Global Intellectual History

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Ibn Khaldun: an intellectual biography

Siep Stuurman

To cite this article: Siep Stuurman (2019): Ibn Khaldun: an intellectual biography, Global
Intellectual History, DOI: 10.1080/23801883.2019.1593089

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Published online: 18 Mar 2019.

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GLOBAL INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

BOOK REVIEW

Ibn Khaldun: an intellectual biography, by Robert Irwin, Princeton and Oxford,

Princeton University Press, 2018, xxi + 243 pp., $29.95, ISBN: 9780691174662

Most commentators of Ibn Khaldun have agreed on two counts: that he is a towering intellec-
tual figure, not only in Islamic culture but also in world history; and that it is impossible to
summarize his theory of history and the human condition in a few simple axioms or theorems.
Robert Irwin’s new book is an attempt to get to the gist of Ibn Khaldun’s thought by means of
an intellectual biography, that is: by analysing the Khaldunian corpus as an object of intellec-
tual history. This turns out to be an exercise in critique as well as reconstruction.
The chief butt of Irwin’s critique is the numerous later commentators who have made Ibn
Khaldun into a precursor of modern social thought, characterizing him as ‘the Montesquieu of
the fourteenth century’ or as a forerunner of Comte and Durkheim, or even of Keynes. Here, I
fully agree. The notion of ‘precursor’ is the historical equivalent of an extradition order: get out
of the fourteenth century and betake yourself to modern times where you belong! Historians
should not act as temporal immigration officers. Instead, they should try to find out what
people were up to in their own temporal habitat.
Irwin surefootedly makes his way through Ibn Khaldun’s voluminous oeuvre, showing that
in his search for historical explanations the author incessantly navigates between secular the-
ories of causation and divine agency. But God is mostly working through natural causes. God
can make people to act wickedly or stupidly and thereby destroy themselves. When that
happens to princes it can bring about the fall of states and dynasties. To take another well-
known example, Ibn Khaldun explains the Arab capacity to cooperate and found vast
empires in the generations after Muhammad by their social solidarity (asabiyya) but also by
the divine guidance of their leaders, from the Prophet to his successors. Irwin’s final conclusion
is that we should not make Ibn Khaldun more secular and more systematic than he really was.
It is too easy to discard the religious, the occult and the superstitious in the Muqaddimah and
so turn it into a ‘modern’ theory of history.
On the other hand, however, we know that Ibn Khaldun himself regarded his work as a
novel and original attempt to go beyond history as descriptive narrative and to arrive at an
explanation of the dynamics of history, and in particular a theory of the rise and decline of
states and dynasties. Irwin is inclined to view the religious elements in Ibn Khaldun as integral
parts of his explication of history, but many of them are formulaic and can also be read as a
form of authorial prudence. For the overwhelming majority of Ibn Khaldun’s contemporaries,
to say that history could be adequately explained without any regard for divine guidance would
be tantamount to unbelief. Even in cases were divine guidance is explicitly affirmed by Ibn
Khaldun it is always coupled to an explanation in terms of social solidarity. On the relation
between the two explanations he is not entirely consistent. At one moment he declares that
the great successes of the Arabs in the first centuries after Muhammad could not have
come about without the guidance and the unifying force of Islam. But some twenty pages
further, he states that ‘every mass undertaking by necessity requires asabiyya’ and that this
also applies to religious movements, coming close to Machiavelli’s famous dictum that only
armed prophets are successful (Muqaddimah, I: 305–306, 322–327).
To reconcile the two explanations Irwin attributes to Ibn Khaldun the philosophical tenet of
occasionalism, which held that what we may call ‘natural causation’ is in reality brought about
by continuous divine intervention. Consequently, God remains the ultimate mover in every
2 BOOK REVIEW

