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Wesleyan niversity
Ibn Khaldn's Philosophy of History. by Muhsin MahdiReview by: J. J. SaundersHistory and Theory, Vol. 5, No. 3 (1966), pp. 342-347Published by: Wileyfor Wesleyan University
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342
REVIEW ESSAYS
the bare chronicle
of facts, with
the highest possible form of poetry,
tragedy,
does indeed
make a point about
poetry, but it tells us very little
about his-
tory and therefore
nothing about its true essence.
As the most
complete of
the modern English commentators on the Poetics notes: There is no really
satisfying explanation
of Aristotle's absolute neglect
of Thucydides
.
. .
who
had unmistakably
tried to make
history 'philosophical'
. .
.
It seems
a genuine
blind spot
-
or a deliberate omission. 5
The distinction in Poetics IX between poetry
and history
is
rhetoric,
not
philosophy, and
to found an argument on this
distinction
without
rearguing
the case
is
to build on foundations
of sand.
Like
many
theories
used
by
the
authors
of critical books,
Sen Gupta's serves
the
same function as the
love story in the average musical comedy: it provides a place to begin, a
place to end,
and in between it
is best forgotten.
Still Shakespeare's
Historical Plays is a better book than its argument.
The
author's
close
reading
of the
plays is,
I
think, the best we have,
and the
difference between
the merits
of his perceptions and the weakness
of his
premises should not surprise
a student of criticism. There have
been many
great critics,
few great critical theorists. And,
we might add,
it is not only
the critics
who write
better
than they
know. For it is quite possible that
Shakespeare, if he thought about the problem of the relationship of poetry
and
history
at
all, might
well have
accepted
Sidney's story
of the
quarrel
between
the
poet
and
the historian
and
Sen Gupta's
modern formulation of
their essential
differences. But surely once Shakespeare actually
began to write
his
histories,
the only problems
that
would
matter
to
him would be not those
of the
theoretical quarrel
between the
poet
and
the historian
but
the practi-
cal
problems
of
the quarrel
between the
poet
and
his poem.
OWEN
JENKINS
Carleton
College
IBN
KHALDUN'S
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
By
Muhsin
Mahdi.
Chicago:
The
University
of Chicago
Press
(Phoenix Books),
1964.
Pp.
325.
No famous thinker has suffered such long
and strange neglect
as Ibn Khal-
dufn; his
case must
surely
be
unique.
It
was
his misfortune
to live
when
Arabic culture, of which he was so bright an ornament, was in full decline,
and
Western
Europe
had ceased
to borrow from
it. Had he flourished
a
cen-
tury or
two
earlier,
he
might
have
been
studied
in the schools of
Paris
and
(London, 1965),
84: As
a theoretical statement about
the
writing
of
history (and
we
have no other
from
Aristotle)
it
is woefully inadequate . .
.
. It is
a
mistake to try
to
extract
from these
statements
any
Aristoteliantheory
of
history.
5.
Gerald F. Else, Aristotle's Poetics (Cambridge, Mass.,
1957),
304.
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REVIEW
ESSAYS 343
Oxford and enjoyed an unbroken
continuity
of fame and influence.
As it
was,
he had no
predecessors
and no successors. Nothing
in the previous
history
of Muslim
thought prepares us for him:
the Ovidian
tag which Montesquieu
proudly affixed to L'Esprit des Lois, prolem sine matre creatam, could
with more propriety have
been fastened to the Muqaddimah.
His book,
when
published,
stirred no excitement, created
no school,
provoked (so far as we
know) no dissent or discussion.
Maqrizi
was his disciple, but Maqrizi was
a
mere chronicler,
albeit
a full and accurate one,
and if he ever
read
the
Muqaddimah, its insights
left no mark
on his writings. The Turks
indeed
translated
it (or part of it)
in the eighteenth century,
but what use
they made
of it we know not.
Not till four centuries after his death did Ibn Khaldufnrise from his long
sleep, when
attention was drawn to him
by Europe's leading Arabists
of the
age of Napoleon,
the French
Silvestre de Sacy and
the Austrian Josef
von
Hammer.
They printed selections from
his writings,
and de Sacy contributed
a life
of him
to the 1818 Biographie Universelle.
