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CIVILIZATION AND STATE

FORMATION IN THE ISLAMIC
CONTEXT: RE-READING IBN
KHALDŪN

Johann P. Arnason and Georg Stauth

ABSTRACT Ibn Khaldūn’s theory of history has been extensively discussed

and interpreted in widely divergent ways by Western scholars. In the context
of present debates, it seems most appropriate to read his work as an original
and comprehensive version of civilizational analysis (the key concept of ‘umran
is crucial to this line of interpretation), and to reconstruct his model in terms
of relations between religious, political and economic dimensions of the human
condition. A specific relationship between state formation and the broader
context of civilizational processes appears as the most central theme. This civ-
ilizational approach is then contrasted with the most influential recent Western
interpretation, put forward by Ernest Gellner. Gellner translates Ibn Khaldūn’s
analysis into functionalist terms and thus tones down its historical and civiliza-
tional specificity. The consequences are most obvious when it comes to dis-
cussing the unity and diversity of the Islamic world, especially with regard to
the Ottoman Empire.
KEYWORDS civilization • Ibn Khaldūn • Islam • nomadism • state formation

In the tenth volume of Arnold Toynbee’s Study of History, devoted to

the ‘inspirations of historians’ and originally meant to conclude the whole
work (the long postscript known as a 12th volume was published seven years
later), two North Africans are credited with insights which prefigure
Toynbee’s own turn to an explicitly religious vision of history. St Augustine
(354–430) and Abdarrahman Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406) were, in this view, in
agreement on the ‘ultimate answer to a series of questions evoked by the
tragic spectacle of the downfall of a civilization’; for them,
Thesis Eleven, Number 76, February 2004: 29–47
SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd
[0725-5136(200402)76;29–47;040260]DOI:10.1177/0725513604040260
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30 Thesis Eleven (Number 76 2004)

Man on Earth is a denizen of two worlds and a citizen of two commonwealths

simultaneously. Man has a franchise in a mundane commonwealth in virtue of
a human esprit de corps, and at the same time a franchise in a supra-mundane
commonwealth thanks to divine revelations. (Toynbee, 1954: 87)

A whole millennium separates these two thinkers, and there can be no

doubt that Ibn Khaldūn’s work was as independent of his saintly precursor
as of any other Christian sources.1 Later in the same volume, when Toynbee
presents ‘acknowledgements and thanks’ to his sources of inspiration, Ibn
Khaldūn reappears as unmistakably the more significant figure: his ‘vision of
a study of History bursting the bounds of This World and breaking through
into an Other World’ is presumably the most direct source of Toynbee’s rede-
finition of his own project, whereas the lesson learnt from St Augustine has
to do with ‘the relationship in which those two worlds stand to one another’
(1954: 236). No other historian or philosopher of history is as closely associ-
ated with the idea of a human drama unfolding in two dimensions.
At the other end of the ideological spectrum, a French Marxist (writing
in the mid-1960s and translated into English almost 20 years later) argues that
‘Ibn Khaldūn’s work marks a decisive change – no less than the emergence
of the science of history’; this new science is based on ‘materialist and dialec-
tical arguments’ and linked to an ‘eminently evolutionary’ conception of the
world (Lacoste, 1984: 160, 159, 156). But the thinker who achieved this
unprecedented breakthrough was not only an exceptionally significant fore-
runner of Marxism. His work can still serve to clarify one of the most con-
fusing debates within the Marxist tradition: the controversy about the Asiatic
mode of production. Ibn Khaldūn appears as a pioneering analyst of ‘tribal
and trading empires’ and their ‘artificial mode of production’ (Lacoste, 1984:
32), and thus as a guide to the prehistory of underdevelopment in the Islamic
world.
Other examples of interpretive appropriation could be added to the list.
In particular, attempts to use Ibn Khaldūn’s work as a key to the dynamics of
Islamic civilization (and its specific openings or obstacles to modernizing
change) are worth noting: they seem more considered than the sweeping
materialist or spiritualist claims, and will be considered at some length below.
But this brief glance at rival readings may suggest that Ibn Khaldūn is indeed,
as a prominent Arab interpreter of his work puts it, a ‘unique phenomenon in
Western culture’ (Al-Azmeh, 1981: v); there is probably no other premodern
non-Western thinker who has been invoked as an intellectual ancestor by so
many otherwise diverse 20th-century Westerners, and there is certainly no
comparable case of an outsider singled out by Western interpreters as the
supreme internal analyst of a civilization whose mainstream representatives had
consistently underestimated him (although it is not true that the was wholly
ignored and had to be rediscovered by European scholars).2 It is not
uncommon for official self-images of non-Western civilizations to be more or
less extensively incorporated into standard Western versions (Confucian
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Arnason & Stauth: Civilization and State Formation in the Islamic Context 31

accounts of China and Brahmin accounts of India are the obvious cases in
point), but here we are dealing with a marginal (although not, as we shall see,
fundamentally heterodox) thinker whose work first rose to prominence as a
result of the intercivilizational collision between Islam and the ascendant West.
The aim of the present article is not to assess the present state of the
debate between different readings of Ibn Khaldūn.3 We will focus on two
more specific and limited issues: the relevance of his thought to the ques-
tions raised by the recent revival of civilizational analysis within historical
sociology, and the implications of this approach for the use of ideas derived
– more or less legitimately – from his work in some seminal sociological
interpretations of Islam.

I. IBN KHALDŪ N’S MODEL OF CIVILIZATIONAL ANALYSIS

Ibn Khaldūn refers to history as a ‘noble science’, but complains that it
has fallen into confusion and needs restatement of basic principles; he
stresses the unique novelty of his approach and claims divine inspiration for
it, but begins with clarification of basic concepts which refer to familiar
realities. His most fundamental concept, ‘umran, defines the general object
of historical inquiry; we follow the two translations we have used (Monteil
and Rosenthal) in rendering it as ‘civilization’. Others have preferred ‘culture’;
Lacoste (1984: 151) interprets ‘umran as ‘the totality of economic, social and
cultural activities’. Al-Azmeh (1981, 1982) is at first inclined to use the untrans-
lated original term, and although he accepts ‘civilization’ in his second book,
he notes its problematic Western connotations and proposes ‘organized habi-
tation of the world’ as a more adequate translation. This formulation is unob-
jectionable (although hardly exhaustive), but we may add that its implications
are by no means alien to Western civilizational theory. Imperatives and trans-
formations of social organization (more precisely: the organization of social
power) are central to Norbert Elias’s work on the civilizing process; inter-
action with and appropriation of the world are key aspects of the civiliza-
tional dynamic which Marx ascribes to capitalism; finally, the idea of specific
ways of inhabiting the world is essential to the conception of civilizations in
the plural.
More specifically, a closer look at Ibn Khaldūn’s analysis of ‘umran will
show that the use of the term ‘civilization’ is justified by thematic affinities
with the main currents of contemporary civilizational analysis. At the most
elementary level, the emphasis on an integrated and unfolding totality of
human life and activity is reminiscent of theorists who have proposed a broad
civilizational perspective as an antidote to the inbuilt reductionisms of
separate social sciences. A distinctive and important version of civilizational
analysis has linked this totalizing view to the idea of diverse but equally com-
prehensive forms of life; Ibn Khaldūn does not take this pluralizing line of
thought very far but, as we shall see, his distinction between two archetypes
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32 Thesis Eleven (Number 76 2004)

