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Ibn Khaldûn's Philosophy of History. by Muhsin MahdiReview by: J. J. SaundersHistory and Theory, Vol. 5, No. 3 (1966), pp. 342-347Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2504453 .

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342 REVIEW ESSAYS

the bare chronicle of facts, with the highest possible form of poetry, tragedy, does indeed make a point about poetry, but it tells us very little about his- tory and therefore nothing about its true essence. As the most complete of the modern English commentators on the Poetics notes: "There is no really satisfying explanation of Aristotle's absolute neglect of Thucydides . . . who had unmistakably tried to make history 'philosophical' . . . It seems a genuine blind spot - or a deliberate omission."5

The distinction in Poetics IX between poetry and history is rhetoric, not philosophy, and to found an argument on this distinction without rearguing the case is to build on foundations of sand. Like many "theories" used by the authors of critical books, Sen Gupta's serves the same function as the love story in the average musical comedy: it provides a place to begin, a place to end, and in between it is best forgotten.

Still Shakespeare's Historical Plays is a better book than its argument. The author's "close reading" of the plays is, I think, the best we have, and the difference between the merits of his perceptions and the weakness of his premises should not surprise a student of criticism. There have been many great critics, few great critical theorists. And, we might add, it is not only the critics who write better than they know. For it is quite possible that Shakespeare, if he thought about the problem of the relationship of poetry and history at all, might well have accepted Sidney's story of the quarrel between the poet and the historian and Sen Gupta's modern formulation of their essential differences. But surely once Shakespeare actually began to write his histories, the only problems that would matter to him would be not those of the theoretical quarrel between the poet and the historian but the practi- cal problems of the quarrel between the poet and his poem.

OWEN JENKINS

Carleton College

IBN KHALDUN'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. By Muhsin Mahdi. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press (Phoenix Books), 1964. Pp. 325.

No famous thinker has suffered such long and strange neglect as Ibn Khal- dufn; his case must surely be unique. It was his misfortune to live when Arabic culture, of which he was so bright an ornament, was in full decline, and Western Europe had ceased to borrow from it. Had he flourished a cen- tury or two earlier, he might have been studied in the schools of Paris and

(London, 1965), 84: "As a theoretical statement about the writing of history (and we have no other from Aristotle) it is woefully inadequate . . . . It is a mistake to try to extract from these statements any Aristotelian theory of history."

5. Gerald F. Else, Aristotle's Poetics (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), 304.

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Oxford and enjoyed an unbroken continuity of fame and influence. As it was, he had no predecessors and no successors. Nothing in the previous history of Muslim thought prepares us for him: the Ovidian tag which Montesquieu proudly affixed to L'Esprit des Lois, "prolem sine matre creatam," could with more propriety have been fastened to the Muqaddimah. His book, when published, stirred no excitement, created no school, provoked (so far as we know) no dissent or discussion. Maqrizi was his disciple, but Maqrizi was a mere chronicler, albeit a full and accurate one, and if he ever read the Muqaddimah, its insights left no mark on his writings. The Turks indeed translated it (or part of it) in the eighteenth century, but what use they made of it we know not.

Not till four centuries after his death did Ibn Khaldufn rise from his long sleep, when attention was drawn to him by Europe's leading Arabists of the age of Napoleon, the French Silvestre de Sacy and the Austrian Josef von Hammer. They printed selections from his writings, and de Sacy contributed a life of him to the 1818 Biographie Universelle. The complete Arabic text of the Muqaddimah was edited by Quatremere in 1858, and a French trans- lation made by de Slane in 1862-68. The Western world then learned with surprise that this alien from fourteenth-century North Africa had formulated principles, outlined a science of human culture, and adumbrated a philosophy of history at a time when such things were undreamed of in Europe; and that he had reached conclusions and detected relationships which it had imagined to be recent discoveries of its own. It was struck particularly by his conception of 'asabiya, the social cement which held a community together, and by such generalizations as that nomadic conquests were never durable unless they rested on a strong religious basis.

From that moment Ibn Khaldufn took his place as a social philosopher of unusual acumen, a lonely pioneer who blazed new trails, though for ages there were none to follow him. Robert Flint gave generous space to him in his History of the Philosophy of History (1893) and so spread his fame in the English-speaking world. Ibn Khaldufn's fellow-Muslims took him up, and rejoiced that Europe should bestow such respect on one of their co-religionists. The Egyptian poet and critic Taha Husain devoted a perceptive monograph to him in 1918.1 Arnold Toynbee in 1934 pronounced him the peer of Thu- cydides and Machiavelli and described the Muqaddimah as "undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place."2 After an encomium of this kind, reminiscent of Macaulay in its sweep and decisiveness, it was high time that Ibn Khalduin, who, one suspects, was being more praised than read, was subjected to a close and critical scrutiny. Now, more than a century after his discovery, we have fuller

1. Taha Husain, La philosophic sociale d'Ibn Khaldoun (Paris, 1918). 2. A Study of History (Oxford, 1934), III, 322.

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means of judging his achievement and understanding what he was about. In 1958 Dr. Franz Rosenthal published the first full English translation of the Muqaddimah, and the non-Arabist may be satisfied that he is reading as accurate an approximation to the Arabic original as is likely to be attained. And Dr. Muhsin Mahdi, in a book originally published in 1957 and now re-issued in a paperback edition, has written what is easily the best study of Ibn Khalduin's thought, his analysis being grounded on a thorough exam- ination of the text and a deep knowledge of Muslim philosophy.