The complete
Arabic text
of
the Muqaddimah
was edited by Quatremere
in 1858, and a French
trans-
lation made by de Slane
in 1862-68. The Western
world then learned with
surprise that this alien from
fourteenth-century
North Africa had formulated
principles, outlined a science of human culture, and adumbrated a philosophy
of
history
at
a
time when such things
were undreamed of
in Europe; and
that he had reached conclusions
and detected relationships
which
it had
imagined to be recent discoveries
of its
own. It was struck particularly
by
his
conception
of
'asabiya,
the social cement which held
a
community
together,
and
by
such generalizations as
that
nomadic conquests
were
never durable
unless they rested on a strong
religious basis.
From that moment
Ibn
Khaldufn
took
his
place
as
a
social
philosopher
of unusual acumen, a lonely pioneer who blazed new trails, though for ages
there were none
to
follow
him. Robert Flint gave generous
space
to
him in
his History
of the Philosophy
of History (1893) and
so spread
his fame
in
the
English-speaking
world.
Ibn
Khaldufn's
ellow-Muslims
took him
up,
and
rejoiced
that Europe
should bestow
such
respect
on one
of their
co-religionists.
The
Egyptian poet
and critic Taha
Husain devoted a
perceptive
monograph
to him in 1918.1
Arnold Toynbee
in
1934 pronounced
him the
peer
of Thu-
cydides
and
Machiavelli
and
described the Muqaddimah
as
undoubtedly
the
greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any
time
or place. 2
After
an
encomium of
this
kind,
reminiscent
of
Macaulay
in
its sweep
and decisiveness,
it was
high
time that
Ibn
Khalduin,
who,
one
suspects,
was
being
more
praised
than read,
was
subjected
to
a
close and
critical
scrutiny. Now,
more
than
a
century
after
his
discovery,
we
have
fuller
1. Taha
Husain,
La
philosophic
sociale
d'Ibn Khaldoun
(Paris, 1918).
2. A
Study of History (Oxford,
1934), III,
322.
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REVIEW ESSAYS
means of
judging his achievement and understanding
what he was about. In
1958
Dr. Franz Rosenthal
published the first full English translation of the
Muqaddimah, and the non-Arabist may be satisfied
that he is reading as
accurate an approximation to the Arabic original as is likely to be attained.
And
Dr.
Muhsin Mahdi, in a book originally
published in 1957 and now
re-issued
in
a
paperback edition, has
written
what
is easily the best study of
Ibn
Khalduin's thought, his
analysis being grounded on a thorough exam-
ination of the text and
a deep
knowledge of Muslim philosophy.
Mahdi has shown
us
-a
necessary
task
-what
Ibn
Khaldfun was not as
well
as
what he
was. He was
not
a remote
and cloistered
academic philosopher,
though much of his thinking was done during a brief sojourn in the solitude
of the
castle
of Ibn Salama
in
southern
Algeria,
but
a busy man of affairs,
adviser,
diplomat, teacher, judge,
who
turned
to the
study
of
history
to see
what light it
would throw
on
the failure of
his
political career. He
was
not
an
historicist,
in the
sense of one who
believes that all
reality is historical;
on
the
contrary,
he
accepted
without
question
the
conviction the Muslims
had inherited from
the Greeks, that
since
history deals only with probabilities
and
particular happenings,
it is second-class
knowledge
at
best, has
no
place
among the true sciences, and is by no means an essential part of the intellec-
tual
equipment
of
the educated
man.
He had no
theory
of
progress,
and
gave
no
sign
of
believing
the world was
getting
better and
better.
It
would have
been
strange
if he
had,
for the fourteenth
century,
like
ours, was an age
of
misery
and ruin. His
youth
was clouded
by
the
grisly
ravages
of
the
Black
Death, his old
age by
the dreadful invasions and
massacres
of
Timur,
whose
towers
of
skulls
must
have sickened
that
generation as the Nazi
gas-chambers
sickened ours.
In
any case,
the
Muslim,
unlike the
Christian, expects
no
Second Coming or millennium
-
of which the utopia of the progressive is
but a
secularized
version
-
and to him
there has never been a
government
of true
justice
and
righteousness,
which
fully
and
faithfully
observed
the
shari'a or
sacred
law,
since the
days
of the
rightly-guided
caliphs
in
the
early age
of
Islam.
Nor did Ibn
Khaldufn
accept any theory
of
cyclical
recur-
rence.
He,
of
course, recognized
repeating patterns
in
the rise and
fall
of
dynasties
and
the
periodic
nomad
invasions,
and he
treated
the
life of
states
as
analogous
to the life of
individual
men,
but
he
drew
no
Spenglerian
con-
clusions from this, and specifically repudiated the return of all things
notion as
a Shi'ite
heresy.
