It is significant that at this time the Zahirite school of law (_fiqh_) developed into a school of kalam and applied its literal principles unflinchingly to its new victim. The leader in this was Ibn Hazm, a theologian of Spain. He died in 456, after a stormy life filled with controversy. The remorseless sting of his vituperative style coupled him, in popular proverb, with al-Hajjaj, the blood-thirsty lieutenant of the Umayyads in al-Iraq. “The sword of al-Hajjaj and the tongue of Ibn Hazm,” they said. But for all his violence of language and real weight of character and brain, he made little way for his views in his lifetime. It was almost one hundred years after his death before they came into any prominence. The theologians and lawyers around him in the West were devoted to the study of _fiqh_ in the narrowest and most technical sense. They labored over the systems and treatises of their predecessors and neglected the great original sources of the Qur’an and the traditions. The immediate study of tradition (_hadith_) had died out. Ibn Hazm, on the other hand, went straight back to _hadith_. _Taqlid_ he absolutely rejected, each man must draw from the sacred texts his own views. So the whole system of the canon lawyers came down with a crash and they, naturally, did not like it. Analogy (_qiyas_), their principal instrument, he swept away. It had no place either in law or theology. Even on the principle of agreement (_ijma_) he threw a shadow of doubt. But it was in theology rather than in law that Ibn Hazm’s originality lay. Strictly, his Zahirite principles when applied there should have led him to anthropomorphism (_tajsim_). The literal meaning of the Qur’an, as we have seen, assigns to God hands and feet, sitting on and descending from His throne. But to Ibn Hazm, anthropomorphism was an abomination only less than the speculative arguments with which the Ash‘arites tried to avoid it. His own method was purely grammatical and lexicographical. He hunted in his dictionary until he found some other meaning for “hand” or “foot,” or whatever the stumbling-block might be.