ابن خلدون : سيرة فكرية

by Robert Irwin, عبد الله فجير العمري (ترجمة)

The definitive account of the life and thought of the medieval Arab genius who wrote the Muqaddima

Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) is generally regarded as the greatest intellectual ever to have appeared in the Arab world--a genius who ranks as one of the world's great minds. Yet the author of the Muqaddima, the most important study of history ever produced in the Islamic world, is not as well known as he should be, and his ideas are widely misunderstood. In this groundbreaking intellectual biography, Robert Irwin provides an engaging and authoritative account of Ibn Khaldun's extraordinary life, times, writings, and ideas.

Irwin tells how Ibn Khaldun, who lived in a world decimated by the Black Death, held a long series of posts in the tumultuous Islamic courts of North Africa and Muslim Spain, becoming a major political player as well as a teacher and writer. Closely examining the Muqaddima, a startlingly original analysis of the laws of history, and drawing on many other contemporary sources, Irwin shows how Ibn Khaldun's life and thought fit into historical and intellectual context, including medieval Islamic theology, philosophy, politics, literature, economics, law, and tribal life. Because Ibn Khaldun's ideas often seem to anticipate by centuries developments in many fields, he has often been depicted as more of a modern man than a medieval one, and Irwin's account of such misreadings provides new insights about the history of Orientalism.

In contrast, Irwin presents an Ibn Khaldun who was a creature of his time--a devout Sufi mystic who was obsessed with the occult and futurology and who lived in an often-strange world quite different from our own.

Genres: History, Biography, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Islam, Middle East, Sociology

240 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2022

About the author

Robert Graham Irwin was a British historian, novelist, and writer on Arabic literature.

Reviews

[Charles Haywood · Rating 3 out of 5]

I generally liked this book, by the erudite Orientalist Robert Irwin, but I am not sure why it exists. It is too academic to be popular, and too popular to be academic. I learned something about the famous medieval Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun, but I would have been lost if I did not already know much about Ibn Khaldun and medieval Islam generally. So this is not a reference work, or even a normal biography. Really, it’s a seminar in print, discussing a grab-bag of topics about Ibn Khaldun, valuable mostly as an add-on if you are particularly interested in medieval Islam or the history of North Africa.

If a core premise can be found in this book, it is that Ibn Khaldun was a fascinating man, but not at all an early modern man, as he is often portrayed. He did not invent the Laffer Curve, as has been claimed, most famously by Ronald Reagan. He was a historian, of original mold, but he was not an economist or sociologist in any modern meaning of the term. Rather, he was that medieval type common both in East and West—the educated man seeking patronage employment by powerful men (Irwin cleverly calls him “a kind of bureaucratic condottiere”), and tailoring both his writings and their content to that goal. Ibn Khaldun was a man of his time, forgotten by all immediately after his time, and brought back to life by curious Westerners in the early modern period, and by Muslim nations in need of heroes in the later modern period.

He wrote a massive universal history of North Africa, the Book of Lessons (Kitab al-‘Ibar), but nobody reads that, then or now. He is remembered today instead for the lengthy (three volumes) introduction to that work, the Muqaddimah, which strives to be a theoretical analysis of history. For Irwin, the Muqaddimah is a an original and fascinating look into how men of the past thought. It is not, at least to the degree sometimes claimed, a modern book, but it is still valuable to moderns.

Irwin intertwines facts about Ibn Khaldun’s career with different aspects of his intellectual life. His work, over the seventy-four years of his life, largely consisted of moving around North Africa serving different masters, with occasional pauses to sit still in an isolated place and write. Irwin revolves his core analysis of Ibn Khaldun around a tale from The Thousand and One Nights, “The City of Brass,” an illustration of which graces the cover of this book. The story tells of an Umayyad’s caliph’s desire to find a jar, sealed by Solomon, containing a jinn. The caliph sends the governor of North Africa to scour the landscape for it, which he does, but not before many adventures in ruined cities and dead lands. Those ruined cities, which were in fact scattered all over North Africa, were proof, to Ibn Khaldun, of the continual decay of things. They were a message to the present. Ibn Khaldun did not believe in the future progress or improvement of Man. Quite the contrary. He wrote the Muqaddimah as both analysis and warning to devout Muslims, of how the future would be like the past, cyclical and with the constant throwing-down of the great, at least until the end of Time, which was likely near.

No doubt exacerbating his gloom about Muslim decline, Ibn Khaldun wrote as Europe was very much on the rise, and this was apparent to him. “He noted how Maghribi rulers now preferred to employ European mercenaries because of their superiority in fighting in formation. The Christian merchants who visited the Maghreb seemed to be extraordinarily wealthy.” Christians were “more versed in the crafts” and had superseded the Muslims in sea power. That the Black Death had recently ravaged the Middle East (Ibn Khaldun was born in 1332) no doubt further increasing his feeling of gloom, coloring the Muqaddimah’s picture of inevitable decay.

Ibn Khaldun therefore developed a theory that, as Irwin points out, inverted the Chinese theory of cyclical political systems (and also contradicts Edward Gibbon’s theses about Rome, in whose mind barbarism and religion were the downfall of the Empire). In Ibn Khaldun’s mind, the highest and best moral and mental attitude was exemplified by desert nomads, in particular their group solidarity, or ‘asabiyaa, and their devotion to a pure form of Islam. The peak of civilization was reached when they invaded and conquered cities, establishing themselves as the new elite of a civilization. Inevitably, their descendants grew wealthy and therefore soft, weak, and irreligious, so in the fourth generation, a new set of nomads would overwhelm the settled areas, beginning the cycle again.

Irwin thinks this is dubious history even as applied to North Africa, much less broader areas, but it is the core of the Muqaddimah. Irwin is also interested in Ibn Khaldun’s other intellectual pre-occupations, which are many. He dabbled in physical science, although like early European inquirers he blended science with astrology and alchemy. He also studied what today would be called social science, though his presentation of that is mostly as a moral scold, in a traditional Muslim vein. (Ibn Khaldun was an adherent of the rigid Maliki madhhab.) Nonetheless, Irwin gives Ibn Khaldun full credit for his “readiness to analyze, theorize, and produce generalizations based on the evidence,” comparing him to the contemporary French chronicler of the Hundred Years War, Jean Froissart, who “gave no thought to the underlying cause of the events.”

Still, we should not conclude that Ibn Khaldun was a modern man; his interests “give his writing the perhaps delusive appearance of modernity.” Contrary to later legend, Ibn Khaldun was in no way a philosopher, though his “capacity to reason abstractly and to generalize about social and historical phenomena” seemed to point in that direction. He was an Ash’arite occasionalist, uncomfortable with scientific causality, and what works of Aristotle he refers to were not actually works of Aristotle. Of course, in medieval Islam being a philosopher was dangerous; several rivals of Ibn Khaldun, other scholar-bureaucrats, were executed for heresy, although at this remove it’s hard to tell if that was a pretext and they merely lost some power struggle at the court they served. But there is no evidence that Ibn Khaldun was a frustrated philosopher.

Whatever the ups and downs, and there were many, he led an interesting life. For example, in 1400, the Mongol conqueror Tamerlane invaded northern Syria, and threatened Damascus. Ibn Khaldun, fascinated by what this said for his own thesis of nomadic “improvement” of decadent societies, accompanied the Mamluk sultan to defend Damascus, and stayed when the sultan decamped back to Cairo. Tamerlane, who like many conquerors enjoyed the company of scholars, especially those who flattered him, allowed Ibn Khaldun to spend a month with him. Fortunately for Ibn Khaldun, he was given leave to return to Cairo (falsely promising he would come back to Damascus), before Tamerlane sacked the city, as usual killing or enslaving almost all the inhabitants. All this is captivating history, and shows Ibn Khaldun as multidimensional, even if, as Irwin notes, we know little about his personal life.

