Book Review - Ibn Hazm

Salaam to all! Yaya here. I decided to do a book review on Ibn Hazm because I've heard of the name many times before but not know a single thing about the personality. So, below is a brief summary of the book I've chosen.

IBN HAZM OF CORDOVA AND HIS CONCEPTION OF THE SCIENCES
BY A.G. CHEJNE

Ibn Hazm (d. 1064) of Cordova was a humanist par excellence and one of the intellectual giants in Islam. He was born at the turn of the tenth century, in the
golden age of al-Andalus.

He was a poet, historian, theologian, jurist, philosopher and polemicist (see below for meaning) who is reported to have written four hundred volumes on various disciplines. As a prolific writer, he had a great deal to say about the sciences: religious sciences, grammar and lexicography, poetry, literary criticism, logic, astronomy, astrology, medicine, alchemy, music and others.

He recognized the interdependence of the sciences; he believed and promoted a broad liberal education combining the secular and the religious disciplines. Besides, he was a critic and an intellectual rebel who raised his voice on the major issues of his time attacking fearlessly the leniency and indifferences of religious scholars, jurists and rulers towards the socioreligious problems facing eleventh-century al-Andalus and the whole Muslim world.

He was a rationalist and devout religious man, who combined a rigorous scientific method with religious criteria clamoring for change and corrective measures in the approach to religious matters and insisting on individual inquiry (ijtihad) instead of the over reliance on old authorities.

His fresh new approach did not endear him to the secular and religious authorities, which subjected him to ostracism and persecution, but he never relinquished his beliefs. In fact, the sale of his books was forbidden and many of them were burned. Despite these heavy restrictions many of his works survived and had a considerable impact on succeeding generations.

Ibn Hazm is a marvelous thinker and Islamic intellectual, but sadly his ideas were not accepted by the community in his time. His belief of combining both secular and religious education was not realized until now, in the modern time. He was simply living in the wrong place at the wrong time. His method of combining scientific method with religious criteria, in the approach to religious matters, is an interesting way and most probably acceptable in this time.

The book contains 340 pages not including front page, content page, preface and acknowledgement. About 90 pages comprise of bibliographies, notes and appendixes. 45 pages were the Arabic version of one of his famous book, Maratib al-‘ulum. The rest is about Ibn Hazm himself and his thoughts on the sciences.

- polemicist: a writer who argues in opposition to others (especially in theology