Ibn Hazm

Ibn Hazm of Cordoba wrote the finest book on love in Arabic and one of the first comparative studies of religion, and he did both after losing everything twice. He was born into the Umayyad administration of al-Andalus at its height, the son of a vizier, and grew up inside the palace complex at Cordoba among the women of the household, which he says taught him what he knew about people. The state collapsed while he was in his teens. The fitna that destroyed the caliphate drove his family out, the family property was seized, and he spent his adult life moving between the taifa courts, imprisoned more than once for trying to restore the Umayyads. The Ring of the Dove, written about 1022, is a treatise on love built out of anecdotes, many of them his own, discussing the signs of love, the go-between, separation and forgetting, with an honesty about desire that startles readers who expect a medieval religious writer. He became one, increasingly: a Zahirite, holding that scripture means what it says and that jurists who reason by analogy are inventing law. His Book of Opinions on Religions, Sects and Heresies examines Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and the Muslim schools with an eye for internal contradiction that has made him claimed as an early comparative religionist and resented as a polemicist. His books were burned publicly in Seville, and he is said to have replied that burning the paper does not burn what it contains. He is buried near Huelva. Two of his remarks have outlived the quarrels that produced them: that the paper can be burned but not what it holds, and his description of love as an ailment whose cure is itself. His legal school did not survive him by much, but the Ring of the Dove has never gone out of circulation.

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