JANE JAKEMAN BOOK REVIEW

ROBERT IRWIN: IBN KHALDUN

3200 WORDS

 Ibn Khaldun, an Intellectual Biography by Robert Irwin

Princeton University Press, 243 pp, February 2018, ISBN 978 0 691 17466 2

‘Nothing breaks my back except my books,’ said the fourteenth-century Muslim

scholar Ibn Khaldun, and he meant the labour of writing them, not the staggering
load of manuscripts which he has beqeathed to us.
Wali al-Din ‘Abd al-Rahman Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) has the distinction of being
quoted by Engels and Ronald Reagan, of having impressed both Tamburlaine and
Arnold Toynbee, but has received less acknowledgement in his own Arabic-speaking
world, where, by curious twists of fate, he has sometimes been stigmatised as an
Orientalist. Robert Irwin produced a powerful refutation of Edward Said’s
condemnation of Western scholarship in ‘For Lust of Knowing: the Orientalists and
their Enemies’ (2007), so it is not surprising that he now turns his attention to a
medieval Islamic cleric who has also been on the receiving end of accusations of
blinkered romanticism.
Usually referred to as plain Ibn Khaldun, (‘ibn’ means ‘son of’ and in this instance
actually referred to a distant ancestor), this prolific scholar was perhaps an observer
rather than a participant in the various cultures which he inhabited: in fact, he might
be called the original étranger. It was a life packed with drama – imprisoned,
captured by pirates, living among the Amarzegh (or Berbers as they are generally
known in the West) - and fortunately he described many of his experiences in an
autobiography recounting his travels in East and West.
Like most successful scholars and bureaucrats in the Arab world of the time, Ibn
Khaldun was a devout Muslim. He was originally from Tunis, at the time a suburban
backwater ruled by a petty dynasty but ambition was evidently an important part of
Ibn Khaldun’s psychological make-up and he took the main avenue open to a
remarkably clever mind in a culture where religious scholars could also become
leading state administrators. This was a path which took him eventually to high office
in the greatest city of Islam.
In the first fifty years of Ibn Khaldun’s life, travelling through North Africa, living in
the court of Granada, he experienced a range of states and administrations in the
Western Muslim world before he arrived in Cairo, probably one of the most
important centres of culture, learning and trade that has ever existed, where he was to
hold down a powerful position in jurisprudence.
Ibn Khaldun himself gave a famous description of Cairo as he encountered it: ‘he
who has not seen Cairo does not know the grandeur of Islam. It is the metropolis of

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the world, garden of the universe, assemblage of the nations, the ant-hill of the human
species, the portico of Islam, the throne of royalty … .’
In more pragmatic terms, it was a city of probably about four million, having
endured, some thirty-five years before Ibn Khaldun’s arrival, an episode of the Black
Death in 1346-7 which had reduced the population possibly by about a third, but left
it still greater than any European city. Egypt was then ruled by mamluk sultans of
slave origins, ‘mamluk’ deriving from an Arabic verb and meaning ‘the owned.’ By
the mid thirteen hundreds, the rule of these ‘slaves on horseback’ had been an
established pattern for a century, based on the purchase of young men from Turkish
and Caucasian areas who were trained up as soldiers. One of them would eventually
emerge at the top of the heap and claim the throne, and some attempted to found their
own dynasties, but epigones rarely had much success.
This system seems outwardly chaotic, but resulted in a powerful empire embracing
much of present-day Syria and Arabia, and, with an active merchant class, its
expansion included wealthy cities, adding Damascus, Jerusalem and Aleppo to the
great markets of Cairo. By 1383, when Ibn Khaldun settled in the city, the ruling
sultan was the Circassian, Barquq, whose mamluk soldiery controlled the various
bureaucrats and religious leaders, and the mercantile classes. Beneath them was an
urban under-class: they cannot be called a peasantry, since that implies a connection
with the land, but was constituted from the workers, beggars and servants who kept
the city going.
The financial foundation of all this was the ‘iqta system, whereby the agricultural
land of Egypt was divided up into sectors which the mamluk who had made it as
Sultan awarded to his favoured supporters, keeping a good part for himself. The
owner of such a portion, which would be worked by fellahin labourers, thus had little
connection with his estates, did not live there and could not pass them on to his heirs.
There was nothing like the European ‘landed gentry’ system. Anyone tackling the
subject of economics, as did Ibn Khaldun, had to grasp the intricacies of an
enormously complex system.
He was well-placed to understand how the city worked, becoming chief qadi, or
judge, of the Malikite religious order. The ulama, or community of devout scholars,
all followers of Sunni Islam, was divided into four sects, each with differing
interpretations of religious law and each allocated its own area within a madrasa or
college. This gave rise to a four-sided plan which can still be seen in many surviving
religious buildings, such as the mosque and college of Sultan Hasan in Cairo. In
addition to the many mosques, madrasas and local shrines which abounded in the
city, the khanqah, an institution to house, feed and otherwise serve the needs of
communities of sufis, proliferated, usually instigated by the patronage of some
powerful sultan or lord.
Ibn Khaldun was a Malikite.These were adherents of the eighth century sheikh,
Maliki ibn Anas, who was celebrated in North Africa and Andalusia, but in Cairo two

