Ibn Khaldūn and the Introduction to History
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Monday 27 May 2024 is the 692nd anniversary of the birth of Abū Zayd ‘Abd ar-Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad ibn Khaldūn al-Ḥaḍramī, better known to posterity as Ibn Khaldūn (27 May 1332–17 March 1406), who was born in Tunis, under the Hafsid Sultanate, on this date in 1332 AD. His dates in the Islamic lunar calendar are 732 to 808 of the Hejira Era.
Ibn Khaldūn was a Tunisian Arabic philosopher and historian who wrote a singular treatise, The Maqqadimmah, which discusses politics, history, sociology, philosophy of history, and related problems. A contemporary philosopher of history, Hayden White, wrote of Ibn Khaldūn:
“Readers of Toynbee’s Study will know that Ibn Khaldun has been acclaimed as the producer of ‘the greatest work of its kind that has ever been created by any mind in any time or place.’ Toynbee enshrines Ibn Khaldun in a pantheon which houses Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Josephus, St. Augustine, Gibbon and Turgot; and of that group, Ibn Khaldun seems, at least at first glance, the most modern of all. Evidence of his modernity is reflected in the dispute between historians and sociologists for the honor of claiming him as their own.”
White is correct that historians and sociologists have both sought to claim Ibn Khaldūn as their own, but he further notes, “Ibn Khaldūn cannot be classified as either historian or sociologist with any sort of terminological accuracy.” Here is some of Toynbee’s fulsome praise for Ibn Khaldun, which includes the bit quoted by White:
“In his chosen field of intellectual activity he appears to have been inspired by no predecessors, and to have found no kindred souls among his contemporaries, and to have kindled no answering spark of inspiration in any successors; and yet, in the Prolegomena (Muquddamat) to his Universal History he has conceived and formulated a philosophy of history which is undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place.”
Ibn Khaldun’s great book is The Maqqadimmah, which means prolegomena, which means that it was intended as an introduction to the study of history, sort of like Jean Bodin’s Method for the Easy Comprehension of History. Some call The Maqqadimmah a history; some call it a work of historiography; some call it a philosophy of history; some have called it the first work of sociology. It could be said that The Maqqadimmah contains elements of all of these. We’re probably best off sticking with Ibn Khaldun’s original intention, which is that it an introduction to history rather than history itself. This sense of being an introduction to the study of history comes out clearly in an early passage from The Maqqadimmah:
“The (writing of history) requires numerous sources and greatly varied knowledge. It also requires a good speculative mind and thoroughness. (Possession of these two qualities) leads the historian to the truth and keeps him from slips and errors. If he trusts historical information in its plain transmitted form and has no clear knowledge of the principles resulting from custom, the fundamental facts of politics, the nature of civilization, or the conditions governing human social organization, and if, furthermore, he does not evaluate remote or ancient material through comparison with near or contemporary material, he often cannot avoid stumbling and slipping and deviating from the highroad of truth.”
Still, The Maqqadimmah belongs to a number of unclassifiable works that touch on many aspects of human life and experience. Unclassifiable books are difficult to assimilate, and The Maqqadimmah presents additional problems for us. We all have difficulty understanding a work written in a fundamentally different historical era, with its alien presuppositions. For westerners, as well, there is the difficulty of reading a work conceived within a distinct civilization. But these barriers can be overcome.
The Islamic Golden Age is in some respects less alien to us than the European middle ages, since it is, like classical antiquity, and like our own times, a time of cosmopolitanism, of aspirations to universality, of plenty, and of routine travel. We can read writers like Ibn Khaldūn, Ibn Fadlan, and Ibn Battutah as though they were contemporaries, whereas the works of Wolfram von Eschenbach and Gottfried von Strassburg strike us as strange, even when we find in them much that is familiar. Perhaps the virtue of being readable to posterity comes at the cost being alienated from one’s own time.