Other topics Irwin briefly talks about, in a fairly scattered fashion, are whether Ibn Khaldun was a Sufi (probably yes, he concludes); sorcery and the occult; eschatology; an obscure divination machine, the low social status of schoolteachers; poetry; rote learning; and oral vs. written transmission of history. At greater length Irwin discusses Ibn Khaldun’s thoughts on economics, including that “he was original and almost unique among medieval Arab writers in” writing on economics. Most of Ibn Khaldun’s thoughts on economics are also through a moral lens, but he did anticipate the labor theory of value and offered insights into factors affecting profitability. On the other hand, his famous complaint than in its waning days a regime increases tax rates isn’t a foretaste of the Laffer Curve; it’s part of Ibn Khaldun’s basic pessimism that everything, including productivity, inevitably declines. For him, higher taxes were due to demands for more money, to spend on luxuries, in a time of declining income, not a misguided attempt to raise more money from the same level of productivity.

Irwin concludes with an analysis of modern usages of Ibn Khaldun, starting with French colonialists and Orientalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who resurrected Ibn Khaldun from endless years of being totally forgotten. Their purpose was both academic and practical; they hoped, or some of them hoped, to gain insights into their rule in North Africa. German Orientalists originated the concept of Ibn Khaldun as a proto-modern, a precursor of Hegel and Comte. In the English-speaking world, Arnold Toynbee in the twentieth century popularized Ibn Khaldun as a shining light in a dark time, casting him as part of a line of “thinkers who were ready to make generalizations,” from Thucydides to H. G. Wells. Irwin also discusses in detail modern English translations of the Muqaddimah, pro and con, plus and minus. His basic point for all these moderns is that “many who have studied Ibn Khaldun . . . [have] created an Ibn Khaldun in [their] own image.” True, no doubt, but all this is inside baseball, really of very limited interest to the general reader, even one with an interest in medieval Islam.

Many have wondered why Ibn Khaldun wrote his massive books, since nobody asked him to and his peripatetic ways meant that his books never received a receptive audience. Irwin says, “I suspect that Ibn Khaldun’s ideal destination audience was himself and that he wrote to clear his head of all those ideas and insights that boiled and seethed within it.” I think this makes a great degree of sense; some people are just driven to write, and it seems like Ibn Khaldun was one of those. That doesn’t mean I’ll go read the Muqaddimah myself, or even an abridged version, since the return on investment seems low. But that should not detract from the accomplishments of an interesting polymath in an interesting time. I suspect, though, that for the casual reader, there are better summaries of Ibn Khaldun than this book.

[Murtaza · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ibn Khaldun was not a historian or philosopher in the way that we think of such terms today. While he charted the rise and fall of dynasties and attempted to explain the mechanics of cyclical history, his histories were fundamentally moralistic in nature. In his view, the main reason to study the past was to extract moral lessons from it which can be used to guide human beings towards the path of salvation. Such an understanding of history and the natural world is the basis of the traditional Islamic understanding of empirical study in general. Studying worldly things is done with the ultimate goal of guiding moral behavior, rather than making life easier for its own sake. Logic and rationality are tools that have their place, but they are not ends in themselves and are ultimately subordinated to worship and submission to a transcendent order, within which mankind must understand its place.

Rather than positing Ibn Khaldun as a proto-Marx or Montesquieu, in this book Robert Irwin refreshingly manages to take him on his own terms as someone whose worldview was very different from later modern thinkers. Ibn Khaldun was a stern religious conservative, a Sufi who believed in metaphysical causes and explanations for phenomena, and someone who studied and practiced what we might today refer to as “occult sciences,” along with his empirical works. He studied dream interpretation, believed in spirits and divination and subordinated his empirical study of societies to its place within the divine order. In other words, he thought about the world quite differently than a modern sociologist. Much of what Ibn Khaldun wrote about morality and the rise and fall of dynasties is of timeless value, while much else seems strange and archaic to us as at least at the present moment.

Ibn Khaldun lived in North Africa during the time of the Black Death, growing up around the ruins of the departed Carthaginian and Roman empires. During his lifetime the great Arab empires had seemingly been eclipsed by Turks and Berbers. Ibn Khaldun’s understanding of the world was thus deeply pessimistic, as most cyclical histories tend to be. Growing up around ruins tends to focus the mind on the ultimately futile and transient nature of all worldly endeavor. As such it’s hard to see how Ibn Khaldun can be characterized as the progenitor of later Enlightenment thinkers, with their belief in the ultimate perfectibility of mankind and the social order.

While this is not a biography in a straightforward sense, it was fascinating to read of Ibn Khaldun’s encounters with historical figures such as Tamerlane, whom he seems to have admired as a virile barbarian conqueror. Ibn Khaldun had a hard life by our standards, his wife and children dying in a shipwreck and he himself being the target of much intellectual sniping and jealousy from his peers. It’s not clear how much this fazed him however, since according to the norms of the time none of his writings were very self-revelatory or reflective of his personal feelings. By the accounts of others he was an arrogant and haughty man, though in his defense he seemed to have much to be arrogant about.

Its sobering to read of Ibn Khaldun’s study of ancient thinkers like Galen and al-Jahiz, figures that were as ancient to him than he is to us. His study of classical antiquity is even more impressive given how difficult it was to undertake. Like most medieval Islamic thinkers Ibn Khaldun held Aristotle in high regard, but he also seems to have consumed some works by him that were actually written by other impostors. Likewise, despite his skepticism towards the mystical philosopher Ibn Arabi, he appears to have read some works falsely attributed to him. This was a pre-modern version of “fake news” that appears to have been common at the time. It reminds me of the (real) Aristotle’s famous quote, “Great men may make great mistakes.”

The book makes a powerful point that the modern renaissance of interest in Ibn Khaldun in the Muslim world was largely made possible by European Orientalist study of him. The Arabs forgot Ibn Khaldun not long after his death. He was later discovered with interest by the Ottoman Turks and again by the Europeans. In the modern period Jamaladdin al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh popularized his works for the Arab peoples once more, and today he is seen as a national hero in the modern states of North Africa.

While Irwin sometimes meanders off in his writing, I quite appreciated the general tone of humility in this work. He admits what he doesn’t know and tries to avoid projecting his own outlook onto the medieval Muslim Ibn Khaldun, as many other scholars have done. As L.P. Hartley, once wrote “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Ibn Khaldun was certainly of the past in his thinking and outlook on the world. That is perhaps what makes him most interesting today after all.

[Shadin Pranto · Rating 4 out of 5]

জীবনীগ্রন্থ রচনা করা সহজসাধ্য নয়৷ কারণ একজন মানুষের অনেকগুলো দিক থাকে। সবগুলো সমানভাবে বিচার করে কোনো সিদ্ধান্তে পৌঁছাতে বিদ্যা-বুদ্ধির যে দৌঁড় থাকা জরুরি তা জীবনী লেখকদের থাকে না। আরও একটি সীমাবদ্ধতা জীবনী রচিয়তাদের গ্রাস করে তা হলো ব্যক্তিগত পছন্দ-অপছন্দ। লেখক নিজের মতাদর্শ মোতাবেক জীবনীগ্রন্থ রচনা করেন, ফলে লেখা হয়ে ওঠে ব্যক্তিপূজা কিংবা ব্যক্তিনিন্দা। এখানেই রবার্ট আরউইনের সাফল্য। খালদুনকে তিনি নানা আঙিক থেকে দেখিয়েছেন। কোন দৃষ্টিকোণ পাঠক গ্রহণ করবেন তা একান্তই পাঠকের নিজস্ব ব্যাপার।

এককথায় চতুর্দশ শতকে জন্ম নেওয়া ইবনে খালদুনকে পরিচয় করিয়ে দেওয়া কষ্টসাধ্য। তিনি রাজনীতিবিদ ছিলেন। জীবনের শেষদিন পর্যন্ত ক্ষমতার কাছাকাছি থাকার জন্য অনেককিছু করেছেন। মনে রাখা ভালো আল মুকাদ্দিমা কোনো একক গ্রন্থ হিসেবে রচিত হয়নি। মূলত একটি ইতিহাসবিষয়ক গ্রন্থের ভূমিকা হলো আল মুকাদ্দিমা। স্মরণযোগ্য মুকাদ্দিমা শব্দের অর্থ গৌরচন্দ্রিকা তথা ভূমিকা। শাসকের আনুকুল্য পেতে তিনি আল মুকাদ্দিমা উৎসর্গ করেছিলেন। উত্তর আফ্রিকা ও মিশরের বিভিন্ন রাজবংশের অধীনে বড়ো বড়ো পদে নিযুক্ত ছিলেন খালদুন। তাই ক্ষমতার মারপ্যাঁচ ভালো বুঝতেন৷ কিন্তু সফল রাজনীতিবিদ তাকে বলা যাবে না।