of ‘umran – beduin and sedentary – has very significant implications.

Lacoste’s objection to the concept of civilization is related to this point: as he
sees it (1984: 93), the term should be avoided because it suggests a demar-
cation from barbarism or savagery. It is true that such dichotomies are alien
to Ibn Khaldūn’s thought, but they are not taken for granted by modern
civilizational analysts. Rather, the debate on their validity is internal to the
tradition of the field, and some of its major figures – for example Marcel
Mauss – have applied the concept of civilization to primitive societies.
A further – and perhaps the most important – indication of affinity is
the central role which Ibn Khaldūn attributes to the dynamics of state for-
mation. This is a prominent theme of civilizational analysis, especially in the
Eliasian version; but Ibn Khaldūn’s account of the relationship between state
formation and the broader civilizational context is one of the most original
and widely acclaimed parts of his work. Finally, the interpretation of ‘umran
as a discontinuous but unending development of human abilities – set out
in detailed analyses of arts, crafts and sciences in the concluding books of
the Muqaddimah – lends itself to comparison with Durkheim’s conception
of the human being as a product of civilization (which was also his explicit
reason for accepting Comte’s definition of sociology as a ‘science of civiliz-
ation’).
Ibn Khaldūn’s science of civilization begins with a forceful and fre-
quently quoted statement:
‘differences of condition among people are the result of different ways in which
they make their living. Social organization enables them to co-operate toward
that end and to start with the simple necessities of life, before they get to
conveniences and luxuries’. (Ibn Khaldūn, 1958, 1: 249, n.d. 87; it may be noted
that Monteil’s translation refers to ‘peoples’ and speaks only of perfecting needs
after satisfying them)

Similar formulations – on the cooperative fulfillment of human needs,

culminating in the pursuit of wealth, as the infrastructure of civilization – can
be found in various parts of the Muqaddimah; they have been singled out
by those who want to present its author as a pioneer or ancestor of the
‘materialist’ vision of history. The analogy with Marx is all the more tempting
in view of other statements which read like anticipations of the labour theory
of value: ‘human labour is necessary to every profit and accumulation’ (1958,
2: 313, n.d.: 273); Monteil’s translation is even more suggestive of parallels
with Marx. Moreover, Ibn Khaldūn is quick to neutralize the objection that
this does not apply to natural resources, such as precious metals: ‘it is civiliz-
ation that causes them to appear, with the help of human labour’ (1958, 2:
325, n.d.: 278).
There is no denying the importance and originality of these
approaches. But a more balanced reading of the Muqaddimah must rela-
tivize them. The interpretive hypothesis proposed – and only roughly
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Arnason & Stauth: Civilization and State Formation in the Islamic Context 33

outlined – here is that Ibn Khaldūn works with a tripartite model of the kind
that has proved particularly pertinent to civilizational analysis (for more
extensive discussion of this, see Arnason, 2003); more precisely, he analyzes
economic, political and cultural-intellectual aspects of civilization in a way
that highlights their respective inherent trends or logics. This frame of refer-
ence is, for him, a key to the essentials of civilization in general, but in the
context of later debates and experiences it can also be read as an expres-
sion – an unusually reflective one – of the self-articulation built into Islamic
(or, to follow Hodgson, Islamicate) civilization. In that regard, a further point
should be added; the three levels of analysis are, in different but equally
decisive ways, linked to the religious dimension which Ibn Khaldūn accepts
as an ultimate datum.
At the economic level, the analysis begins with elementary forms of
material life (in the sense familiar to readers of Marx and Braudel). Ibn
Khaldūn distinguishes two civilizational patterns; his labels for them are
usually rendered as beduin (badw) and sedentary (hadara). In both cases,
specific ways of gaining livelihood are reflected in corresponding modes of
‘umran. But the classifying criteria are not easily translated into Western
terms. The ‘beduin’ type includes agricultural and pastoral groups that are,
as Ibn Khaldūn puts it, attracted by the desert; on the sedentary side, urban
ways of life are obviously central, but the category also covers rural com-
munities involved in handicrafts and trade, and thus integrated into the
broader orbit of the urban network. To vary a well-known formula, the polar
opposites are not so much ‘the desert and the sown’ as ‘the desert and the
walled’. In short, the two ‘natural groups’ of human societies are – contrary
to what Lacoste (1984: 113) suggests – defined in terms of different ways of
life, but the way in which the material structures are demarcated and inte-
grated reflects a cultural self-understanding and a civilizational context. One
of the major implications is that the peasantry does not appear as a separate
social force or category: it is divided between two worlds.
Ibn Khaldūn assumes that beduin civilization preceded the sedentary
type, and as he explains at some length, the older form of life is also a more
limited and stagnant pattern of human development. But the permanent inter-
action of the two types is at the very centre of his vision of history, and the
balance sheet of their respective strengths and weaknesses is too ambiguous
for the distinction to be understood as an evolutionary sequence. The dis-
tinctive virtues associated with the beduin way of life are closely related to
its inherent constraints and demands. Most importantly, beduin tribes possess
– to an exceptionally high degree – the collective quality that Ibn Khaldūn
calls ‘asabiyya. This is one of his most untranslatable terms, and Western
interpreters have differed widely in their views on its meaning. Rosenthal
translates it as ‘group feeling’, Monteil mostly as ‘esprit de corps’ or ‘esprit
de clan’. It seems misleading to equate it with Durkheim’s mechanical soli-
darity and ascribe to Ibn Khaldūn the claim that this is solidarity tout court
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34 Thesis Eleven (Number 76 2004)

