Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography

"Ibn Khaldun, the great 14th-century North African historian, was interested in the lessons of history, a little bit like Edward Gibbon . When Gibbon visited Rome and saw the crumbling buildings around him, he wondered what explained the rise and fall of the Roman Empire . Ibn Khaldun did the same thing several hundred years earlier. He noticed these crumbling cities and civilizations in North Africa and wondered what happened to them. He was interested in those big questions of civilizational rise and decline. You could sit down and try to read the Muqaddimah , his famous treatise of historical sociology. But I think it’s much better to start with this great biography by Robert Irwin, which tells the story of Khaldun as a person. You read how he was a famous juror in southern Spain and in North Africa, how his family were killed in a terrible shipwreck, how in the siege of Damascus, he was lowered in a basket outside the city walls to go and speak to the great conqueror, Tamerlane, who wanted to know about his theories of history. Ibn Khaldun was an amazing historical thinker. He had a cyclical theory of history, which was quite common at the time, as it was among the ancient Greeks. He thought there were patterns to the ways civilizations come and go. The key to it all in the Muqaddimah – and Robert Irwin talks about it a lot as well – is a concept called asabiya , which is an Arabic term meaning collective solidarity, or group feeling. Khaldun argued that what makes a civilization thrive is this strong asabiya or group feeling, and when that asabiya is eroded – for example, when civilizations become very unequal in terms of wealth – then the civilizations fall apart, and they are prey to outside invaders like nomadic tribes who become the new conquerors. Khaldun’s questions about what makes civilizations rise and fall are absolutely pertinent today when we are wondering whether we are going to bend or break in the face of the ecological crisis, risks from new technologies and other kinds of turbulence. How do we create asabiya, this social glue or social trust to help us be resilient in the face of change? He’s a really fantastic figure for exploring that. We should be looking to Ibn Khaldun. Though I don’t really believe in his cyclical theory of history. We should take it all with a pinch of salt. Robert Irwin is very good at pointing out some of those problems of Khaldun’s analysis as well."