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other orders were usually given preference, the Shafi’ites, who followed the teaching
of a native Cairene holy man and the Hanafites, favoured by the ruling mamluk élite.
Ibn Khaldun was not only a Malikite qadi but also became administrator of the large
khanqah founded by the Sultan Baybars II. The Malikites, though strict, were a fairly
pragmatic order concerning dealings with the outside world and the khanqah post
would of necessity require some practical knowledge of finance.
That, however, was only one aspect of Ibn Khaldun’s interests. He was an
immensely prolific author, best known as a historian and indeed as a writer who
revolutionised historiography, albeit unintentionally, since, like most of his
contemporaries, he revered tradition and did not consider originality to be a virtue.
Arab historiography generally consisted of two principal forms: biographies and
chronologies, which of course overlapped to some extent. Writing biographical
accounts of holy persons and religious scholars, adding to previous accumulations,
was a venerable formula, having its basis in the desire to record details of the lives of
the Prophet and his early followers. The chronological approach was similar to that of
the Western chroniclers, describing rulers reign by reign, listing kings and sultans,
their principal achievements and quirks. But Ibn Khaldun analysed and framed his
history, drawing conclusions and even making predictions. For him, dynasties were
cyclical in nature, arising from a strong primitive incursion by forceful new groups
who then became progressively weaker, only to collapse and make way for a more
vital successor. It was this cyclical theory that has so greatly appealed to many
Western historians, particularly Arnold Toynbee.
How did Ibn Khaldun arrive at his view of incursion, collapse and renewal? Irwin
sets out the development of the medieval scholar’s theory, which followed a sharp
twist in his circumstances. At an early stage of his career, he lived in one of the most
sophisticated courts known to the Muslim world, that of Granada. But he took
himself to the semi-nomadic Berbers of North Africa, where he began his most
famous work, The Muqadimma, a title sometimes translated as ‘Prologomena’,
which was to lay the foundations of his great history. This avowedly preliminary
work, huge in itself, exists in several uncollated Arabic manuscripts and, as Irwin
notes, there is no complete critical Arabic edition. We are fortunate to have a modern
English version by Franz Rosenthal* published in three volumes in 1958 (there have
been subsequent reprints) which makes Ibn Khaldun’s fascinating collection of
observations, facts and legends accessible to English speakers..
Irwin is himself a noted Arabist and gives a succinct account of the background
history of Ibn Khaldun’s world, including a very clear and patient analysis of the
difficult comings and goings of the petty leaders of North African states, and follows
his subject’s move to the intellectual influences he encountered in the kingdom of
Granada. This was ruled somewhat insecurely by the Nasrid ruler Mohammed Vth,
whom Ibn Khaldun had encountered in Morocco during a period of exile from his
throne and whom he followed in his successful return. An older scholar, Ibn al-
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Khatib, a man of immense learning, was Mohammed’s vizier. He was greatly

