Ibn Hazm Quotes on Knowledge
Ibn Ḥazm of Córdoba (994–1064), the Andalusian polymath who gave the Ẓāhirī (literalist) school of Sunni jurisprudence its most rigorous philosophical statement, defended an explicitly anti-speculative epistemology in the long Iḥkām fī uṣūl al-aḥkām and the wide-ranging comparative work al-Fiṣal fī al-Milal wa-l-Aḥwāʾ wa-l-Niḥal. The framework rejects analogical reasoning (qiyās), juristic preference (istiḥsān), and the construction of speculative metaphysical theology, confining religious knowledge to the strict literal sense of the Quran and the authentically transmitted Hadith — a position that nevertheless rests on a thoroughgoing rationalist analysis of language and inference, displayed at length in Ibn Ḥazm's surviving treatise on logic.
Quotes
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Attributed to Ibn Hazm:
“The proper philosopher follows the evidence wherever it leads.”
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Attributed to Ibn Hazm:
“Knowledge is more lasting than wealth, more honorable than office.”
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“كلما نقص العقل توهم صاحبه أنه أوفر الناس عقلا وأكمل ما كان تمييزاً”
The less reason someone has, the more he fancies himself the most rational and most discerning of all. Ibn Hazm (a. 1064). "رسالة في مداواة النفوس وتهذيب الأخلاق والزهد في الرذائل". in ʾIḥsān ʿAbbās. رسائل ابن حزم . volume 1 (second ed.). المؤسسة العربية للدراسات والنشر. 1987. p. 397. -
“M. Asin in Al-Andalus ; 1939; vol IV; p. 278.”
What fixes and preserves a nation’s language, as well as its sciences and its history, is simply the strength of its political power, accompanied by the happy welfare and leisure of its inhabitants. -
“We know with certainty that never could man have acquired the sciences and arts by himself guided only by his natural abilities and without the benefit of instruction. (This applies, e.g., to) medicine, the knowledge of the physiological temperaments, the diseases and their causes, in all their numerous varieties, and the invention of adequate treatment and cure of each of them by drugs or prepara”
Regarding the role of experiment and observation, Ibn Hazm: Kitab al-fisal fi’l-milal wa-l-ahwa wa-l-nihal , 5 parts in two vols; Cairo, 1899 and 1903; Vol I, p. 72. -
“I have come across most people- with the exception of those that God most High has protected-they rush into misery, worry, the exhaustion of this world, and amassing terrible sins, that will earn them hell-fire, gaining nothing in pursuing their evil deeds… And they know that their evil intentions will neither fulfill their wishes, nor bring any gains; and that with purer intentions they will obtain great rest for their souls.”
Kitab al-Akhlaq wa’l Siyar p: 17 -
“Kitab al-Akhlaq wa’l Siyar p: 17”
I have come across most people- with the exception of those that God most High has protected-they rush into misery, worry, the exhaustion of this world, and amassing terrible sins, that will earn them hell-fire, gaining nothing in pursuing their evil deeds… And they know that their evil intentions will neither fulfill their wishes, nor bring any gains; and that with purer intentions they will obta -
“Should the merit of science being fear of the ignorant, and love and honour for the scholars, that alone should encourage striving for it. What then about its other virtues in this world and the other.”
ibid, 19 -
“There is no worse calamity for science and for scholarship than those intruders who are foreign to them. They are ignorant and yet think they know; they ruin everything whilst convinced they are fixing all.”
itab al-Akhlaq wa’l Siyar p: 22