10 0000@ingentaconnect Com@content@imp@hpt@2019@00000040@00000001@art00003

FROM A NEW VISION OF HISTORY TO AN
EARLY SOCIOLOGY OF POWER AND CIVILIZATION

IN IBN KHALDUN’S MASTERPIECE
Annalisa Verza1
Abstract: In 1377, during an intellectual retreat from the turmoil of political life in
a very critical and precarious moment in history, Ibn Khaldun — Tunisian proto-
sociologist and historian — wrote the massive seven-volume history called Kitab
al’ibar (book of lessons from history). This paper stresses that an important function
of Ibn Khaldun’s revolutionary work — setting the history of civilizations within the
frame of rational schemes where it is subject to regular laws akin to those of physics —
must have been a legal and political one: to prod the rulers of his time to be more
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
responsibly aware in their political and legal action, tilting such action in favour of the
preservation of social cohesion, understood as key to the very survival of a given civi-
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2018
lization.
Keywords: Ibn Khaldun, sociology, historic cycles, political responsibility, civili-
zations, power, sociology of politics, sociology of law.
I
Ibn Khaldun and His Time
Like perhaps only a few of the many late-medieval intellectuals whose
thought has come down to us, Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), born in Tunisia to an
important Andalusian family of Yemenite origins, embodies the deep crisis
and instability of his time, not only in his thought but also in his personal
political experience, as well as in his own biography (and autobiography).2
Not unlike the great traveller Ibn Battuta, with whom he was acquainted,3
he was exposed to the broader cultural experience of those whose circum-
stances destine them to a life always on the move, and who in this way
develop an eager curiosity to make sense of the world about them. In this
respect there was a twofold aspect to his travels — at once geographic and
intellectual.
1 CIRSFID — Università di Bologna, via Galliera 3, 40121 Bologna, Italy. Email:

annalisa.verza@unibo.it
2 Ibn Khaldoun, Le Livre des Exemples, Vol. I, Autobiographie, Muqaddima,
trans. A. Cheddadi (Paris, 2002).
3 In commenting on the stories coming out of Ibn Battuta’s travels, Ibn Khaldun (The
Muqaddimah I, p. 368) notes that, even though they have something of the incredible
about them, for which reason they elicited a good deal of scepticism, it would be
wrong to discard something as untrue just because it is new, for it is instead an empiri-
cal method that needs to be used in assessing the truth of any assertion. The edition of
the Muqaddimah I refer to in this essay is The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to His-
tory, trans. Franz Rosenthal (3 vols., New Jersey, 1958).
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XL. No. 1. Spring 2019
50 A. VERZA
Even his family, that of the Banu Khaldun, had been accustomed to moving
from place to place for generations, and was thus alert to the instability that
seemed to mark its fate. Indeed, the family originally came from Yemen (one
of Ibn Khaldun’s ancestors bore the name al-Hadrami, for the Hadramut part
of Yemen), and in the eighth century, in the early age of Muslim conquest, it
made its way to the land of al-Andalus, where it settled, and where until the
thirteenth century it held some of the highest government offices in Seville.
But even after this five-century arc, the comfort of the position the family had
secured did not smother its distinctive propensity to cast a wider, restlessly
searching gaze on the world, and so it was that in 1228 it took the farsighted
decision to leave its possessions behind and migrate, heading for Tunis — at
the time the capital of Ifriqiyya, held by the Hafsid dynasty, which came into
power after the Abbasid Caliphate — just before the Christian Reconquista of
Andalusia.
In Tunis, between 1348 and 1349, Ibn Khaldun lived through the trauma of
the great plague and the ensuing famine — events which in a matter of only a
couple of years would completely overturn his world, and which proved to be
decisive in prompting him to move elsewhere again.
As he writes in the Introduction to his Muqaddimah, ‘the entire inhabited
world changed’:4
[A destructive plague] devastated nations and caused populations to vanish.
It swallowed up many of the good things of civilizations and wiped them
out. It overtook dynasties at the time of their senility, when they had
reached the limit of their duration. It lessened their power and curtailed
their influence. It weakened their authority. Their situation approached the
point of annihilation and dissolution. Civilizations decreased with the
decrease of mankind. Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads and way
signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties
and tribes grew weak.5
Indeed the plague, soon to be followed by a terrible famine, killed his kin,
many of his friends, and nearly all his teachers. ‘It was as if the voice of exis-
tence in the world had called out for oblivion and restriction, and the world
had responded to its call.’6
So, four years later, without regrets, the young Ibn Khaldun left a job much
below his ambitions,7 and embarked on his new life as a traveller, but also as
an attentive and keen observer of a world that, between destruction and
4The Muqaddimah, trans. Rosenthal, Introduction, I, p. 64.

