obtain any number of adherents, Ibn Hazm was no obscure figure during his lifetime. He became prominent as a violent and abusive controversialist, an opponent of the Ash'arite party and of the Mu'tazilites, curiously enough treating the latter more gently as having limited God's qualities.
Ibn Hazm lived at a time when the Umayyads of Cordova were already in their decay, and in 422 the dynasty fell. Very soon the whole of Andalusia was split into a number of independent principalities, and this was followed by a period of anarchy, during which the country was exposed more and more to Christian attacks, until at length Mu'tamid, King of Seville, fearing that the Muslim states would disappear altogether under the tide of Christian conquest, advised his co-religionists to appeal for help to the Murabit power in Morocco, which, with much misgiving, they did.
The Murabits, the name is that commonly applied to saints in Morocco, were the product of a religious revival led by Yahya b. Ibrahim of the clan of the Jidala, a branch of the great Berber tribe of Latuna, one of those light-complexioned Berber races such as can still be seen in Algeria, and are apparently nearest akin to the Lebu as they are represented in ancient Egyptian paintings. In 428 (= 1036 A.D.) Yahya performed the pilgrimage to Mecca, and was astonished and delighted at the evidences of culture and prosperity which he saw in the lands through which he travelled, so far exceeding anything which had
