Ibn Khaldun

• 1. Introduction

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  In the year 1400, an elderly scholar was lowered by ropes over the wall of a besieged city to meet the man who had surrounded it. The city was Damascus. The conqueror was Timur, the Mongol leader who had founded the Timurid Empire. The scholar was Ibn Khaldun, an Arab historian and philosopher then nearing seventy. For seven weeks he stayed at the threatened city, and across a series of meetings Timur questioned him about the lands of the Maghreb. Ibn Khaldun later recorded all of it in his autobiography. This was a man whose life ran like an adventure. He had been thrown in prison and raised to the highest offices of state, then cast back into exile. He had buried both parents to plague before he was twenty. He would write a single book in six months that scholars now call a foundation of sociology, economics, and the writing of history. Who was this man who counted Timur among the figures he met and outlived? What did he see in the rise and fall of dynasties that no one before him had set down? And why, six centuries later, would an American president quote him on taxation?

• 2. An Andalusian Inheritance

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  Abu Zayd Abd ar-Rahman bin Muhammad bin Khaldun Al-Hadrami was born in Tunis in 1332, into an upper-class family of Arab descent that had once held high offices in al-Andalus. The family traced itself back, in Ibn Khaldun's own telling, to Hadhramaut in the south of the Arabian Peninsula. In his autobiography he wrote: "And our ancestry is from Hadhramaut, from the Arabs of Arabian Peninsula, via Wa'il ibn Hujr also known as Hujr ibn 'Adi, from the best of the Arabs, well-known and respected." Wa'il ibn Hujr was a companion of the prophet Muhammad. The fall of Seville to the Reconquista in 1248 had driven the family out of Spain and into Tunisia. Some of its members had taken political office under the Tunisian Hafsid dynasty. His father and grandfather, by contrast, withdrew from public life and joined a mystical order. Scholars give weight to his claim of Arab ancestry precisely because he clung to it at a time when Berber dynasties dominated North Africa, when such a claim brought no easy advantage. The family's distinction did not spare it from history's violence. His brother, Yahya ibn Khaldun, was also a historian; he wrote a book on the Abdalwadid dynasty and was assassinated by a rival for serving as the court's official historiographer.

• 3. A Classical Education

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  His family's high rank opened doors to the most prominent teachers of the Maghreb. Ibn Khaldun memorized the Quran by heart and received certification, ijazah, across Arabic linguistics, hadith, sharia, and jurisprudence. He recited the Quran to Abd Allah ibn Sad ibn Nazzal, and he learned Arabic first from his own father. The mathematician and philosopher Al-Abili of Tlemcen drew him toward mathematics, logic, and philosophy. Through Al-Abili he studied the works of Averroes, Avicenna, Razi, and Tusi. At the age of 17, Ibn Khaldun lost both his parents to the Black Death, the plague that struck Tunis in 1348 and 1349. That epidemic was a turning point in his youth, taking not only family but teachers. His first book was written at the age of 19, a commentary on the Islamic theology of Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, composed under Al-Abili's supervision in Tunis. The studies that began over recitation and grammar would later carry him into the courts of sultans who needed men who could write.

• 4. The Politics Of Survival

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  At the age of 20, Ibn Khaldun took up his first post in the chancellery of the Tunisian ruler Ibn Tafrakin, as seal-bearer, writing in fine calligraphy the opening notes of official documents. North Africa in his lifetime was a landscape of short-lived regimes, and survival demanded the skill of forming and dropping alliances before they collapsed beneath you. In 1352, when Abu Ziad, the sultan of Constantine, marched on Tunis and defeated it, Ibn Khaldun followed his teacher Abili to Fez. There the Marinid sultan, Abu Inan Fares I, made him a writer of royal proclamations. He repaid the favor by scheming against his employer, and in 1357 the 25-year-old was sentenced to 22 months in prison. Freedom came only with the sultan's death the following year. He schemed again, and again, switching sides among rival rulers. In 1364 the Nasrid ruler of Granada, Muhammad V, sent him on a diplomatic mission to Pedro the Cruel, king of Castile, to seal a peace treaty. Ibn Khaldun carried it off and politely refused Pedro's offer to keep him at court and restore his family's Spanish lands. His rivalry with Muhammad's vizier, Ibn al-Khatib, eventually sent him back to North Africa; al-Khatib was later accused of unorthodox philosophical views and killed, despite Ibn Khaldun's attempt to intercede for the man who had been his enemy.