5Ibid.
6 Ibid. There is doubtless some evocative imagery in Ibn Khaldun’s words here,
but once more we can make out an attempt to offer a rational explanation of the events
in question — an explanation that takes on a Malthusian flavour.
7 He had been engaged in 1350 by Abu Ishaq to transcribe in calligraphic form a ritual
formula that was to appear as an epigraph in the official correspondence.
IBN KHALDUN’S MASTERPIECE 51
rebirth, was before his very eyes going through an utterly critical phase in its
history: ‘When there is a general change of conditions, it is as if the entire
creation had changed and the whole world been altered, as if it were a new and
repeated creation, a world brought into existence anew. Therefore, there is
need at this time that someone should systematically set down the situation of
the world.’8
His experience as a traveller soon led him to play a leading role in the
administrative, political and legal life of the different reigns in his world — a
period during which he would intermittently be accorded great honours and
be imprisoned, or otherwise hurt, depending on the state of the political power
play, and, to some extent perhaps, on plain fate too. (There is some mystery,
for example, surrounding the shipwreck in which his family died in 1378, and
doubt has been expressed as to whether this was really the work of fate.)9
Ibn Khaldun, indeed, himself took an active part in shaping the policies of
most North African and Andalusian dynasties of his time, inevitably becom-
ing a first hand witness to the shifting fortunes of their ever-fragile and critical
holding and passing of power, but also an attentive and analytical decoder of
the dynamics and the deep causes of the underlying changes. In particular, he
was directly involved in the political strategies and power struggles that took
place at the Merinid court of Fez of Abu Inan (when he first arrived in 1352,
following al-Abili, his only teacher and friend to escape from the plague),
where he was appointed as a judge in the mazalim court; at the Nasrid court of
Granada of Mohamed V (1363) where he served as a court diplomat; at the
court of the Christian king of Castile Peter the Cruel (1364), who promised to
return to him his family’s ancient estates on condition that he agreed to live in
Seville; at the court of the emir Abu Abd Allah Muhammad in Bugia, in
Algeria (1365), where he worked as a chamberlain and Malikite judge (qadì);
and later at the court of the emir Abu l’Abbas of Costantina and the Tlemcen
court of Abu Hammu Mussa II, where the sovereign sent him on a mission
among the reign’s Berber tribes, enabling him to firm up important relation-
ships, and where he was offered the office of Grand vizier.
So, the world he knew and in which he moved about was not only large but
also particularly unstable and complex: often accused of forging the ‘wrong’
alliances and targeted under the envy of other court officers, he was even
imprisoned.10
In addition to this experience in the Maghreb he also witnessed what was
unfolding in Europe, which in its alliance-making and jostling for power
seemed susceptible to the same dynamics, and which was visited by the same
(if not even more intense) black plague and famine that had ravaged the
Maghreb. It was with this store of experience to draw on that, between 1375
8 The Muqaddimah, Introduction, I, p. 65.
9 Claude Horrut, Ibn Khaldun, un Islam des ‘Lumières’ (Paris, 2006), p. 96.
10 Ibid., ch. 3.
52 A. VERZA
and 1378, with the urgency of his scientific ‘mandate’,11 and his need to fill
out the details of his historical analysis, he stopped, and retreated with his
family to the Berber fortress of Qal‘a Ibn Salama, under the protection of the
Awlad ‘Arif tribe.
Here, in five intensive months during this intellectual retreat from the bur-
dens of political life, in a flush of febrile inspiration, Ibn Khaldun set himself
to work. Between June and November 1377 (as he says in his autobiography),
counting on no more than his memory, without any textual sources to rely on,
he hammered out the first draft of the Muqaddimah, conceived as the first vol-
ume of a greater work of history — the massive seven-volume history called
Kitab al’ibar (book of lessons from history),12 a work through which he
sought to revolutionize the structure and style of historical inquiry itself, and
consequently also its function.
Ibn Khaldun continued incessantly to revise and improve this work, even in
the final part of his life: the part spent in yet another environment, Egypt,
where he took the position of teacher and Malikite judge, and where he
worked as diplomat for the sovereign. In the final years of his life, this latter
position took him to Damascus, in the presence of the greatest and most
dreaded conqueror and destroyer of his time: Tamerlane.
Despite the innovation of the deep insights it brought to this line of inquiry,
a long time would pass before it would emerge out of the shadows, even (with
the single important exception of Turkey) in the Islamic world itself.
II
A Scientific and Empirical View of History
In the Muqaddimah, by his own account, he sought to reframe history by no
longer conceiving of it as an uncritical fairy-tale branch of literature based on
the settled and hardened canons of the taqlid.
In fact, these canons he harshly criticized, taking issue with the tendency of
medieval Islamic historiography to reject any notion of rationality and method
in its telling of history, and to avoid any objective validation of its narrative in
light of hard facts. Much less were they accustomed, according to Ibn
Khaldun, to engage with the idea that history might be conceived in a dynamic
11 At several places in the Muqaddimah, as well as in his autobiography, Ibn Khaldun

describes his work as divinely inspired. In fact, considering that it took him only four
months to complete a work that in its final form now runs to all of 1,600 pages — written
without the aid of libraries, assistants, or any other support — it would not be entirely
unreasonable to yield to his suggestion that some deep inspiring force was at work,
enabling him to accomplish so much in such a short time.
12 Its full title would translate as Book of Lessons, Record of Beginnings and Events
in the History of the Arabs and Foreigners and Berbers and their Powerful Contem-
poraries.
frame, taking into account its constant (subtle and imperceptible, but irresist-
ible, to Ibn Khaldun’s eyes) flux of change.13
History was instead reported in a markedly poetic and fantastical way:
events were customarily explained by nonchalant reference to supernatural,
miraculous or marvellous forces, and often uncritically handed down from
one source to the next.14 Their interpretation, then, was ordinarily formulated
on a theological basis, seeing in history an effort to approach the ideal set out
in divine law, in a neat contraposition between Good (the lifestyles prescribed
by the Shari’a) and Evil, viewed as intrinsic to actual lifestyles based on cus-
toms that were inevitably and simply wrong. Aside from all that, what was
lacking in the historians criticized by Ibn Khaldun — in their disorderly ‘wan-
dering like nomads through time’,15 as Irene Coltman Brown puts it — was an
actual theory of historical change, a theory capable of providing rational inter-
pretive hypotheses.
Ibn Khaldun turns away from this fabulous, uncritical way of recounting
history, in an endeavour which is not only descriptive but also interpretive. In
sticking to fact, in the interests of objectivity, his effort is at the same time
meant to distil the ‘inner meaning’16 of the facts ascertained to be true — an
inner meaning we arrive at not by formulaically arranging the facts and events
of history in view of a teleological end they are supposed to achieve, but by
looking at the way these facts and events intersect, in giving rise to the differ-
ent forms and modes of social organization that can be observed to take root at
different times and places, in an interpretive effort comparable to that which
propels scientific enterprises.
Previously — at least until the tenth century, in both Islam and the Christian
West — the theological explanation of phenomena had been the ‘normal
way’, the logical corollary of a total lack of confidence in the limited powers
of human reason. The only important exception had been the interpretation of
the sacred texts and the relative framing of human events advanced by the theo-
logical current of the mu’tazilites (represented, for instance, by al-Kindi) — an
interpretation based on logic and reasoning. In affinity with the rationalism
embraced in Greek philosophy — brought to the Islamic world through that
great operation of translatio sapientiae to which we owe much of our knowl-
edge of classical culture — the current of the mu’tazilites (as much as Scholasti-
cism in the Western world) was indeed decisive in introducing that great
13 Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, Introduction.

