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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 June 2010
The purpose of this paper is to raise several questions common to the philosophy of history and to discuss the work of Ibn Khaldūn in relation to them. The paper is accordingly divided into four parts. In the first, the questions are identified; in the second, the relevant aspect of Ibn Khaldūn's writing is introduced; in the third, the questions are discussed with reference to Ibn Khaldūn, and in the fourth an attempt is made to show how the questions might be answered.
1 The following account is based upon Franz Rosenthal's English translation of Ibn Khaldūn's Muqaddima (hereafter referred to as Introduction) which is the introduction to his Universal History (Kitāb al-Ibar). It is published in three volumes by Pantheon Books Inc. in the Bollingen Series XLIII, 1958. I have followed Professor Rosenthal's transliteration of the relevant words.
A study of Ibn Khaldūn's philosophy of history is to be found in Muhsin Mahdi's Ibn Khaldūn's Philosophy of History, Phoenix Books, 1964. Dr.Rosenthal's, E. I. J. book Political Thought in Medieval Islam, Cambridge, 1958CrossRefGoogle Scholar contains an introduction to Ibn Khaldūn in chapter four. There are further references in the notes to that chapter for the student interested in further research on Ibn Khaldūn.
2 Hitti, Philip K., History of the Arabs, New York, The Macmillan Company, 1951. P. 568Google Scholar.
3 Ibn Khaldūn makes an interesting use of Aristotle's distinction between form and matter. He writes “ … dynasty and royal authority have the same relationship to civilization as form does to matter”. The Introduction, volume II, p. 300. On that page Rosenthal traces similar uses of the distinction.
4 Ibn Khaldūn, The Introduction, volume I, p. 77.
5 Ibid., p. 76–7.
6 How important a part this application of the science is for Ibn Khaldūn is discussed by Muhsin Mahdi, op. cit., Chapter V.
7 Quoted by Rosenthal as from Ibn Khaldun's World History, II, 116.
8 Nutting, Anthony, The Arabs, London, Hollis and Carter, 1964, pp. 115–116Google Scholar.
9 Rosenthal uses the expression “group feeling” to translate the Arabic word “’asabīya”. The word “’asabīya” conceptualizes “… a corporate feeling; a common bond, due in the first place to ties of blood and family tradition, creating a sense of solidarity; it inspires common action and is an indispensable driving force in the formation of states and dynasties; its aim is dominion.” Erwin I. J. Rosenthal, Islam and the Modern National State, Cambridge, 1965, p. 18. Mahdi translates the word as “solidarity”.
10 Ibn Khaldūn, op. cit., p. 29f.
11 Ibid., p. LXXXIV.
12 Ibid., p. 30.
13 Ibid., p. 369.
14 Conditions which were to make possible for Ibn Khaldūn a critique of history, other writers have found prejudicial towards an adequate outline of history. Oswald Spengler, for example (Der Untergang des Abendlandes, C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, München) urges a picture of history to be drawn not from the point of view of the observer over against the culture in which he participates, but from a point of view which gains in universality precisely through distance from one's culture. See p. 125.
15 Muhsin Mahdi, op. cit. p. 74.