(Gellner, 1981: 87). Lacoste (1984: 101) rightly objects that this interpretation
– proposed in other terms by Toynbee – neglects the specifically tribal back-
ground to the phenomenon. But ‘asabiyya is not simply a matter of tribal
cohesion. As Ibn Khaldūn notes, the beduin-style social bond is often very
attenuated: they ‘live separate from the community’ (1958, 1: 257, n.d.: 90).
The virtue and the force of ‘asabiyya are most evident when the tribal unit
(it can also be sub- or supra-tribal) embarks on an enterprise which goes
beyond its ordinary routine. We might say that there is an intrinsic affinity
with charismatic ruptures. This is most immediately apparent on the political
level: as Ibn Khaldūn puts it, the goal of ‘asabiyya is royal power (1958, 1:
284–86, n.d.: 100–101). But he also stresses that ‘asabiyya is needed to inspire
the struggle that accompanies a broader spectrum of human activities, includ-
ing prophecy and missionary propaganda. In that sense, Al-Azmeh (1982: 31)
is undoubtedly right in insisting on the polymorphous character of the
concept; it is less clear that – as he also argues – all references to ‘asabiyya
are strictly subordinated to the analysis of the state. In any case, it can be
argued that we are dealing with a capacity for collective will-formation and
commitment to sustained action, rather than simply a high degree of social
cohesion.
Ibn Khaldūn describes the Arabs as the most extreme case of beduin
civilization. Although it is not always obvious whether he uses the term ‘Arab’
in a specific ethnic sense or as a more flexible label for a way of life, it seems
clear that here he means the Arabs living in or coming from the Arabian
peninsula. They are, as he goes on to explain, least adapted to the principles
of monarchic order and state-building, and likely to wreak havoc when they
conquer more civilized countries. But there is another side to the Arab con-
dition: ‘no people are as quick . . . to accept [religious] truth and right
guidance’ (1958, 1: 306, n.d.: 108). Their savagery helps to preserve a natural
religion which makes them receptive to revelation, and the religious trans-
formation thus set in motion can lead to political effects of the kind exempli-
fied by early Islamic expansion and empire-building. Although Ibn Khaldūn
does not elaborate the idea of natural religion (the term fitra seems to be
used elsewhere in the more abstract sense of a natural predisposition), the
point is crucial. To borrow an expression from Lévi-Strauss, we might restate
it as a ‘paradox of civilization’: the societies least affected by the civilizing
process and most distant from its main centres are for that very reason most
capable of religious breakthroughs that can give a new meaning to the whole
process. But historical analysis can only make a case for plausible possi-
bilities. The religious dimension as such is beyond its competence.

THE STATE BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

The political sphere takes pride of place in Ibn Khaldūn’s work, and
his ideas on this subject have seemed most persuasive to the Western inter-
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Arnason & Stauth: Civilization and State Formation in the Islamic Context 35

preters who read him as an analyst of Islamic civilization from within. Our
analysis must begin with his introductory account of the state. This does not
mean that the whole field of ‘umran can be subsumed under the state;
rather, the focus is on interconnections as well as tensions between the
dynamic of state formation and the broader context of civilization. The
necessity of the state is first explained in a way which underlines the need
to control side-effects of the civilizing process, rather than any direct func-
tional links:

When mankind has achieved social organization, as we have stated, and when
civilization in the world has thus become a fact, people need someone to
exercise a restraining influence and keep them apart, for aggressiveness and
influence are in the animal nature of man. (1958, 1: 91, n.d.: 31; the term wazi,
rendered here as ‘someone to restrain’, is translated by Monteil as ‘brake’, but
elsewhere in the text as ‘moderator’; Al-Azmeh suggests ‘custodial authority’)

The state is thus presented as an essential counterweight to the destruc-

tive potential of human nature, but the problem is internal to the social world,
in the sense that he civilizing process seems to perpetuate – or even reinforce
– the destructive trends. In other words, the state serves to protect civiliz-
ation against itself, not simply against the threat of regression to precivilized
conditions. For Ibn Khaldūn, it is by definition monarchic (mulk is translated
alternately as ‘power’ and ‘royal power’), and it can only be sustained in a
dynastic form. Patterns of dynastic continuity and change must therefore be
central to historical narratives.
A more positive relationship between state and civilization will emerge
if we consider the most developed products of the latter. When Ibn Khaldūn
refers to royal power as the ‘form of the world and civilization’ (1958, 2: 291,
n.d.: 265), his terminology is clearly influenced by the Aristotelian distinction
between form and matter, but the concrete meaning is easy to grasp: monar-
chic rule, exercised in and through a network of cities, is an indispensable
framework for cultural development, and more specifically for the blossom-
ing of arts, crafts and sciences. Royal power (operating through court society)
and urban life constitute the preconditions for an autonomous growth of
culture. Two aspects of this process may be distinguished: On the one hand,
it involves what Ibn Khaldūn calls the ‘diversification of the superfluous’, i.e.
the various civilizing uses and refinements of the accumulated surplus. On
the other hand, the pursuit of knowledge and enlightenment brings a funda-
mental human ability to fruition. The ability to think ‘distinguishes human
beings from animals and . . . enables them to obtain their livelihood, to co-
operate to this end with their fellow men, and to study the Master whom
they worship, and the revelations that the Messengers have transmitted from
Him’ (1958, 2: 411, n.d.: 307). Although revealed religion may – as we have
seen – be most accessible on the fringes of civilization, the elaboration of the
message presupposes a complex cultural apparatus, including a whole
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36 Thesis Eleven (Number 76 2004)