সফল রাজনীতিবিদ না হলেও সফল শিক্ষক তিনি ছিলেন। শিক্ষার্থী হিসেবে তৎকালীন প্রথাগত মাদরাসায় তিনি পড়েননি। সেই যুগের বিখ্যাত গুণী-জ্ঞানীদের সরাসরি শিক্ষক হিসেবে পেয়েছিলেন খালদুন। যা তার জীবনে রেখেছিল সুদূরপ্রসারী প্রভাব। কিন্তু ক্ষমতার প্রতিযোগিতায় নিজের গুরুর সাথে মতভেদ হয়। মোটকথা, তার জীবনপথ যথেষ্ট বক্র।

ইসমাইলি মাজহাবের এই বিশেষজ্ঞ শুধু ধর্মীয় জ্ঞানে নিজেকে আবদ্ধ রাখেননি। একটি রাজবংশ বা জাতির উত্থান ও সমৃদ্ধি অর্জনের  পথে সবচেয়ে বেশি ভূমিকা রাখে 'আসাবিয়া'। আল মুকাদ্দিমা'য় পাঁচশবারের বেশি 'আসাবিয়া' শব্দটি ব্যবহার করেছেন। আসাবিয়ার ঠিকঠাক ইংরেজি প্রতিশব্দ নেই। অনেকে একে 'Group Solidarity' হিসেবে উল্লেখ করেছেন। কেউ-বা একদল বুদ্ধিজীবিকে আসাবিয়া বলেছেন। মোটকথা, রাষ্ট্র গঠনে একদল মানুষকে চাই, যারা নিবেদিতপ্রাণ। প্রাথমিকপর্যায়ে এই নিবেদিত গোষ্ঠীর কারণে রাষ্ট্রের বিকাশ বর্ধমান হতে থাকে। শাসকের প্রথম প্রজন্মে রাষ্ট্র প্রতিষ্ঠা লাভ করে। এই পয়লা প্রজন্মের মানুষগুলো অনেক দুঃখ-কষ্ট ও ত্যাগ স্বীকারের মাধ্যমে রাষ্ট্র গঠন করে।  দ্বিতীয় প্রজন্ম থেকে আসাবিয়া ও শাসকদের আগেকার ভূমিকায় দেখা যায় না। শাসক নিজেও হতে থাকেন অসচেতন, ভোগ-বিলাস রাষ্ট্রকে পেয়ে বসে। তৃতীয় প্রজন্মে শাসকগণ দুর্নীতিবাজ, লোভী ও আরামপ্রিয় হয়ে পড়েন। ফলে পতন হয়ে যায় অবশ্যম্ভাবী। মোটকথা, ইবনে খালদুন মনে করেন কোনো রাজবংশ বা জাতির পতন তৃতীয় বা চতুর্থ প্রজন্মে নিশ্চিত হয়ে যায়। মানুষের যেমন জন্ম-মৃত্যু থাকে, তেমনি একটি জাতিও এর বাইরে নয়। খালদুনের এই তত্ত্বের অনেক ব্যতিক্রম ইতিহাসে লক্ষণীয়। কিন্তু যেভাবে একটি রাজবংশের উত্থান-পতনকে তিনি ব্যাখা করেছেন তা যথেষ্ট আগ্রহউদ্দীপক।

ব্যক্তিগতভাবে অনাড়ম্বর জীবনযাপনের পক্ষে ছিলেন খালদুন। শুনতে একটু অদ্ভুত হলেও সত্যি খালদুন বিশ্বাস করতেন মানুষের সকল রোগের মূলে অতিভোজন ও গুরুপাক দ্রব্য আহার। উদাহরণ হিসেবে বেদুইনদের কথা তিনি লিখেছেন। এই বেদুইনরা পরিশ্রমী ও অনাড়ম্বর জীবনযাপন করে। তাই তারা সুস্থ-সবল থাকে। কিন্তু তার এই তত্ত্ব মেডিক্যাল সায়েন্স গ্রহণ করে না।

গণতন্ত্রে খালদুনের আস্থা ছিল না। বরং সামরিক একনায়কতন্ত্রের জয়গান গেয়েছেন খালদুন। কেননা সামরিক একনায়কতন্ত্রে তড়িৎ সিদ্ধান্ত নেওয়া যায় ও জাতির সবার মাঝে ঐক্য বিরাজমান থাকে!

খালদুনকে শতভাগ যৌক্তিক মানুষ বলা অতিশয়োক্তি হবে। তিনি কালো জাদুতে বিশ্বাস করতেন। বিভিন্ন অতিলৌকিক ঘটনাকে ইতিহাসের পাতায় তিনি স্থান দিয়েছেন নির্দ্বিধায়। এমনকি ধর্মীয় দিক থেকে কিছুটা কট্টরপন্থাও তার লেখনীতে বিদ্যমান।

খালদুন অনুপম ও অতুলনীয়। তার কোনো পূর্বসূরি নেই, তিনি তৈরি করেননি কোনো উত্তরসূরি। খালদুনকে তার সমকালে লোকে বুঝতে পারেনি। দীর্ঘদিন মুসলমানদের জ্ঞানী-গুণী মহলে খালদুন অনুচ্চারিত ছিলেন। পঞ্চদশ শতকের পর ইউরোপের বিদ্বৎসমাজ তাকে পুনরায় আবিষ্কার করে। এরপর পণ্ডিতগণ নানাভাবে খালদুনের লেখাকে ব্যাখা করেছেন। কেউ-বা পূর্ব আফ্রিকার স্ব-অধিকারের সপক্ষে কথা বলতে খালদুনকে উপজীব্য করেছেন। আবার ফরাসি উপনিবেশপন্থিরা খালদুনের লেখার অনুবাদের মাধ্যমে আরবদের বিরুদ্ধে ক্ষেপিয়ে তুলতে চেয়েছেন পূর্ব আফ্রিকা জনগণকে। অর্থাৎ খালদুনের লেখাকে বোঝা অনেক সহজ। আবার এতটাই কঠিন যে তাকে নির্দিষ্ট ছকে কখনোই ফেলা যায়নি। তাই বিভিন্ন পণ্ডিতের বয়ানে বিভিন্ন রঙে হাজির হয়েছেন খালদুন।

আরউইন সাহেব অনেক পড়াশোনা করে লিখেছেন। একেবারে সহজ ভাষায় লেখা নয়। তাই আমার মতো নাদান পাঠকদের পড়তে একটু ঝক্কি পোহাতে হবে। বাকিসব ঠিকঠাক। 

[Alex Sarll]

An intellectual biography of the the 14th century Arab historian variously claimed as a precursor of Montesquieu, Comte, Spengler and/or Gibbon, not to mention a founding influence on sociology and economics, and an inspiration for Asimov’s Foundation and Herbert’s Dune. But one of Irwin's recurring themes here is that those who come to Ibn Khaldun tend to envision him in their own image, however much fancy footwork that may require. Irwin seems to have resisted that temptation as best he's able: the abiding impression he gives is of a man who was fascinating but also infuriating, and Irwin is careful to emphasise that for all we might have in common with people in the past, there is also much that divides us. On the one hand, a 15th century polemic by one of Ibn Khaldun's followers makes the observation, still sometimes considered satirically viable today, that breathing is pretty much the only thing not taxed. On the other, this is someone who for all his insights, was somehow convinced that it was impossible to die of starvation. Similarly, for all that he anticipates Adam Smith in his observations on the division of labour, Ibn Khaldun was convinced (despite evidence even in his own time and place) that gold and silver were divinely ordained as measures of value, and as such not subject to fluctuation. The speech in which Ronald Reagan (mis)quoted his ideas necessitates the sub-chapter head 'IBN KHALDUN DID NOT INVENT THE LAFFER CURVE', but in some ways you could say their interest in divination and their faith-based economic policies made them bedfellows of a sort. Still, at least Ibn Khaldun understood that there was little real difference between trading and gambling - something which continues to escape a surprising number of people today - even if he did also believe that one of the key arguments against hoarding was that a hoarder “is persecuted by the combined psychic powers of the people whose money he takes away” - a pleasing notion of psionic proto-Marxism which, alas, doesn't seem to be having much impact on the modern 1%.