14 Irene Coltman Brown, ‘Ibn Khaldun and the Revelation from the Desert’, History
Today, 31 (5) (1981), pp. 19–25, at p. 22. It is worth noting that even the cyclical
theories of history advanced by Giambattista Vico and Auguste Comte took as their
jumping-off point certain phases in history in which social narratives were couched
in the fantastical, the mythological, the supernatural.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, Foreword.
54 A. VERZA
endeavour to rationalize culture which in the twelfth century would be devel-

oped by Ibn-Rushd (Averroes),17 and which, in historiography, would find its
highest accomplishment with Ibn Khaldun’s masterpiece.
This is precisely what Ibn Khaldun sets out to do in the Muqaddimah,
undertaking a rigorous factual analysis aimed at conveying knowledge, and
offering education (such is the typical mission of the ‘ibar) on the ‘inner
meaning’ of the dynamics of history, even if it meant debunking deep-rooted
cultural platitudes.
Ibn Khaldun’s conception of historical time, in particular, is not absorbed
by the theological dimension. For him, at the level of social dynamics —
neatly distinguished from the level of theology — good and evil operate as
two faces of an ever-changing and complex reality. Methodologically, then,
his point is not to assess historical events as right or wrong but rather to under-
stand them. To this end, the turning points of history are interpreted through
the lens of a scientific method, at bottom sociological, grounded in empirical

observation — anticipating Montesquieu, among others. In his Muqaddimah,
Ibn Khaldun sets out to critically investigate the way the different environ-
mental, social, cultural, economic and psychological key factors characteriz-
ing each culture interact in shaping the course of history, on the explicit
premise that his scientific analysis will point to an outcome aligned with what
Islam has already announced.
In this frame, God is present but transcendent, and set in a different dimen-
sion: the constitutive elements for a study of civilizations, aimed at distilling
the ‘inner meaning’ of their trajectory below the surface of sheer facts, is
rather provided by history itself, rationally understood and analysed. Hence,
the divine precepts must be understood within the context of a dynamic and
multifaceted reality, determined in different ways over time and in different
places according to the many influxes coming from the environment, climate,
food, the economy and other variables, and according to the particular posi-
tion that civilization is occupying within its own historical parable.
Within social reality, change, which for Ibn Khaldun is inevitable, devel-
ops according to nonlinear causal chains in virtue of which it cannot be under-
stood by a study of its single components. It is for this reason that he takes up
hundreds of pages — revealing a sensibility we could now properly character-
ize as proto-sociological — in which he makes it his aim to uncover the inter-
dependence that links up a broad range of apparently unrelated events, such as
famine and pestilence, the spread of a certain kind of diet, and the weakening
of the group’s natural defences; or an increasing population density and the
development of the arts, the influence of poetry, and the construction of
monuments; or the tendency of law to rigidify in imitation of the past — seek-
ing all the deep connections that hold among these elements.
17 Cf. Majid Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy (New York, 1970),
pp. 18–22.
Society, as conceived by Ibn Khaldun, reveals itself to be a complex system

in which a multiplicity of economic, political, cultural, religious and familial
factors interact in significant ways, cooperating to shape the unfolding of
history.
This view brought about a change in the khabar itself — the central concept
in traditional Arab historiography, understood to indicate at once the event
itself and its narration — which, in Ibn Khaldun, is given a new meaning and
valuation. Indeed, in his view, given the needs of a world marked by such
instability, it is no longer useful for the khabar to be seen solely as a moment
through which to ‘pass on’ histories from the past under the stewardship of
near-sighted historiographers not interested in making the intellectual effort
needed to interpret them (he wryly remarks in this regard that ‘[t]he pasture of
stupidity is unwholesome for mankind’).18
Ibn Khaldun writes, to the contrary:

[If the historian] trusts historical information in its plain transmitted form
and has no clear knowledge of the principles resulting from custom, the
fundamental facts of politics, the nature of civilization, or the condition
governing social organization, and if, furthermore, he does not evaluate
remote or ancient material through comparison with near or contemporary
material, he often cannot avoid [. . .] deviating from the high road of truth.19
Far from offering a mere record of events, Khaldunian history is under-
stood as ‘ibra,20 marked by the ‘educative’ rationality of history underlying
the changefulness of facts such as they unfold on the surface. As Ibn Khaldun
writes:
today, the scholar in this field needs to know the principles of politics, the
nature of things, and the differences among nations, places, and periods
with regard to ways of life, character qualities, customs, sects, schools and
everything else. He further needs a comprehensive knowledge of present
conditions in all these respects. He must compare similarities or differences
between present and past conditions. He must know the causes of the simi-
larities in certain cases and of the differences in others. He must be aware of
the differing origins and beginnings of dynasties and religious groups, as
well as of the reasons and incentives that brought them into being and the
circumstances and history of the persons who supported them. His goal
must be to have complete knowledge of the reasons for every happening,
and to be acquainted with the origin of the event. Then, he must check trans-
mitted information with the basic principles he knows.21
18 Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, I, p. 7.

19 Ibid., I, pp. 15–16.
20 Muhsin Mahdi, Ibn Khaldûn’s Philosophy of History: A Study in the Philo-
sophic Foundation of the Science of Culture (Chicago, 1957), pp. 63–72.
21 Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, Introduction, I, pp. 55–6.
56 A. VERZA
History is, in this sense, a discipline through which these facts can be inter-
preted, by fitting them into theoretical models constructed to that end, and by
working from them to induce general laws on the way society functions and
evolves. This means going to the root cause of historical phenomena so as to
extract the dynamics according to which they change.
This intellectual and rational operation produced an ‘entirely new’ science:
an early sociology, singularly detached from any link to laicism. This Arabic
sample of sociology is, instead, rooted in its own Arabic culture, as it pro-
ceeds from a genuine and original process developing from that particular
‘hybrid’ or miscegenated mentality that in Arabic is called aql-naql, coupling
(in what today may strike us as a paradoxical combination) rational knowl-
edge (aql)22 with revealed knowledge (naql).
Indeed, by distinguishing the aql element from the naql element, Ibn
Khaldun could neatly separate the world of science from that of religion,
underscoring the limits of the former as nonmetaphysical, without bringing

