Ibn Khaldun by Robert Irwin

The Liberal historian H.A.L Fisher made the following confession in the preface to his History of Europe, published in 1934:

Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me, I can only see one emergency following up on another as wave  follows on wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can no generalizations, only one safe rule for the historian; that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen .  .  .the ground gained by one generation may be lost by the next.

Well, Ibn Khaldun was wiser and more learned than Fisher. He was able to contemplate the complexity, unpredictability, and bloodiness of politics as practiced by the Medieval Merinids, Hafsids, ‘Abd al-Wadids, and Nasrids, and having considered all that, he was able to generalize and draw from it laws that governed the formation and and dissolution of communities. His version of history was less narrowly political than that of Fisher and gave more weight to such factors as the economy, climate, kinship bonds, and the operations of the supernatural*. The laws he discovered would, he believed, explain not only what had happened, but what would happen.

Fisher’s lament had surely been a critical response to the publication of the first three volumes of Toynbee’s A Study in History , which had been published a few years earlier.**  Doubtless, the pessimistic tone of Fisher’s response also reflected the disillusionment that was widely felt in the wake of the First World War, as well as anxiety about the rise of Nazism and Communism in Europe. But there is something of a touch of disingenuousness about Fisher’s disavowal of any ability to see a pattern. If his History of Europe really had no plot, no shaping pattern, and was a blurred concatenation of events without any special significance, then this would make for hard reading (but it is not and I read it several times as a schoolboy). His book does have a plot, even if this is not admitted by the author. And indeed, having penned his despair at history’s failure to deliver easy lessons, he then added : This is not a doctrine of cynicism and despair. The fact of progress is written plain and large on the page of history.” And, as one would expect from a Liberal historian writing in the tradition of the Whig version of history, a pattern of sorts does appear in the narrative of his book. Under the Romans civilization flourished for three hundred years in much of Europe, before being destroyed by the Teutonic invasions. The story thereafter is one of slow and bumpy progress toward a new civilization. The Renaissance, the Reformation, and the French Revolution were milestones on that progress. But as Fisher wrote, civilization was once again under threat from the Teutons and “Nordic Paganism”. Fisher took it for granted that European history had a meaning, unlike that of the rest of the world: “But of all the human misery which prevails in the vast spaces of Asia, Africa and South America where thousands of millions of men and women lived, worked and died, leaving no memorial, contributing nothing to the future, these volumes are not concerned.”

To return to Ibn Khaldun, writing this book has been the culmination of a necromantic pursuit. I have spent most of my life communing with a man who has been dead for over six hundred years, a man whose ways of thinking are very different from my own. It has been a kind of séance and, as is so often in the case of séances, it has sometimes been difficult to interpret the messages coming across the centuries. I am conscious that I have sometimes failed to understand what Ibn Khaldun is saying. I am not the first person to be defeated by his account of the  operations of the za’uiraja [half divination machine, half parlor game], but I also found his exposition of physiology, psychology, dreaming, and soothsaying somewhat obscure. Then, setting aside topics on which he seemed to have difficulty in expressing himself clearly, more generally the sheer depth and elaboration of the man’s thinking is challenging. Even when what he is saying sees perfectly clear, it is still difficult. Otherwise there would not be so many different interpretations of the message of the Muqaddima. Wordsworth’s lines on Isaac Newton come to mind:

The marble index of the mind
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.

Those “seas of thought” are indeed strange and to modernize Ibn Khaldun and to elide the strangeness of his thinking is to denature him. Previous accounts of his life and works, in the course of seeking to demonstrate that he was the world’s first sociologist, or an early Marxist, or a philosopher in the Aristotelian tradition, or a forerunner of the political philosopher Leo Strauss, have exaggerated Ibn Khaldun’s rationality and posited an essentially secular frame of mind. ( In many cases they have presented him as being guilty of what the Surrealist used to term “anticipatory plagiarism.”) He has been stretched out on a procrustean bed, in which certain parts of him have been lopped off in order to make him fit on a piece of furniture of modern design. The discarded parts include, among other things, his devotion to Maliki jurisprudence and his preoccupation with occultism and futurology, as well some of his bizarre  scientific ideas.

Who was Ibn Khaldun writing for? Well, certainly not for me. Nor come to that, for the massed academics of the twenty-first-century world. Moreover, though he dedicated copies of the Maqaddima to the ruler of Tunis and to the sultan of Egypt, it does not seem he wrote the book to guide a ruler. It is unlikely that Ibn Khaldun was seeking readers among his fellow jurists and teachers of whom he had a rather low opinion. We have also seen that he was suspicious of merchants and shopkeepers. Most of the tribesmen he had dealing with could not read. I suspect that Ibn Khaldun’s ideal destination audience was himself and that he wrote to clear his head of all those ideas and insights that boiled and seethed within it.

Some of our problems in reading Ibn Khaldun arise from trying to make him a more systematic thinker than he really was. He was inconsistent in the use of certain keywords, including ‘asabiyya [‘group solidarity’], badawi [affiliations of various sorts] and “Arab”  [sometimes a race, sometimes ‘nomadic’].He was inconsistent on whether  the Mamluk system [slave armies] was immune from the historical cycle of decay or not. He was inconsistent on whether his cyclical theory of history applied outside the Maghreb or not. He was inconsistent on the causes of the plague. That he often seems to contradict himself in the Maquaddima is not surprising. The book was written over a long period of time in various locales. While at times he ha access to large libraries, at other times he did not. Moreover, as Aristotle observed, “Great men may make great mistakes.”