system of interrelated sciences (some of which can, however, lose contact

with the religious dimension or deviate into misrepresentations of it).
Ibn Khaldūn’s extensive treatment of these themes (the section on edu-
cation and the sciences is the longest in the Muqaddimah) leaves no doubt
about their importance for the science of civilization. He does not introduce
a specific term for culture as a part of the civilizational complex, but he some-
times uses the terms for sedentary culture and court culture (hadara and
adab) in such a way that they seem to refer to the cultural dimension (as
defined above); in view of that, Monteil’s translation of a chapter heading as
‘culture is the goal of civilization’ (Ibn Khaldūn, 2000: 588) seems appropri-
ate. But sedentary civilization is also described as the goal of the beduin one.
For the reasons suggested above, an evolutionary interpretation of this state-
ment seems arbitrary and anachronistic; the point is, rather, that the complex,
wealthy and refined civilization of the urban centres and their surroundings
inevitably becomes a pole of attraction for its beduin counterpart. Strategies
of response are bound to focus on the power structure most central to the
coveted other. In that sense, monarchy becomes the goal of ‘asabiyya. A set
of prima facie teleological statements thus translates easily into arguments
about structural factors and their impact on social actors.
Ibn Khaldūn’s formula for the upshot of this civilizational push and pull
between the desert and the walled is his most famous idea: the dynastic cycle
as a self-destroying but ever-rebuilt bridge between two worlds. States are
founded by dynasties of tribal origin or with a tribal basis; their distinctive
sources of strength, especially the ‘asabiyya’ of their followers, enable them
to conquer urban centres and maintain control over urban societies. This
superior authority is most effective when backed up by a project of religious
reform, thus reproducing on a more modest scale the original Islamic union
of tribalism and revelation. But in due course, the triumphant dynasty – often
capable of imperial expansion during its ascendant phase – is undermined
by inbuilt and irresistible trends of urban life. There are several sides to this
dynamic of decline, all of them related to the broader environment of urban
civilization and bound to affect the inner core of monarchic power.
City life as such tends to undermine ‘asabiyya: through the fragment-
ing effects of a growing division of labour, the polarization of wealth and
poverty, and the temptation to individual pursuit of pleasure and luxury. This
general dynamic of decadence has specific repercussions on the dynastic
state. Ibn Khaldūn identifies ‘two foundations’ as essential to royal authority
(1958, 2: 118, n.d.: 210; Monteil translates the latter expression, perhaps more
pertinently, as ‘edifice monarchique’): armed force, which embodies
‘asabiyya, and money, procured through taxation. The affinity with much
later Western theories of state formation is obvious. As for the military elite
animated by ‘asabiyya and organized around the ruler, exposure to the urban
environment – with the potential for corruption magnified by the privileges
of power – leads to internecine rivalry. Taxation becomes more oppressive
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Arnason & Stauth: Civilization and State Formation in the Islamic Context 37

as the new dynasty lapses into luxury and squandering. This self-destructive
turn leads to growing interference with the activities and possessions of the
rulers’ subjects, including those most decisively involved in economic life
(both Monteil and Rosenthal translate the term mutamawwil as ‘capitalists’).
It is not being suggested that the effects of dynastic rule on economic
development are uniformly negative. Gellner’s tongue-in-cheek argument
about Ibn Khaldūn’s ‘Keynesianism’ (Gellner, 1981: 34–5) makes some sense:
the dynasty in its capacity as the ‘greatest market’ functions as a kind of mul-
tiplier. But this is only one part of a complex picture. Ibn Khaldūn saw the
ambiguity of the relationship between state power and economic life more
clearly than most observers of the societies in question. In the long run,
however, the dysfunctional dynamic is too comprehensively reinforced by
other trends for the path to decline and fall to be avoidable. Last but not least
interestingly, Ibn Khaldūn argues that rule through law and penal sanctions
– characteristic of urban life, whereas beduin civilization could rely on habits
and customs – is detrimental to the morale of the subjects. Those who submit
to law and put their trust in it tend to lose their natural courage and vigour
(Ibn Khaldūn, 1958, 2: 258–61, n.d.: 90–91).
Ibn Khaldūn’s modern interpreters have – despite disagreement on
other issues – mostly read his theory of history as a generalizing projection
of patterns observed in his own society (Gellner is particularly emphatic on
this point). Although the overall thrust of his reflections is undeniably in that
vein, some minor qualifications may be suggested. He makes unambiguous
claims to grasp the most basic and general determinants of human civiliz-
ation as such, but the historical and geographical frame of reference is the
Islamic world. Within that domain, his paradigmatic case of dynastic rise and
decline – with the civilizational connotations outlined above – was undoubt-
edly the relatively recent imperial venture of the Almoravids and the
Almohads, who had – from the mid-11th to the mid-13th century – domi-
nated the regional scene and at their most powerful ruled both the Maghreb
and Muslim Spain. The same model is applied to the beginnings of Islamic
expansion (with variations to be discussed below), and a brief allusion to the
Mongol onslaught on the Middle East shows that Ibn Khaldūn wanted to fit
this massive disruption from outside into the same pattern. On the other
hand, he clearly saw the 14th-century Maghreb as a culture in decline (he
vastly exaggerated the impact of an 11th-century invasion by Arab tribes, and
Western historians were at first inclined to follow him in this), and contrasted
it with the more prosperous and civilized Middle East (but since Egypt was
for him a part of the more advanced East, this cannot – as Toynbee would
have it – be taken to reflect a growing divergence of Arabic and Iranian
civilizations). Such views might seem to raise doubts about the universality
and invariance of cyclical models. In more general terms, there are some
signs of tension between the generalizing intention and the perception of a
particular historical lifeworld.
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38 Thesis Eleven (Number 76 2004)

POLITICS AND RELIGION

As we have seen, the human world mapped out by Ibn Khaldūn’s new
science has a religious dimension, and some later interpreters have treated
this as the most central theme of the Muqaddimah. For present purposes,
however, the main question to be considered has to do with the relationship
between religious and political constituents of civilization. Although the mis-
guided notion of Islam as an undifferentiated unity of religion and politics is
still influential among the broader public, scholarly debates have left it
behind; but there is less agreement on the specific pattern or patterns of
differentiation that emerged in the course of Islamic history. In that context,
it may be useful to consider the view taken by the most perceptive internal
analyst of Islamic civilization.
To begin with, we should note the obvious but far from trivial fact –
too often neglected by Western interpreters – that Ibn Khaldūn was an
orthodox Sunni Muslim. The following defence of the Quran is only one of
numerous emphatic statements that might be quoted to illustrate this point:
‘Proofs for the Quran are the decisively miraculous [inimitable] character of
its text, and the general continuity of its transmission. This leaves no room
for any doubt’ (Ibn Khaldūn, 1958, 3: 25, n.d.: 324). The primacy of revel-
ation and the finality of its Islamic version are unambiguously affirmed in the
introductory reflections on human civilization, where Ibn Khaldūn distin-
guishes three types of human souls: those of ordinary mortals, including
scholars; those of ‘saints . . . men of mystical learning and divine knowledge’;
and the prophets, in whom God has implanted the ‘natural ability to slough
off humanity in that moment which is the state of revelation’ (1958, 1: 198–9,
n.d.: 71). Sufism is accepted as a legitimate branch of religious science (a
systematic effort to revive the piety that came naturally to early Muslims), but
its Shi’ite offshoots are rejected; Ibn Khaldūn disputes the first premise of
Shi’ism, i.e. Ali’s privileged status among the companions of the Prophet.
Finally, his orthodox convictions are evident in the critique of philosophy.
As he sees it, the philosophers succumb to the illusion that intellectual
reasoning can encompass the whole of reality. This pursuit of absolute know-
ledge is harmful to religion, but it seems to be a natural product of urban
life. The philosophical temptation is, in other words, integral to the dynamic
of decadence that is built into advanced civilization.
This firm commitment to orthodoxy does not prevent Ibn Khaldūn from
distinguishing between religious and political principles of social organiz-
ation. The institution of monarchy is natural to mankind, and since it serves
to contain the most animal part of human nature, it must be based on force;
but a regime of brute force is unstable, and proper order requires generally
accepted norms. If they are adequately formulated and implemented, ‘the
result will be a political [institution] on an intellectual [rational] basis’; this
political level of authority (as distinct from the purely natural one) is marked
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Arnason & Stauth: Civilization and State Formation in the Islamic Context 39

