hence a simple buying rule. One buys al-Muhalla for the map of opinions and arguments, not to follow its conclusions, which require a teacher to be placed in context. A reader who approaches it that way will find a rare wealth. A reader who looks in it for a rule to apply risks finding himself, without knowing it, outside the school he follows.

His works

المحلى بالآثار

His great treatise of fiqh, in some ten volumes depending on the edition. For each question, the positions of all the schools with their proofs, then the author's discussion and conclusion. The reference work on legal disagreement, for an advanced reader.

الإحكام في أصول الأحكام

His treatise on legal theory, in which he sets out and defends the Zahiri method against analogy and the other derived sources. A dense text, indispensable for understanding al-Muhalla.

الفصل في الملل والأهواء والنحل

His work on comparative religions and sects, begun in Cordoba in 418 and completed in Majorca in 440. One of the first systematic treatises of its kind, in several volumes.

طوق الحمامة

His treatise on love and lovers, written in his youth, blending observation, poetry and memories of Cordoba. The most translated Andalusian text in the world, and the most accessible of his entire output.

الأخلاق والسير

A short epistle on conduct, character and the ordering of one's life, written in his maturity. Brief chapters, direct tone: the best entry point into his thought.

جمهرة أنساب العرب

His great collection of Arab genealogies, a reference for the history of tribes and families down to the al-Andalus of his own day.

مراتب الإجماع

An inventory of the questions on which he considers a consensus to exist, discipline by discipline. A brief and much consulted work, often published with Ibn Taymiyya's remarks.

جوامع السيرة

His abridgement of the Prophet's biography, sober and without chains of transmission. Suitable for continuous reading.

To these should be added his epistles on questions of creed and logic, his replies to his opponents, and the surviving fragments of dozens of other titles.

A book shelved in the wrong section

Two practical warnings about this author that the catalogues do not give.

The first concerns what has survived. Ibn Hazm is said to have written close to four hundred works. The fires of Seville, the civil wars of Cordoba and the centuries have destroyed the vast majority. What you can buy today represents a fraction of the output. If you see a title cited that you cannot find anywhere, it most probably no longer exists.

The second concerns his most famous book. طوق الحمامة is a treatise on love, written by a man of twenty-eight, with poems and personal recollections. You will find it in the literature sections, where it fully belongs. But it is by the hand of the same Ibn Hazm who wrote al-Muhalla, and it also reads as a jurist's testimony on the Andalusian society of his time. Many buyers discover it by chance and are then surprised to find the same name on a ten-volume treatise of fiqh. It is indeed the same man, and that is what makes him unique.

Buy Imam Ibn Hazm's books in Arabic

Every book sold by My Maktaba is in Arabic, in its original edition, and every one is new. For each title, the listing states the publisher, year, number of volumes, format and whether the text is vocalised. For al-Muhalla, the quality of the edition and the presence of indexes matter particularly, since the work serves as a reference rather than a reading.

To approach his work in Arabic, start with الأخلاق والسير: an epistle of short chapters on the conduct of life, in a classical but clear language, which gives you his voice without requiring any legal background. Tawq al-Hamama comes next, if literature attracts you. Fiqh and legal theory demand a markedly higher level and, with this author more than any other, a teacher to place what one reads.