Man has always been fascinated by his past, and history is one
of the oldest of the arts. At first it may have been confused with legend and
the sagas of heroes; often it had a religious cast and purported to show the
operation of the supernatural in human affairs. The Greeks were the first to
secularize history, to make it a chronicle of factual events as far as these
could be determined. Herodotus, who wrote in the 5th century before Christ, was
called by the Greeks "the father of history."
It is only in comparatively recent times, however, that men have
taken a long look at history and have tried to find out what is behind the rise
and fall of dynasties, the spread and decay of civilizations. Vico, born in
17th-century Italy, is sometimes called the founder of this science. Oswald
Spengler and Arnold Toynbee are modern seekers for the pattern or design in
historic events. But much earlier, in the turbulent North Africa of the 1300's,
an Arab scholar and statesman named Ibn Khaldoun sat down in his study in an
Algerian village to compose the Muqaddimah, an Introduction to World
History. If Herodotus is the father of history, Ibn Khaldoun is the father of
the philosophy of history.
The 14th century in the Maghreb—the Arab West—was an age of
political turmoil and intrigue, and Ibn Khaldoun was a true child of his age.
Born in Tunis in 1332 of a family originally from South Arabia, Abd al-Rahman
ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldoun al-Hadrami, to give him his full name, was a patrician
by birth, a member of the ruling class. The University of Zeitounia, or the
Olive Tree, which still exists in Tunis, was already well into its fifth century
when the young Ibn Khaldoun studied there. At the age of 20 he was appointed to
a minor post at the court of the Hafsid ruler of Tunis, but during hostilities
between Tunis and the neighboring city of Constantine, Ibn Khaldoun absconded
and fled westward. In Morocco he joined the court of the ruler of Fez, a
Merinid, traditional enemy of the Hafsids. The court at Fez was a gathering
place of scholars and poets, and Ibn Khaldoun continued his education there.
But he was drawn into politics and because of his Hafsid
connections incurred the suspicion of the ruler of Fez, who was mounting an
attack on Tunis. During the campaign, Ibn Khaldoun was put into prison, where he
remained for nearly two years. Released on the death of this ruler, he threw
himself enthusiastically into the political intrigues of the successors. When
the candidate he supported died, Ibn Khaldoun fled to Spain.
Throughout the 14th century the Muslims were gradually being
forced out of the Spanish Peninsula by the Christians. The family of Ibn
Khaldoun had lived for several generations in Sevilla before settling in Tunis,
and they may, like many Tunisian families today, have kept the key to their
Spanish house to remind them of their lost domain. Granada, however, was still
in Arab hands, and Ibn Khaldoun was welcomed there both for his family name and
for his reputation as a scholar. The ruler in fact entrusted him with a
diplomatic mission to the Christian King of Castille, Pedro the Cruel, who is
said to have offered this Arab emissary a post at his own court and the
restoration of his family property in Sevilla. Ibn Khaldoun declined the ofTer
and returned to Granada. Another intrigue, however, soon forced him back to
Africa.
For the next nine years, Ibn Khaldoun continued to play an
ambiguous role in the dangerous game of North African politics. He frequently
changed sides, traveled from court to court, was taken prisoner twice, agitated
among the tribes for various masters, and was alternately prime minister,
fugitive, tax collector, and retiring scholar. Disgusted with politics at last,
he settled in the village of Qal'at al-Salamah in the province of Oran and there
began to write the book that was to make him famous.
Enough has been said to show that Ibn Khaldoun had firsthand
knowledge of the history of his own time and place. Perhaps it was his lack of
attachment to any one country or ruler that explains the impartiality with which
he was able to view human events. His extended travels—later in life he went
to Egypt, Syria, and Arabia—and the high development of medieval Arab learning
may explain his wide range of knowledge and interests. For his book is a
geography as well as a history of the known world; it describes the principal
races and religions with which he was familiar, the crafts, arts, and sciences,
medicine, poetry, and the law of Islam; its interests range from the homely
detail of how many times a teacher may strike a pupil (three) to the
abstractions of economics and city planning.