He
sought
in
history
no
forecast of the
future.
Still
less was
Ibn
Khaldufn
a secularist
or
agnostic,
as some
have oddly
supposed,
misled no doubt
by
the
relatively
minor
role
played by theology
and the
supernatural
in
his
principal
work. It is
one of
the
high
merits
of
Mahdi's
book that
he
has
proved
how
deeply
embedded
Ibn
Khaldufn's
thought
is in the
traditional
theology
of
Islam, particularly
in
fiqh
or juris-
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REVIEW
ESSAYS 345
prudence, and how much he owes philosophically to Avicenna and Ghazali.
A devout Muslim of the rigid Maliki school, he spent much of
his life as a
qadi
administering the shari'a, and though in the Muqaddimah
he is con-
cerned primarily with man as a social and political being, the all-pervading
presence of Allah can be sensed throughout, and he would probably
have
endorsed the saying of Hegel, that history is the autobiography
of God. If
his pages are not filled with signs and wonders, as are those of
many of his
Christian contemporaries, this is not to make him a skeptic; miracle has not
the
same place in the Muslim system as in the Christian, where
the most
stupendous of miracles, the Resurrection, lies at its heart.
What Ibn Khaldufn
did, as Mahdi makes clear, was to invent,
like Vico
three centuries later, a new science to supplement and explain the history
which failed to give him the guidance he wanted. A practical
politician, he
had known disgrace and imprisonment at the hands of captious or ungrateful
sultans, and he first turned to the history books to see if he could
divine the
reasons for his failure. Arabic historical literature was already copious.
There
must
have been a sizable public for this kind of writing
-
chiefly, one
imagines, State officials, ministers, political advisers and civil servants.
War
and
politics were the staple themes of the chroniclers, who filled
their pages
with the doings of kings and caliphs, princes and governors. History was no
part
of
the regular education of a Muslim, but was regarded as a
useful guide
to
statesmen, as it was in the Europe of Machiavelli or Bolingbroke. Ibn
Khaldufnwas disappointed to find in
it
nothing but a heap of facts,
with
no
guiding principles.
But
surely
beneath the surface chaos of events there
must
be
deep verities, fixed and unchangeable? One
must
probe beyond
or
behind
history,
and
construct,
in
fact,
a
kind
of
meta-history.
He did not call
his
book ta'rikh, the common Arabic word for
history,
but 'ibar,
a
plural
whose
verbal
root
has
the
meaning
of
to
pass, travel, go beyond, go
from
the outside to
the
inside. (Mahdi
has a
most
interesting analysis
of this word
of
many significations:
de
Slane's
translation
of 'ibar
as
examples, though
defensible,
is
misleading.)
Ibn Khaldufn's
ntention
was to build
a
bridge linking
the
external
aspect
of
the
past
with its inner
meaning,
a
meaning
which
he
hoped
to
elucidate
through
what
he
named
'ilm
al-umran,
the
science
of
culture.
Umran
is
organized
human
society,
treated under five heads:
(1) primitive culture;
(2)
the
State; (3)
the
city; (4)
economic
life;
and
(5)
the
sciences.
An
inner
logic
holds
all these
together.
Man is
naturally
a
gregarious
animal.
The earliest
type
of human
association was
something
like Bedouin
nomadism.
Civilization,
when
it
arises,
is institutionalized
in a state. The state
builds
cities,
cities
create
wealth,
and wealth
provides
the means
and leisure for the
cultivation
of
the
arts and sciences. The
dynamic
of
change
is
supplied by
the
constant encroachment
of nomadic
upon sedentary societies,
a
threat
of
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346
REVIEW ESSAYS
which a
medieval North African townsman was always conscious. (Ibn Khal-
dun asserts that his native Barbary had not even in his day recovered from
the fierce ravages of the Bedouin tribe of the Banu-Hilal in the eleventh cen-
tury.) The author's claim of originality in this comprehensive and penetrating
survey appears to be justified; nothing comparable to it had been attempted
before. Above all, his discussion of the economic aspect was thoroughly novel.
Arabic treatises on
taxation
existed,
and
some elementary
advice
on
fiscal
and
related matters was commonly found in the mirrors for princes
which
viziers
compiled for the instruction of their often ill-educated masters;
but
no one before Ibn Khaldufn, n either Islam or Christendom, had entered
so
fully
and
shrewdly into questions
of
money
and
prices, wages
and
tariffs,
state
revenues and balanced budgets. He was the first to treat economics scien-
tifically
and to
see
its
importance
in
the
life
of societies.3
But as Mahdi warns us,
Ibn
Khaldufn
is
a
whole world removed from
modern
sociology.