them into contradiction or undervaluing either one relative to the other.23
If historiography is to be able not only to report but also to interpret the real-
ity of today and the past, thirsting for answers, it cannot, according to Ibn
Khaldun, be framed within the naql of tradition24 under the methodical canons
of the religious science of the ahadith, but must be developed within the aql
frame of science, and as such it needs to be equipped with a methodological
rigour and an internal logic of its own.
It is precisely through this cultural hybridization, then, that the history of
the continuing and inevitable change accompanying human civilization —
and so also the history of events like war, pestilence and famine — can be
given a rational explanation and can be bounded, on a Khaldunian concep-
tion, within the more reassuring frame of a new science that could overcome
the limits of a ‘literary’ narrative and thus deliver the teaching and knowledge
(albeit within certain limits) by which man, caught in the ebb and flow of
events, is enabled to at least grasp the actual inner meaning the uncovering of
which defines the new mission of historical inquiry itself.
So, while, according to Ibn Khaldun, history develops under the aegis of
divine law, the aim of his analysis was to extrapolate its dynamics in order to
reveal the ultimate goal hiding beneath the multiplicity of events. This, he
thought, would make it possible to achieve a better social organization and
better government, enabling humanity to advance in its ascent towards the
ideal.
22
Mahmoud Dhaouadi, ‘The Ibar: Lessons of Ibn Khaldun’s Umran Mind’, Con-
temporary Sociology, 34 (6) (2005), pp. 585–91.
23 Cf. Constant Hamès, ‘Islam et Sociologie: Une Rencontre qui n’a pas eu lieu?’, in
Sociology and Religions: An Ambiguous Relationship, ed. L. Voyé and J. Billiet
(Leuven, 1999), pp. 171–82.
24 Cf. Giuliana Turroni, Il mondo della storia secondo Ibn Khaldun (Rome, 2002).
Indeed, in this very tension between the real and the ideal lies and develops
all Ibn Khaldun’s philosophy of the history of civilizations.
III
The Backdrops to the History of Civilization
A debate has raged in the literature on the question of whether Ibn Khaldun’s
new science is to be defined as sociological, philosophical or historical, or
indeed whether it is theological, thus reducing his work exclusively to one of
these areas of study. But the question is in fact badly framed, for his investiga-
tion spans all of these areas, and in fact is complex and multilayered, working
on all these levels at once.
We know that, in painting, it took centuries to transition from the flat,
two-dimensional figures of Egyptian, Byzantine and early European art to the

first, labourious, repeated endeavours that Paulo Uccello made to model per-
spective — not to mention that this, too, was happening in this same critical
fourteenth century. It can safely be said that in this same period, the same shift
was happening with Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah, introducing the idea of per-
spective into the study of history and civilizations.
Indeed, his Muqaddimah is a theory of depth and perspective, and it is a mis-
take to pigeonhole him into any single category, only highlighting his work as a
‘gatherer’ of useful historical and empirical data (under a historico-sociological
label),25 or his philosophical bent,26 in light of his cyclical view of the life of
civilizations (in a scheme that many consider para-Aristotelian),27 thus failing
25 See, for example, Abdelghani Megherbi, La pensée sociologique d’Ibn Khaldoun

(Alger, 1971); Fuad Baali, Society, State, and Urbanism: Ibn Khaldun’s Sociological
Thought (New York, 1988); Faridah H. Hassan, Ibn Khaldun and Jane Addams: The
Real Father of Sociology and The Mother of Social Works (Madrid, 2006), pp. 1–23;
Mahmoud Dhaouadi, ‘Ibn Khaldoun, sociologue avant la lettre’, Sciences Humaines,
15 (6) (2011), pp. 1–5; Mehmet Soyer and Paul Gilbert, ‘Debating the Origins of
Sociology: Ibn Khaldun as a Founding Father of Sociology’, International Journal of
Sociological Research, 5 (2012), pp. 13–30; Mehmet Soyer, Examining the Origins
of Sociology: Continuities and Divergencies between Ibn Khaldun, Giambattista
Vico, August Comte, Ludwig Gumplowicz, and Emile Durkheim (Denton, 2010);
Syed Farid al-Attas, Applying Ibn Khaldun: The Recovery of a Lost Tradition in Soci-
ology (Abingdon/New York, 2014).
26 Cf. Taha Hussain, La philosophie sociale d’Ibn Khaldoun (Paris, 1918); Gaston
Bouthoul, Ibn-Khaldoun: Sa philosophie sociale (Paris, 1930); Muhsin Mahdi, Ibn
Khaldun’s Philosophy of History (London, 1957); Stephen Frederic Dale, The
Orange Trees of Marrakesh: Ibn Khaldun and the Science of Man (Cambridge,
2015). The list is only exemplificatory.
27 Cf. Bouthoul, Ibn-Khaldoun; Mahdi, Ibn Khaldun’s Philosophy of History;
Turroni, Il mondo della storia secondo Ibn Khaldun; Abdessalam Cheddadi, Ibn
Khaldûn: L’homme et le théoricien de la civilisation (Paris, 2006); Krzysztof
58 A. VERZA
to appreciate the richness and depth achieved in virtue of the mutual feedback
between all these dimensions.
The significance of his Muqaddimah, then, is multifaceted. For we have to
view it in light of the interplay among these dimensions, including its being a
historical investigation, but one in which history is understood in modern
terms as a study of civilizations also conceived of as cultural units, where
society, in an unprecedented way, emerges as a sui generis object of study
characterized by dynamics of its own.
Far from being a work that we can box into any single discipline, then, the
Muqaddimah, like a theatrical stage — and herein lies its extraordinary inter-
est — presents an architecture having several levels of depth and focal planes.
In other words, it offers a perspectival stage.
On one plane, the stage of history is filled with meticulously empirical
observations on the dynamics governing the interrelations among concrete