Still, the real focus is on Ibn Khaldun's theories of history, his search for its interior meaning or 'batin' as against the mere externals or 'zahir'. He was much preoccupied by the notion that settled civilisations fall into decadence, at which point they are conquered by nomadic people possessed of more primitive vigour...who promptly settle down, and the cycle repeats. But unlike the Spenglers or Gibbons of this world, he was broadly in favour of this. It's that same hypocritical hard-on of the soft academic for the rough boys which goes back at least to Plato's grubby fascination with Sparta, and still replays as farce in rock critics' inexplicable pretence that there's anything interesting about the Gallaghers, or the leftwing liberal's defence of the dictatorial strongman just so long as he's foreign. Irwin notes that, having begun with these theories, Ibn Khaldun's work doesn't actually do a great deal to live up to them, and that beyond a few set-pieces his actual histories are fairly standard affairs, not even as colourful as those of Western contemporaries who were already writing in a more literary and rhetorically lively style. But as Irwin also notes, it's debatable whether any one man's attempt at a comprehensive history could live up to Ibn Khaldun's prospectus, even if that man were himself. Still, you can see why – whatever its flaws – it might appeal to the likes of Toynbee in particular, who loved the combination of grand design and mystical faith. Something Hegelian there too, of course, though Hegel and Marx were both considerably more convinced of the possibility of progress than the doom-laden Ibn Khaldun.

Irwin has elsewhere written persuasively of the problems with Said’s broad-brush attacks on orientalism; still, it is noticeable that until the tenth chapter, on the cultural afterlife of Ibn Khaldun and the Muqadimmah, when he quotes secondary sources the writers tend to have European names. It turns out that this is at least in part because for a long time Ibn Khaldun was a classic prophet without honour in his own land, being adopted first by Ottomans and then Europeans before finally making his way back to the Arabic world. And Irwin certainly neither shies away from nor approves of the ways in which his subject was adopted and misrepresented by colonialist projects, who tended to see Ibn Khaldun as sui generis, both supporting and himself a unique exception to an imperially convenient narrative of the perpetual strife and indolence of the Middle East. Although for all their sleights of hand, you can see why colonialists might have been drawn to a thinker who suspected that the great age of the Arabs was over, and the torch of civilisation passing to Europe. Irwin, on the other hand, is always careful to dig back down into Ibn Khaldun’s own milieu and the currents of thought among which he moved – Sufism, Maliki jurisprudence, the Ash'arite occasionalism which held that "What we call cause and effect are nothing more than God's habit.” Yes, he’s obviously fascinated with the earlier era of orientalists – the colourful likes of Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, one of the key figures in bringing Ibn Khaldun to European attention, or the equally brilliantly named Reinhart Dozy, whose bellicosity gives the lie to nominative determinism. But he generally manages a wonderful balancing act of being at once magisterial and humble. “Who was Ibn Khaldun writing for? Well, certainly not for me. Nor, come to that, for the massed academics of the twenty-first century world…I am conscious that I have sometimes failed to understand what Ibn Khaldun is saying”. As when Bertrand Russell occasionally admits to not following some particularly abstruse manoeuvre by the scholastics, there are few things which make me trust an expert so much as a frank admission that even they can’t follow everything. On top of which, he has a lovely turn of phrase, as when Ibn Khaldun meets the conqueror the West tends to know as Tamerlane: “Timur, for his part, was fond of historians (though they seem to have been less fond of him).”

(Netgalley ARC)

[Baher Soliman · Rating 4 out of 5]

هل كان ابن خلدون يتخيّل وهو يقوم بتأليف المقدّمة في عزلته الطوعية في قلعة بني سلامة أنّ هذا الكتاب هو الذي سيقوم بتخليد اسمه لا كتابه العبر ولا اشتغاله بالعمل السياسي في الشمال الأفريقي ومصر ولا انخراطه في البنية الهرمية الإفتائية في مصر! لقد عمِلت المقدَّمة على إعادة التفكير في ابن خلدون بعد أن ظلّ لسنوات عديدة في طي النسيان، وكما يوضح " روبرت إرون" في كتابه الممتع عن ابن خلدون أنّه تم تقديم ابن خلدون للغرب عن طريق سيلفستر دي ساسي و جوزيف فون هارمر حيث عرف الأخير ابن خلدون عبر الأتراك العثمانيين، ومنذ ذلك الوقت بات التفكير في ابن خلدون كمنوذج مبكّر لماركس و مونتيسكو ودوركايم، لكن إرون لا يقع في ذلك الفخ، بل يقوم بالتفكير في ابن خلدون كمثقف فذ مُختلِف عمن جاء بعده من رواد عصر التنوير، لا يعني هذا الاختلاف- كما نفهم من إرون- تميّز ابن خلدون عنهم، بل تميُّزه في عصره وفي طبيعة كتابته التاريخية، بمعنى آخر في طريقة تفكيره في التاريخ التي رغم تفرّدها لا يعزلها إرون عن عقلية ابن خلدون كرجل سني عاش في القرون الوسطى كان ينظر للتاريخ نظرة أخلاقية.

من الصعب تقديم سيرة عن مثقف أو مفكّر من العصر الوسيط بالمعنى الحديث للسيرة، هذا ما يُدركه إرون، فهو يقول أنَّ الكتابة عن الشعور والأحاسيس والحياة الشخصية لم تكن أمورًا مُعتادة عند مشاهير ذلك الزمن، وبالتالي هو هنا يُقدّم فكر ابن خلدون ممزوجًا بسيرته السياسية، فالسياسية تحكّمت بشكل كبير في حياة ابن خلدون، ومن هنا يظهر ابن خلدون بشكل براجماتي في ظل ما سرده إرون وأطلق عليه " لعبة العروش في شمال أفريقيا في القرن الرابع عشر"، حيث التنافس بين القبائل والصراع بين المرينيين والحفصيين، بل والانقلابات العسكرية داخل بيت السلطة الواحد، وكما يقول إرون فإن السرد التاريخي لهذه المرحلة هو حكاية عنيفة وملتوية من الصراع على الحكم والخيانات والنفي والاغتيال.

وهنا يظهر ابن خلدون سريع التقلّب في ولاءه، فيكثر اعتقاله ويكثر انتقاله من تونس إلى المغرب إلى غرناطة ثم مرة أخرى إلى أفريقيا الشمالية وفق تقلبات ومتغيرات السياسية في ذلك العصر قبل أن يحطّ رحاله بالنهاية في مصر المملوكية حيث يحكمها المملوك القوي السلطان برقوق، ولم تخل حياة ابن خلدون في مصر أيضًا من ذلك التقلُّب، لكن بالنهاية ما صنع قيمة ابن خلدون الفكرية هو ما كتبه، وهو الذي أطال عمره أكثر من اشتغاله بالسياسة.

الحقيقة كان ابن خلدون يملك ذاكرة زاخرة بالمواقف السياسية والأسرار والانطباعات عن الحكام في تونس والمغرب وغرناطة ومصر ممن اختلط بهم وعمل معهم، لكنه في الواقع وبسبب طبيعة التأليف في ذلك العصر ضنّ علينا بتقديم معلومات تفصيلية، كما أنَّ ابن خلدون لم يكن يهدف من تأليف المقدّمة أو العبر نقد حكام عصره، بل يقول لنا إرون أنَّ ابن خلدون كان يهدف من تأليف تاريخه العبر تقديمه لحاكم من حكّام البربر الحفصيين أو المرينيين، وبالتالي كان ابن خلدون يهتم في المقام الأول بالتأريخ للسلالة البربرية وإن لم يغفل التأريخ للسلالة العربية بطبيعة الحال. لم يُحدّثنا ابن خلدون عن أمور شخصية وبالكاد عرفنا حادثة مأساوية وقعت له حيث غرقت زوجته و بناته الخمسة قرب سواحل الإسكندرية، ورغم أنّه كتب سيرته التعريف بان خلدون ورحلته شرقًا وغربًا إلا أنّها سيرة تنقصها أشياء دقيقة.

