The Muslim jurist, poet, and ascetic Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm b. Mas‘ūd b. Sa‘īd al-Tujībī al-Ilbīrī was born at the end of the tenth century in or near the town of Elvira, in the province of Granada, where he was to die in 1067. With the gradual collapse of the Umayyad caliphate, Al-Andalus broke up into numerous petty states ruled by members of different ethnic groups, the so-called mulūk al-ṭawā’if (Ar. party-kings and hence the term Taifa kingdoms); Granada fell to the Berber dynasty of the Zīrids. Abū Isḥāq, who had studied and subsequently taught Mālikī law, acte…