SOURCE: Dozy, Reinhart. “‘Abd-er-Rahmân V and Ibn Hazm.” In Spanish Islam: A History of the Moslems in Spain, translated by Francis Griffin Stokes, pp. 574-80. London: Chatto & Windus, 1913.

In the following essay, Dozy concentrates on Ibn Hazm's romantic imagination, noting his relationship to Caliph ‘Abd-er-Rahman V and the latter's anti-Christian views.

The historian of a calamitous epoch, and of a people rent and agonised by civil wars, sometimes longs to avert his gaze from the strife of factions and its attendant bloodshed, in order to soothe the imagination for a while in the realms of fancy, amidst ideals of innocence and peace. Let us therefore linger for a brief space over the poems with which pure and ingenuous love inspired the youthful ‘Abd-er-Rahmân V and his Vizier Ibn Hazm. Their verses exhale a perfume of youth, artlessness, and joy; the allurement of their pure accents is...