Cordoba's Own Reading, and a School That Outlived Its Institutions

The Zahiri school found its most consequential exponent two centuries after Dawud al-Zahiri's death, in Ibn Hazm of Cordoba, a court secretary turned jurist and theologian who lived through the collapse of the Umayyad caliphate of al-Andalus in the early eleventh century. Ibn Hazm adopted and extended Zahiri method across an enormous range of subjects, from law to comparative religion to love poetry, and his surviving legal compendium, al-Muhalla, remains the fullest working example of how a Zahiri jurist actually applied the school's literalist principles case by case, refusing analogy even where it would have produced an outcome he might otherwise have favored.

Neither Dawud's Baghdad nor Ibn Hazm's Cordoba produced a dynasty willing to make Zahirism a state's official law the way Sunni rulers elsewhere backed Hanafi or Maliki practice, and the school gradually faded as an organized, self-perpetuating institution with its own teaching chain, leaving no living community that identifies primarily as Zahiri today. Its texts did not disappear with its institutions, however: al-Muhalla continued to be copied and read, and in the last century a number of scholars associated with Salafi reform movements, which share the Zahiri instinct to prefer scriptural text over inherited school opinion, have returned to Ibn Hazm's arguments, citing a medieval literalist school to support a modern one.