instance. Irwin time and again characterizes Ibn Khaldun’s methodology as traditionalist and
not really philosophical. I find that hard to believe for occasionalism was a highly sophisticated
philosophical affair. It was one of the theories of causation explored by Descartes to explain the
connection between mind and body, and it was fully embraced by Nicholas Malebranche, a
second-generation Cartesian. Just like Ibn Khaldun, Descartes sought to explain as many
natural phenomena as he could by natural causes, without calling them natural causes lest
he would lapse into materialism. In the same vein, Irwin invokes Ibn Khaldun’s great interest
in sorcery, the occult, and the future ‘last days’ as evidence of his traditionalist and distinctly
un-modern mindset. However, as Malise Ruthven objected in his review of Irwin in the
New York Review of Books (7–20 February, 2019), occasionalism also underpinned
Newton’s explanation of gravity, and, even more than Ibn Khaldun, Newton spent an enor-
mous amount of time on alchemy and biblical chronology, but that does in no way invalidate
the originality and stark novelty of Newtonian physics.
Moreover, Ibn Khaldun himself advanced an audacious hypothesis on the double nature of
the Quranic scriptures. The orthodox view was that the Quran was timeless, the uncreated
word of God, and thus could not have a history. Ibn Khaldun subscribes to this view, but
then makes an consequential qualification. The Quran, he explains, is a term with a double
meaning:
it is primeval and persisting in the essence of God … But it is also created, inasmuch as it
consists of combinations of letters (sounds) produced in the recital by human voices.
When it is called primeval, the first thing is meant. When it is called recitable and audible,
this refers to its recitation and written fixation. (Muqaddimah, III, 64)
Such a twofold reading of the Quran is in line with the distinction Ibn Rushd (Averroes) made
between the theological and the philosophical roads to the truth. It sits ill with Irwin’s insis-
tence that Ibn Khaldun agreed with Al-Ghazali’s critique of philosophy which was criticized
by Ibn Rushd (68–69).
I am also puzzled by Irwin’s thesis that Ibn Khaldun’s work cannot be classified as a phil-
osophy of history. He spots a mistranslation by Franz Rosenthal who rendered ‘hikma’ in the
opening statement of the Muqaddimah as ‘philosophy.’ But is that really sufficient to portray
Ibn Khaldun as an adversary of ‘philosophy’? In his classic work on the history of Arabic his-
toriography, Tarif Khalidi considers hikma as the methodological turn to what we today would
probably call ‘theory’ (Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period, Cambridge Univ.
Press 1994: 131). Hikma includes the mathematical natural sciences and the philosophical dis-
ciplines, such as logic, philosophy and dialectical theology. Itrwin is right that it is not identical
with ‘falasifa’, the habitual Arabic term for philosophy in the narrow sense, but it definitely
includes philosophy. To deduce from its use that Ibn Khaldun harboured a deep aversion to
‘philosophy’ seems farfetched.
In his introduction to the Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun castigates the dull and tradition-
bound historians who look no further than the surface of things. What the historian should
do instead is to investigate the ‘causes and origins’ as well as the ‘how and why’ of events.
Of his own work, Ibn Khaldun says that he shows ‘why dynasties and civilizations originate,’
and that he comments ‘on urbanization, and on the essential characters of human social organ-
ization.’ This is strong language that indicates that Ibn Khaldun considered his own work as a
conscious departure from tradition and as a scientific endeavour. Today, we might label Ibn
Khaldun’s use of hikma as a ‘theoretical approach’ to history. Khalidi assigns him to the his-
toriographical genre of siyasa, that is: the study and explanation of the rise and decline of states
and political regimes.
 GLOBAL INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 3

