Ibn Hazm and the Zahiri School of Literalist Jurisprudence

Abu Muhammad Ali ibn Hazm (994–1064 CE) was born in Córdoba into a family serving the Umayyad administration, and his life was shaped decisively by the collapse of the Córdoban caliphate during the fitna, the civil wars that fragmented al-Andalus into competing taifa kingdoms after 1009. Ibn Hazm briefly served as vizier to the last Umayyad claimants, was imprisoned more than once for his political loyalties, and eventually withdrew from public office to devote himself to scholarship at his family estate near Niebla, in the southwest of the peninsula. This political disillusionment left a visible mark on his intellectual temperament: a deep suspicion of arbitrary human authority, whether exercised by a caliph, a jurist, or a theologian claiming interpretive license over revealed texts. His autobiographical and psychological treatise Tawq al-Hamama (The Ring of the Dove, composed around 1022), written for a friend and covering the phenomenology of love, jealousy, and separation, is often read alongside his legal works as evidence of a mind trained to observe human behavior with the same exacting precision he later applied to scriptural interpretation.