Wesleyan University

Ibn Khaldn's Philosophy of History. by Muhsin Mahdi

Review by: J. J. Saunders
History and Theory, Vol. 5, No. 3 (1966), pp. 342-347
Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2504453 .
Accessed: 31/08/2014 02:13
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
.
Wiley and Wesleyan University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to History
and Theory.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 142.51.1.212 on Sun, 31 Aug 2014 02:13:21 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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 Aristotelian theory of history."
5. Gerald F. Else, Aristotle's Poetics (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), 304.
This content downloaded from 142.51.1.212 on Sun, 31 Aug 2014 02:13:21 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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 Khaldufn rise 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 fellow-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.
This content downloaded from 142.51.1.212 on Sun, 31 Aug 2014 02:13:21 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
344 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-
This content downloaded from 142.51.1.212 on Sun, 31 Aug 2014 02:13:21 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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
Khaldufn was 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 intention 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
This content downloaded from 142.51.1.212 on Sun, 31 Aug 2014 02:13:21 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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, in 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.
This content downloaded from 142.51.1.212 on Sun, 31 Aug 2014 02:13:21 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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'n a 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.
This content downloaded from 142.51.1.212 on Sun, 31 Aug 2014 02:13:21 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions