A powerful member, briefly, of a moribund dynasty, an insider and yet simultaneously an exile, Ibn Ḥazm was a loyal upholder of the waning Umayyad caliphate of Spain, itself in exile from the place of its origins. Indeed, as the caliphate of Córdoba crumbled, Ibn Ḥazm’s loyalty intensified; in the chaotic period of savage bickering among the party kings, his fidelity to the extinguished dynasty became a fixed principle, at one with the high status accorded to faithfulness (wafāʾ) throughout his thought. Ibn Ḥazm’s allegiance to Umayyad claims was quixotic and stood in inverse proportion to his hopes. Though banished more than once because of his Umayyad sympathies, Ibn Ḥazm viewed his exile in purely transcendent terms. It was, he declared, the out-of-placeness of the man who no longer sets hope in the life of this world that occasioned his estrangement. His unwavering reliance on reason in the face of fanaticism isolated him still further. To an old friend he wrote, in a treatise on the true nature of belief, “this is what attaches us one to the other for we are strangers [ghurabāʾ] among those fanatically opposed to anyone who concedes this world to them so that his belief may be vouchsafed” (Risālat al-bayān 3:187).