The Muqaddimah

"This 14th-century work on the philosophy of history and social sciences, exploring the rise and fall of civilizations, fits Mark Zuckerberg's interest in understanding societal dynamics and long-term trends."

"Ibn Khaldun began writing the book in 1375 so it’s certainly the oldest on my list. It is also a unique work from that period in its attempt to analyse the context of history by understanding how societies organise themselves and how different modes of organisation can affect the interactions amongst people. The book has had a really powerful influence on me, in part because I began my work by studying nomads similar to those Khaldun writes about and calls desert people. Although Bedouin nomads are his prime example, he explains that it is a way of life that encompasses all the people who live at the margins, whether that be the mountains, or the steppes or the deserts and he asks the basic question: Why could such people who come from the margins and aren’t particularly sophisticated manage to form so many dynasties of the Arab Near East and North Africa? He looks at how their form of socialisation in a tough environment gives them a group solidarity that can be a great military advantage in times of conflict, and, when the opportunity is ripe, allows them to conquer more populous regions. But these opportunities are rare because sedentary civilisations, areas of urban high culture and irrigated agriculture, are generally economically more prosperous and politically powerful. People there have weak social solidarity but strong economic integration. They therefore maintain complex political organisations and professional militaries that can fend off these people from the margins. But he notes that their lack of internal solidarity creates a vulnerability when incompetent ruling dynasties become bankrupt – no one is there to defend them from outside invaders. As Khaldun saw it, it was charismatic leaders from marginal regions that restored order and founded new dynasties; dynasties that then also decline in four generations and themselves are replaced by new outsiders. So for a person who looks at Afghanistan, there are some wonderfully interesting parallels that he describes. There are echoes but it is not entirely similar to his Bedouin groups because Afghan history is also affected by people coming out of Central Asia that have a different model of tribal organisation which is more hierarchical. They are more willing to accept leadership. They have ruling clans as opposed to everybody believing that he can be the ruler and that sets up a different political dynamic. That is why you get the long-lived dynasties like the Ottoman Empire, which lasted 800 years, and the Mughuls, who lasted more than 300 years. Obviously they lasted for more than four generations. So what I wanted to see is what happens in this interaction zone, and what we find is an Afghan dynasty that lasts for 230 years – which is much more like the Turks. But if you look at it internally you see that it follows an Ibn Khaldun cycle, which is that clans within the royal élite fight and replace each other on a four generation cycle just as Khaldun describes in his book. So we see this interesting dynamic in which the highly egalitarian Pashtun tribes find it easier to accept the legitimacy of a royal clan because they could never agree on who had the right to replace it. It was finally overthrown in 1978 by communists attempting to topple the entire system. After more than two decades of war, it is interesting that the Bonn Accord chose Karzai, whose ancestors first founded the Afghan state. The interesting thing is that Karzai comes out of that descent group. In other words, while thinking we were creating a new democracy we were in fact helping to restore the same sort of ruling dynastic élite that had previously governed Afghanistan."