Mahdi has shown us -a necessary task -what Ibn Khaldfun was not as well as what he was. He was not a remote and cloistered academic philosopher, though much of his thinking was done during a brief sojourn in the solitude of the castle of Ibn Salama in southern Algeria, but a busy man of affairs, adviser, diplomat, teacher, judge, who turned to the study of history to see what light it would throw on the failure of his political career. He was not an historicist, in the sense of one who believes that all reality is historical; on the contrary, he accepted without question the conviction the Muslims had inherited from the Greeks, that since history deals only with probabilities and particular happenings, it is second-class knowledge at best, has no place among the true sciences, and is by no means an essential part of the intellec- tual equipment of the educated man. He had no theory of progress, and gave no sign of believing the world was getting better and better. It would have been strange if he had, for the fourteenth century, like ours, was an age of misery and ruin. His youth was clouded by the grisly ravages of the Black Death, his old age by the dreadful invasions and massacres of Timur, whose towers of skulls must have sickened that generation as the Nazi gas-chambers sickened ours. In any case, the Muslim, unlike the Christian, expects no Second Coming or millennium - of which the utopia of the progressive is but a secularized version - and to him there has never been a government of true justice and righteousness, which fully and faithfully observed the shari'a or sacred law, since the days of the "rightly-guided" caliphs in the early age of Islam. Nor did Ibn Khaldufn accept any theory of cyclical recur- rence. He, of course, recognized repeating patterns in the rise and fall of dynasties and the periodic nomad invasions, and he treated the life of states as analogous to the life of individual men, but he drew no Spenglerian con- clusions from this, and specifically repudiated the "return of all things" notion as a Shi'ite heresy. He sought in history no forecast of the future.

Still less was Ibn Khaldufn a secularist or agnostic, as some have oddly supposed, misled no doubt by the relatively minor role played by theology and the supernatural in his principal work. It is one of the high merits of Mahdi's book that he has proved how deeply embedded Ibn Khaldufn's thought is in the traditional theology of Islam, particularly in fiqh or juris-

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prudence, and how much he owes philosophically to Avicenna and Ghazali. A devout Muslim of the rigid Maliki school, he spent much of his life as a

qadi administering the shari'a, and though in the Muqaddimah he is con- cerned primarily with man as a social and political being, the all-pervading presence of Allah can be sensed throughout, and he would probably have endorsed the saying of Hegel, that history is the autobiography of God. If his pages are not filled with signs and wonders, as are those of many of his Christian contemporaries, this is not to make him a skeptic; miracle has not the same place in the Muslim system as in the Christian, where the most stupendous of miracles, the Resurrection, lies at its heart.

What Ibn Khaldufn did, as Mahdi makes clear, was to invent, like Vico three centuries later, a "new science" to supplement and explain the history which failed to give him the guidance he wanted. A practical politician, he had known disgrace and imprisonment at the hands of captious or ungrateful sultans, and he first turned to the history books to see if he could divine the reasons for his failure. Arabic historical literature was already copious. There must have been a sizable public for this kind of writing - chiefly, one imagines, State officials, ministers, political advisers and civil servants. War and politics were the staple themes of the chroniclers, who filled their pages with the doings of kings and caliphs, princes and governors. History was no part of the regular education of a Muslim, but was regarded as a useful guide to statesmen, as it was in the Europe of Machiavelli or Bolingbroke. Ibn Khaldufn was disappointed to find in it nothing but a heap of facts, with no guiding principles. But surely beneath the surface chaos of events there must be deep verities, fixed and unchangeable? One must probe beyond or behind history, and construct, in fact, a kind of meta-history. He did not call his book ta'rikh, the common Arabic word for "history," but 'ibar, a plural whose verbal root has the meaning of to pass, travel, go beyond, go from the outside to the inside. (Mahdi has a most interesting analysis of this word of many significations: de Slane's translation of 'ibar as "examples," though defensible, is misleading.)