Barbara Stowasser wrote of Ibn Khaldūn in “Ibn Khaldun’s Philosophy of History: The Rise and Fall of States and Civilizations”:
“…Ibn Khaldun’s ideas were in some ways too realistic and hence revolutionary for the intellectually stagnant society in which he lived and worked. There is very little evidence that he had any impact on Arab thought in the late 14th or early 15th centuries. It was only in the 16th and particularly in the 17th centuries that an Ibn Khaldun rediscovery got underway, and the people who rediscovered and read and commented upon him were the Ottoman Turks. The Ottomans, as you know, concentrated much of their intellectual interest upon history and political thought, and they were fascinated with Ibn Khaldun. In the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, the study of Ibn Khaldun constituted an important segment of Turkish intellectual history. It was only in the 19th century that Europe joined the Turks in reading Ibn Khaldun.”
It is the fate of many substantive thinkers to be unappreciated in their own time. We know that no prophet is accepted in his own country, just as we know that the past is a foreign country. We could add to that that the future is a foreign country to the past. So therein lies the rub: later generations are arguably less well equipped to appreciate a work neglected in its own time, being further removed from the lived experience that was the inspiration of the work. Also we project our own concerns into a past innocent of the world we take for granted.
To a certain extent, this is unavoidable. Most of the terminology that we have today for discussing historiography and philosophy of history did not yet exist for ibn Khaldūn, so in order to see the relevance of his work we often have to translate his ideas into a modern idiom, and there are certain hazards in doing so. That’s why Hayden White wrote that Ibn Khaldun can’t be called an historian or a sociologist with any terminological accuracy. But what about conceptual accuracy? Say we agree that Ibn Khaldun is not an historian in the modern sense of the term. How then is he to be mapped onto the conceptual space of history?
I would argue that the hazards increase as we approach foundational concepts, and it is the nature of a work like The Maqqadimmah to engage with foundational concepts. The idea of history is itself a foundational concept, and the idea of knowledge is a foundational concept, and science, and so on. When we read Chapter VI of The Maqqadimmah we find a catalogue of knowledge (or sciences) that sets alchemy next to logic, and Sufism next to dream interpretation, which, to the modern mind, seems like a category error. In this sense, Ibn Khaldun reads more like St. Thomas Aquinas than a contemporary.
If we want to extract from The Maqqadimmah the perennial lessons it has to teach, we have to take it out of the context in which it was formulated. Its context is a world now lost to us, which can only be recovered with great difficulty. Part of this difficulty, for example, is that there is a lot in The Muquaddimah about magic, divination, and sorcery. Take the following, for instance:
“In the Ghayah, Maslamah . . . mentioned that when a human being is placed in a barrel of sesame oil and kept in it for forty days, is fed with figs and nuts until his flesh is gone and only the arteries and the sutures of the skull remain, and is then taken out of the oil and exposed to the drying action of the air, he will answer all special and general questions regarding the future that may be asked. This is detestable sorcery. However, it shows what remarkable things exist in the world of man.” (Sixth Prefatory Discussion to Chapter II)
It’s worth observing that this is a falsifiable methodology, but it is unlikely to have been tried a number of times sufficient to get statistically significant confirmatory or disconfirmatory evidence. I do wonder how many readers of Maslamah did actually attempt this. On the one hand, Ibn Khaldun seems to credit this sorcery as possibly efficacious. On the other hand, his scientific detachment is evident from his final remark: he notes that this is detestable, but it remains interesting as testimony to the remarkable things that we find in the world of man. And we do find remarkable things in the world. Ibn Khaldun is absolutely right about that. I suspect that the scientifically detached Ibn Khaldun would have been ready to discuss the possibility of confirmatory or disconfirmatory evidence for sorcery. It is this scientifically detached Ibn Khaldun that we must extract from the intellectual and cultural context in which sorcery is commonplace.
While we do an author a certain degree of violence by thus extracting his ideas from their human, all-too-human context, it is not at all unusual. Reading Saint Augustine is not all that different: there is much that I have extracted from Saint Augustine that I find to be of value, despite his many digressions to profess his faith. Augustine, too, like Ibn Khaldun, is interested in divination and demonology, and since we don’t credit this today we tend to gloss over these sections, although they were a large part of Augustine’s world, as they were also a large art of Ibn Khaldun’s world. Do we sacrifice this world in order to derive the perennial lessons, or do we keep Ibn Khaldun (and Saint Augustine) whole and intact, treating them as mere historical figures whose work no longer bears upon our world?