لا يعد إرون ابن خلدون عالم اجتماع بالمفهوم الحديث مثل دوركايم، ويرى ثمة مشكلات في كلامه عن البدو وفي كلامه عن فكرة العصبية، يرى مثلًا أنَّ أفكاره مناسبة جدًا لتفسير حوادث عصره أكثر مما تفسر حوادث التاريخ كله، بل ويرى أنَّ فكرة " العصبية" استقاها من قراءته لتاريخ المرابطين والموحدين، ويصف نظرية ابن خلدون في التاريخ الدوري بأنَّها نظرية تشاؤمية، من ناحية أخرى يُعجَب إرون بعقلانية ابن خلدون التي جعلته يرفض أساطير تاريخية مثل أسطورة مدينة النُحاس. يرصد إرون كيف تتجاوز المقدّمة التاريخ إلى الفلسفة والدين والقضاء، لكن هل يُعد ابن خلدون فيلسوفًا؟ يقول إرون أنَّه لم يعد نفسه كذلك، بل وناهض أفكار الأفلاطونية وعدّها مخرّبة للدين والدنيا، ورغم مكانه ابن خلدون فإنه لم يترك مدرسة تحمل أفكاره ولا تلاميذ كثر، وكان أشهر تلاميذه أستاذ الفقه المالكي " محمد بن عمّار" و المؤرخ الشهير " المقريزي"، وفي نفس الوقت هاجم ابنَ خلدون شخصياتُ بارزة مثل بدر الدين العيني الذي اتّهم ابن خلدون باتهامات يقول عنها إرون " لا يمكن تصدقيها" مثل اتهامه بالشذوذ الجنسي، وهي افتراءات شنَّها عليه اعداؤه.

رفض ابن خلدون التصوف الفلسفي وهاجم ابن عربي وابن سبعين والحلاج، ويتعرّض إرون لفكرة إيمان ابن خلدون بالسحر والقوى الغيبية، لكنه وقف مع فكرة تقديم ابن خلدون رائدًا لمفكرين اقتصاديين مثل ماركس وإبنغلر، نعم كتب ابن خلدون عن الأمور الاقتصادية في المقدّمة واعتمدت أفكاره على الأخلاق والحكمة والشريعة، لكنه لم يكن ماديًا مثل ماركس، فكما يقول الكتاب أنّ ابن خلدون وضع الأخلاق والدين والممارسة الاقتصادية ضمن السياق الأوسع لعلم الاجتماع.

في نهاية الكتاب يتكلم إرون عن أبرز ما قيل عن المقدّمة في الشرق والغرب، يؤكّد أنّ الأتراك العثمانيين من أوائل المعجبين بابن خلدون، ويوضح كيف تم الاستفادة من التراث الخلدوني بطريقة استعمارية، حيث حاولت فرنسا قراءة ما كتبه ابن خلدون عن البربر لمعرفة كيف تُدير مستعمراتها في الشمال الأفريقي، وأُعجِب توينبي بابن خلدون وعمل على نشر قراءة ابن خلدون قبل ظهور ترجمة روزنتال بالإنجليزية، وهي الترجمة التي هاجمها لعدم دقتها بعد ذلك مارشال هودجسون في كتابه " مغامرة الاسلام"، وفي السياق العربي كان اكتشاف ابن خلدون جزء من خلفية النهضة العربية بداية من القرن التاسع عشر، وعدّه محمد عبد الله عنان مؤسسًا لعلم الاجتماع المُعاصر، ويوضح إرون أنّه قد يكون رائدًا في هذا المجال لكن من الصعب عدّه مؤسسًا له.

أعتقد الكتاب من الكتب الممتعة عن ابن خلدون وحياته وفكره والترجمة ممتازة صراحة، عابه بعض التداخل في الأفكار وعدم ترتيبها، وأحيانًا عدم وضوح موقف المؤلف من ابن خلدون في بعض القضايا أثناء نقله للرؤى المختلِفة عن ابن خلدون. كان ابن خلدون شخصية مدهشة على المستوى الفكري وشخصية مثيرة للجدل على المستوى الإنساني.

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 4 out of 5]

The large body of work on Ibn Khaldun includes biographies, commentaries, and comparisons with Western thinkers (Vico, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Spengler...) "If you tried to read everything that has been written about Ibn Khaldun," says Irwin, "you would die before you could finish the job." Instead, in this short book he gives a biographic overview and intellectual history, focusing on the reception of the Muqaddimah by European scholars. Irwin - a student of Bernard Lewis and convert to Islam - rejects overly modern interpreters who try connect Ibn Khaldun, the "father of sociology", to Weber, Durkheim and Marx; as well as those who look back to ancient Greece for sources for his ideas. Instead Irwin situates him in his time as a devout Mālikī jurist, whose theory of civilisational decline was based in religion - since men cannot obey the law (sharia), they inevitably tend toward decadence and dissolution. But he was a deep thinker, ahead of his time, and as Irwin notes, it is no coincidence that the West only began to read him in the nineteenth century, since before writers like Macaulay, Hegel and Jacob Burckhardt, there was no precedent for his abstract theories of history.

Born in Tunis in 1332, Ibn Khaldun lived in a time when it was clear that the great Abbasid renaissance was in its twilight, following the scourge of the Mongol invaders (and helped along by Tamerlane, who Ibn Khaldun met and advised). He based his theory of ʿasabiyyah on the nomadic (Bedouin) tribes whose periodic invasions punctuated his history of the Maghreb (Kitāb al-ʻIbar), and among whom he lived for a time. ("Not many philosophers have been obliged to eat their own horse" in one scholar's words, though Diogenes would probably have been down.) Whether he was a Sufi remains unclear. For Ibn Khaldun, ʿasabiyyah is the health and energy which nomads possess, and as they settle into sedentary city life it diminishes, until they are eventually destroyed by other nomads. Irwin notes that this is somewhat the opposite of Gibbon's worldview, in which barbarism and religion are what destroys civilisation. "Bedouin" and "Arab" seem to have more broadly applicable meaning in Ibn Khaldun's work, although in this as in much else there is scholarly disagreement. We may speculate what he would have thought of the wealthy, well-fed peasants found in France or Italy, or of those whose life crossed between urban and rural boundaries, like shepherds who regularly visit cities for market day.

In covering modern interpreters of the Muqaddimah, Irwin includes nineteenth-century and modern Orientalists, contemporary Moroccan scholars, French colonialists, science-fiction writers (Isaac Asimov's Foundation owes an obvious debt to the Muqaddimah, and Frank Herbert admitted having read it before writing Dune), as well as Reaganomics. As one of the earliest thinkers on economics, sociology, and the philosophy of history, he had a major influence on the history of ideas in East and West. In the words of Toynbee, one of the Muqaddimah's great Western admirers, it is "undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever been created by any mind in any time or place".

[Mahmoud Haggui · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the 19th century onwards, there has been a conscious or unconscious drive to westernize Ibn Khaldun, comparing him to Machiavelli, Hobbes, Montesquieu, Vico, Marx,Weber and Durkheim. Though, Ibn Khaldun’s world had more in common with the Quran and the Thousand and One Night than it does with the modern historiography or sociology. It is precisely Ibn Khaldun’s irrelevance to the modern world that makes him so interesting and important. When I read the Muqaddima, I have the sense that I am encountering a visitor from another planet. Irwin comments.

[Derek · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m impressed that an English biography of Ibn Khaldun is so widely available. My Tunisian in laws would be happy to know that the great man is getting his due in the English speaking world. The book is a serious, well-researched biography of this fascinating Arab scholar. The book also guides one through a fascinatingly complex medieval Arab world. I do have to confess that I got somewhat lost in that complexity.

[Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Broke my rule of never reading secondary literature. Go to the source or fuck off. People talking about genius does not equal genius, it’s always a waste of time.

[Tamara · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book itself is really good- but I listened to it on audible and the reader was horrible. History buffs should read, not listen, to this book that delves into ibn Khaldun’s spiritual inclinations as well as his brilliance and impact.

[Rob Squires · Rating 2 out of 5]

Listening to this audiobook was pretty much as close to torture as it gets. Not only did the book smack of old school Orientalism, being loaded with baseless assumptions and wild speculations, the narrator managed to mispronounce pretty much every single Arabic word—of which there were many—that was in the text. Indeed, it was "fingernails on the chalkboard" annoying. If someone pronounced French or Spanish words this poorly in an audiobook, they'd be thrown from the Ivory Tower or, at a minimum, not be able to show their face in polite society ever again. Were it not for the context, I honestly would not have known what the narrator was trying to say. For example, his pronunciation of Ihya 'Ulum al-Deen (i.e. Imam al-Ghazali's magnum opus) was so frightfully bad that I almost stopped listening at that point...and later regretted that I had not.

And as far as the content: anyone delving into this book to learn more about the Muslim World and its history would probably come away with a very distorted view and more misinformed than when they started. If this book has any value, it will be for future historians who study the phenomenon of Orientalism and its misportrayal of "the other" by smug and culturally arrogant academics. This was truly painful and I'm glad it's over.

[Michael G. Zink · Rating 3 out of 5]

Marvelous opportunity that missed the mark

This book left its fabulous ambition unfulfilled. I enjoyed becoming acquainted with Ibn Khaldun, his 14th century world, and his important writings. The story of Ibn Khaldun and his contemporaries was new to me, and very interesting. Unfortunately, the author seems to have difficulty deciding whether his objective was to present and analyze Ibn Khaldun and his writings, or to review every subsequent translation (or mistranslations) and interpretation of Ibn Khaldun’s work. Now at the end of this book, it is not at all clear what perspective the author holds of Ibn Khaldun.

I come away disappointed. The story was ambitious and had so much potential, but that potential was unfulfilled.

[Revanth Ukkalam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Irwin holding his subject by hand, takes him into the oriental world. In what looks to the alien and untrained like a decisive and brilliant analysis, he presents Khaldun as a man with ties deeply with his land and still more - Islam. Economics, politics, and historiography even (Khaldun doesn't recognise history as subject) are in their embryo in Khaldun. Philosophy is an even stranger case. He sides not with Faylasufs but al Ghazzali. But why? Irwin has some answers. In fiqh, in Asabiyya, in al Khatib. Just read this book.

[Hani Al-Kharaz · Rating 2 out of 5]

لم يرق للمستوى المأمول للأسف!

[Gaele · Rating 4 out of 5]

AudioBook Review:
Stars: Overall 4 Narration 4 Story 4

Going into this, I knew it would be a challenge, but a very interesting one as the ‘who first did’ questions about near everything in the world are endlessly fascinating to me, and the ‘credit’ is often adjusted to reflect current sociological bias (i.e.: Columbus ‘discovering’ America when people had lived and thrived there successfully for thousands of years). And that has happened throughout time, with a particular dearth of ready information for those of us in the West when it comes to Islamic or Arabic scholars, discoveries and history. Princeton University Press approached me with an offer, and since I’m always up for information to expand my knowledge and provide new perspectives, I grabbed at this title. My listen was not without my own set of problems, I was frequently referring to other sources for definitions of words and putting pieces into historical context, understanding the ebb and flow of populations and power centers was necessary for me to understand just how this man’s ideas and concepts came about and were applied. And that was possibly the most revealing part of this book for me – not only was I seeing a perspective on sociology and its origins, the beginnings of the Labor theory of value (which everyone who ever took Econ 101 has heard of), and his view of the history of the world as outlined in The Muqaddamah. That sent me off on a whole other tangent with more added to the reading list as the tome is all-encompassing as is history’s influence on any cultural development at any given time.

But – I’m digressing – here Irwin takes the life of Ibn Khaldun and tries to explain his work and thinking from a ‘fly on the wall’ perspective, attempting to remove the labels and ‘boxes’ that are so popular when categorizing a person and showing just how unique and singular this man was, both in thought and the application of his personal beliefs to those thoughts. Khaldun was a conservative, religious man, a Sufi who believed in metaphysical causes and explanations for phenomena, but also was aware of the rise and fall of tribal importance, dynasties and their adjustments over time and changes in circumstance. He interpreted dreams, believed in spirits and divination, and his more ‘scholarly’ thoughts and conclusions were often placed within his own view of a divine order, and as such his teachings seem to be ‘all encompassing’ as they provided the whys to people in ways that they could understand and see them in the world they were living in. In his own life his thoughts and perhaps even his sense of hopefulness were often challenged by outside factors: Black Death, the remnants of Roman and Carthagian empires, the rise of Turks and Berbers and his belief in the rise and fall of dynasties and ruling of ‘the world’ as ultimately futile, as all will reach a ‘tipping point’ from which the only way is down. This contrast of pessimism in the ‘future’ of worldly endeavors while he is explaining his thoughts or belief in the ultimate ‘perfection’ of man and his intentions was striking and when combined with his recognition of past influencing present and future, all while being rather unusually placed in the middle of ‘big thinkers’ of the past (Aristotle, Galen, Ibn Aribi) he was quickly forgotten only to be resurrected by the Ottoman Turks, and the European Orientalists. Muhammad Abduh, an Egyptian Islamic jurist who wrote The Theory of Unity and Jamaladdin al-Afghani, an Afghani Islamic Ideologist were responsible most recently for bringing his work again into the light.

This was a title so full of references and names unfamiliar to me that it took a longer time to digest and absorb, while the narration provided by John Telfer was clear and did allow for ‘stopping points’ when I had to dig deeper into a word or statement to be sure it was understood. Non-fiction in audio form is intriguing and pushes you forward, while allowing you to make your own breaks to answer questions. I’ve now added a pile of books and information to look up because of this introduction, and I’m curious to see what more those reveal to me. But, on the whole, I did enjoy this style of biography as Irwin brought the mind of Ibn Khaldun into focus and showed the genius that, as far removed from our world of today his mind and his thoughts are singularly impressive, worthy of standing with other ‘well-regarded’ thinkers of the past.

I received an AudioBook copy of the title from Princeton University Press for purpose of honest review. I was not compensated for this review: all conclusions are my own responsibility.

Review first appeared at I am, Indeed

[أشرف فقيه · Rating 4 out of 5]

كلنا سمعنا بابن خلدون ومقدمته، لكن هذا الكتاب يقدم مقاربة -شبه أكاديمية- شاملة للرجل ولزمانه ليجيب على السؤال البسيط: لم ابن خلدون؟
المؤلف؛ روبرت إروِن، دارس متمكن، وواعٍ بتعقيدات التراث العربي: الفكري والعقدي والإثني. إنه يعرف تفاصيل المرحلة التي عاشها ابن خلدون: ممالك الأمازيغ التي تقاسمت الشمال الإفريقي والأندلس مقابل مماليك المشرق فيما تيمورلنك بينهما. يعرف إروِن معنى أن تكون حضرمياً في المغرب ومغربياً مالكياً في مصر أيام السلطان قلاوون، ويعرف دور "الزايرجة" والسيمياء وعلم البديع والتصوف والتفلسف في تكوين عجينة النخبة المثقفة في القرن الذي عاشه ابن خلدون. وقد وظّف ذلك كله ليشرح لنا السر وراء عبقرية الرجل الذي طبقت شهرته الآفاق، وإن عُدّ منجزه "صنيعة مستشرقين".. مثله مثل ألف ليلة. وقد فصّل المؤلف في الأكاديمي تطور (العلم الخلدوني) أكاديمياً عبر المدارس الأوروبية المختلفة وعلاقته بتطور مناهج التأريخ والاجتماع والاقتصاد المعاصرة -مع التحفظ الشديد على علاقة ابن خلدون بالاقتصاد-. لكن ذلك لا ينفي أن صاحب (المقدمة) يظل رجلاً استثنائياً في مواهبه وقدرته على قراءة زمانه. والأثر الذي تركه عميق وواضح في أعمال آرنولد توينبي وفي كتابات إسحق عظيموف وجورج لوكاس مخرج (حرب النجوم).. والتفاصيل في هذا الكتاب الممتع.