actors, such as kings and chieftains, but also characters one would encounter
in their everyday experience: beggars, merchants, teachers, fashioned into
‘ideal types’ proper in Weber’s sense. On a deeper plane, in the background,
we find the environment and culture in which these characters are steeped — a
background that exerts a shaping influence on humans and their activities
without thereby determining their action. Thus we find that the climate affects
human character and predispositions, and the same can be said of dietary cus-
tom or of population density and how large or isolated the social group is; and
even of apparently eccentric or contingent elements, such as one’s training in
a given art or science (along with the accompanying habitus,28 like a strict
upbringing aimed at instilling a sense of submission and a uniformity of
behaviour or a liberal upbringing aimed at maximizing ‘fortitude’), or fluency
in another language, or a familiarity with certain concepts (as Wittgenstein
would later say, even the limits of our language determine the limits of our
world)29 — these are all factors that, for Ibn Khaldun, act concurrently to col-
lectively characterize human groups.
But even this background plane, in Ibn Khaldun’s theory, does not form the
bedrock of historical development. For beneath it we find a third plane that, in
our theatrical metaphor, lies behind the scenes, explaining the functioning of
the interlocking forces of history at the deeper level of what Ibn Khaldun con-
siders dynamic laws: these are not absolute, to be sure, but are nonetheless
sufficiently constant to point us to regular, prefixed trajectories that the
Pomian, Ibn Khaldun au prisme de l’Occident (Paris, 2006); Dale, The Orange Trees
of Marrakesh. Here, too, the list is only exemplificatory.
28 Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, III, p. 342.
29 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ed. Amedeo G. Conte
(Turin, 1964), prop. 5.6.
course of human history will follow.30 Within these schemes the various fac-
tors of history interact, giving rise to changes in the concrete that are predict-
able while admitting of variations, which in turn fit certain patterns of change,
in a way reminiscent of those variations on a musical theme, circular but not
repetitive, which, in a primitive form, were germinating in his own time in
‘his’ Iberian peninsula, and which would soon take over Europe and its high
music, like the Follies of Spain (folies d’Espagne),31 with their reiteration of
codified variations on eight-bar phrases and mathematical relations among
notes set against a background based on a fixed common scheme — making
the music predictable, reassuring, almost trancelike.
This identification of cyclical orbits in history represents what can be
described as the more ‘philosophical’ plane of Ibn Khaldun’s inquiry, but this
philosophy, understood as a rational attempt to understand the world, relies
already, in the manner of sociology, on the scientific method: the laws gov-
erning the cyclical progression of history are thus essentially the physical
laws of nature — they are not moral laws, even if an understanding of such
natural laws cannot fail to provide guidance by informing human wisdom.
Indeed, social facts, according to Ibn Khaldun, are much like physical facts, in
that their variation can be interpreted in light of a scientific inquiry. The con-
stitutive elements for such an inquiry are furnished by history, but in proceed-
ing along this line of reasoning it is essential for history to avoid, as noted, the
macroscopic mistakes one is liable to make by reading history through pre-
conceived paradigms.
However there is one more dimension to the perspectival depth of Khal-
dunian history. Indeed, it is only moving even further behind the scenes, that
we find the final backdrop. It consists of the empty space that contains narra-
tion and its logic and extends immensely beyond its scope: this is the trans-
cendent and divine world, a world that Ibn Khaldun, as a man of deep and
sincere faith, accepted to be — apart for what had been religiously
revealed — beyond his grasp.32
IV
The Time of History and its ‘Educative’ Function
Even time, on a Khaldunian approach, takes on a particular depth. Indeed, the
present is no longer merely understood as the outcome of the contingencies of
the day, a simple event to be anecdotally reported, but is rather set in a law of
constant and cyclical but directional change: it becomes a constitutive ele-
ment in a more complex period of time with which it interacts.
30 See, for example, Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, I, p. 345, where a dynasty’s
lifecycle is explained by comparison with that of a person.
31 Cf. M. Lombardi, ‘Le follie di Spagna’, in Percorsi europei, ed. M.G. Profeti
(Florence, 1997), pp. 167–92.
32 See, for example, Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, III, p. 249.
60 A. VERZA
Specifically, time is understood to carry with it that which has transpired in

the past, but by the same token it is also understood as the antechamber caus-
ally linked to the events which have yet to come to pass, forming a chain-
linked sequence developing on an increasing number of levels. Precisely on
account of this complexity, history’s rationale seems elusive; yet Ibn Khaldun
manages to bring into focus a profusion of details thus making up an unprece-
dentedly sociological picture proper.
On the Khaldunian conception of history, then, while previous events and
cycles affect the positioning of current events, if we are to properly under-
stand the latter, we will have to locate their position within their own cyclical
scheme — a logico-causal scheme that makes it possible to confer on history a
rationality that lends to it a certain predictability.
No detail of this history can be reported — much less explained — without
taking into account that which has gone before. On the contrary, the past is
what, for Ibn Khaldun, lays the groundwork for the developments we can
observe today, and so also for the decisions that will advance the development
of history. These decisions, in line with the idea that history is to serve an edu-
cating function, will accordingly have to be taken while bearing in mind what
their future effects will be in the long run.
In the Koran there is a verse, based on the Surah of the Throngs, suggesting
precisely that image: ‘He created the heavens and earth in truth. / He wraps the
night over the day and wraps the day over the night / and has subjected the sun
and the moon, / each running [its course] for a specified term.’33
In this image, night and day incessantly settle into each other until the end
of time as if they formed what has been described as ‘the immense coil of
time’,34 made up of a present that endlessly coils around the past, repeating its
trajectory across a wider radius, and in its turn providing the basis on which
the future can coil around its own tracks.
I like to think that this spiralling image of time and its progressive cycling,
an image that Ibn Khaldun was certainly familiar with, may have poetically
inspired him.
The theses on the dynamics of political history that Ibn Khaldun has handed
down to us in his work, accordingly, reconstruct the complex game of inter-
secting political forces that by turns come to power, in accordance with a
‘spiraliform’ scheme looking to which we can try to infer general (and, in this
sense, universalizable) laws on the functioning of civilization, which is a
broader and more complex entity than society, encompassing not only the
population but also its symbolic and cultural universe.
The history of this new collective entity, namely civilizations, is driven by
laws allowing for the possibility of predictive accounts, just like the laws that
33 Sureh of the Throngs, XXXIX, 5, in The Quran, Saheeh International (London,
1997).
34 Il Corano, ed. Hamza Piccardo (Rome, 1994), p. 399.
govern the natural world, and it proceeds along a course set in an ever-renewing
scheme broken down into predetermined phases.
The starting point is a specific ‘backward’ environment at the margins of
civilization (an environment that in the time and place in which Ibn Khaldun
is writing was defined by the ideal type of the badawa).35 In this environment,
social groups begin to form that live in a subsistence economy and whose cul-
ture is comparatively unrefined. Even so, the members of these groups share a
sense of cohesion and pride; they are a mettlesome lot and do not perceive
themselves to be (nor are they) subject to the rule of a sovereign; rather, they
feel bound by the pride they take in supporting a natural leader, someone cho-
sen from their own ranks whom they elevate to the status of first among equals
(primus inter pares), one who is seen as a ‘champion’ of their group and
embodies the virtues and values cherished by the group.
Having built up ‘fortitude’ and cohesion — a concept referred to as