• 5. The Book In Six Months

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  By 1375 Ibn Khaldun had wearied of politics and the constant switching of allegiances. He took refuge with a Berber tribe in western Algeria, in the town of Qalat Ibn Salama, and lived there for more than three years under their protection. In that seclusion he wrote the Muqaddimah, the Prolegomena, the introduction to a planned history of the world. He said in his autobiography that he wrote it in six months. The town lacked the texts he needed to finish, so in 1378 he returned to his native Tunis. The Muqaddimah is built around a single idea he called asabiyyah, translated as group cohesiveness or solidarity. This bond arises on its own in tribes and small kinship groups, and a religious ideology can sharpen and enlarge it. Asabiyyah carries a group to power, Ibn Khaldun argued, but it holds within itself the seeds of that group's collapse, to be replaced by a newer and more vigorous cohesion. From this came his most cited observation: when a society reaches the height of civilization, its peak is followed by decay. The group that then conquers it is, by comparison, a band of barbarians. Once in control, those barbarians are drawn to the refinements of literacy and the arts; they assimilate, and in time a fresh set of barbarians conquers them, and the cycle turns again. He broke from the Muslim historians before him, who weighed the credibility of who transmitted a story. Ibn Khaldun weighed the validity of the story itself and pressed for critical thinking.

• 6. A Science Of Society

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  Ibn Khaldun called for the creation of a science to explain society, and in the Muqaddimah he wrote that "Civilization and its well-being, as well as business prosperity, depend on productivity and people's efforts in all directions in their own interest and profit." To him the state was a necessity, a force needed to restrain injustice, yet force itself, and so an injustice in its own right. He divided science into religious knowledge, the sciences of the Quran, and non-religious knowledge, which he split further into intellectual sciences such as logic, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, and auxiliary sciences such as language, poetry, and literature. At the center of his account of human behavior stood the faculty to think, fikr, which he held responsible for drawing people into social structures and the division of labor. He drew a sharp line between nomadic and sedentary life. A society in its earliest stage is nomadic and concerned with survival; a later society is sedentary, with greater achievement in crafts. The truest measure of a society, he believed, was not its land but its language. He marveled at how non-Arabs flourished in Arab society once they mastered Arabic: "These people were non-Arab by descent, but they grew up among the Arabs who possessed the habit of Arabic," he recalled, "because of this, they were able to master Arabic so well that they cannot be surpassed." He warned that too much bureaucracy, too many taxes and regulations, would choke the specialized labor on which a society's progress depends.

• 7. The Cairo Years

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  "He who has not seen it does not know the power of Islam," Ibn Khaldun said of Egypt, where Mamluk prosperity stood in contrast to the border wars and inner strife of other Islamic regions. In 1384 the Egyptian sultan al-Malik udh-Dhahir Barquq appointed him professor of the Qamhiyyah Madrasah and Grand qadi of the Maliki school of jurisprudence. He thought little of how justice was administered in Egypt and set out to reform what he saw as abuses, complaining too that Egyptians were far too easy-going about the Day of Judgment. Resistance forced him to resign the judgeship within a year. That same year, 1384, a ship carrying his wife and children sank off Alexandria. He returned from a pilgrimage to Mecca in May 1388 and turned to teaching in the Cairo madrasas. Under duress, with other Cairo jurists, he once issued a fatwa against Barquq during a revolt, and fell from favor before relations were restored. Altogether he was called six times to the high office of Maliki qadi, never holding it long. After his meetings with Timur at Damascus, he wrote for the conqueror a long report on the Maghreb, then on his return composed an equally extensive history of the Tatars with a character study of Timur, which he sent to the Merinid rulers in Fez. He died on the 17th of March 1406, one month after his sixth selection as Maliki qadi, having been placed under arrest amid suspicion that he had joined an underground reform party called Rijal Hawa Rijal.

• 8. The Long Afterlife

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  Few of Ibn Khaldun's own students grasped the Muqaddimah, and contemporaries such as Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani charged him with inadequate historical knowledge and disorganization, noting that he was not well-liked in Egypt because he opposed respected traditions, even the customary judicial dress. Recognition came slowly and from far away. Ottoman intellectuals discovered him in the 17th century; Katip Celebi named him a great influence, and Mustafa Naima applied his cyclical theory to the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire. Europe first met him in 1697, in a biography within Barthelemy d'Herbelot de Molainville's Bibliotheque Orientale, with a complete Arabic edition of the Muqaddimah finally published in 1858. Modern admirers have been emphatic. The British historian Arnold J. Toynbee called the Muqaddimah "the greatest work of its kind." The economist Paul Krugman described him as "a 14th-century Islamic philosopher who basically invented what we would now call the social sciences." Arthur Laffer, namesake of the Laffer curve, acknowledged that Ibn Khaldun's ideas preceded his own. In 1981, U.S. President Ronald Reagan cited him as an influence on his supply-side economic policies, paraphrasing the observation that at the beginning of a dynasty great revenues came from small assessments, and at its end small revenues came from large ones. Six hundred years after his death, in 2006, Spain commemorated the anniversary with an exhibit titled "Encounter of Civilizations: Ibn Khaldun," and in 2007 Ibn Haldun University opened in Istanbul, teaching its social sciences in English, Turkish, and Arabic.