[Fearless Leader · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not very useful.

[Daniel Perry · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't have the background required for this book--I forget by which rabbit hole I came to it--but I really liked seeing the work of salvaging the texts (mainly the Muqaddima) as well as the man from the Orientalist lens through which "Western" scholarship has apparently insisted on regarding them.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full review here:

https://geotrickster.com/2018/05/19/i...

[Mohammed Saad · Rating 3 out of 5]

هذا الكتاب لكي تستفيد منه حق الاستفادة يحتاج أن تُقرأ المقدمة قبله، لكن عزائي أن قرأت الكتاب للاطلاع على نمط الكتابة في هذا النوع من الكتب.

[ناديا · Rating 5 out of 5]

"ابن خلدون كان فيلسوفًا بالمعنى الفضفاض المعاصر للكلمة، أي أنه محب للحكمة، فقد تأمل وفكر مليًا بالاسئلة الكبرى، وحاول أن يعالج الأمور علاجًا منطقيًا، لكن ذلك لم يكن كافيًا لجعله فيلسوفًا في المغرب في القرن الرابع عشر. وعلى الرغم من ذلك، فإن ماجعله مميزًا ضمن المؤرخين في العصور الوسطى هو قدرته على التفكير بطريقة مجردة، والتعميم في الظواهر الاجتماعية والتاريخية"

يقع الكتاب في عشرة فصول عدا مقدمة الباحث البريطاني وخاتمته، اللتان بدا فيهما تبحر واعجاب الكاتب في سيرة مفكرنا العربي.
سرد المؤرخ أروين الظروف التي احاطت ابن خلدون، من اول ولادته، تعليمه، تنقلاته والمناصب التي تولاها، وبمن تأثر، كما فنّد العديد من افكاره متفقًا مع بعضها، مختلفًا مع أخرى، معللًا ذلك بتغير الفضاءات التي نعيشها في زمننا الحالي، سواء كانت سياسية، اقتصادية أو اجتماعية.

كتاب أكثر ما أعجبني فيه، الفصل الذي تناول القراءات والترجمات الأجنبية لفكر ابن خلدون، مقدمته تحديدًا.
لفتتني فكرة إهمال العرب لفكره النهضوي فترة طويلة! "اذ كانت المنشورات الأوروبية هي التي جعلت المفكرين العرب يعيدون اكتشاف ابن خلدون في وقت متأخر في القرنين التاسع عشر والعشرين."

سيرة مكتوبة بعناية وجهد فائقين، زاخرة بالمعرفة عن شخص المفكر ذاته، الحقبة التي عاش فيها، و العديد من مفكريها كابن الخطيب و الأبلي، حتى أنه أشار لقراءات عربية معاصرة أذكر منها: دراسة المصري محمد عبد الله عنان بعنوان" ابن خلدون حياته وتراثه الفكري"، دراسة عزيز العظمة " ابن خلدون في البحوث المعاصرة".
كما تزودت روايات بأفكار ابن خلدون، عربيًا رواية "العلامة" لبنسالم حميش الفائزة بجائزة نجيب محفوظ، أجنبيًا في سلسلة روايات Dune لفرانك هربرت.

أنتصر ابن خلدون في مؤلفاته للبربر والبدو، و اتهم على طول الخط العصبية والقبلية سببًا جوهريًا لسقوط المجتمعات انسانيًا وتاريخيًا.

هل كان ابن خلدون عالم اجتماع؟ هل هناك مبالغة في ابداعه؟ كتاب روبرت ارون دون شك سيقدم لقارئه اجابة وافية، وتصورًا واضحًا عن المقدمة قيل مطالعتها.

▪️ابن خلدون كان مميزًا وفريدًا من نوعه، فهو يسحق الجميع بعظمته (وعندما وصفه غوتيي بالعظيم، لم يكن يقصد أنه بهيج وسهل المراس، بل كان يقصد أنه عبقري). فقد كان ابن خلدون مؤرخًا محترمًا، مثل جوينفل ودوق دو سان سيمون، اذ كانت نظرته الى التاريخ غربية، وكان عبق عصر النهضة واضحًا في فكره.

[O · Rating 3 out of 5]

After reading a positive review in Literary Review magazine I decided to purchase this book. My knowledge of Ibn khaldoun was limited to the fact that he was an acclaimed historian and I wanted to know why. This book simply does not answer that question. On the contrary, it reads like a smear campaign. There is hardly a page that does not include a derogatory or disdainful remark: Ibn Khaldoun suggested "somewhat doubtfully"; "was not consistent"; "[he] reasoned, somewhat strangely" and so on. The author cites ample examples where Ibn Khaldoun, in his opinion, was wrong such as Ibn Khadloun's statement that the larger a city the richer. He tells us why Ronald Reagan's reference to Ibn Khaldoun in a speech was misplaced or undeserved by Ibn Khaldoun. Moreover, Irwin's translations are frequently inaccurate. He translates "Tadris"as study when, in fact, it more accurately translates as teaching. I puzzled why Irwin would write a biography of someone he clearly has no regard for. Then I looked Irwin up and realized that he is a disciple or Bernard Lewis and the puzzle dissolved.

[Francesco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author explained that he is "not interested in making Ibn Khaldun’s writings seem relevant to present-day issues…. It is precisely Ibn Khaldun’s irrelevance to the modern world that makes him so interesting and important." I liked this approach because it does not attempt to stretch Khaldun's words (which are often obscure) to support specific theories on world history, urbanization, or rise and fall of civilizations. Obviously, Khaldun was a man of his time, deeply religious, interested in occultism and with supernatural beliefs, and with a very specific life experience. Irwin succeeds in situating Khaldun in his time and faith. With that said, there is much we can learn from studying Khaldun today. His ideas on cycles of dynasties, on urban vs rural dwelling, on moral leadership are fascinating. I found Irwin's biography an excellent scholarly work -- but also very readable, and a great book to learn about Khaldun and his time.

[James Spencer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A real intellectual joy, although not a biography in any real sense. More a critique and commentary on Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddima. As such it is a bit of biography of that work, addressing itself to what makes it great but also how it has been read and misread over the centuries. I particularly enjoyed Irwin's tying of the Muqaddima to modern science fiction works, Asimov's Foundation series and especially Herbert's Dune. This will not appeal to everyone but as someone who knew little about Muslim tenants (despite living in Saudi Arabia for several years, shame on me), this was fascinating.

[Song · Rating 2 out of 5]

淡如白水的评论集。作者主题就是讲了伊本·赫勒敦这位写了《历史绪论》一书的伊斯兰学者的生平思想，和后世各种思想流派的关系。感觉每个主题都考虑到了，但都讲得很浅，读完几乎没留下什么印象。所以这本书是一本综述，或者入门介绍性质的作品？

按照作者的介绍，伊本·赫勒敦试图用《历史绪论》来讨论历史规律，因此考察了以埃及为中心的各个马穆鲁克政权的兴衰。但他对历史规律的看法，无疑离现代思想具有很远的距离。让我想起有次我读明代著名笔记作品《草木子》，索然无味，完全是古代人在扯各种什么阴阳五行，虽然这在当时可能是很重要的思想，但对于一个现代普通读者，确实没什么了解的必要。

伊本·赫勒敦虽然被奉为涂尔干的前辈，与苏菲主义，东方学，马克思理论都有关系，但正如作者所澄清的，这些大多是西方学者的附会。

这本书是少数我读下来几乎没有什么收获的作品。

[Hans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very informative book on 14th century North Africa.

[Hamza Saad Abdelwahab · Rating 5 out of 5]

اذكر اني في سن مبكرة حاولت قراءة المقدمة ولم افهم شيئاً وتوقفت عن القراءة.

