Anthropological aspects of Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah: A Critical Examination

Abstract

The Tunisian-born scholar Abū Zayd ’Abd ar-Raḥmān ibn Khaldûn al-Ḥaḍramî (1332-1406) is considered to be one of the greatest social analysts of the Medieval Muslim world. Descending from a family of jurists and government officials, he was living in turbulent times of Maghrebian dynastical clashes and political turmoil. His abilities and skills gained him entrance into inner circles of Moroccan, Tunisian, Algerian and Granadean rulers. The immediate experience in court politics provided him with important understanding of social power dynamics in different settings. He skillfully employed this knowledge in his “new historical science”, laid out in his masterpiece, The Muqaddimah, the first volume of his grand history of the world. The Muqaddimah is its author’s attempt to uncover the latent or inner principles of history which induce the rise and fall of dynasties. In this lengthy (about one thousand five hundred pages long) Introduction to the history of North African Muslim states, Ibn Khaldun drew on perspectives similar (but not identical to) those of modern sociology, politicology, economy and anthropology in order to expound the laws of history of Islamic societies. Despite the fact that his work was not recognized as particularly significant in his day, Ibn Khaldun received professorship (mainly due to his expertise in Maliki law) at Al-Azhar University in Cairo at the age of fifty, and became, for a brief period of time, the chief qadi (judge) of Egypt. Shortly after the death of Barquq (1399), Mamluk Sultan of Egypt and Syria, who held him in great esteem, Ibn Khaldun accompanied the Sultan’s successor in his voyage northeast, where he met Timur (Tamerlane), the great Mongolian warrior-emperor, and a would-be conqueror of Syria, outside the walls of Damascus. The series of conversations between the two men lasted for forty days. Their discussions touched on many topics, from the nature of group solidarity to the demands of urban civilization and beyond. Ibn Khaldun died at the age of 74, and was buried at the Sufi cemetery in Cairo, but the site of his grave remains unknown to this day.