by the ability ‘to cause the masses to act as required by intellectual [rational]
insight into the means of furthering their worldly interests and avoiding
anything that is harmful [in that respect]’ (1958, 1: 387, n.d.: 136). The third
and highest level is royal authority on a religious basis, i.e. a caliphate or an
imamate (Ibn Khaldūn uses the two terms interchangeably), guided by
revealed law and concerned with welfare in the other world. A clear case is
thus made for theorizing political authority as a component of civilization in
general, separate from the more specific demands of revealed religion. This
level of analysis is not as devoid of normative implications as Gellner (1981:
30–31) suggests; Ibn Khaldūn condemns unjust government as a threat to
civilization and to the very survival of the human species (1958, 2: 107, n.d.:
206). In that connection, he introduces the idea of a ‘cycle of justice’ (more
complex than Gellner would have it) and notes its Persian origins. The ‘cycle’
is, to be brief, a model devised to highlight the interdependence of enlight-
ened rule, military strength and economic prosperity. The explicit borrowing
of basic guidelines from a non-Islamic tradition underlines the universality of
political reason and its problems. But Ibn Khaldūn does not defend the
position which Saïd Arjomand (2003) describes as ‘Islamic royalism’, i.e. the
attribution of divine legitimacy to the institution of kingship as such.
Ibn Khaldūn’s distinction between levels of royal authority takes a
historical turn which seems somewhat out of tune with the otherwise cyclical
model. The history of Islamic states appears as a long-drawn-out retreat from
full exercise of religious authority. The early caliphate, corresponding to the
third level defined above, was replaced by a monarchy which preserved
some defining traits of its predecessor, ‘namely, preference for Islam and its
ways, and adherence to the way of truth’, but tended to replace the direct
authority of religion with ‘group feeling and the sword’ (1958, 1: 427, n.d.:
148); later on (from the ninth century onwards), this transitory pattern
declined into monarchy pure and simple, political at best and always in
danger of regressing to the purely natural level. Ibn Khaldūn leaves no doubt
that the Islamic rationale for the caliphate remains intact, but there is nothing
in his analysis of observable trends that would suggest an imminent restora-
tion. The role of religious propaganda (and aspirations to religious reform)
in the rise of new dynasties, especially those that graft their message onto
the ‘asabiyya of conquering tribesmen, does not translate into a formula for
reversing the descent from caliphate to monarchy. A long chapter on tra-
ditions about the mahdi (the saviour expected to appear at the end of time)
is largely devoted to a critique of false beliefs and failed projects. Should we
take this inconclusive line of argument as a pointer to long-term patterns of
decline, more fundamental than the tribal-dynastic cycle? It is perhaps more
plausible to assume a basic uncertainty concerning the religious dimension
of history. Each chapter of the Muqaddimah ends with a Quranic invocation,
but the verse quoted after surveying the destinies of the caliphate seems
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40 Thesis Eleven (Number 76 2004)

particularly fraught with meaning: ‘God determines night and day’ (1958, 1:
428, n.d.: 149).

II. DOMESTICATING IBN KHALDŪN: THE SEARCH FOR KEYS

TO ISLAMIC MODERNITY
At various points of the above argument, we have alluded to Ernest
Gellner’s interpretation of Ibn Khaldūn. Its presuppositions and implications
should now be examined more closely. Gellner’s emphasis on socio-political
structures and their inbuilt dynamics is at first sight conducive to less dogmatic
approaches than the readings which insist on aligning the Muqaddimah with
materialist or spiritualist visions of history. Moreover, it is closely linked to dis-
tinctive perspectives on Islamic modernity. Gellner did not apply his version
of Ibn Khaldūn as directly to contemporary issues as some more recent writers
– obviously inspired by his work – have tried to do (Ruthven, 2002). But
although he noted the massive and irreversible changes caused by the
onslaught of modernity, he tried to show that they were best understood as
disruptions of a self-equilibrating constellation first theorized by Ibn Khaldūn,
rather than as new beginnings. Most importantly, new technologies of state
control have – on this view – upset the power balance; the tribal factor has,
however, survived in the watered-down form of patronage, and religion is still
capable of active intervention in political conflicts. ‘Secularization is con-
spicuous by its absence. Politics is frequently fundamentalist. Strong religion,
strong state, weak civil society, and the fragile ‘asabiyya of quasi-kin, quasi-
territorial patronage – that seems to be the heritage’ (Gellner, 1990: 126).
For Gellner, the enduring relevance of Ibn Khaldūn’s interpretive frame-
work was inseparable from even more fundamental affinities between the
Islamic tradition and the spirit (rather than the structures) of modernity. His
views on this subject, formulated most succinctly in texts published during
the 1980s, seem to have taken shape during the preceding two decades, and
the encounter with Ibn Khaldūn was clearly of major importance to that
process. The starting-point was an obvious empirical fact: Islam was proving
more resistant to secularization than the religions of other major world civiliz-
ations. For Gellner, this was due to inbuilt adaptive potentials and patterns
of reform, rather than to traditionalist inertia. The egalitarian and scriptural-
ist stance of the Islamic Great Tradition made it responsive to modern con-
ditions, and at the same time capable of translating modernizing imperatives
into its own language. Changes induced by external forces – or inspired by
external challenges – can be presented as ways of continuing a permanent
struggle to impose the higher standards of orthodox Islam on local com-
munities and backward cultures. Gellner refers to Islam as a ‘permanent refor-
mation’ and as the most ‘protestant’ of world religions. But its capacity to
shape collective identity was at least equal to that of any other religion. The
combination of strong identity and egalitarian scripturalism favours the fusion
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Arnason & Stauth: Civilization and State Formation in the Islamic Context 41