asabiyya,36 one that plays a key role in Khaldun’s theory — and having thus
become predisposed to pursue individual glory as well as the glory of the
group, even at the cost of sacrificing oneself — all virtues nurtured in the
unforgiving desert environment — a close-knit group manages to take down
the previous dynasty and conquer and build the city. In the urban area
(hadara) that has been taken over, power consolidates into the hands of a
leader, but at the same time the arts and sciences find the ground on which to
gradually flourish.
In the last phase, however — in virtue of a number of factors that include
the individualistic atomism attendant on urbanization; the mutual dependence
resulting from an increased division of labour (a description that feels like we
are reading Adam Smith);37 the inevitably corrupting effect of power (as
evidenced by an unreasonable increase in taxes, which in any event cannot
sustain the level of public spending);38 an accustomization to luxury that
35 The term is tied to a triliteral root that stands for the desert and its inhabitants —
which is to say the Bedouins.
36 The word asabiyya derives from the Arab root ’ayin, sad, ba, which is common
to a number of related verbs designating actions such as tying, swathing and fasten-
ing, as well as joining ranks with someone, supporting them, rooting for them and
fanaticizing. The same root also accounts for nouns that can be translated as ‘nerve’
and ‘nervousness’; ‘tendon’, ‘league’, ‘association’, ‘collegiality’ and ‘group spirit’
(asabiyya itself); ‘bandage’ and ‘band’; and ‘zealousness’, ‘fanaticism’ and ‘intoler-
ance’; as well as for adjectives that translate to ‘neurotic’, ‘intolerant’, ‘fanatic’ and
‘partisan’. See Dizionario compatto italiano arabo e arabo-italiano, ed. Eros Baldissera
(Bologna, 2006).
37 Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, I, p. 347; A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature
and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Chicago, 2008).
38 For a recent editorial on the Laffer curve, see Renzo Orsi, Davide Raggi and
Francesco Turrino, ‘Ridurre le tasse si deve’, lavoce.info, 13 december 2013, http://
www.lavoce.info/archives/15593/ridurre-le-tasse-pressione-fiscale-curva-di-laffer/
62 A. VERZA
becomes compulsive;39 and above all a progressive, albeit predictable, detach-

ment from the group’s own foundational values — the social group as a
collective entity becomes depleted of its own vitality and so loses its abilities
and control. This, in turn, will set the scene for another conquest by other
social groups, newer and more cohesive, that once more will be emerging out
of the badawa.
In this third phase, the civilization expressed by the social group enters into
senility — a debilitating condition where the once-strong cohesion comes
apart and the pristine virtues are lost — thus paving the way for emergent
groups to sweep in, prodded by the poverty of the badawa and eager to estab-
lish a place for themselves in the comfort and security of the hadara.
However, history will repeat itself once more along the same lines, because
the nascent power — having found strength and common cause in the very
privations from which it emerged, and prompted by that same condition to

seek power and comfort — will itself lose its compass in its own asabiyya (the
true engine of Khaldunian history) once that objective is achieved. Hence,
precisely in virtue of its acquired amenity, the group in power will slide into a
corruptive process destined to take it down, causing it, in turn, to succumb to a
new group.
In this way, even though the asabiyya, as has been commented upon, is so
impalpable as to almost appear ‘metaphysical’,40 in its cyclical growing and
fracturing — a necessary condition for the wellbeing of society as a whole —
it acts as the main engine of historical change.
Perhaps the insight that led Ibn Khaldun to identify this dynamic came to
him, or may have been reinforced in him, by the Quran, and in particular by
Surah 8 (Al-anfal: The Spoils of War), which at verse 46 says: ‘And obey
Allah and His Messenger, and do not dispute and [thus] lose courage and
[then] your strength would depart; and be patient. Indeed, Allah is with the
patient.’41
Asabiyya is the heart of society’s life: it makes no sense, for Ibn Khaldun,
to speak of individuals as such. Indeed, from the very first pages of the
Muqaddimah, individuals are described as beings who necessarily have to
become political if they are to survive, flourish and realize their cultural
potential — and these are features that can emerge only in associative life.
Accordingly, as we have seen, the key element in sustaining the moral and
material wellbeing of a society lies in its cohesion, or solidarity — the very ele-
ment which, mutatis mutandis, enables the group to protect itself against the
aggression of the outside world, and hence to survive in history. Conversely,
when asabiyya is no longer ascendant, it becomes corrupted — concurrently
39
Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, II, p. 277.
40
Ibrahim Kalin, ‘Ibn Khaldun Has a Message for Us’, Daily Sabah Columns, 10
December 2016.
41 The Quran, Saheeh International.
with the achievement of a peaceful, culturally urban society — and it thereby

robs citizens of their ‘fortitude’ and pride from within, weakening them just as
they are losing that sense of cohesion that had enabled them to advance as a
civilization proper.
The only element that, in this cyclical pattern of advances and retreats, sug-
gests the possibility of identifying in history a stream of continuous linear
progress is, in Khaldunian theory, culture.
That is because culture does not necessarily wither away along with the
human groups that have caused it to flourish, but can be passed on to the next
generation. Indeed this is what normally happens, according to a ‘mimetic’
principle whereby the more backward cultures, coming out of the subsistence
world of the badawa and seeking the power gained by the civilizations that
have managed to move into and take over the hadara, will imitate what the
latter in that process have established as the dominant or winning model.42

