Overture of History

The Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun

Arnold Toynbee, one of the most distinguished modern historians, called Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah (“Introduction to History”) “undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place.” Yet neither the Muqaddimah, nor the universal history that followed it, made any impact on European scholarship until the 19th century, when western scholars suddenly discovered that Ibn Khaldun had anticipated many of their theories of social and historical development by nearly 500 years.

What Ibn Khaldun did was to recognize, before anyone else, that history was “more than information about political events, dynasties and occurrences of the remote past, elegantly presented and spiced with proverbs.” History, he wrote, was a “new science” that should uncover an “inner meaning” and find “the causes and origins of existing things and deep knowledge of the how and why of events.”

To find this inner meaning, Ibn Khaldun developed a rational, analytical approach in which he discarded clichés and conventional ideas and rejected superstition and unsupported data. Too often, he commented, history had been written without a critical attitude, without thorough research, without knowledge of politics, custom, civilization and social organization. Figures were exaggerated – armies, revenues, wealth – and stories were accepted without any examination of their probability, or with errors of interpretation.

As one example, Ibn Khaldun pointed to the Arabian Nights tale about the famous Caliph al-Ma’mun that had been repeated in many histories. “One night, on his rambles through the streets of Baghdad” Ibn Khaldun wrote, “al-Ma’mun is said to have come upon a basket that was being let down from one of the roofs by means of pulleys and hoisted cords of silk thread. He seated himself in the basket and grabbed the pulley, which started moving. He was then taken up in to a chamber of extraordinary magnificence. Then a woman of uncommonly seductive beauty is said to have come out from behind the curtains. She greeted al-Ma’mun and invited him to keep her company. He drank wine with her the whole night long. In the morning he returned to his companions… He had fallen so much in love with the woman that he asked her father for her hand.”

To Ibn Khaldun this tale was utterly unacceptable as history. “How does all this accord with al-Ma’mun’s well-known piety and learning, his emulation of the life of his forefathers…? How could it be correct that he would act like one of those wicked scoundrels who muse themselves by rambling about at night, entering strange houses in the dark, and engaging in nocturnal trysts…? And how does that story fit with the position and noble character of al-Hasan ibn Sahl’s daughter, and with the firm morality and chastity that reigned in her father’s house …?” Such stories were always cropping up in the works of the old chroniclers, he said, adding that the true historian must distinguish silver and gold from dross and base metals.

Furthermore, Ibn Khaldun wrote, historians must be aware that conditions and customs do not remain constant. Earlier, for example, al-Mas’udi, one of the great historians of Islam, had described the conditions of the world, the sects and customs, the countries and the dynasties—and his work had become a basic reference for historians. But in the intervening centuries the face of the earth had changed. Populations had shifted. Climatic conditions had altered. The Black Death had swept the inhabited world, weakening tribes and dynasties, laying waste cities, emptying villages. In sum, the world had changed, and in his new history of it Ibn Khaldun traced the extent and searched for an explanation of these changes.

History, Ibn Khaldun explained, was information about human social organization. Man was distinguished from other animals by his sciences and crafts; by his need for restraining influence and authority; by his economic activities; and by civilization—in other words, by his need to live in villages and cities with other human beings “for the comforts and companionship and for the satisfaction of human needs, as a result of the natural disposition of human beings toward cooperation in order to be able to make a living.” The ability to think, and therefore cooperate, was given to human beings to compensate for their lack of the fangs, claws, horns, thick hides and powerful muscles that protected the animals.

Human social organization, he went on, was necessary to provide food, shelter and clothing, as well as defense against other animals and against men own natural aggressiveness. And once civilization had been achieved, the authority of a ruler also became necessary as a restraint against injustice and aggression.

According to Ibn Khaldun’s theory of history, social organization developed in two fundamentally different environments: desert, or Bedouin, and town, or sedentary. In the first setting, rural people—sometimes nomads, sometimes villagers far from the great population centers—lived a simple existence, restricting themselves to the bare necessities. They were governed by their natural leaders and bound together by ‘Asabiyah group solidarity stemming from blood ties and family traditions—a term traditionally used to describe narrow bias, clannishness and atavism, but used by Ibn Khaldun in a positive sense.

From this reservoir of civilization, Ibn Khaldun explained, sedentary society developed. As population increased and created a surplus of labor, crafts and sciences developed and, in turn, provided better and more varied food, more comfortable houses, more elaborate clothes and other luxuries. As population increased, so did ‘Asabiyah, and with it the Mulk, the worldly or practical rule of a leader; he at first was merely the Ra’is, or chief, but his simple political organization anticipated the state proper.

Social organization, Ibn Khaldun believed, arose from this beginning and followed a predictable cycle in which, over the generations, dynasties rose and fell. Nonetheless, civilization’s better qualities were preserved because succeeding generations tended to maintain the civilized customs of the past. In sum, political and cultural life move in never-ending circles of decline and re-birth, but civilization remains. The only occasions when the cyclical movement is interrupted are when certain turning points in history occur; in his own era these were the Black Death and the Mongol invasions.

To this cyclical movement of states and dynasties Ibn Khaldun admitted but one exception: the rule of the first four caliphs of Islam, the successors of Muhammad the Prophet. To Ibn Khaldun the formative period of Islam, pure and unworldly was the ideal state.

Many of Ibn Khaldun’s concepts and attitudes, in fact, had their sources in Islamic theology and philosophy. Yet he was a profoundly original thinker, as well—in many ways the first modern historian. In addition to being the first to take an analytical view of human society, he was the first to perceive the importance of economics in political history, to draw distinctions between the impact of rural and urban life and to stress the role of the city in the emergence of civilization and of the state. His other striking contribution was the idea of ‘asabiyah group solidarity—as the driving force of political action.

The Muqaddimah is the best-known part of Ibn Khaldun’s universal history, but the volumes that followed this introduction were great accomplishments in themselves. The first four dealt with the pre-Islamic world and with Arabia and eastern Islam; the last two were devoted to the history of the Berbers and the Muslim dynasties of northwest Africa—Maghrib—and concluded with Ibn Khaldun’s own autobiography. The chapters on the history of the Maghrib—much of which Ibn Khaldun himself had witnessed—is, even today, the most important sources of information about northwest Africa of that era.