"He was born in Tunis early in the 14th century. And from the beginning it was a catastrophe: Tunis was invaded by forces from Marrakesh; the Black Death struck, sweeping across North Africa on its way to Spain . Ibn Khaldun lost his parents and most of his teachers and a lot of his friends. So he starts out with this sort of gloomy grim perspective; as he looks around himself he sees deserted villages and ruins everywhere – some of them recent ruins, some are ruins produced by Arab invasions of the 10th and 11th century. Surveying this devastation, he asks himself, ‘What is the meaning of all this? Given that things are so different now from how they were in, say, the time of Masudi, this calls for a new kind of history,’ he decides. But it’s a while before he gets down to it. He tries his luck as a scholar and courtier, and he occupies high offices in various North African regimes as well as in the Court of Grenada and Muslim Spain. Sometimes he does well and sometimes he doesn’t. The problem with being this kind of scholar-administrator is that it’s not like being a civil servant in Britain, where you retire with a pension. In Ibn Khaldun’s day you were lucky to retire with your life. You made a lot of money as an administrator in 14th-century North Africa but eventually people would turn against you, and torture you to extract that money. So he and all his contemporaries in the same line of business end up in prison at one time or another. Sometimes they are murdered – Ibn Khaldun’s brother, who himself held high office, was murdered. Several of his rivals were murdered or executed. So it’s a dodgy business and after a while he retires to a remote castle in western Algeria – a tribe lends it to him. He spends about two and a half years writing the first draft of the Muqaddimah , which he will work on for the rest of his life. It’s one hell of a great work. It’s intended as a prolegomenon – an introduction to what he is going to write – and the complexity starts there, really, because he started out with one idea of what he was going to write about….and then he broadens and broadens. Originally he was just going to write a history of Berber dynasties in North Africa; then he decided, ‘Well, I’d better do the Arab dynasties as well. Then he broadened it to the whole Arab world and then he tried to look also at Byzantium and India and the Israelites, but then why stop at history? What about musicology and poetry and medicine and philosophy and theology and the occult and so on? So it’s kind of an encyclopaedia, but primarily and originally it’s to understand the underlying principles of history. He starts by saying what counts as good evidence and what counts as bad evidence, and he gets rid of the whole business of chains of transmission ( isnads ), and tries to establish logical ways of assessing the truth of things. Yes, he asks why men and women come together to form distinct groups or cultures. So he looks at the rise and fall of dynasties, and he’s particularly aware of, firstly, the rise of the caliphate, of the prophet and the first four rightful Caliphs. Then he’s aware of how the Almoravids, Almohads and the Marinids came to power in North Africa. What he fastens on, through looking at the way these things happened, is a kind of pattern: tribesmen in the hinterlands come together and they form social bonds because they’re hardened by the rigours of desert life (including the threat of camel raiding). They have to depend on one another, and they get a group feeling known as asabiyya – this propels them and gives them the strength to invade settled civilizations and occupy the towns, establishing a new dynasty. As the dynasty establishes itself it gets softer, no longer facing the desert’s challenges, and it relies on professional administrators, and it has mercenaries and uses slave troops rather than tribesmen. It needs to tax more and more. And the asabiyya declines and they’re vulnerable to the next wave of hungry tribesmen coming in from the hinterlands. And so that’s the motor of change. Yes, misused him actually. Reagan’s simple argument was that the more you tax, the less revenue it brings in. Ibn Khaldun does say that, but he gives other factors as causes of this effect – it isn’t just that more taxation causes a loss of revenue. It’s also that the ruler is spending more money on hiring mercenaries and trying to establish trade monopolies. It’s much more complicated than Reagan would have you understand. And mine too, again and again I find myself banging my head against him – he’s not easy. He’s a very rigorous thinker, but also sometimes strangely illogical. He has some similarities with Machiavelli, who was also a scholar and a politician, and whose life was probably also endangered sometimes. There is in fact a tiny and not very respectable school of thought that thinks that Machiavelli might have read some version of Ibn Khaldun’s work – but that’s almost certainly nonsense. When one gets to the crunch there’s not much resemblance between