Abu Muhammad Ali ibn Hazm was a Spanish-born Arab theologian, philosopher, and jurist.
Background
Ibn Hazm was born on November 7, 994 into a notable family. His grandfather Sa'id who moved to Córdoba and his father Ahmad both held high advisory positions in the court of the Umayyad Caliph Hisham II. Ibn Ḥazm was born into a notable family that claimed descent from a Persian client of Yazīd, the son of Muʿāwiyah, the first of the Umayyad dynasty rulers in Syria.
Education
He had a careful education in the usual legal and literary style of the time.
Living in the circles of the ruling hierarchy provided Ibn Ḥazm, an eager and observant student, with excellent educational opportunities. Experiences in the surroundings of the harem made an indelible impression upon him.
Career
Circumstances for Ibn Ḥazm changed drastically upon the death of al-Muẓaffar in ad 1008, when the stability that the Umayyads had provided for more than two and one-half centuries collapsed. A bloody civil war ensued and continued until 1031, when the caliphate was abolished and a large number of petty states replaced any semblance of a centralized political structure. The family was uprooted, and Aḥmad died in 1012; Ibn Ḥazm continued to boldly and persistently support Umayyad claimants to the office of caliph, for which he was frequently imprisoned.
By 1031 Ibn Ḥazm began to express his convictions and activistic inclinations through literary activity, becoming a very controversial figure. With the exception of a short stay on the island of Majorca, he apparently spent most of his time on the family estate in Manta Līsham. According to one of his sons, he produced some 80, 000 pages of writing, comprising about 400 works. Less than 40 of these works are still extant.
The varied character of Ibn Ḥazm’s literary activity covers an impressive range of jurisprudence, logic, history, ethics, comparative religion, and theology. His appreciation of the resources of the Arabic language and his skillful use of poetry and prose are evident in all his works. One delightful example is The Ring of the Dove (Ṭawq al-ḥamāmah), on the art of love. Probably best known for his work in jurisprudence and theology, for which the basic qualification was a thorough knowledge of the Qurʾān and Ḥadīth (tradition), he became one of the leading exponents of the Ẓāhirī school of jurisprudence. The Ẓāhirī principle of legal theory relies exclusively on the literal (Arabic: ẓāhir) meaning of the Qurʾān and Ḥadīth. Though his legal theories never won him many followers, he creatively extended the Ẓāhirī principle to the field of theology. He made a comparative study on the religious pluralism of his day, which is among the earliest of such studies and is highly regarded for its careful historical detail.
He conversed and debated with the leading contemporaries of his area, to whom he exhibited an insatiable thirst for knowledge as well as uncompromising convictions. Most observant, careful in analysis, meticulous in detail, and devoted to the clarity of his positions, he demanded the same of others. According to a saying of the period, the tongue of Ibn Ḥazm was a twin brother to the sword of al-Ḥajjaj, a famous 7th-century general and governor of Iraq. He attacked, in his writings, deceit, distortion, and inconsistency; but at the same time Ibn Ḥazm exhibited a sensitive spirit and expressed profound insights about the dimensions of human relationships.
He as shunned and defamed for his political and theological views. When some of his writings were burned in public, he said that no such act could deprive him of their content. Although attacks against him continued after his death, various influential defenders appeared. Though he apparently was easy to despise, Ibn Ḥazm could hardly be ignored.
He died in 1064.
Religion
In his "Book of Religions and Sects" there is evidence of careful, firsthand investigation by Ibn Hazm and awareness of the historical evolution of each of Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Islam. The section on Islam is chiefly devoted to the sectarian movements and philosophically dissident schools of thought. Second only in importance to his work on comparative religion is the Ring of the Dove, a treatise on love in its psychological and ethical complexities.
Views
In addition to his views on honesty in communication, Ibn Hazm also addressed the science of language to some degree. He viewed the Arabic language, the Hebrew language and the Syriac language as all essentially being one language which branched out as the speakers settled in different geographic regions and developed different vocabularies and grammars from the common root. He also differed with many Muslim theologians in that he didn't view Arabic as superior to other languages; this was due to the fact that the Qur'an does not describe Arabic as such, and in Ibn Hazm's view there was no proof for claiming any language was superior to another.
Ibn Hazm was well known for his strict literalism, and is considered the champion of the literalist Zahirite school within Sunni Islām. A commonly cited example is his interpretation of the first half of verse 23 in the Qur'anic chapter of Al-Isra prohibiting one from saying "uff" to one's parents; Ibn Hazm said that half of the verse only prohibits saying "uff" and doesn't prohibit hitting one's parents for example, [25] but rather that hitting them is prohibited by the second half of the verse as well as verse 24 which command kind treatment of parents.
Ibn Hazm's views on sound is that it travels at specific speeds. He gave examples of echo inside the Mosque of Córdoba to prove his statements; among the examples he proposed was the reference to the interval between lightning and the thunder that follows it. He also implicitly believed that lightning causes thunder.
Ibn Hazm also presented a notion on Dynamics regarding the "nature of motion of bodies". Ibn Hazm explained that: "there are mobile objects and stationary objects, but there is no motion nor staticness".
By the 9th century, scholars like Ibn Hazm supported the view that the Earth was a sphere, and he is known to have started his debate by stating verses from the Quran: "He makes the Night overlap the Day, and the Day overlap the Night" (Zumar; 5)- the word "to make [something] overlap" here, in Arabic kawwara ( كَوَّرَ ), is derived from kura( كُرَة ), which means "ball" or "sphere". And after detailed studies using celestial globes he concluded proof, and the now astronomer Ibn Hazm stated publicly that: "the Sun is always vertical to a particular spot on Earth". Ibn Hazm's proof inspired generations later on including the geographer al-Idrisi, who depicted the world as a globe.
Quotations:
He was frequently and effectively quoted, so much so that the phrase “Ibn Ḥazm said” became proverbial.
Personality
An activist by nature with a deep sense of the reality of God, Ibn Ḥazm lived very much in the political and intellectual world of his times; in spite of his activism, however, he was very much a nonconformist and a loner.