Among the sciences that may be able to thrive between the end of the dying
cycle and the beginning of the next will also be Ibn Khaldun’s own ‘new sci-
ence’, or at least this is what he can be assumed to hopefully expect. His com-
posite ‘multilayered’ science, rational and empirical, in fact has been devised
expressly in order to grasp the ‘deep sense’43 of social dynamics, their educa-
tive function and the instructive lesson (‘ibar) that history imparts from the
past, and which can now be interpreted in a new way.
Thanks to the survival of culture, subsequent cycles of civilization will
almost never start anew from scratch. In fact, it is always possible, in this theory,
to start afresh a new cycle from a ‘higher’ level, and it is the differential ele-
ment consisting in the transmissibility of culture that affords this possibility.
Now, precisely in virtue of this element, the Khaldunian scheme of history
should not be construed as a perfect circle, where the course of events is ines-
capably locked in a loop into the sameness of its own repetition (as deplored
by various exegetes who have descried in it an alleged Khaldunian pessi-
mism). Such a model of the anacyclosis of history, incidentally, was not new,
but had been previously envisioned in Plato’s Republic,44 in the forty books of
Polybius’ Histories,45 and even before that in some of the Bible’s Wisdom
Books, most notably in Kohelet.
Rather, the Khaldunian scheme of history should be described as spiralling
upward, in a mixed model, at once cyclical and directional, that, unlike the
closed loop model, significantly makes it possible, for those who are instructed
on the ‘inner meaning of history’ (even though the timescale on which to
reason in this way about history may be long), to recognize with keener
42Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, I, p. 58.
43Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, Preface.
44 Plato, Republic, chs. VIII and IX.
45 Polybius, The Histories, trans. W.R. Paton, Loeb Classical Library (6 vols.,
Cambridge MA, 2010–12).
64 A. VERZA
awareness the situations from the past, so as to move forward in facing the
events of the present, advancing to a higher level.
Indeed, whereas the looping circle shuts out any movement other than that
of the past endlessly and ineluctably repeating itself in the manner suggested
in Kohelet — in keeping with the old saying, there is nothing new under the
sun: ein chadash tachat hashemesh — the ‘spiraliform’ model opens the pos-
sibility for each new iteration to build on the cultural legacy of the previous
one, offering a vantage point from which to observe and supersede the past by
learning from its ‘instructive examples’ (the lessons from the past that give
Khaldun’s Muqaddimah its name and meaning), thus moving into the new
cycle with the benefit of the knowledge and understanding gained from an
awareness of what has gone on before.
While it is true, then, that in the Khaldunian scheme the curve drawn by the tra-
jectory of history will continue to force a rotation spin modelled on that of the
past, and will continue to do so even in the present, when the same curve reaches
a new and higher plane, it will have the possibility to adjust its course and evolve.
The possibility to effect this corrective adjustment and evolution will depend
precisely on our historical consciousness, and hence ultimately on a conscious-
ness handed down from our historical past — and it is with this goal in mind that
Ibn Khaldun changes the analyses of history from a fabled chronicle —
hagiographic, rhythmically predefined according to the rigidified dictates of
the traditional taqlid, designed to exalt the sovereigns and dynasties of the day
(this is a literary form and not a science) — to his new science, rescued from the
many fallacies that over time have come to undermine the validity of history,46
and offered as a rational interpretation of the past47 and a close observation of
the present, coupled with a cautious educative projection onto the future.
V
Destiny and Rationality
On a first level, the project just described may be understood as answering
to a need for a scientificity and objectivity — revolutionary at the time —
regarded as inherently valuable.
What I will claim here, however, is that Ibn Khaldun’s decision to forge his
impressive reformulation of the grand scheme of history, as he sets out to do
in his Muqaddimah — and even more importantly, his project to frame the
ongoing political change within the template of a rational sort of ‘law’ that,
like the predetermined laws of physics, makes it possible to explain the
46 His corrective intent is also evidenced by the fact that Ibn Khaldun analytically
lists these fallacies at the beginning of his work.
47 Indeed, as Laroui argues, unlike what is rigidly normative and extracts its own
meaning from itself, historical explanation, or khabar, requires instead a correspon-
dence with the external event to be explained, and must accordingly be verified.
Abdallah Laroui, Islam et l’histoire (Paris, 1999), p. 144 n.11.
cyclical dynamic governing the birth, flourishing and fall of dynasties and
civilizations — must have been pushed, on the one side, by a deeper genera-
tive need, connected to the urgency dictated by the critical instability of his
time, and pulled, on the other, by the goal of shaping the course of things to
come in the concrete.
In other words, the huge and innovative effort made in the Muqaddimah
must have sprung in direct response to a deeply felt need arising out of history
specifically as it was unfolding before Ibn Khaldun’s eyes — a need directly
tied to the fast-paced succession of crises and rebirths he lived through him-
self: that apparently chaotic unravelling of events, indeed, needed to be made
intelligible, so that at least some measure of control could be exercised over it.
Hence it was, at first, the urge to make somehow intelligible the ubiquitous
turmoil and ‘frenzied’ instability of his time, I submit, that prompted him to
embark on this enterprise.

Ibn Khaldun must have been driven by a need to identify an intrinsic ration-
ality of history, because such a rationality, at least enabling us to map out the
course of historical events within a predictive framework, would have been
the only, somehow reassuring, possible way to face the ongoing crisis of his
world. This must have been the spring that impelled him to set out his model
of historical inquiry — a model so ahead of its time and so remarkable in its
ability to anticipate the canons developed much later in other centuries, at
other places,48 that for a long time it had to exist in isolation.
But as noted, Ibn Khaldun was a man of both thought and action, and these
two spheres of his life cannot be separated: this much can be appreciated from
his autobiography, but it is also a feature of his thought and of the science to
which he devoted himself. Indeed, it is not difficult to grasp the practical and
political import of his thought in shaping the ‘spiraliform’ structure within
which to frame the development of society and culture. For what Ibn Khaldun
gives us is a conceptual and interpretive toolkit through which a history so
complex as the changing forms of an entire civilization can be made intelligi-
ble and meaningful, in light of the rational causality it seems subject to.
This rationalization is what makes it possible to steer political action with
greater insight than might otherwise be possible, thereby indirectly urging
caution in steering society — an attitude that proved all the more necessary in
Ibn Khaldun’s own time, in light of the deep changes that were afoot.
48 Ibn Khaldun’s historical method has even been likened to Marc Bloch and Lucien
Febvre’s Annales School. In fact Marc Bloch had been a pupil of Émile Durkheim, a
sociologist who was very well acquainted with Ibn Khaldun’s thought. Perhaps this
explains why even Bloch’s history was a history of societies, organized groups whose
development depends crucially on a sense of social cohesion; even Bloch believed in the
explanatory power of the social structure in shaping history by defining its laws, vocabu-
lary and human activities; and even Bloch, like Durkheim and Ibn Khaldun, saw a corre-
lation between an increasing population density and economic development and a
greater division of labour. See Dale, The Orange Trees of Marrakesh, pp. 284–7.
66 A. VERZA
So, while Ibn Khaldun understood it to be critically important to search for

and establish historical truth, at the same time he was also entrusting history
so conceived with an important practical task: to help us understand the truth
underneath the changes of human fate that dynamically characterize social
history, with the goal of making a political use of that awareness.
Indeed, while a linear conception of time would have made it possible to
think of it without accounting ourselves responsible for the future course of
events — allowing us to think of it as being beyond our ken, and therefore
unpredictable — and a circular conception stuck in the ouroboros of an eter-
nal return would have wound up making pointless our endeavour to control
and change our own destiny, the Khaldunian spiral, as we have seen, suggests,
on the contrary, that we can be wiser and more cognizant in seizing the oppor-
tunities and averting the dangers that come our way in the present moment.
These are the same dangers and opportunities we have seen in the past, and
which will continue to crop up in the future, and we will be able to see this pre-
cisely because we can reason from a clear vision — handed down culturally
from the past — of history and its turns.
Inevitably, then, the possibility to anticipate the direction of social develop-
ment, starting from objective data of reality against the backdrop of a cycli-
cal — and hence intelligible — scheme, will provide a push to channel and
regulate the key practical and normative actions and decisions (taken in
spheres of social life as politics and the economy itself)49 by fitting them into
an iterative scheme that makes them intelligible by charging today’s action
with a causative value with respect to future events.
Then, too, since it is social cohesion, in the form of the asabiyya, that Ibn
Khaldun identifies as the keystone on which rests the survival of civilization
(anticipating the analyses that jurists and philosophers like Léon Duguit
would undertake much later in Europe),50 the whole philosophico-historico-
sociological architecture he designed appears to suggest, especially to those
in positions of power, that this is precisely the basis on which to steer social
policy. Society, in other words, can thrive only so long as it rests on moral,
legal and political principles predicated on the need to constantly maximize
the intensity and duration of its own cohesion, so as to counteract the natural
entropy tending to break it up, an inherently destructive force that seems
always to be looming on the horizon.
49 As various commentators working in the Marxist tradition have admirably