the two of them in terms of what they write: Machiavelli believes that sometimes the ruler must do for the good of the state all sorts of dodgy things; he values virtu (martial spirit and leadership qualities) and honour and cunning and so on. Whereas Ibn Khaldun believes in Islamic values alone, and would never transgress or do anything the Qur’an says is wrong. Machiavelli is interested in how to get power and how to continue to hold it. Ibn Khaldun is not interested in that at all, he has no interest in advising a ruler how to do anything. Rulers are just a phenomenon, which he studies. It’s a mistake that some readers of Ibn Khaldun have made, they’ve tried to present him as kind of would-be Aristotle who would advise Alexander. He never does that in fact, and his book doesn’t offer guidance for kingship. What it’s for is a possible question, but it’s not that. It is perhaps an intent to systematise the perceived world. There’s a famous book by one of the Annales historians, Lucien Febvre, about the impossibility of atheism in the age of Rabelais, and I think it’s true – it never would have occurred to Masudi to move beyond Islam. One more thing about Masudi, actually: Masudi, like Jahiz, became rather unfashionable after his death, but his problem was, not that he was a Mu’tazilite but rather that he was a Shiite. So Sunni historians tended to say ‘Oh no, he’s not really good’, just simply because he was Shia and so he was seen as untrustworthy, and a promoter of the Alid cause. Ibn Khaldun, having eventually having got a draft of the Muqaddimah out, goes to Egypt where he finds good patronage from the Sultan. He continues to work on Muqaddimah there, and he behaves with enormous arrogance. He’s made chief qadi, but he won’t wear the qadi’s robes, he’ll wears only North African clothes; he’s absolutely rigorous in his interpretation of the law and won’t take any bribes…. And so, for these and all sorts of other reasons, he’s widely detested by the intelligentsia of late-14th, early-15th-century Egypt. He has almost no disciples. He’s neglected in the Arab world. But then his work is picked up by Ottoman intellectuals and administrators in the 17th and 18th century, who are looking at their empire and recognise that they’re beginning to lose bits of it. They get really interested in Ibn Khaldun and his presentation of the rise and fall of dynasties. Quite a few of them study him and reinterpret him – they think he’s really great. Then I think it’s Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, an Austrian, rather crack pot, eccentric orientalist, who picks up on this, because he really does know his Ottoman sources and was producing an enormous history of the Ottoman empire. And then he passes it on to Silvestre de Sacy, the éminence grise of French orientalism in the early 19th century. Sacy translates miscellaneous bits of the Muqaddimah , and I don’t know why he chose the bits he did, but he insists that Ibn Khaldun is a great man. Then Étienne Marc Quatremère, another scholar, chooses to translate the whole Muqaddimah , and he does it very badly because he doesn’t have very good dictionaries and also he’s a bit bonkers and ill by the time he’s doing it. But, from then on, the French have got a substantial text, which they can work with – and indeed, that’s the text that one day Arnold Toynbee will pick up and use when he produces his A Study of History [1934 onwards], published in 12 volumes and intended to understand how civilizations rise and fall and how they inter-relate. Toynbee presents Ibn Khaldun as a kind of demigod, and thereafter he’s been picked up by one historian after another, and by sociologists and anthropologists and so on. So, the French are really following the Ottomans but they are the pioneers of promoting it. And they have a reason for doing so, because Ibn Khaldun, apart from the Muqqadimah, did this history of the North African dynasties – of the Berbers and Arabs – and the French are busy invading that part of the world. So they think, ‘Well, we’ve just invaded Algeria, we’re probably going to do Morocco, and if we’re lucky we’ll get to Tunisia – we must study! We need a good book to show us how they think and how they lived.’ Some of what Ibn Khaldun said is misinterpreted as suggesting that there’s an eternal antagonism between Arab and Berber, and it all suits the French colonial enterprise quite nicely. Oh, he’s a great man. He’s on stamps and bank notes and he’s the national hero of Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt. They all claim him and they have conferences devoted to him. There’s a huge literature on him – the oddity is that the best edition of the Muqaddimah is Rosenthal’s three-volume English translation. There is no full scholarly edition of Ibn Khaldun in Arabic. There was a man that was working on it, but he died and as far as I know it’s never been finished or printed. So one has to go to this English translation rather than the Arabic. Which is really quite an unusual situation."

