Ibn Hazm 994 – 1064

Abu Muhammad Ali Ibn Hazm was an Andalusian polymath, jurist, theologian, philosopher, and poet, one of the foremost minds of medieval Islamic Spain. He served briefly as vizier to several caliphs of the declining Umayyad caliphate of Cordoba before withdrawing to a life of scholarship under political disfavor. His vast surviving corpus includes the Ring of the Dove, a celebrated treatise on love and friendship; the Book of Religions and Sects, an early systematic comparative study of religion; and a major work in Zahirite literalist jurisprudence. He is said to have written more than four hundred works.

Abu Muhammad Ali ibn Ahmad ibn Said ibn Hazm was born in 994 in Cordoba, the son of a vizier of the late Umayyad caliphate of al-Andalus. The collapse of the caliphate in his early manhood ruined his family's political standing and threw him into the politics of the successor petty kingdoms; after several attempts to restore the Umayyads he withdrew from public life, spent his final decades in scholarship at the family estate of Manta Lisham near Niebla, and died there in 1064.

His vast literary output reportedly ran to four hundred volumes; some forty works survive. They include the celebrated Tawq al-Hamamah (The Ring of the Dove), an essay on love combining personal reminiscence with philosophical reflection; the al-Fisal fi al-Milal (The Decisive Word on Sects), one of the earliest comparative histories of religion in any language; the monumental al-Muhalla on Zahirite jurisprudence; and treatises on logic, ethics, and grammar.

Ibn Hazm was the most important exponent of the Zahirite or 'literalist' school of Islamic jurisprudence and one of the sharpest polemicists of medieval Islam, contemptuous of legal analogy and philosophical speculation alike, while drawing freely on Aristotelian logic and rhetorical analysis. His writings shaped Andalusian intellectual life and continued to be read in the eastern Islamic world long after Zahirism had ceased to be a living legal school.