I touched on this previously in my episode on J. G. A. Pocock and contextualism, since the context of Ibn Khaldun’s work is almost unrecoverable to us, and I said that we have to strip away this context to get at what is perennially true in his work. What do we have if we don’t strip away the unfamiliar context? Robert Irwin in his book Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography had this to say:
“It is precisely Ibn Khaldun’s irrelevance to the modern world that makes him so interesting and important. When I read the Muqaddima, I have the sense that I am encountering a visitor from another planet — and that is exciting. There have been other ways of looking at the world than the one we mostly take for granted today.”
Some years ago a correspondent said something not unlike this to me. The society that Ibn Khaldun described no longer exists. As such, we could say that his work belongs to historical sociology, but that isn’t an adequate way to understand the book. Understanding the book in the fullness of its historical, social, and cultural context alienate the work from us and our concerns, and this meaning can only be recovered by means of the patient contextual methods pursued by Pocock and others of the contextualist school.
Despite the strangeness, there are moments within The Maqqadimmah when Ibn Khaldun seems to affirm the categories of our thought and his argument makes perfect sense. For example:
“People who grow up in villages and uncivilized (thinly populated) cities and who have an innate desire for scientific activity, cannot find scientific instruction in those places. For scientific instruction is something technical, and there are no crafts among the inhabitants of the desert, as we have stated before. These people, therefore, must travel and seek scientific instruction in cities where (civilization) is highly developed, as is the case with all crafts.” (VI, 8)
This quote highlights a theme that runs throughout Ibn Khaldun, and that is the contrast between sedentary life in cities and the nomadic life of the Bedouin of the desert. As we can see in from the previous quote, Ibn Khaldun gives cities their full measure, acknowledging that craft specialization is only to be found in cities, but he also sees the problems with urban life, which are distinct from those of village and desert. He makes some interesting observations on urban juvenile delinquency:
“The city, then, teems with low people of blameworthy character. They encounter competition from many members of the younger generation of the dynasty, whose education has been neglected and whom the dynasty has neglected to accept. They, therefore, adopt the qualities of their environment and company, even though they may be people of noble descent and ancestry. Men are human beings and as such resemble one another. They differ in merit and are distinguished by their character, by their acquisition of virtues and avoidance of vices. The person who is strongly colored by any kind of vice and whose good character is corrupted, is not helped by his good descent and fine origin. Thus, one finds that many descendants of great families, men of a highly esteemed origin, members of the dynasty, get into deep water and adopt low occupations in order to make a living, because their character is corrupt and they are colored by wrongdoing and insincerity. If this (situation) spreads in a town or nation, God permits it to be ruined and destroyed. This is the meaning of the word of God: ‘When we want to destroy a village, we order those of its inhabitants who live in luxury to act wickedly therein. Thus, the word becomes true for it, and we do destroy it’.”(IV, 18)
For Ibn Khladun, then, civilization and its cities are a mixed blessing, and while the Bedouin of the desert do not possess craft specialization, they are also free of the vices and luxury of urban life. Ibn Khaldun also discusses this contrast as it touches upon law:
“When laws are (enforced) by means of punishment, they completely destroy fortitude, because the use of punishment against someone who cannot defend himself generates in that person a feeling of humiliation that, no doubt, must break his fortitude. When laws are (intended to serve the purposes of) education and instruction and are applied from childhood on, they have to some degree the same effect, because people then grow up in fear and docility and consequently do not rely on their own fortitude. For this (reason), greater fortitude is found among the savage Arab Bedouins than among people who are subject to laws. Furthermore, those who rely on laws and are dominated by them from the very beginning of their education and instruction in the crafts, sciences, and religious matters, are thereby deprived of much of their own fortitude. They can scarcely defend themselves at all against hostile acts. This is the case with students, whose occupation it is to study and to learn from teachers and religious leaders, and who constantly apply themselves to instruction and education in very dignified gatherings. This situation and the fact that it destroys the power of resistance and fortitude must be understood.” (II, 6)
One can see in passages like this why many have identified Ibn Khaldun as a sociologist, or a theoretician of culture. In Muhsin Mahdi’s book-length study, Ibn Khaldun’s Philosophy of History: A Study in the Philosophic Foundation of a Science of Culture, Mahdi characterizes Ibn Khaldun’s effort as being toward a “science of culture.” He finishes off his book by taking a swipe at Hegelian philosophies of history:
“Ibn Khaldun did not turn to history to find his standards and goal, or to see how the Idea progressively realizes itself and learn its future course so that he could join the predetermined course of history. For him, future action cannot he determined by any science. It continues to be the product of an art which requires the knowledge of the end of man and society, and the knowledge of the actual circumstances supplied by history, but which must he perfected through experience. Having equipped himself with such knowledge, it remains the responsibility of the wise man to decide what is best under particular circumstances. He is not relieved of the task of making right choices. History, even when ascertained and explained in the light of the new science of culture, may help the wise man to make a better choice, but it does not and cannot choose for him.”