Ibn Khaldufn's intention was to build a bridge linking the external aspect of the past with its inner meaning, a meaning which he hoped to elucidate through what he named 'ilm al-umran, "the science of culture." Umran is organized human society, treated under five heads: (1) primitive culture; (2) the State; (3) the city; (4) economic life; and (5) the sciences. An inner logic holds all these together. Man is naturally a gregarious animal. The earliest type of human association was something like Bedouin nomadism. Civilization, when it arises, is institutionalized in a state. The state builds cities, cities create wealth, and wealth provides the means and leisure for the cultivation of the arts and sciences. The dynamic of change is supplied by the constant encroachment of nomadic upon sedentary societies, a threat of

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which a medieval North African townsman was always conscious. (Ibn Khal- dun asserts that his native Barbary had not even in his day recovered from the fierce ravages of the Bedouin tribe of the Banu-Hilal in the eleventh cen- tury.) The author's claim of originality in this comprehensive and penetrating survey appears to be justified; nothing comparable to it had been attempted before. Above all, his discussion of the economic aspect was thoroughly novel. Arabic treatises on taxation existed, and some elementary advice on fiscal and related matters was commonly found in the "mirrors for princes" which viziers compiled for the instruction of their often ill-educated masters; but no one before Ibn Khaldufn, in either Islam or Christendom, had entered so fully and shrewdly into questions of money and prices, wages and tariffs, state revenues and balanced budgets. He was the first to treat economics scien- tifically and to see its importance in the life of societies.3

But as Mahdi warns us, Ibn Khaldufn is a whole world removed from modern sociology. He never rated his "new science" very highly: it was merely a humble addition to falsafa, the corpus of scientific (i.e., organized) knowl- edge which Islam had inherited from the Greeks and in which political philos- ophy had always had a place. Since there is in Islam no distinction between Church and State, ecclesiastic and lay, politics cannot be separated from theology and comes within the scope of the shari'a. If Ibn Khaldun is a ration- alist, as is often said, he is one operating fully within the Platonic-Islamic tradition. His 'ilm al-umran was designed to supplement history, and history itself had the purely practical aim of enabling men to be ruled more wisely. Nothing would have surprised him more than to see the high rank assigned in the modern West to historical knowledge, though he would probably have reflected that one could hardly expect anything else from unbelievers.

Yet here, one suspects, Mahdi has exaggerated the wide gulf which separates Ibn Khaldun's thought from ours. Noting that Ibn Khaldun created his "new science" without disturbing the traditional philosophy of his time, Mahdi asserts that the "moderns" have thrown over their traditional philosophy altogether and, repudiating universal essences, natures and causes, have pro- claimed all knowledge to be historical. This is much too sweeping. The his- toricism which came in with the Romantic revolt against the Enlightenment's faith in the uniformity of human nature has been on the defensive some time now against the assaults of Popper and others, who flatly deny there is any ultimate meaning in history. In any case, only idealists of the Croce-Colling- wood school ever claimed that history could or would absorb philosophy. Neo-Kantians, following Dilthey, are engaged in a Critique of Historical Reason, and assure us that the past can never be known as Ranke thought

3. J. J. Spengler, "Economic Thought of Islam: Ibn Khaldun," Comparative Studies in Society and History 6 (1964), 268-306.

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it could, that we never see it "as it really was," but only partially and through spectacles of many colors; that (in Simmel's words) "history as knowledge cannot be a copy of reality."4 We have given up Comte's positivist approach, and few historians would today echo Bury's famous claim that history was a science, no more and no less: they are more likely to describe themselves, as Becker did, as "keepers of useful myths." Marc Bloch criticized the hap- hazard inquiry into "causes," demanded of the historian an analytical and methodical approach, and set him to search for "collective sensitivities" which involved seeing cultural patterns and historical situations as wholes. Is this so far removed from Ibn Khaldufn's 'ilm al-umran? And Bloch certainly did not claim unique status for historical knowledge. True, Bloch was a secular rationalist and Ibn Khaldu'n a theological one, but a strong current is running in favor of "putting God back into history," as we can see from the writings, in England alone, of such scholars as Professor Butterfield and Father D'Arcy and the recent Bampton lectures of Professor Alan Richardson.5 Perhaps there is a growing conviction that, as Reinhold Niebuhr puts it, we cannot interpret history without a principle of interpretation which history as such does not yield.6

What has happened is that history has won recognition as an independent discipline (a very recent victory: Tout of Manchester talked as late as 1923 as though it had only just been achieved) at a time when the traditional philosophy (if by this is meant the old Christian-Hellenic scheme of thought) is disintegrating; and nothing so imposing or comprehensive, neither history nor natural science, has been found adequate to take its place. Ibn Khaldufn would have held that history cannot exist detached from the theological set- ting which alone gives it meaning. The Western world has yet to prove that it can.

J. J. SAUNDERS

University of Canterbury New Zealand

4. G. Simmel, Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie (Leipzig, 1907), 51. 5. A. Richardson, History Sacred and Profane (London, 1964). 6. R. Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York, 1941), I, 151.

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