of Islam and nationalism; this convergence can, however, take a direction

which allows Islamic societies to avoid the ‘painful dilemma between
Modernism and Populism’ (Gellner, 1981: 67).
The Islamic heritage enables modernizers to reconcile the pursuit of
wealth and power with maintenance of core traditions. Gellner did not back
these claims up by any detailed analysis of modernizing strategies and trans-
formations in the Islamic world. His uncertainty as to ‘whether modern con-
ditions really favour laxity and liberalism or rigorism and centralization’ (1981:
65) seems to have made him less interested in models that might prove tem-
porary. In the early 1980s (his most trenchant statements on the subject date
from that period), he was inclined to stress the adaptability of Islam to revol-
utionary projects with a more or less significant Marxist admixture. On one
occasion he speculated about future ‘Che Khomeyni movements’ (1981: 67).
He did not link this prospect to further possible adjustments or deformations
of Ibn Khaldūn’s model (these movements might have been seen as another
substitute version of ‘asabiyya). A passing reference to the tribal-dynastic
cycle as a ‘permanent revolution’ was obviously more marginal to the
argument than the ‘permanent reformation’ of the Great Tradition.

Redefining the tribal cycle

The ideas summarized earlier gave an overall direction to Gellner’s
reading of Ibn Khaldūn. We should now look more closely at his specific
interpretations and uses of the theoretical model that he proposed to extract
from the Muqaddimah. The first point to note is that he tended to rephrase
Ibn Khaldūn’s insights in a language much closer to modern functionalism.
This line of reasoning leads to the reconstruction of a comprehensive form
of social life (Gellner [1981: 80] once used the term ‘Ibn Khaldūn civilization’).
The model is explicitly equated with the world of Islamic civilization as such;
but as will be seen, second thoughts on atypical cases have some far-reaching
implications.
Gellner’s restatement begins with a strong emphasis on the economic
interdependence of townsmen and tribesmen. His account of the two
societies comes closer than Ibn Khaldūn’s to treating them as parties to a
common division of labour, supposedly characteristic of the whole arid zone
where Islam spread most rapidly and successfully. But this does not mean
that they should be treated as parts of an integrated social system. On the
contrary: the social organization of the tribes serves to protect and codify
their independence from the power centres of urban society. As Gellner
(1969: 41) sees it, a segmentary structure reflects the imperative of ‘divide
that ye need not be ruled’. Power is diffused throughout sets of sub-groups,
always mutually exclusive at their respective levels. The segmentary form of
social organization is a complex and much-debated topic; the broader context
of the discussion is beyond the scope of this article, but Gellner’s attempt to
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42 Thesis Eleven (Number 76 2004)

graft an idea developed by 20th-century anthropologists onto Ibn Khaldūn’s

model raises questions which must at least be briefly considered.
The model of a segmentary order was first applied to acephalous
African societies; the transfer to an Islamic (more particularly North African)
environment poses two obvious problems. On the one hand, Gellner’s own
distinction between primitive and marginal tribalism highlights a major differ-
ence between the two contexts. In the primitive case, we are dealing with
self-contained cultural and political units, whereas the marginals belong to a
larger cultural or civilizational world but resist subordination to its political
centres. As Gellner puts it, marginal tribalism ‘knows what it rejects’ (1969:
2). But if the segmentary model in general is nevertheless to be linked to the
abovementioned imperative, some kind of tacit knowledge must be imputed
to the primitives: their adoption of segmentary principles cannot (on the
assumption of self-contained units) be construed as a solution to problems
inherent in their social-ecological situation, but it might be understood as an
implicit, anonymous and collective choice, resulting in the creation of insti-
tutional patterns.
Further reflection along these lines would bring us closer to the idea of
‘society against the state’, pioneered by Pierre Clastres, and – in more general
terms – to the notion of societal self-constitution, thus opening up a prob-
lematic very different from the functionalist frame of reference that predom-
inates in Gellner’s analysis (although he was never a thoroughgoing
functionalist, and the counterweights became more visible in the later phase
of his work). He made no move in that direction. Instead, he tried to defuse
the problem by suggesting a general predisposition of pastoralists towards a
segmentary form of organization. But since he knew that the model was
neither limited to pastoralists nor universal among them, he did not take this
idea very far. In the end, the question remained unsettled.
On the other hand, it seems prima facie implausible that an Islamic
setting could leave the essentials of a trans-cultural segmentary model
untouched – the formative power of Islamic religious culture is too pervasive
for that degree of institutional immunity to be conceivable. In a later
summary, Gellner (1990: 109–14) lists the characteristics of what he calls ‘the
typical Middle-Eastern tribal quasi-state’, and includes the ‘external ideo-
logical input’ of Islam; he acknowledges that this factor ‘seems to have a life
and authority of its own’, but does not pursue the question of its overall
impact on the model. As we shall see, however, the Islamic connection (and
its irreducibility to functional logic) returns to haunt him.
The segmentary model as such is not to be found in the Muqaddimah,
but Gellner uses it to strengthen specific and restrictive interpretations of Ibn
Khaldūn’s ideas. In particular, it serves to justify a narrow understanding of
‘asabiyya. It is widely accepted that the segmentary form of organization cor-
responds to Durkheim’s mechanical solidarity; Gellner takes up this line of
argument and translates ‘asabiyya into Durkheimian language, adding that
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Arnason & Stauth: Civilization and State Formation in the Islamic Context 43

