Ibn Khaldūn, Abū Zayd ʿAbdarraḥmān

Abstract

A historian as well as a sociologist and anthropologist avant la lettre, Ibn Khaldūn was one of the most original figures of the medieval Arab culture. His political experience in various courts of the Maghreb and Muslim Spain during the first half of his life, as well as his many travels to the Middle East, provided him with a concrete understanding of the social and political realities of his time. His education was first and foremost religious, legal, and literary, but he also had strong foundations in the Graeco-Arabic philosophical tradition. In his works he raises a new question, namely, how does one write true history exceeding the limits of formal critique of historical information as it was practiced in the Arabic historiographical tradition. The answer he developed involves knowledge of society as well as taking into account all available knowledge as a condition for historical knowledge. He thus felt obliged to invent a “science of the society” in the narrow sense of the word, in which the social and political realities of the Maghreb and the Arab world in medieval times obviously occupy an important place. From this point of view, he deserves the title of “sociologist.” However, his global approach to the civilizations of his time, despite the limited information he had at his disposal, equally makes him a careful “anthropologist,” whose ideas even to this day retain attention. He was foremost a historian, however, and as such he contributed more than an innovative approach. He had a vision of history based on the internal dynamics of societies and on their universal struggles for dominance, on the scale of the great empires of his time.