Beware of Bitter Oranges: Modern lessons from a medieval thinker

*Originally published on June 24, 2021.

About history, Ibn Khaldun wrote that it is "a discipline widely cultivated among nations and races. It is eagerly sought after. The men in the street, the ordinary people, aspire to know it. King and leaders vie for it."

He noted that while on the surface, history may seem like a mere collection of facts or information for entertaining crowds at parties, a close study of it could show how "certain dynasties came to occupy an ever wider space in the world, and how they settled the earth until they heard the call and their time was up."

It's this theory of civilization — how societies form and how they decline — that set his most famous book, Muqaddimah, apart from anything that came before it. 

Ibn Khaldun was a 14th century North African scholar widely regarded as the first in many disciplines — sociology, history, economics — even Ronald Reagan referred to Ibn Khaldun as a precursor to Adam Smith.

Because of Ibn Khaldun's wide-ranging interests and writing, he sometimes becomes all things to all people. But his key contribution to scholarship is turning history from something that was merely a descriptive narration of past events into a formal scholarly undertaking with a clear methodology.

Bruce Lawrence is a retired professor of religious studies from Duke University, and currently an adjunct professor at Ibn Haldun University in Istanbul. He says Ibn Khaldun was the first person to really think about comparative history.

"He was thinking about causal rather than descriptive categories for doing history and looking at society. He was not only first in terms of being the 14th, 15th century, but also first in terms of setting out a methodology that some people would say, and I would argue with them, is still relevant today."

Transregional thinking

Ibn Khaldun, like most upper class men of his time, was highly educated. He studied philosophy — Greek and Islamic — and spent his life working in the court system writing petitions to the government on behalf of constituents, as well as writing procedures on good governance. His job, in that sense, became his field work allowing him to learn about the lives of people, their relationships to one another and to the people who ruled over them. 

In many ways, Ibn Khaldun was like his contemporaries doing similar jobs and writing about methodology and good governance, said Nora Lafi, a Berlin-based researcher of Ottoman history at Leibniz ZMO. But Lafi added, what distinguishes Ibn Khaldun was his effort to make generalizations about these ideas across societies.

"He tried to think in a transregional way and a universal way. So I think that this transregional dimension is very exceptional for his time." She attributes his attention to the transregional element partly to Ibn Khaldun's own life. His family was exiled from their home in Seville during the Christian reconquest along with other Andalusian Muslims and Jews.

Ibn Khaldun had lived experience of what happens when society breaks down and social cohesion is lost, Lafi said. He was also a traveller moving between Cairo, Fez, Wahran, Andalusia, and Damascus. This travel gave him critical insight in what holds different societies together and how group dynamics both shore up state power and displace it.

Collective Integrity

The Muqaddimah is a complicated text that can broadly be broken down into three key areas, according to Stephen Dale, professor emeritus of South Asian and Islamic history at the Ohio State University.

First, it's a summary of knowledge of all kinds, including mathematics and literature. Second, it's a criticism of traditional historiography and the way most chroniclers wrote about things. And, finally, it contains Ibn Khaldun's own ideas about historical sciences to analyze North African politics.

"So he's using his own ideas and analyzing these tribal states in North Africa. And it's from those ideas he develops this kind of dialectical theory in which the tribe conquers a city like Marrakech," said Dale.

"[The Conquerors] settle down in the city, and, over time, all of the things which made them an effective military force, which allows them to conquer these cities, begin to disappear." 

A key part of Ibn Khaldun's analysis relies on not only understanding the nature of a society but on the nature of its constituent group, Dale explained. Ibn Khaldun divides them into urban and rural or tribal people. When it comes to the nomadic Bedouin tribes — a group that, for Ibn Khaldun, represent all non-urban groups — they have fewer indulgences, greater military prowess, better training and stronger in-group social cohesion.

"Ibn Khaldun's civilization had many parts, and one of the parts was being a nomad where you didn't have literacy and you didn't have urban rights or urban benefits, but you still had a certain notion of collective integrity," said Bruce Lawrence.

"He saw a constant interaction between what he was not, which is this rural, nomadic desert like presence of a past and a present group of people different from himself — and then all the urban society stretching from North Africa all the way to Central and South Asia, which he knew about and wrote about in the Muqaddimah." 

Social solidarity

At the heart of this analysis lies something Ibn Khaldun calls asabiyyah. It's been translated variously as social solidarity or social cohesion. It's the name Ibn Khaldun gives to that sense of loyalty and fellow feeling individuals have for one another when they come from the same group.

According to Stephen Dale, "Ibn Khaldun said there are two things which produce asabiyyah. One is kinship. And the second is day to day cooperation in society."

Ibn Khaldun believed it wasn't merely enough to be related to someone to have a sense of asabiyyah, though that is one type of cohesion but, rather that fellow feeling needs to be cemented by working together toward a common goal.  

This idea of in-group solidarity is what makes Ibn Khaldun's analysis universal, and understanding the basis of asabiyyah among different groups is key to understanding the overall dynamic in a given society, according to Lafi.

"[Asabiyyah] doesn't have a colour or a religion. You belong to a group and the group has some principles and reactions vis-a-vis another group. And this asabiyyah guides how the group is made and how it functions."

Lafi asserts asabiyyah is still relevant today and can help us understand the kinds of schisms we see in liberal western societies today. She sees valuable lessons we can take from Ibn Khaldun's work.

"Ibn Khaldun's life and work invite us to critically discuss and deconstruct existing categories of alterity, identity and otherness. And I think we have to do that...  to rethink our life today and the way we want to build a life together."

Guests in this episode:

Stephen Dale is a professor emeritus of South Asian and Islamic history at the Ohio State University.

Nora Lafi is a Berlin-based researcher on Ottoman history at Leibniz ZMO and professor at Freie University.

Bruce Lawrence is a retired professor in religious studies from Duke University, and currently an adjunct professor at Ibn Haldun University in Istanbul.
 

* This episode was produced by Naheed Mustafa.