"The reason I chose this book is that it’s the first work of global history that has what we might now qualify as a social scientific theory, instead of just representing history as providential—although Ibn Khaldun is a fatalist: he does believe that everything is in the hands of God. But he sees God as working in history through what we might call social mechanisms, in particular through the antipathy, the struggle, the dialectic, if you like, between settled and pastoral peoples. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He has an idea of a development of society through pastoral to settled conditions. He sees people who are at different stages in that process of development, and connects that to the struggles that forge historical change. The sort of changes he is interested in are primarily changes of dynasty, of power structure at a very high level. But he does have an overall vision, a pattern, what we might now call a ‘master narrative’ of how those changes happened. So he’s a very exciting new voice in global history in the 14th century. Yes it is. You can see vestiges of general theories before then. You might go back to Thucydides and say, ‘Well, he had at least a general theory of war, that it was a response to fear.’ You can go back to the 12th century and see Gerald of Wales, in his historical works about Wales and Ireland, anticipating Ibn Khaldun by suggesting that history is a succession of developmental stages in the way society unfolds from nomadism to pastoralism to sedentarism. But Ibn Khaldun is the first person systematically to apply that model to the whole of history. Up until then, I don’t think you can honestly say that anybody had a master narrative that wasn’t providential or fatalistic. It depends what you mean by convincing. Books don’t have to be right to be great. Greatness is often the result of very creative and intelligent mistakes. I don’t endorse Ibn Khaldun’s theory, but I acknowledge its brilliance and as a historical document about his own thought and the thought of his own time it’s infinitely precious and inestimable. We don’t know about the Daniel writers, who they were, or who he was, or anything about them, except that they were very well informed historically. I think the answer is that global historical writers who do travel sometimes show it and reveal the benefit of it. One of the books I put on my list is Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China. That’s a book I admire tremendously, and obviously Needham would never have begun to think about that if he hadn’t been on a mission for the British government in China during World War II . Sometimes real experience of different environments has an impact on stimulating a historian’s imagination. But particularly in modern times, when every part of the world is relatively well informed about every other part, it’s possible to write global history without ever leaving your armchair. Gibbon wrote these wonderful, meticulous, vivid descriptions of Constantinople even though he’d never been there, he’d just read about it. I once wrote a book called Millennium —which was my first attempt to write global history—and when the Japanese publisher took me out to lunch to celebrate the launch of the Japanese translation he asked me what I’d thought about my visit to Japan . I had to confess to him that I’d never been there and that I wrote it entirely on the basis of other people’s accounts. He was terribly shocked and said that it was misleading the public to write so vividly about a place I hadn’t seen but, you know, you can do that nowadays."

"The Muqaddimah is the ‘Introduction’ of Ibn Khaldun’s multivolume world history. It is very important because once we say that Muslims engage in politics under certain conditions that aren’t religious principles, then the question is, what are these conditions? That’s what Ibn Khaldun focuses on. In this book, he says he’s doing neither theology nor philosophy, but something new. He is very conscious that he is building a new social science, which he calls the science of ‘human civilization and social organization’. Ibn Khaldun explicitly differentiates his position from philosophers and their Aristotelian methods and Muslim philosophical syllogisms, making analogies and then drawing large generalizations without empirical observation. He insists he’s not doing that. But he is also clear that he is not doing Islamic science, or working on Islamic law. He says, ‘if you are interested in Islamic law perspectives on Islam and the state, go and read the book of Mawardi’, the 11th-century Muslim jurist. Mawardi wrote the first and possibly the only major book on the legal theory of the Caliphate in the 11th century, based on a certain understanding of Islamic law. Ibn Khaldun says he’s not interested in this theological, Islamic legal perspective. Rather, he says that he’s doing an empirical analysis based on historical observation. If I can summarize his approach: he looks at the dialectical relationship between two human groups. One group is the sedentary, urban people. And there are, of course, degrees here, from small towns to big cosmopolitan metropoles—in his time, Cairo, for example, or previously Baghdad, which had a population of over half a million. The other group is the nomadic people. Again, it’s a matter of degree: starting with desert nomadic tribes, all the way to the inhabitants of mountains and outlying villages. Ibn Khaldun looks at these two groups’ characteristics and for him, neither of the two is good or evil. Both have good and bad