for Ibn Khaldūn it was the only conceivable kind of solidarity. ‘Asabiyya is,
in short, social cohesion as such, necessarily based on kinship but rational-
ized through the segmentary order. As suggested in the first section of the
article, Ibn Khaldūn’s understanding of ‘asabiyya is too complex and multi-
faceted to be circumscribed in this way. To note only the most obvious objec-
tion, the political creativity attributed to ‘asabiyya invites association with
charisma and thus with classical sociological sources significantly different
from the Durkheimian one. The notion of collective charisma seems com-
patible with some aspects of the unevenly developed Weberian problematic.
Gellner ignores these connotations; his version reserves the charismatic
dimension for another part of the model, and confines it to a strictly delim-
ited role. The rural saints, extensively described in Gellner’s main case study
of Islam in social practice, represent a permanently routinized (and by the
same token functionalized) charismatic complement to the segmentary order.
Saintly lineages are entrusted with supervisory and regulatory tasks best left
‘outside the web of alliance and feud’ (Gellner, 1981: 41).
An elementary but far from insignificant point should be noted in
passing: the saints are unthinkable without proper Islamic credentials, includ-
ing a genealogy that links them to the Prophet. Once again, Gellner has to
acknowledge broader civilizational connections. He nevertheless tries to
explain the key features of urban religion in the same functional terms as the
rural variety: ‘the town constitutes a society which needs and produces the
doctor’ (Gellner, 1969: 8), i.e. a learned elite representing a unitary and puritan
version of Islam. But there are other sides to urban life. The impoverished
and alienated strata of the population need a more escapist and emotional
kind of religion, and this gives rise to practices which tend to resemble the
rural style; however, in the urban setting, ‘a religion externalized in ritual and
personality’ (Gellner, 1981: 48) has a compensatory rather than a directly
organizational function. Gellner’s mostly vague references to Sufism suggest
that it should be included in a broad definition of impure Islam.
Finally, the recurrent union of religious reform and tribal conquest –
central to Ibn Khaldūn’s model – appears as an irruption of history into the
functional pattern, in the sense that no inherent need of the dual urban-
pastoral society necessitates it, but it can be explained in terms of latent and
intermittently activated conflicts. In the urban centres, the relationship
between learned guardians of sacred law and rulers who are constantly
tempted to deviate from it can take an antagonistic turn; on the tribal side,
a permanent ‘lust after the city’ (1969: 5) becomes an incentive to mobiliz-
ation under favourable circumstances. When both conditions are satisfied,
the dynastic cycle is repeated without any basic changes to the social-
ecological framework.4
Gellner obviously takes it for granted that Ibn Khaldūn’s sociological
insights are wholly separable from his orthodox Islamic views. The ideas
borrowed from the Muqaddimah and – as we have seen – adapted to a
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44 Thesis Eleven (Number 76 2004)

particular modern school of social thought are also used to update and
amplify a thoroughly a-religious approach to the history of religions, first
proposed by David Hume. The original version of the argument posits a
pattern of ‘flux and reflux’ between monotheism and polytheism, or – as
Gellner puts it in more flexible terms – religious monism and pluralism;
Gellner rejected Hume’s psychologistic explanations and placed a stronger
emphasis on changing relations between religion and politics. As he saw it,
comparative analysis of Islam and Christendom was essential to better under-
standing of that problematic. It is anything but self-evident that the whole
spectrum of Islamic heterodoxies can be aligned with religious pluralism. But
that whole field of inquiry is beyond the scope of this article.
It seems more important to note some consequences of Gellner’s
decision to bracket the Islamic presuppositions of Ibn Khaldūn’s work. First,
the specific receptivity of the Arabs (as representatives of the most extreme
version of the beduin form of life) to revealed religion is left out of the
picture. As suggested above, it is in fact crucial to Ibn Khaldūn’s vision of
civilization and its history. Second, the religious input into the dynastic
cycle – the reformist zeal that reinforces ‘asabiyya – can no longer be
understood as a more modest re-enactment of the Islamic ‘miracle’, as Ibn
Khaldūn once described it (1958, 2: 134). That view was, however, essen-
tial to the self-understanding of the actors in question, as well as to Ibn
Khaldūn’s more detached analysis. Finally, there is no scope for funda-
mental shifts in the relationship between religious and political authority –
changes of the kind that Ibn Khaldūn saw as a shift from caliphate to
monarchy. Although his version of Islamic history need not be taken at face
value, it could have been taken as a starting-point for a more sensitive
interpretation of the distinctive but not unchanging cultural framework of
Islamic politics.
As we have seen, Gellner’s aim was twofold: to restate Ibn Khaldūn’s
insights in more rigorous terms, focusing on the determinants and dynamics
of basic structures, and to present the refurbished model as a master key to
the history of Islamic societies, including crucial aspects of their unfinished
and tortuous transitions to modernity. Tensions between these two lines of
argument could not go unnoticed. On the one hand, Gellner had to admit
that structural-functional analysis could not account for the ‘sociological
mystery’ of Islam: the extraordinary authority and uniformity of a religious
culture ‘without a central secretariat, general organization, formal hierarchy,
or any machinery for convening periodic councils’ (Gellner, 1981: 56), but
capable of perpetuating strikingly similar patterns on scriptural as well as
popular levels of religious life. Gellner did not go beyond a brief acknow-
ledgment of this problem. His comments suggest an inclination to see
civilizational facts as limits to sociological explanation, rather than as
openings to a new field of inquiry.
On the other hand, a historical phenomenology of Islamic societies and
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Arnason & Stauth: Civilization and State Formation in the Islamic Context 45

their political regimes is bound to raise doubts about the general validity of
Gellner’s model. The Ottoman Empire poses the most massive problem, and
he discussed it at some length; a brief mention of the Mamluks in Egypt as
early practitioners of the same principles was never taken further (as for the
Indo-Islamic world, we can assume that its composite character and its
different geographical context were seen as reasons enough to set it aside).
Gellner’s primary reference to Morocco – the only Arab country which never
came under any kind of Ottoman control – enables him to treat the Ottoman
Empire as a counter-example, but from any other point of view, it must be
a very central part of the picture. Its expansion, domination and decompo-
sition – with more or less significant episodes of Western involvement during
the terminal phase – shaped the course of modern history in almost the whole
Arab world. Gellner’s attempts to make sense of the Ottoman case are there-
fore worth closer consideration.
The problem, to cut a long story very short, is that the Ottomans
achieved ‘political cohesion at the top . . . by the artificial creation of a new
elite, technically slaves’ (Gellner, 1981: 73), and this ensured stability far
beyond the normal life-span of an Ibn Khaldūn-style dynastic regime. If we
put together the synoptic essay on Muslim society and a brief restatement
published nine years later, Gellner seems to suggest no less than four
different answers to the Ottoman question, and this uncertainty may be seen
as an indicator of serious problems with the underlying assumptions. The
most dismissive response is to treat the Ottoman model (and Mamluk-type
regimes, more generally speaking) as an exceptionally developed version of
one of the techniques used by conquering dynasties striving to strengthen
their grip on urban societies. The case in point is far too central and signifi-
cant for this view to carry conviction. The other extreme is the hypothesis
that within ‘Muslim civilization, there exist at least two possible solutions to
the problem of political organization’ (Gellner, 1981: 77), the one analyzed
by Ibn Khaldūn and the Mamluk model perfected by the Ottomans. Gellner
toys with this idea, but further steps would obviously have forced him to
rethink the whole question of unity and diversity in the Islamic world. A later
variation suggests that the two models might be ideal types, mixed in diverse
ways by different regimes, rather than separate historical patterns (Gellner,
1990: 115). But the most favoured option is obviously an adjusted model
which explains the Ottoman power structure as a secondary formation,
superimposed on a more general and fundamental pattern: ‘Inside every
Mamluk state, there appear to be many Ibn Khaldūnian social formations
hidden away and signaling wildly to be let out – and very frequently suc-
ceeding’ (Gellner, 1981: 85).
Gellner’s reflections on the Ottoman Empire raise a whole range of
questions which cannot be tackled here. But to conclude this discussion, we
would suggest that two contributions to the collection which also contains
Gellner’s brief reformulation of his model could be taken as starting-points
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46 Thesis Eleven (Number 76 2004)