But experience and learning alone cannot account for Ibn
Khaldoun's extraordinary gift for deducing a few essential principles from
the vast panorama of human activities and historic events. This gift can only be
ascribed to genius, a term that explains nothing but merely names a phenomenon
that may appear inexplicably in a village in North Africa as it does in Newr
York, Peking or Timbuktu.
For the ideas of Ibn Khaldoun were far ahead of those current in
the Islamic world of his time, and at least three centuries ahead of those in
Europe. Unlike his contemporaries on both sides of the Mediterranean, he refused
to accept history as either the reflection of God's will or the caprice of
princes. Every society, he decided, is the product of forces that operated in
the past, and to understand a society it is necessary to find out what those
forces were. He discovered three laws: the law of causality, which operates in
the affairs of men as it does in nature; the law of resemblance, for "human
nature is uniform because of the common origin of mankind. There are certain
constants in humanity which are met with everywhere and always, which means that
the present is a criterion for judging the past"; and the law of
differentiation, by which climate, geography, even diet may influence the
economic and political life, the beliefs and morality of a society. Ibn Khaldoun
also held a cyclical theory of history, lie saw that states, like men, have
their periods of youth, maturity and old age, and thought that the cycle lasted
about 120 years in each case.
Many of Ibn Khaldoun's ideas are almost universally accepted
today and may even seem obvious and commonplace, but this is often the fate of
once revolutionary ideas. Others of his theories have been superseded or
rejected, and many of his assumptions have been proved false. But the importance
of Ibn Khaldoun is that he found a new way of looking at human events and
discovered patterns that no one had seen before. In his book we can find the
seeds of several sciences yet to be born—economics, anthropology, political
science, and of course the science or philosophy of history. Parts of his book
have been compared to the work of such later geniuses as Machiavelli,
Montesquieu, Gibbon and Hegel. Of course these thinkers and those sciences
developed independently of Ibn Khaldoun, who was practically unknown in Europe
until the 19th century. But when he was discovered, European scholars were
surprised to find how much that they considered to be modern discoveries of the
West had been foreshadowed in the work of the medieval Arab.
Ibn Khaldoun's life did not end with the completion of the Muqaddimah.
At the age of 50 he went to Egypt, never to return to the Maghreb.Cairo was
enjoying a period of prosperity and cultural brilliance under Mameluke rule. Ibn
Khaldoun quickly gained the confidence of the ruler and was successively
appointed university professor, college president, judge and diplomat. His taste
for intngue and a knack for making enemies frequently caused his dismissal from
these positions of honor, but his intelligence, talents—and intrigue
again—always brought him back.
While he was in Egypt a personal tragedy occurred. His wife and
children, who had followed him through all the vicissitudes of his wandering
life in North Africa and Spain, had been left behind in Tunis when he first went
to the Land of the Nile. A few years later he sent for them, but the ship they
sailed in, which also happened to be carrying a gift of purebred Arab horses
from the ruler of Tunis to the ruler of Cairo, was sunk outside Alexandria with
all lives lost. Ibn Khaldoun went into retirement from grief, but his energetic
and—it must be admitted—somewhat combative nature brought him back into
public life.
Toward the end of his career he accompanied the Mameluke Sultan
of Egypt, Faraj, on an expedition to Damascus to oppose the Tartars, who were
besieging the city. The leader of the Tartars, Tamerlane, or Timur the Lame, had
won over most of Asia, from China to Syria, and had dreams of world conquest. As
part of a Damascus delegation sent to make peace, Ibn Khaldoun was let down in a
basket from the walls of the beleaguered city to go and meet the Tartar chief.
The two men, the scholar and the conqueror, were much impressed by each other.
Ibn Khaldoun spent two months in the Tartar camp, and at his host's request
wrote a description of the Arab West. After being permitted by Tamerlane to
return to Cairo, Ibn Khaldoun wrote a penetrating analysis of his old
antagonist's character, describing him as being at once cruel and extremely
intelligent and shrewd.
Ibn Khaldoun died in office, as the Malekite judge of Cairo, at
the age of 74. In his life and work he managed to combine the two sides of man
in society: contemplation and activity, participation and understanding,
thinking and doing. And in the Muqaddimah he viewed man's past and
present for the first time in a scientific way, examining the causes of history
rather than merely the ends.