characteristics. The urban people are open to civilization, meaning the arts, science and philosophy. But they are prone to indulge in luxuries, to be egoistic, lazy people, who militarily rely on the army. When the army is defeated, they are powerless, defenceless. For the nomad, the problem is that they are not open to the idea of civilization. They don’t have a refined understanding of arts and sciences, but they are brave people. They have neither gates nor doors. And they are ready to fight any time and they rely on their own group’s power. They are not egotistical. Instead, they have ‘ asabiyya ’ which basically means group feeling or esprit de corps . With this, the nomads rely on each other and constitute a strong body. “In the Muslim world, out of 50 countries, only seven are electoral democracies” He says that, historically, we see a circular pattern. The nomads attack cities, conquer them, then they settle down and they turn into urban people and they transform. That’s the dynamic of history. He didn’t use the term ‘state’ that we use. He talked about the ‘royal authority’, a kind of state at the time. He argues that the inherent goal of asabiyya is to establish a royal authority. Therefore, it’s inevitable that the nomadic people would establish a state, but then they would lose asabiyya and become a sedentary people—that’s almost a deterministic understanding. But in addition to this determinism, he also provides certain economic and political solutions. For example, he asks rulers to avoid dominating the economy, because such domination leads to corruption and the failure of the state. Certain modern thinkers and politicians have been inspired by Ibn Khaldun. Ronald Reagan, for example, repeatedly cited him because Ibn Khaldun says, at the beginning of an empire, the tax rate is low, but the revenue is high, while at the end of an empire, the tax rate is high, but the revenue is low. Some critics say it’s a misunderstanding because what Ibn Khaldun refers to is not a limited tax rate, but corruption and his concern that the more corrupt the government becomes the more money it extracts from the people, making the economy inefficient. Some modern analyses give credit to Ibn Khaldun, but say that he’s a bit outdated because today we have nationalism, which is a modern development. With nationalism, the urban people now have a source of asabiyya , or group feeling; nationalism brings them together and prevents them becoming egotistical individuals. They can act and fight as a group. Nonetheless, I think Ibn Khaldun is still relevant today; his theory may help us understand several modern issues from global migration to the Taliban’s recent takeover in Afghanistan. Another debate that is related to Ibn Khaldun is whether Muslim societies experienced a rise and fall of scientific creativity. Some modern scholars, both in the West and in the Muslim world, deny that Muslim societies historically experienced a scientific decline. They label those who analyse ‘the decline’ as Orientalists. In reality, however, Ibn Khaldun (who wrote in the late fourteenth century), Katip Celebi (who wrote in the mid-seventeenth century), and several other Muslim scholars acknowledged the scientific decline of their societies. A major reason for certain modern scholars’ denial of ‘the decline’ is their lack of comparative analysis. If we compare Muslims’ scientific creativity between the ninth and twelfth centuries with that in later centuries, particularly between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the decline is obvious. He is read today. Historically, he was mostly neglected because, after the 11th century, there emerged what I call an “ulema-state alliance” in Central Asia, Iran and Iraq, which marginalised intellectuals and merchants. Later on, in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries, this ulema-state alliance spread to Syria, Egypt and other parts of the Muslim world. When Ibn Khaldun wrote his book, the Mamluks were in Egypt. The Mamluk military oligarchy represents the deepest institutionalization of the ulema-state alliance, together with the Ottomans. At that time, because this intellectual stagnation had already begun, two major Muslim thinkers in the western part of the Muslim world, Ibn Rushd in what is Spain today, and Ibn Khaldun in Egypt, were not really studied deeply. Ibn Rushd was attacked and certain of his books were burned, for example, his exegesis on Plato’s Republic . We don’t have it in Arabic form, it was destroyed. We only have it today from the Hebrew translation. Ibn Khaldun was luckier because he didn’t deal with certain philosophical issues that Ibn Rushd was studying. He didn’t write a rebuttal to Ghazali, as Ibn Rushd did, which was one of the reasons why he was attacked. Ibn Khaldun wasn’t attacked, but he was neglected. The Ottomans studied Ibn Khaldun but only for their interest in the rise and fall of empires. Later on, in the 19th century, his Muqaddimah was rediscovered by Western European scholars, and then Muslim interest in him was revived in the 20th century. Today, he is a source of pride for Muslims. Muslims, unfortunately, do not have many Nobel Prize winners or major social scientists, but the existence of a leading Muslim social scientist in history makes Muslims proud today. But his formulas about the separation of political authority and economic power and his warnings about corruption are not followed in most Muslim-majority countries. State control of the economy is widespread. We don’t see such separation of powers as suggested by Ibn Khaldun."