Abū Muḥammad ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad ibn Saʿīd ibn Ḥazm (Arabic: أبو محمد علي بن احمد بن سعيد بن حزم‎; also sometimes known as al-Andalusī aẓ-Ẓāhirī;[4] November 7, 994*– August 15, 1064[1][2][5] (456 AH[3]) was an Andalusian polymath born in Córdoba, present-day Spain.[6] He was a leading proponent and codifier of the Zahiri school of Islamic thought,[2] and produced a reported 400 works of which only 40 still survive, covering a range of topics such as Islamic jurisprudence, history, ethics, comparative religion, and theology, as well as The Ring of the Dove, on the art of love.[5][6] The Encyclopaedia of Islam refers to him as having been one of the leading thinkers of the Muslim world,[2][7] and he is widely acknowledged as the father of comparative religious studies.[5]
After the death of the grand vizier al-Muzaffar in 1008, the Umayyad Caliphate of Iberia 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.[9]


Historic map of Majorca and Minorca by the Ottoman admiral Piri Reis.
Ibn Hazm's father died in 1012 and as 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.[5][9] By 1031, Ibn Hazm retreated to his family estate at Manta Lisham and had begun to express his activist convictions in the literary form.[9] 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, genealogy, jurisprudence, logic, history, ethics, comparative religion, Islamic studies, Muslim prophetic tradition and theology.[11] He is also known to have been fond of adventure and travels, and wrote about his visit to the island of Majorca and its capitol Palma. His notes grant interesting insight into the invention and construction of caravels