هذا الكتاب بداية جيدة لقراءة فكر ابن خلدون الأفكار سلسلة وبطريقة ميسرة للفهم.

[John David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ibn Khaldun (1132 - 1406) doesn’t get first billing as the most popular medieval, Arabic-speaking philosopher-polymath of his day; that honor usually goes to either Ibn Rushd, anglicized as Averroes (1126 – 1198) or the earlier Ibn Sina, anglicized as Avicenna (980 – 1037). However, Ibn Khaldun is often considered one of the greatest social scientists to work in Africa during the Middle Ages – so great, in fact, that his Muqaddimah (roughly, “prolegomena” or “introduction”) is still considered one of the first attempts at a comprehensive sociology. Robert Irwin is a historian and novelist who became fascinated with Arabic-language thought early in life, including Ibn Khaldun himself, who is the subject of “Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography” (Princeton University Press, 2019).

Ibn Khaldun was born in Tunis under the Hafsid Sultanate and lived a highly peripatetic life traveling between Nasrid Granada and Mamluk Cairo. He travelled all over north Africa looking for a regular job as a scholar, secretary, or scribe, but never found anything permanent; many scholars interpret his pessimism regarding history through this failure. Those familiar with the Muqaddimah will know that it lays out a cyclical philosophy of history with eras of alternating bourgeoning and decay. Irwin incorporates this idea throughout the book, suggesting that Ibn Khaldun drew carefully from his own experiences in formulating it. This isn’t surprising considering the state of northern Africa at the time, which was comprised of several fractured mini-states. In fact, there’s quite a bit about the internecine tribal politics of many of these groups, especially in the first half of the book, which will probably only be of interest to a specialist.

One of the most enduring theses of the Muqaddimah is that society is composed of tribal, itinerant groups (think of the Bedouins) and more settled, urban groups. Ibn Khaldun thinks ‘asabiyya (roughly, “group cohesion” but also with connotations of “tribalism”) is the impetus which allows the smaller tribes to conquer the larger populations where this solidarity has dissipated. Once they have gained power, their sense of ‘asabiyya will in turn start to decline, making way for the next rural group – and so the cycle continues, repeating itself about once every four generations in Ibn Khaldun’s reckoning. Other historiographers like Giambattista Vico and Arnold Toynbee took Ibn Khaldun’s idea of a cyclical history and ran with it, adding to and eliding from as they felt necessary.

One of Irwin’s points is that, for better or worse, Ibn Khaldun has been co-opted by many other thinkers as well. In just a few pages, he compares him with Thomas Mann, Confucius, Polybius, and Oswald Spengler – without providing much comparative insight. Because Ibn Khaldun’s analysis includes some economics, some Marxists have glommed onto him as an Ur-Marxist. Because of his skepticism toward received myths, he’s been called a rationalist – despite making overt references to magic and sorcery. Someone even suggested, not long after the election of Ronald Reagan, that Ibn Khaldun’s ideas prefigured the Laffer Curve. In short, he’s the Rorschach test of medieval, Arabic-speaking polymaths. He has a history of being whoever you want him to be.

If you want a one-book resource that summarizes Ibn Khaldun’s major ideas, you’ll get that here – but you’ll also get a lot of extra information, like the aforementioned politicking, speculations regarding whether he may have been a Sufi, and other topics that may seem only marginally relevant. This is a great resource if you’re already moderately knowledgeable about Ibn Khaldun’s body of work, especially if you’ve already read the Muqaddimah and Kitab al-Ibar (“Book of Lessons,” something akin to an historical encyclopedia). If you want a broader or more general introduction, Irwin may give too much detail about African politics or secondary analysis about the historical reception of the Muqaddimah instead of looking at just Ibn Khaldun’s ideas themselves. Read alongside the Muqaddimah itself as ancillary material or under the tutelage of a course that helped contextualize the information, this would have been a better reading experience. I just don’t have the background in medieval African or Islamic history to get as much out of it as I possible could have.

[Nathan Casebolt · Rating 4 out of 5]

In October 1981, the New York Times covered a presidential press conference with the headline “Reagan Cites Islamic Scholar.” President Reagan, in defense of his administration’s theory of supply-side economics, drafted the scholar whom the Times called “the greatest Arab historian to emerge from the highly developed Arabic culture of the Middle Ages.”

More recently, in 2015, Mark Zuckerberg named Ibn Khaldun’s “The Muqaddima” as one volume in his Year of Books. Trivia like this illustrates the texture Robert Irwin brings to the subject of Ibn Khaldun, a man he’s spent his professional life studying. Irwin is an engaging writer, which is good when your subject is the intellectual life of an idiosyncratic medieval Islamic diplomat, judge, teacher, and thinker.

Ibn Khaldun lived in interesting times, which is to say, not great times. Born in North Africa in the first half of the 14th century, he wrote his great theoretical works while gaining and losing favor and offices from Spain to Egypt. He saw family swept away by the Black Death, his younger brother murdered in a political feud, and his wife and children drowned off the coast of Egypt.

Immersed in death, drifting through the twilight of the Arab dynasties, and shadowed by the ruins of Carthage and Rome and Egypt, it’s no wonder Ibn Khaldun took a pessimistically cyclical view of history. In his view, history is the story of dynasties rising from austere nomadic tribes marked by asabiyya (cohesive group loyalty), decaying amidst urban luxury and pleasures, and crumbling before new dynasties arising from new tribes steeped in asabiyya, until Allah ends the cycle at the Last Day.

What makes Ibn Khaldun unique is that he was among the earliest scholars to propose a fresh approach to the writing of history. He encouraged a framework embracing rigorous observation of phenomena common to different societies in order to build explanatory and predictive theories of history, politics, and economics. If that sounds very modern and not very medieval to you, then you might understand why he’s considered such a landmark theoretician today.

However, it’s important to recognize that Ibn Khaldun was not a premodern modern. The tenth chapter, “The Strange Afterlife of the Muqaddima,” is a masterclass in surveying the way in which he has been abstracted, dissected, secularized, and adopted as an intellectual ancestor by all manner of modern historians, economists, demographers, and sociologists.

He was in reality a man of his time and place: blinkered by his elitist prejudices, constrained by his Muslim theology, and limited by his lack of empirical science. And yet, his insights were innovative enough that some slandered him as a heretic and few took him seriously until the Western scientific method began its rise to ascendancy. Today he is more broadly appreciated as a significant thinker anticipating or influencing theorists as diverse as David Hume, Oswald Spengler, and Arnold Toynbee.

Irwin admits that Ibn Khaldun’s mind was so unique and, often, obscure that Irwin’s own interpretation of the scholar’s thought might be subject to the same weakness he documents in others. That said, I’m thankful to Irwin for introducing me to a man at once caught in the gears of history and yet perceptive enough to strain for a glimpse of the machinery that drives them.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I first discovered the Muqaddimah a few years ago while surfing through recommendation links on Amazon. It seemed to be a hugely important work. I could not understand how I could have missed it for so long. I had to read it. But modern translations for free or at a reasonable price did not seem to be easily available, plus it was long and medieval writing is always daunting. A medieval work from the Islamic World would doubtless be even more elliptical and confusing than Christian works of the same era. So I procrastinated.

When I found this book, I thought that it could be a way into the Muqaddimah for me, by helping me to understand the world that gave birth to Ibn Khaldun and the major themes of his work. It did do that, but in the end it made me wonder whether I really want to make the effort read the Muquaddimah, as one of the principal themes of this book is that Ibn Khaldun may have been brilliant but that he is best understood in the context of his life and times - an Islamic historian of the Middle Ages who had some interesting ideas, but who was not truly a precursor of Marx, Darwin, Weber and all of the other great lights of European intellectual history, though the reverence in which he has been held by European scholars does create an interesting irony that he is perhaps more honored outside of his own culture than within it. And his most lauded idea is his theory of cyclical history. That doesn't excite me. History may be more than just muddling through, but I have never found a grand design of history that seemed even remotely correct to me. So in the end, instead of preparing me to dive in, the book gave me more reasons to further procrastinate my attack on the Muqaddimah.