Ibn Khaldūn

ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Khaldūn was a North African Arab historian, judge, diplomat and political adviser, and one of the most original thinkers of the medieval world. His Muqaddimah (“Introduction”, 1377), the theoretical preface to a universal history, proposed a new science — the science of human social organisation, or civilisation (ʿilm al-ʿumrān) — to explain the rise and fall of states by their social, economic, geographical and psychological causes. Its central concept, ʿaṣabiyya (“group solidarity”), and its theory of the cycle of dynasties, which rise on the hardiness and cohesion of desert peoples and decay in the luxury of the city within three or four generations, have led historians to call him a founder of sociology, historiography, demography and economics. Rediscovered in Europe in the nineteenth century, he is now read around the world.

Life

Ibn Khaldūn was born on 27 May 1332 in Tunis, into an aristocratic family of Arab origin that had lived for centuries in Seville before migrating to North Africa on the eve of the Christian conquest (1248). He received a thorough education in the Qurʾān, law, Arabic, logic and philosophy, especially from the scholar al-Ābilī. The Black Death of 1348–49 killed his parents and many of his teachers — an experience that shaped his sense of the fragility of civilisations.

His career was a series of high offices and sudden falls amid the shifting dynasties of the Maghreb. At twenty he became a secretary at the Ḥafṣid court of Tunis; he then served the Marīnid sultan in Fez, where he was imprisoned for two years on suspicion of conspiracy (1357–58); went to Granada, where he became a friend of the vizier and poet Ibn al-Khaṭīb and was sent on an embassy to King Pedro of Castile at Seville (1364), who offered to restore his family’s estates if he would stay; became chamberlain at Bougie (Béjaïa); and spent years negotiating with the Arab and Berber tribes of the interior on behalf of various rulers. Weary of politics, in 1375 he retired with his family to the castle of Qalʿat Ibn Salāma, in what is now Algeria, where in about five months of 1377 he wrote the Muqaddimah.

In 1382 he moved to Cairo, capital of the Mamlūk sultanate and the greatest city of the Islamic world, where he taught at al-Azhar and other colleges and was six times appointed chief Mālikī judge, each time dismissed for his severity against corruption. His wife and children were drowned in a shipwreck on their way to join him (1384). In 1400–01 he accompanied the Mamlūk army to Damascus, besieged by Timur (Tamerlane); lowered over the walls by rope, he met the conqueror, who questioned him at length about the Maghreb, and recorded their conversations in his autobiography. He returned to Cairo, where he died on 17 March 1406.

The new science

The Muqaddimah opens with a critique of historians, who repeated absurd reports — of armies of hundreds of thousands, of fabulous cities — because they did not know “the nature of civilisation”. Historical reports must be tested not only by the reliability of their transmitters, as in the science of hadith, but by their conformity with the nature of things: is the event possible, given what we know of human society? History, rightly understood, is “information about human social organisation, which itself is identical with world civilisation”, and requires a new science that studies the causes of social phenomena.

ʿAṣabiyya and the cycle

Human beings need cooperation to survive, and so need society and a restraining authority. Ibn Khaldūn distinguishes badāwa — the life of desert and rural peoples (Bedouin, Berbers, nomads), who live with only necessities — from ḥaḍāra, sedentary urban civilisation, with its crafts, sciences and luxuries. Desert peoples are braver, more self-reliant and more virtuous; above all they possess ʿaṣabiyya, a strong sense of group solidarity rooted in kinship and shared hardship. ʿAṣabiyya is the force that makes conquest possible; when reinforced by religion, as with the early Arabs under Islam or the Almohads, it can found great empires.

Once a group conquers and founds a dynasty, the cycle begins. The first generation retains its desert toughness and solidarity; the second, in power, grows accustomed to sedentary life and the ruler monopolises glory, alienating his kin and relying on clients and mercenaries; the third forgets the desert entirely, sinks into luxury, and “loses the sweetness of fame and solidarity”; by the fourth, the dynasty’s prestige is destroyed. A dynasty rarely lasts beyond three or four generations — about 120 years. Then it is conquered by a new group with stronger ʿaṣabiyya, and the cycle begins again.

Economics

The Muqaddimah contains remarkable economic insights. Labour is the source of value: “profit is the value realised from human labour”. Cities flourish through the division of labour and cooperation, producing a surplus that supports crafts and sciences. On taxation he observed that “at the beginning of the dynasty, taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments; at the end, a small revenue from large assessments” — because heavy taxes discourage enterprise — an idea modern economists have compared with the “Laffer curve”. He criticised state interference in commerce, which ruins both the merchants and the ruler’s revenue.

Knowledge and the sciences

The final part of the work surveys all the sciences of his day — Qurʾānic exegesis, hadith, law, theology, Sufism, logic, mathematics, medicine, philosophy, astrology, alchemy, Arabic language and poetry — and how they are taught. He was sceptical of metaphysics and attacked alchemy and astrology, arguing that the sciences flourish only where civilisation is prosperous, and decline with it.

Legacy

Ibn Khaldūn had few direct successors in the Arab world, though Ottoman historians studied him. European orientalists rediscovered the Muqaddimah in the nineteenth century; Arnold Toynbee and many later historians praised it extravagantly, and it has been compared with Machiavelli, Vico, Montesquieu and Marx. Modern scholars warn against making him merely a “precursor” of European thinkers, and read him as a Muslim jurist and philosopher working within his own tradition.

In conversation

• ʿAṣabiyya — the solidarity that founds empires.
• Four generations — the builder, the keeper, the imitator, the destroyer.
• The meeting with Timur — the historian and the conqueror.