(Journal Review) of Ibn Khaldun Philosphy of History by Muhsin Mahdi (1966)

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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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3/7

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.



4/7

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-



5/7

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



6/7

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.



7/7

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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