I suspect many people would agree with this, whether or not they have read Ibn Khaldun, or whether or not they have any interest in philosophy of history. Although Ibn Khaldun did not seek his standards and goals in history, he did understand the importance of understanding history on its own merits. Hence the need for an introduction to history.
It is worth reflecting on the idea that an introduction to history may be more difficult than history itself. Insofar as an introduction to history is a guide to the understanding of history, we can see why this is the case, though it seems counterintuitive that an introduction should be more difficult than that to which it introduces us. Anyone can memorize names, dates, and places, and anyone can follow a narrative, but understanding what is happening and why is much more difficult. The Maqqadimmah attempts to assist us with this difficulty.
There is a lot in The Maqqadimmah, but when I think about Ibn Khaldun, I keep coming back to the image of the man in the vat of sesame oil. I can imagine, in my mind’s eye, Ibn Khaldun being told about this, and hearing about it in his travels, he is invited to actually witness this sorcery or something similar. I can see the whole thing in flickering lamplight, being led to some hole in the wall in a dingy part of a city, passing the kind of disreputable characters that Ibn Khaldun wrote about inhabiting cities, and then the door opening onto to bizarre scene of a partially dissolved man being decanted from a barrel of oil. I imagine it like a scene from a Sinbad movie from the 70s.
What would Ibn Khaldun have to say about this? What would he do? How would he respond? For this, I draw on an historical analogy, which might seem a bit strained, but hear me out. When as Westerners we read accounts of the witch craze we start to get a feel for the relative scope of the rationality of the individuals involved. If you read enough, you go beyond the words and you get a sense of the man involved. The man whose words you read is a man of his time, since we all are, but there were different temperaments then as there are today, and some temperaments are skeptical, some credulous, some rational, some practical. And some of these temperaments are more consistent with what we would recognize today as rationality.
Some men confronted with witches and spectral evidence were all in. The kind of man who would be all in for a moral panic in the 16th or 17th century is the same kind of man who would be all in for a moral panic in the 21st century. Some men were skeptical, but willing to listen. We know their type today. Some were pragmatic, uninterested in claims about demons and spirits, only seeing the situation for what it is. These too a familiar characters for us. And, of course, there are men with an intuitive sense of scientific detachment, sometimes skeptical, sometimes pragmatic, always interested, even if horrified. I take ibn Khaldun to be a man like this.
So, to return to the man in the vat of sesame oil, I think Ibn Khaldun confronted with this scene would have been angry about the practice of sorcery, indignant about the treatment of the subject of the experiment, and dismissive of the claims of the sorcerer, whom we can imagine waving his hands and protesting how he has an explanation for everything. Change a few details and this could be any of us today. I’ve seen some strange things in my time — nothing as strange as what Ibn Khaldun describes — but strange enough. Here, I think, we find our connection to Ibn Khaldun and The Maqqadimmah. Circumstances change, but men are what they are in every age. This is the introduction to history that we need, the human side of history, but it’s not the introduction to history we usually get. This is part of what makes The Maqqadimmah both difficult and interesting. It is unfamiliar, but it is a necessary unfamiliarity.