observed, Ibn Khaldun has been perceptive in his analysis of the way in which even eco-
nomic forces contribute to shaping individual attitudes and social relations. A Marxist
interpretation of Khaldun can be found in Lacoste.
50 For Leòn Duguit — a jurist who drew much inspiration from the sociology devel-
oped by Durkheim, who in turn was among the first to revive Khaldun — it is the paradig-
matic function of natural law ultimately to foster solidarity. See, in particular, the first
chapter of his 1901 L’État, le droit objectif et la loi positive (Paris, 2003).
In reality we have even more ancient examples in which history has been
read ‘admonishingly’ as a motley series of events tied together by a design,
that is, by a through-line to be found in the annihilating power of corruption
and in the causal link that obtains between the loss of collective moral values
(exemplified in individualism, the loss of moral cohesion, the unleashing and
diversification of desires) and political downfall and the loss of grace. Con-
sider the books of the Biblical prophets, for example Jeremiah, Isaiah, Jonah
and Zechariah, dating from the eighth to the fourth century BC (and going
back even further is the work of the oral prophets, who did not leave behind
any written scripture, such as Samuel, Nathan, Elijah and Elisha), in which
the loss of coherence in collective values and the breakup of social solidarity
(corruption, a lack of solidarity with orphans and widows, mutual iniquities)
are connected with a ‘rightful’ salvific decadence as well as with political
decadence (as when a people is conquered by another, a case in point being

the events related in Jeremiah 1:15–16).

This foresight should not come as a surprise, since Biblical culture provides
one of the basic sources on which the Quran draws — however unsystemati-
cally — for its narrative, and it is through such referencing that this culture
constantly, if unmethodically, resurfaces from the deep undercurrents of
Islamic culture: it would therefore not be far-fetched to think that these
themes could also have influenced Ibn Khaldun, all the more so in that he
makes explicit reference to the prophetic books (as in Muqaddimah, III,
para. 31), demonstrating that he is quite conversant with them.51
There is, then, a practical consequence that follows from this rationalizing
rereading of history that does away with the alibi of fatalism and in its place
brings in the idea of a historical and political responsibility that we must take
on in the long run. Which is to say that once we are trained to see the dynamics
of this rationalized history, we implicitly commit ourselves to a consequence
that, previously, the conception of history as an unpredictable flow of events
did not impose: we commit ourselves to the task of pondering in a scientific
way the decisions that will shape the course of history.
With the foresight gained by a knowledge of the ‘deep sense’ of history
inevitably comes a sense of responsibility. There is something of the tragic here,
an element through which his conception, like the earlier ‘pathei mathos’ of
the ancient Greek tragedies, winds up applying a transformative force to the
historical account itself, as this, instead of being conceived as a self-enclosed
event, paratactically set next to others, is made an element in a conceptually
understandable temporal syntax rationally linking a chain of events, making it
51 What is more, some scholars believe that he may also have been aware of the inter-
pretations that a century earlier Maimonides in his Guide for the Perplexed offered of
the prophetic books. See Salomon Pines, ‘Ibn Khaldun and Maimonides: A Compari-
son between Two Texts’, Studia Islamica, 32 (1970), pp. 265–74.
68 A. VERZA
intrinsically possible to assess the wisdom and advisability of political and

legal action.
Inherent in a conception that sets out to rationalize the dynamics of social
history, then, is not only a titanic effort to find a way out of the chaos of politi-
cal life in a period of particularly intense turmoil, but also an appeal to an
assumption of political responsibility. It is perhaps not too much ventured to
speculate that this hard legacy entrusted by Ibn Khaldun’s history to political
leaders, might have been an important contributing factor explaining why, for
such a long time, this conception failed to find favour with the very rulers of
North Africa to whom Ibn Khaldun had devoted and entrusted his ‘totally
new’ science.
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FROM A NEW VISION OF HISTORY TO AN

EARLY SOCIOLOGY OF POWER AND CIVILIZATION

1 CIRSFID — Università di Bologna, via Galliera 3, 40121 Bologna, Italy. Email:

4The Muqaddimah, trans. Rosenthal, Introduction, I, p. 64.

11 At several places in the Muqaddimah, as well as in his autobiography, Ibn Khaldun

13 Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, Introduction.

endeavour to rationalize culture which in the twelfth century would be devel-

the lens of a scientific method, at bottom sociological, grounded in empirical

Society, as conceived by Ibn Khaldun, reveals itself to be a complex system

Ibn Khaldun writes, to the contrary:

18 Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, I, p. 7.

underscoring the limits of the former as nonmetaphysical, without bringing

two-dimensional figures of Egyptian, Byzantine and early European art to the

25 See, for example, Abdelghani Megherbi, La pensée sociologique d’Ibn Khaldoun

observations on the dynamics governing the interrelations among concrete

Specifically, time is understood to carry with it that which has transpired in

Having built up ‘fortitude’ and cohesion — a concept referred to as

becomes compulsive;39 and above all a progressive, albeit predictable, detach-

privations from which it emerged, and prompted by that same condition to

with the achievement of a peaceful, culturally urban society — and it thereby

latter in that process have established as the dominant or winning model.42

embark on this enterprise.

So, while Ibn Khaldun understood it to be critically important to search for

49 As various commentators working in the Marxist tradition have admirably

decadence (as when a people is conquered by another, a case in point being

the events related in Jeremiah 1:15–16).

intrinsically possible to assess the wisdom and advisability of political and

Annalisa Verza UNIVERSITÀ DI BOLOGNA

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