Does what Ibn Khaldun wrote have relevance today? Many Arab academics have argued that he does. Cheddadi believes that modern anthropologists can learn from him. Himmich finds support for the tenets of Marxism in the Muqaddima. Other Arab scholars have hailed Ibn Khaldun as an early Arab nationalist. To take a different kind of example, the ghostly presence of Ibn Khaldun can be detected in The Arab Human Development Report 2004, which had this to say about the Gulf and, more generally, about the Arab world in the twenty-first century: “clannism [‘asabiyya] in all its forms (tribal, clan-based, communal, and ethnic) . . .tightly shackles its followers through the power of the authoritarian patriarchal system. This phenomena . . represents a two-way street in which obedience and loyalty are offered in return for protection, sponsorship and a share of the spoils  . . . Its positive aspects include a sense of belonging to a community and the desire to put its interests first.” For all its reference to “positive aspects,” the Report is clearly using ‘asabiyya in a pejorative sense and moreover applying it in an urban context. Ibn Khaldun’s sense of the word always had a positive and dynamic quality, whereas the Report implicitly presents ‘asabiyya as something that contributes to the stagnation of contemporary Arab society.

Few today would share Ibn Khaldun’s positive vision of tribal loyalty as the engine of social change. Much of the Muquaddima’s fascination lies in the fact that’s its author, starting from medieval premises and working on medieval data, went onto create powerful theoretical models to explain how things worked in the world he lived in. In that sense Ibn Khaldun can indeed be compared to Darwin, Marx, and Durkheim, even though Ibn Khaldun’s theoretical models and conclusions cannot apply to modern societies. As Mark Zuckerberg observed when selecting the Muquaddima as one of his books of the year in 2015, “While much of what was believed then now is disproven after 700 years of progress, it’s still interesting to see what was understood at the time and the overall world view when it is considered together.”

Perhaps the ultimate purpose of the Muquaddima was to prepare Muslims for the Last Judgment. Ibn Khaldun quoted a saying of the Prophet: “Be in this world as if you were a stranger and a passing traveler.” The bleakness and loneliness of this historian are striking. It can be argued that Ibn Khaldun was unreasonably prejudiced against luxury and today there must be many who would argue from their experience, and against Khaldun, that living in luxury can be conducive to health and contentment. He was austere. He was also arrogant, as both his contemporaries and his own writings bear witness, but then he had a lot to be arrogant about. On quite a few issues the Qur’an and Maliki law books did his thinking for him. In so many ways he was outstanding and exceptional; yet in other ways his thinking was that of a thoroughly conventional Muslim. Consequently this book has served not only as an count of the workings of a genius, but also as a guide to perfectly ordinary Muslim beliefs.

Finally: “We almost strayed from our purpose. It is our intention now to stop . . .Perhaps some later scholar, aided by the divine gifts of a sound mind and solid scholarship, will penetrate into these problems in greater detail than we did here . . .God knows and you do not know.”[Muq., vol 3, p.481]

.   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

* In his chronicle Ibn Marzuq (who became one of Ibn Khaldun’s betes noirs) provided material details about costume, cuisine and folk customs, the kinds of things that tended to be neglected in the latter’s writings.

As Patricia Crone observed: “In practice the government of the time was more often than not both weak and oppressive: weak in the sense that it could not get much done, oppressive in the sense that rulers would freely sacrifice the lives and properties of their subjects in order to a stay in power and keep some semblance of order.” And yet curiously little of this nightmarish turbulence featured in Muqaddima.

When expounding on his suspicions about commerce and the accumulation of excess capital Ibn Khaldun cited a hadith to this effect: “The Prophet said: ‘The only thing you really possess of your property is what you ate, and have thus destroyed, o what you wore, and have thus worn out; or what you gave to charity, and have thus spent.”

Furthermore, as Fromherz observed: “For Ibn Khaldun, the science of astrology held as many secrets about humanity’s actions as his more interesting theories of economy, tribalism and state development.” He also believed in numerology and letter magic. His primary beef with occult practices was that they might carried veiled Shiite messages and cause political disruption.

Ibn Khaldun followed the Maliki school of jurisprudence and thus stressed the importance of the public’s interest but his theory of the rise and fall of governments was fairly simple: dynasties formed through straightforward adherence to Sharia Law and economic austerity. Once in power they succumbed to the enticements of wealth and luxury, not longer followed the law, decayed and were then replaced by one or another of the ‘barbarian’ (Nomadic) tribes whose social cohesion and military strength were underwritten by poverty and strict adherence to religious law. In all this the hand of God was paramount. Such were and are the conundrums of futurology. The Apocalypse, End Times and the Antichrist formed significant aspects of the thinking of Medieval Islamic scholars  much as they did they did Christian ones, from the 1250s to the end of the Middle Ages. [ See  The Anti-fraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature by Penn R. Szittya, Princeton University Press, 1986].  For background to these developments see  Thomas N. Bisson’s difficult but fascinating The Crisis of the Twelfth Century; Power, Lordship  and the Origins of European Government. The spread of global trade and the revival and innovating articulations of technologies from the Classical periods by increasing wealth produced a breakdown of the ethos of ‘public interest’ in the governing classes resulting in a proliferation of  the now romantically conceived ‘Castle Kingdoms” by independently exploiting agents, so-called knights.

This is too much for a mere footnote, I concede. I just wanted to mention that I recently read those two books.

** Toynbee was drawn to Ibn Khaldun- he read it in a French translation- ‘it was like discovering a long-lost relative’. Although he disputed  Muqaddima on several points, as he aged, Toynbee eventually identified God as the ultimate mover of the cycles of civilization and came to view the primary function of civilizations as to be the bearers of religion. “History is a vision of God’s creation on the move”.