Ibn Hazm - Career

Career

Ibn Hazm lived among the circle of the ruling hierarchy of the Umayyad government, produced an eager and observant attitude in young Ibn Hazm, he gained an excellent educational opportunity at Cordoba. His talent gained him fame and entered service under the Caliphs of Córdoba, and was known to have worked under Al-Mansur Ibn Abi Aamir, Hajib (Grand Vizier) to the last of the Umayyad caliphs, Hisham III. He was also a colleague of Abd al-Rahman Sanchuelo.

After the death of the Grand Vizier al-Muzaffar in 1008, the Umayyad Caliphate of Spain, became embroiled in a civil war that lasted until 1031 resulting in its collapse of the central authority of Córdoba and the emergence of many smaller incompetent states called Taifas.

Ibn Hazm's father died in 1012 and Ibn Hazm continued to speak in favor of a centralized Political Structure he was accused of supporting the Umayyads, for which he was frequently imprisoned. By 1031 Ibn Hazm retreated to his family estate at Manta Lisham and had begun to express his activist convictions in the literary form. According to one of his sons, Ibn Hazm produced some 80,000 pages of writing, consisting of 400 works, only 40 of those works are still existent. A varied character of Ibn Hazm's literary activity covers an impressive range of Anthropology, Jurisprudence, Logic, History, Ethics, Comparative Religion and Theology. He is also known to have been fond of adventure and travels, he wrote about his visit to the island of Majorca and its capitol Medina Mayurqa near Palma, and gives interesting insight into the invention and construction of Caravels.

According to a saying of the period, "the tongue of Ibn Hazm was a twin brother to the sword of al-Hajjaj" (an infamous 7th century general and governor of Iraq) and he became so frequently quoted that the phrase “Ibn Hazm said” became proverbial.

He opposed the allegorical interpretation of religious texts, preferring instead a grammatical and syntactical interpretation of the Qur'an. He granted cognitive legitimacy only to revelation and sensation and considered deductive reasoning insufficient in legal and religious matters. He did much to revitalize the Zahiri madhhab, which denied the legitimacy of legal rulings based upon qiyas (analogy) and focused upon the literal meanings of legal injunctions in the Qur'an and hadith and governance. Many of his rulings differed from those of Dawud al-Zahiri, from whom the school takes its name.