The dove's collar (Ibn Hazm)
The collar of the dove or Of love and lovers ( Arabic طوق الحمامة في الألفة والألاف, DMG ṭauq al-ḥamāma fī l-ulfa wa-l-ullāf ) is the title of a treatise on the love of the Arab Córdoba- born politician and scholar Ibn Hazm . It is the first book that Ibn Hazm wrote after retiring from political life.
The treatise reflects the courtly love cultivated in Muslim society in Moorish Spain . Ibn Hazm describes the everyday life and the prevailing morality of his social class, in which the rulership tolerates or even promotes love between slaves and in which erotic relationships between men are common. In the book, Ibn Hazm reflects on his own life story, his experiences and observations and loosens up the text with anecdotes and love poems. It is about the essence of love, its meanings and appearances, about confusion and union of lovers, about loyalty and also about separation and loss.
Ibn Hazm's book is characterized by the author's freedom of movement and personal passion as well as his moral standards and strong ties to Islam .
content
A friend asked Ibn Hazm to write a book about "love, its appearances, causes and vicissitudes ..." and "... about what happens in love and what happens to you truthfully" (p. 10).
Of the thirty chapters of the book, the first ten deal with the origins of love, which can be ignited under the most varied of conditions: love at first sight, people who fall in love in their sleep, those who have a special quality People are attracted to the same thing that later becomes the cause of annoyance and disgust. Twelve chapters are about difficulties that lovers have to struggle with, six more about blows of fate. The last two chapters deal with the “abomination of sin” and the “excellence of chastity”.
The book ends with a praise to creation and the Creator, who gave man the senses and intellect and made him “the repository of his word and the permanent abode of his faith”. He steered people on the “right path to the Paradise Road”. Man should be obedient to his Creator, he should be ashamed of his "desire for fleeting pleasure, whose repentance never goes away and whose consequences never end". A final poem praises the beauty of nature and the wisdom of the Creator in color pictures and closes with an appeal to abandon the follies that drag us to perdition.
reception
Ibn Hazm's book, like other of his theological and literary writings, has evidently received very little attention in the history of the Arab world. The author himself was an outsider in the learned world of Moorish Spain because of his sharp pen and his opinion differing from the prevailing theological teachings. He was a supporter of the law school of the Zahirites , had been banned from teaching the Great Mosque with the rule of the Almoravids and had been expelled from Cordoba several times. The treatise has only been handed down in a corrupt text form, which is only preserved in a single manuscript.
The book was filmed in 1991 under the title The lost collar of the dove - Tawk al hamama al mafkoud by the Tunisian director Nacer Khemir .
Ernst Wilhelm Heine wrote a novel from the milieu of the Knights Templar in the 13th century under the same title .
Edition history
The handwriting of the book was not rediscovered until the 19th century in Leiden and published in 1914 by the Russian philologist D. K. Pétrof. After the first translations into Russian and English, the German translation was carried out by Max Weisweiler in 1941. Weisweiler tried to translate the interspersed poems into verse as well, which, according to experts, led to a loss of the beauty of the metaphors that make up the real charm of this book, which is reminiscent of the Arabian Nights . The cuts made in the most recent edition concern the book's teaching examples, which reflect the spiritual world of Spanish Islam.
expenditure
- Of love and lovers. From the Arab. transfer and an afterword by Max Weisweiler. Frankfurt a. M. 1995. [Abridged version of the German first edition, Leiden 1941]
- Tawq al-Hammama (The Dove's Collar) . Abridged version in Arabic. Audiobook, 2 MC.
Web links
- Short table of contents and excerpt (PDF file; 142 kB)
- Full text in English translation
- Walter Boehlich: A book about love and lovers . In: Die Zeit , No. 6/1962
literature
- Walter Jens (Ed.): Kindlers New Lexicon of World Literature. Vol. 8. 1998, ISBN 3-89836-214-0 , pp. 283-284.