Robert Irwin - Ibn Khaldun : An Intellectual Biography

PREFACE

The world historian Arnold Toynbee, who produced a twelve-volume study of the rise and fall of civilizations, described Ibn Khalduns theoretical treatise on history, the Muqaddima, as undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever been created by any mind in any time or place.

Wali al-Din Abd al-Rahman Ibn Khaldun (13321406) was born in Tunis and in the first half of his life he held various advisory and bureaucratic roles in the service of the Merinid rulers in Fez, the Hafsids in Tunis, the Abd al-Wadids in Tlemcen, and the Nasrids in Granada. In 1375 he retired to a remote castle in western Algeria where in the course of the next four years he worked on the first draft of the Muqaddima, his book on the principles of history and rise and fall of dynasties. In 1378 he reentered civilization and undertook some teaching in Tunis while consulting its libraries. He also worked on a lengthy chronicle that followed on from his book on the principles of history. In 1382 he left for Mamluk Egypt. There he held the office of chief qadi (judge) of the Maliki rite several times and he continued to work expanding and revising what he had already written. In 1400 he had a memorable meeting outside the walls of Damascus with the would-be world conqueror Timur (also known as Tamerlane). Ibn Khaldun died in Cairo and was buried in a Sufi cemetery.

The Muqaddima (Prolegomena) is a lengthy theoretical consideration of the laws of history as well as a general survey of Islamic societies and their arts and sciences. It is divided into six chapters: Chapter one deals with human society in general; chapter two, nomadic society; chapter three, states, caliphs, and kings; chapter four, civilized society and towns; chapter five, trade and ways of earning a livelihood; chapter six, sciences and arts. Though the original aim in writing the chronicle that followed, the Kitab al-Ibar wa diwan al-mubtada wal-khabar (The Book of Warning and the Collection of Beginnings and Historical Information), seems to have been to produce a history of the Berber and Arab tribes of North Africa and the dynasties that they established, as he wrote, the scope of his history expanded and became something grander. The theoretical prolegomena to the history, the Muqaddima, occupies three fat volumes in its English translation, while the standard Arabic edition of the history, the Ibar, is in seven volumes. The first draft of the Muqaddima was allegedly completed in 1377 in five months and it is on this work that Ibn Khalduns chief claim to fame rests, rather than on the history that followed it.

The first question posed in the Muqaddima is why do historians make mistakes? Three things lead to error in writing history. First, partisanship. Secondly, gullibility. Thirdly, ignorance of what is intrinsically possible. It was this third issue that first and foremost he sought to address, since earlier chroniclers had not given any serious consideration to the general laws that govern the formation and dissolution of human societies. They had not studied the batin (the interior meaning) of history, but were only compilers of the zahir (its externals). Ibn Khaldun scrutinized accounts of past events and sought to assess them on the grounds of plausibility. One needed to take account of cause and effect, then how things work when the situations are similar, and then how things work when the situations are dissimilar. This was an unusual thing for an Islamic historian to do. TheIbar is an even lengthier work, a chronicle theoretically based on the principles outlined in the Muqaddima. Another much shorter book, Al-Tarif bi Ibn Khaldun wa rihlatihi sharqan wa gharban (Presenting Ibn Khaldun and His Journeys in the East and the West), can be misleadingly described as an autobiography, even though it is somewhat short on self-revelation, for, although Ibn Khaldun had had an adventurous life, he did not present it as such.

During the last two centuries the meaning of what Ibn Khaldun wrote and its significance has been hotly debated. Was he the worlds first sociologist? Was he a sociologist at all? Did his theorizing about history owe much or anything to the principles of Greek philosophy? Has his originality been exaggerated? Islam seems to be central to his historical thought, but in what way exactly? Or was he secretly really a rationalist and an atheist? Was he a Sufi? Why did he make so many enemies in the Maghreb and in Egypt? Does his model of the cyclical rise and fall of dynasties apply outside the Maghreb? Did he think it did? Did he think that nomads were a good thing or a bad thing? Insofar as he was a futurologist as well as a historian, was he any good as a prophet?

These are some of the questions that modern commentators have tried to deal with. That there are so many interpretations of Ibn Khaldun may suggest that he did not express himself very clearly. The bibliography on him is huge. Aziz al-Azmehs Ibn Khaldun in Modern Scholarship listed over 850 items and, as the decades have passed, the number must have at least doubled.One may get a sense of half the history of Orientalism just by following the fortunes of Ibn Khaldun in European scholarship from the early nineteenth century onwards. Even so, it took a long time before he was discovered by European scholars, for he wrote in a century when Europeans had given up translating Arabic works. (The heyday for such translations was over by the twelfth century.)

There are already so many books on Ibn Khaldun that I have been hesitant to add yet another to the list. As Ibn Khaldun himself wrote: It should be known that among the things that are harmful to the human quest for knowledge and to the attainment of a thorough scholarship are the great number of works (available), the large variety in technical terminology (needed for purposes) of instruction, and the numerous (different) methods (used in those works). As far as he was concerned, there were already too many books in fourteenth-century North Africa.