admired by Ibn Khaldun, though his flowery style was not to the taste of the younger
man. Nevertheless, Ibn Khaldun described him as ‘one of the miracles of God in the
areas of poetry, prose, knowledge and culture’, and he was known as ‘the man with
two lives’ because he worked both night and day. For al-Khatib, however, history
was a source of virtuous examples, and he also liked the big frocks school of dramas
and personalities. As Irwin notes, he did not share Ibn Khaldun’s underlying spirit of
enquiry into processes, though his version of history was an endless cycle of
struggles and falls.
But the experience of Granada cannot have been solely intellectual: this was one of
the most refinedly sensual and pleasure-loving courts in existence, Every visitor to
the Alhambra will have carried away some measure of the delights experienced by
the Nasrid rulers: for me, the apogee is reached by the water-channels running down
the side of a stone staircase, so that, descending, one can trail a leisurely hand in the
cooling stream. The feast arranged there to celebrate the Prophet’s birthday in 1362
featured a clock that delivered poems, perfume sprinklers, music, fireworks, candles
placed in crystal and copper holders. Ibn al-Khatib’s account of it is one of the great
set-pieces of Andalusian history.
Ibn Khaldun, leaving Granada, promptly involved himself in dangerous North
African politics, and eventually buried himself in the Algerian hinterland, living
almost the life of a hermit on a cliff above a troglodyte Amarzegh village, where he
studied the tribal peoples and their language. In his consideration of Ibn Khaldun’s
observations, Irwin describes Ibn Khaldun’s concept of ‘asabiyya, the supreme
virtue of these hard-living spirits, which gave them the strength to seize ultimate
power. Perhaps best translated by Irwin’s phrase, ‘group solidarity’, elsewhere
sometimes rather misleadingly rendered by the French term ‘esprit de corps’ which
evokes a certain inappropriate light-heartedness, ‘asabiyya kept tribesmen bound
together and demanded absolute fidelity, so that ther cycle of attaining supreme rule
could begin. But Ibn Khaldun proposed that the dynasties brought to power by these
means did not last long. After a few generations they became weakened by their
luxurious habits and lax morality, and fell when another wave of unspoiled invaders
overcame them. This accorded not only with the successive kingdoms with which
Ibn Khaldun was personally familiar, but with the very origins of Islamic history,
when the army of the Prophet and his followers conquered the enfeebled Byzantine
empire. Irwin’s recognition of the importance of ‘asabiyya is probably related to his
understanding, demonstrated in an earlier work, The Middle East in the Middle Ages
(1986), of a smaller-scale ‘bonding’system which took place under the mamluks of
Cairo. Thereby a leading emir or sultan could free his slaves in a complex religious
ceremony, somewhat akin to the Western concept of creating a knight. This bound
them not only to their former master but to one another in group devotion known as
khushdashiyya. Ibn Khaldun’s admiring records of the tribal bonding he encountered

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among nomadic peoples give him the status some have assigned to him as the first
ethnographer, but have also attracted the claims that he was mythologising their
actually harsh and precarious lives.
The over-arching question which is often asked of many leading figures such as Ibn
Khaldun is: was he a sufi? His religous posts were not in opposition to this, for
sufism, or dedication to finding a path to a mystical unity, was not incompatible with
the practical activities of daily living. The most basic definition of this form of
Islamic mysticism is that given by J. Spencer Trimingham in The Sufi Orders in
Islam (1971): ‘anyone who believes that it is possible to have direct experience of
God and goes out of his way to put himself in a state whereby he may be enabled to
do this.’ Numerous pathways, both psychological and physical, developed for the
achievement of this goal, but usually the novice followed the instruction of a
particualr sheikh. Being a sufi (the word is derived from their plain woollen
garments) was not like entering the Western monastic life. Men and women were
eligible, and could move in and out of the path as they progressed.
Ibn Khaldun’s own account of sufism in The Muqaddima is that ‘the exertion and
worship of the sufi novice must lead to a “state” that is the result of his exertions.
That state may be a kind of divine worship. Then it will be firmly rooted in the sufi
novice and become a “station” for him. … The sufi novice continues to progress from
station to station until he reaches the (recognition of the) oneness of God and the
gnosis which is the desired goal of happiness.’ (Rosenthal, vol. III, p.78)
Modern scholars have varied in their assessments of Ibn Khaldun as a sufi.
Rosenthal, whose 115 page introduction includes a painstaking detailed biography
focusing principally on the external life, says merely that ‘he strove to strike a sound
balance between the active and the contemplative aspects of his personality.’
Allen James Fromherz, whose Ibn Khaldun, Life and Times (2001), drew especially
on the scholar’s autobiography, believed that sufism penetrated his thinking and
theories. Crucial passages in that autobiography describe awakenings to the inner
truth of history, and Ibn Khaldun found meanings beneath the appearances of events.
These accounts, for Fromherz, parallel the discoveries of inner truths that could be
made by those who followed the path of the religious devotee.
The question of Ibn Khaldun’s inner religious life really falls into two parts. Was he a
sufi in a fairly strict sense, i.e. did he follow the teachings of a master in order to
penetrate inner mysteries step by step? If so, was this responsible for his questioning
and theorizing about the meaning of history? This is an extremely difficult problem to
settle because it relates to the processes of a mind of great learning and complexity.
Ibn Khaldun’s views on history were set forth in his own introductory material and
they also form a justification of the writing of historical material. ‘It is eagerly
sought after … . For on the surface history is no more than information about
political events, dynasties and occurrences of the remote past … .The inner meaning
of history, on the other hand, involves speculation and an attempt to get at the truth,