He never
rated
his
new
science
very highly: it was merely
a humble
addition to
falsafa,
the
corpus
of
scientific
(i.e., organized)
knowl-
edge
which Islam had inherited from
the Greeks and in
which
political philos-
ophy
had
always
had a
place.
Since there is in Islam
no
distinction
between
Church
and
State,
ecclesiastic and
lay, politics
cannot be
separated
from
theology and comes within the scope of the shari'a. If Ibn Khaldun is a ration-
alist,
as is often
said,
he is
one
operating fully
within the
Platonic-Islamic
tradition.
His
'ilm al-umran was designed to supplement history, and history
itself
had the
purely practical
aim
of
enabling
men
to be ruled
more wisely.
Nothing
would
have
surprised
him more than to
see the
high
rank
assigned
in the
modern
West
to historical
knowledge, though
he
would probably have
reflected
that one
could
hardly expect anything
else from
unbelievers.
Yet
here, one
suspects,
Mahdi has
exaggerated
the
wide
gulf
which
separates
Ibn
Khaldun's
thought
from ours.
Noting
that Ibn
Khaldun created
his
new
science
without
disturbing
the
traditional
philosophy
of
his
time,
Mahdi
asserts
that the moderns
have
thrown over
their traditional
philosophy
altogether and, repudiating
universal
essences,
natures and
causes, have pro-
claimed all
knowledge
to
be
historical.
This is
much
too
sweeping. The his-
toricism
which came in with
the
Romantic
revolt
against the Enlightenment's
faith in the
uniformity
of human nature has
been
on
the
defensive some time
now
against
the
assaults of
Popper
and
others,
who
flatly deny there is any
ultimate
meaning
in
history.
In
any case, only idealists of the Croce-Colling-
wood school ever claimed that
history
could or
would
absorb
philosophy.
Neo-Kantians,
following Dilthey, are engaged in a Critique of Historical
Reason,
and assure us that
the
past can never
be
known
as Ranke
thought
3. J.
J.
Spengler,
Economic
Thought of Islam: Ibn Khaldun, Comparative Studies
in
Society
and
History
6
(1964),
268-306.
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REVIEW ESSAYS 347
it could, that we never see it as it
really was, but only
partially and
through
spectacles of many
colors; that (in Simmel's words)
history as knowledge
cannot be a copy
of reality. 4 We
have given up Comte's positivist approach,
and few historians would today echo Bury's famous claim that history was a
science, no more and no less: they
are more likely to describe themselves,
as Becker did,
as keepers of useful myths. Marc
Bloch criticized the hap-
hazard inquiry
into causes, demanded of the historian
an analytical and
methodical approach,
and set him to search for collective
sensitivities
which
involved seeing
cultural patterns and historical situations
as wholes. Is
this
so
far
removed from Ibn Khaldufn's ilm
al-umran? And Bloch certainly
did
not claim
unique
status for historical
knowledge. True, Bloch was a secular
rationalist and Ibn Khaldu'na theological one, but a strong current is running
in favor of putting God back into
history, as we can
see from the
writings,
in
England alone,
of such scholars as Professor Butterfield
and Father
D'Arcy
and the recent
Bampton lectures of Professor Alan
Richardson.5 Perhaps
there
is
a growing conviction that,
as Reinhold Niebuhr
puts it, we
cannot
interpret
history without a principle of interpretation
which
history
as
such
does not yield.6
What
has
happened
is
that
history
has won
recognition as an independent
discipline (a very recent victory: Tout of Manchester talked as late as 1923
as
though
it had
only just
been achieved) at a time
when the traditional
philosophy (if by this is
meant
the
old Christian-Hellenic scheme of thought)
is disintegrating;
and nothing so imposing or comprehensive,
neither history
nor natural
science, has been found
adequate to take
its place. Ibn Khaldufn
would
have held that history cannot
exist detached from the theological
set-
ting which alone gives it meaning.
The Western world has yet to prove
that
it can.
J. J. SAUNDERS
University of
Canterbury
New Zealand
4. G.
Simmel,
Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie(Leipzig,
1907), 51.
5. A.
Richardson, History Sacred and
Profane (London,
1964).
6.
R.
Niebuhr,
The Nature and
Destiny of Man (New York,
1941), I, 151.
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