for a more critical reading of both Ibn Khaldūn and his modern interpreters.
Ira Lapidus argues that Ibn Khaldūn and his followers have – notwithstand-
ing the polysemy of ‘asabiyya – made too much of kinship as a basis of
group solidarity; as he sees it, the units conventionally known as tribes are
in fact ‘political and religious chieftaincies whose composition varies greatly’
(Lapidus, 1990: 27). We are, in other words, dealing with patterns of marginal
state formation which may use and adapt the language of kinship but give
rise to new power structures. Lapidus adds that ‘the Islamization of the greater
Middle East also led to a reformulation of tribe-state relations in Islamic
terms’, and that conquest movements which ‘represented a fusion of clan,
religious, and political identities rather than lineage ‘asabiyya’ (1990: 28, 32)
developed on this basis. By contrast, the ‘asabiyya of conquest movements
coming from Inner Asia was ‘based neither on kinship nor on religion but
on predator solidarity’, and on ‘loyalty to successful warrior chieftains’ (1990:
34, 33). Thomas Barfield accentuates the contrast between Middle Eastern
and Inner Asian types of tribal culture and corresponding paths to state for-
mation. The Arabian-Berber pattern of egalitarian lineage structures made it
difficult to build broad and lasting confederations, whereas the Turco-
Mongolian model of hierarchical kinship organization led more naturally to
the creation of dynastic regimes and imperial states (Barfield, 1990: 157–60).
Taken together, these approaches add up to a strong case for diversifying the
received model of tribe-state relationships, and they highlight the divergent
patterns which prevailed in different frontier areas of the Islamic world.5 That
said, the state-building process that coincided with the first crystallization of
Islam as a civilizational pattern is still a very puzzling case. But we cannot
deal with it here.

Johann P. Arnason is emeritus professor of sociology at La Trobe University

and was until recently a co-ordinating editor of Thesis Eleven. His most recent publi-
cation is Civilizations in Dispute, Leiden, Brill, 2003. [e-mail: J.Arnason@latrobe.edu.au]

Georg Stauth teaches sociology at the University of Bielefeld and heads the
program on “Islamic Culture and Modern Society” at the Institute of Advanced Studies
in the Humanities in Essen. He has published widely on the sociology of the Islamic
world and on Western interpretations of Islam, and is co-author of Nietzsche’s Dance,
Oxford, Blackwell, 1988. [e-mail:GStauth@t-online.de]

Notes
1. A recapitulation of some basic facts about Ibn Khaldūn’s life may be useful. He
was born in Tunis, but his ancestors were refugees from Andalusia, and he
seems to have been acutely conscious of this background; during the first half
of his adult life he served various North African dynasties as an administrator
and a diplomat. The Muqaddimah was written during a four year interval in
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Arnason & Stauth: Civilization and State Formation in the Islamic Context 47

the late 1370s. In the early 1380s he moved to Egypt, where he became a judge,
but he was also sent on a diplomatic mission to meet Tamerlane, the last great
conqueror from Central Asia, who was then wreaking havoc and destruction
throughout the Middle East, but did not reach Egypt. Ibn Khaldūn’s career thus
put him in contact with all major contemporaneous currents of Islamic history
west of India.
2. For an interesting account of 17th- and 18th-century Ottoman uses of Ibn
Khaldūn’s work, see Lewis (1993).
3. Although one of us (G.S.) reads Arabic, it should be noted that we are not
dealing with problems of textual interpretation. References to key passages in
a standard Arabic edition are given, but the discussion is most directly based
on Franz Rosenthal’s translation of the Muqaddimah (An Introduction to
History); Vincent Monteil’s French translation is also quoted where that seems
appropriate. Rosenthal describes his version of the text as a mixture of literal
and modernizing ways of translating, and uses words in parentheses to indicate
that he has ‘added something that is not literally found in the Arabic text’ (Ibn
Khaldūn, 1958, 1: cxii). Monteil frequently accepts Rosenthal’s additions without
the parentheses.
4. Long before Gellner, Ortega y Gasset had read the Muqaddimah as a medi-
tation on the antinomy of statehood and civilization. In an essay first published
in 1934, and probably unknown to Gellner (as well as to most other 20th-
century interpreters of Ibn Khaldūn), he located Ibn Khaldūn’s model within a
typology of figures of historical existence (such as the Western conception of
progress understood as work in the service of a growing culture, and the
classical idea of polis or civitas). North Africa, defined in the broad sense that
included the Sahara, was part of a macro-region extending to the eastern
confines of Arabia, and this zone was characterized by an interpenetration of
nomadic and settled populations, unknown elsewhere (at least in a comparable
degree). These infrastructural conditions had given rise to a distinctively
conflictual relationship between the ‘two great historical functions’, civilization
as a result of human cooperation and sovereignty as a response to human
competition (Ortega y Gasset, 1963: 675; the concept of sovereignty is synony-
mous with statehood).
5. There are, of course, other ways of linking the interpretation of Ibn Khaldūn
to new developments in the comparative analysis of Islamic societies. In a
recent essay, S. N. Eisenstadt suggests – in a brief aside on Ibn Khaldūn – that
the combined impact of tribal conquest and sectarian movements should be
analyzed in connection with the dynamics of the public sphere sui generis that
developed in Islamic societies, due to the ‘de facto separation between the
religious community and the rulers’ (Eisenstadt, 2002: 149). Further discussion
of this connection would obviously have to deal with the long-term dynamic
of state formation, including its distinctive modern phase, and its impact on
relations between state and society.

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