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subtle explanation of the causes and origins of existing things, and deep knowledge
of the how and why of events.’ (Rosenthal, vol. I, p.6)
But does this search for inner meaning demonstrate that Ibn Khaldun can be
accounted a sufi? There is no carefully studied path set out, no mystical goal, and one
might well argue that searching for the inner meaning of things was a habit of
thought in the culture in which Ibn Khaldun lives – one might say an influencing
philosophical climate in the sense in which Michael Baxandall sees the ideas of John
Locke manifested in the work of Chardin. All this supports the conclusion of Irwin,
who, although he believes that Ibn Khaldun was a sufi, does not accept that any
particular path was responsible for Ibn Khaldun’s intellectual leaps in historical
argument. As for other doctrines, Irwin summarises the various arguments of Ibn
Khaldun’s possible inheritance from Greek philosophy and science, arguments
behind which one can often see, without needing a sufi-style coup de foudre, some
later author’s desire to appropriate the medieval savant for one culture or another.
Here, Irwin strongly defends Ibn Khaldun as a Muslim thinker, profundly formed by
his own religion.
Yet there is a tendency in Ibn Khaldun, and indeed in Irwin, himself to stray off the
straight and narrow, to be tempted by the delights of the glittering peculiarities of
the past, those sports and anecdotes that make both these historians so readable, the
details that, as John Aubrey said, ‘How these curiosities would be quite forgot did not
such idle fellows as I am put them down.’ The notes on sorcery, talismans and
alchemy in the later books of The Muqaddima are particularly enjoyable. Amongst
such tempting ‘curiosities’ is the story, taken by Ibn Khaldun from an earlier writer,
of Alexander the Great’s invention of a glass box in which he could travel under
water. Ibn Khaldun points out a difficulty in this: that Alexander’s air would run out
and he would become overheated. Irwin takes up this story with enthusiasm but
complains that Alexander’s real problem was that he would be suffocated. The
reader can only boggle at two such brilliant minds at work on this preposterous
project. We must surely applaud Irwin for his refusal to pedagogically point out that
Ibn Khaldun’s ‘Ruby Island’ , where the very pebbles are rubies, is obviously the
crater of a volcano.
Again and again, this section of The Muqaddima will repay the eclectic dipper-in. If
you want power over rulers, here are quite unnecessarily detailed instructions on
making the lion seal which will give you absolute control. Or you may need to
beware of ‘rippers’, who need only point at a garment to see it torn to shreds. Note
also that the ‘evil eye’ is a natural gift, not under the control of the projector.
These fascinating excursions are usually not at all necessary for the theoretical
arguments being put forth under the solemn mantle of the Malikite qadi, but they are
the fruit of a mind capable of extraordinary imaginative power. So, with his incisive
intellect, Irwin brings a deep and sensitive understanding of Ibn Khaldun’s mental
journeys. Irwin is especially observant of Ibn Khaldun’s reactions to the ruined

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antiquities which surrounded him in Egypt and North Africa and the gloomy
speculation of the past which their contemplation arouses.
Irwin, the modern scholar, is himself also a novelist, whose first work of fiction, The
Arabian Nightmare, (1983), invented a legend: the terrible dream which can spread
like an infection. His creative sensibility does not detract from the cutting-edge of
Irwin’s intellectual analysis: on the contrary, it gives a deeper understanding of
another aspect of the medieval sage. Don’t we all truly want to believe that
somewhere ‘Ruby Island’ exists?

Note: Rosenthal’s edition calls it ‘The Muqaddimah’: Irwin refers to ‘The

Muqaddima’. Both are accepted transliterations from the Arabic.

ENDS