Like all previous students of Ibn Khaldun, Irwin considers asabiyya (social ties, solidarity)
the key concept of his theory of history. Asabiyya is a generalization of tribal solidarity that can
extend beyond kinship to clientage and alliances in wars and conquests, eventually underpin-
ning political regimes dominated by urbanized elites. However, urbanization with its attendant
luxury and egoism inevitably saps the roots of rule, and by the fourth generation the dynasty
collapses, to be replaced by a new infusion of asabiyya from the tribes in the interior. Accord-
ing to Irwin, ‘asabiyya is one of god’s tools and through it His divine plan for mankind is
worked out’ (46). While it is true that Ibn Khaldun frequently invokes divine guidance to
account for the inter-tribal solidarity in the early expansion of Islam beyond the Arabian
Peninsula, it seems to me that asabiyya and divine guidance do not always nicely fit together.
The passage Irwin cites to make his case is not unequivocal: ‘Asabiyya’, Ibn Khaldun
declares, ‘is the source of unity and agreement, and the guarantor of the intentions and
laws of Islam. When this is understood, God’s wise plans with regard to His creation and
His creatures will become clear’ (Muqaddimah I, 438). Even so, this passage is part of Ibn
Khaldun’s discussion of the ferocious conflicts over the right successor of Muhammad after
the murder of Uthman, the third caliph, which led to the enduring scission of Islam into Sun-
nites and Shiites. Instead of the solution, it seems to me, the intentions of God had become part
of the problem. Moreover, Ibn Khaldun refers several times to the pre-Islamic asabiyya among
the Arabian tribes, attesting thereby that asabiyya can also work without divine guidance. The
very least we can conclude is that Ibn Khaldun seems unable to decide which is to be the foun-
dational concept: asabiyya or divine guidance.
Irwin devotes 40 pages (out of some 200) to what he calls ‘the strange afterlife of the
Muqaddimah.’ In an entertaining style he dissects the various attempts to portray Ibn
Khaldun as a ‘modern,’ showing that their authors either ignore or explain away the religious
and traditional elements in his writings. He even finds Khaldunian ideas at work in the science
fiction plots of the history of the future in the writings of Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert. This
is a long posterity that runs from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century.
On the other hand, there is no discussion of the ancient predecessors of Ibn Khaldun. In
particular, it would have been useful to compare him to two historians who devoted long chap-
ters to the steppe peoples, Herodotus (fifth century BCE) in ancient Greece and Sima Qian (ca.
100 BCE) in Han China. Both avoided the underestimation of nomadic culture that was wide-
spread among their contemporaries. They respected the redoubtable military strength of the
nomads, they regarded their way of life efficacious in the steppe ecology, and they saw them
as a permanent presence in world history. Ibn Khaldun would have agreed on all counts,
but he went beyond Herodotus and Sima Qian in his vision of the interaction between the
sedentary and the nomadic peoples. Where his ancient predecessors saw a side-by-side of
two distinct cultures, Ibn Khaldun’s model focused on their interaction. In his history the
nomadic and sedentary peoples no longer represent clearly demarcated social ensembles, as
there is a continuous demographic flow from the desert to the urban zones, a movement main-
tained by acculturation processes among the nomads and the dynastic cycles of sedentary
states. His dynamic approach represented a step beyond the more static vision of the seden-
tary-nomadic interaction found in antiquity.
Ibn Khaldun’s greatly admired his tenth-century predecessor al-Mas’udi, and regarded his
work as a paradigm for future historians: ‘When there is a general change of conditions, it is as
if the entire creation has changed … a world brought into existence anew. Therefore there is
need at this time that someone should systematically set down the situation of the world
among all regions and races … doing for his age what al-Mas’udi did for his. This should be
a model for future historians to follow. In this book of mine I shall discuss as much of that
as will be possible for me here in the Maghrib’ (Muqaddimah, I, 65). Irwin, for his part,
4 BOOK REVIEW

does not think much of Ibn Khaldun’s forays into world history, for he ‘only gave substantial
coverage to regions where Arabic was spoken’. He concludes that the Kitab-al-Ibar, the sequel
to the Muqaddimah wherein Ibn Khaldun sought to extend his vision to Western and Central
Asia, does not live up to the latter’s promise (61). That is undoubtedly true, but it would not be
wise, I think, to entirely discard Ibn Khaldun’s program for an investigation of world-historical
connections and crises.
With his insistence on the significance of religion in Ibn Khaldun’s historical program and
practice, Irwin has significantly contributed to a better understanding of his work. Even so,
religion and secular causation remain fixated in a side by side. In my opinion, religion and
the asabiyya-complex stand for two languages of politics and history that are intermeshed
in Ibn Khaldun’s writings. That his new language of natural causation is not identical to
our modern understandings of history should not detract from its novelty nor from its super-
iority to what came before.
What we are still waiting for is an analysis, based on (for instance) J. G. A. Pocock’s para-
digm of political languages-in-time, of what Ibn Khaldun accomplished with each of the two
languages, followed by an investigation of the contemporary problems the two languages
addressed. Only then will we be able to assess the relevance, strengths, and weaknesses of
this great theorist of history and human culture.

Siep Stuurman
History of Ideas, Utrecht University
s.stuurman@uu.nl
© 2019 Siep Stuurman
https://doi.org/10.1080/23801883.2019.1593089