A Study of History : The Growths of Civilizations. New York, Oxford University Press, 1962, Vol. 3, pp. 321-328.
The last member of our Pleiad of historians is Abd-ar-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun al-Hadrami of Tunis (1332-1406) - an Arabic genius who achieved in a single 'acquiescence' of less than four years length, out of a fifty-four years span of adult working life, a life-work in the shape of a piece of literature which can bear comparison with the work of a Thucydides or the work of a Machiavelli for both breadth and profundity of vision as well as for sheer intellectual power. Ibn Khaldun's star shines the more brightly by contrast with the foil of darkness against which it flashes out; for while Thucydides and Machiavelli and Clarendon are all brilliant representatives of brilliant times and places, Ibn Khaldun is the sole point of light in his quarter of the firmament. He is indeed the one outstanding personality in the history of a civilization whose social life on the whole was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.[1] In his chosen field of intellectual activity he appears to have been inspired by no predecessors[2] and to have found no kindred souls among his contemporaries and to have kindled no answering spark of inspiration in any successors; and yet, in the Prolegomena (Muqaddimat) to his Universal History he has conceived and formulated a philosophy of history which is undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place. It was his single brief 'acquiescence' from a life of practical activity that gave Ibn Khaldun his opportunity to cast his creative thought into literary shape.
Ibn Khaldun was born into the Arabic World in an age when the infant Arabic Civilization was struggling (as it proved, in vain) to bring order out of the chaos which was its legacy from a recent social interregnum. This interregnum (circa A.D. 975-1275) had been the sequel to the break-up of the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, which had been the final embodiments of the Syriac universal state; and at the western extremity of the derelict Syriac World - in North-West Africa and in the Iberian Peninsula - the last vestiges of the old order had been swept away by a conflux of barbarians from three continents: European Asturians and Franks from the Pyrenees; African Nomads from the Sahara[3] and highlanders from the Atlas[4] who made themselves a name as the 'Berbers' par excellence;[5] and Asiatic Arab Badu from the North Arabian Steppe who were perhaps the most barbarous and destructive of them all.
The destruction which these barbarians had worked was brought home to Ibn Khaldun by his family history as well as by his personal experience. The Khalduns were a prominent house of the aristocracy of Seville[6] who had emigrated from Andalusia to Africa, about a century before Abd-ar-Rahman ibn Khaldun's birth, in anticipation of the conquest of Seville by the Castilians;[7] and in the family's new home in Ifriqiyah Abd-ar-Rahman, comparing the local conditions in his own generation, as he saw them, with the descriptions of Ifriqiyah in earlier ages which he read in historical works, was evidently impressed by the greatness of the contrast between present and past and was convinced that the immense change for the worse which had taken place within the last three centuries was the handiwork of the Arab Badawi tribes - the Banu Hilal and the Banu Sulaym - who had been unleashed in A.D. 1051 upon a rebellious Maghrib by the Fatimid rulers of Syria and Egypt.
lfriqiyah and the Maghrib',[8] he writes, care suffering still from their devastation by the Arabs. The Banu Hilal and the Sulaym broke their way in during the fifth century of the Hijrah [the 11Ith century of the Christian Era]; and they have continued to wreak their fury on these countries for three centuries and a half, Hence devastation and solitude still reign there. Before this invasion, the whole region extending from the [Western] Sudan to the Mediterranean was thickly populated: the traces of an ancient civilization, the debris of monuments and buildings, the ruins of towns and villages, are there to testify to the fact.'[9]
Ibn Khaldun was conscious of the difference between this purely destructive Arab invasion during the post-Syriac interregnum and the movement which, some three or four centuries earlier, had brought his own ancestors westward from the Hadramawt to AndaIusia. For these Arab emissaries of the Umayyads had come to the Maghrib not to destroy but to fulfil. They had come to step into the shoes of the previous Roman garrisons and Roman officials and to retrieve for the ancient Syriac Society, in its latter days, the former colonial domain of which it had been deprived during eight or nine centuries of alien rule, [10]
“After the preaching of Islam,” Ibn Khaldun observes, “the Arab armies penetrated into the Maghrib and captured all the cities of the country; but they did not establish themselves there as tent-dwellers or as Nomads, since their need to make sure of their dominion in the Maghrib compelled them to keep to the towns. So in the Maghrib at this stage the Arabs did not occupy the open country. It was not until the fifth century of the Hijrah that they came to take up their abode there and to spread tribe-wise in order to camp allover this immense region.”[11]
The first of the two passages here quoted from the Universal History of Ibn Khaldun occurs in a chapter[12] which is perhaps the most crushing indictment of Nomad rule over sedentary populations that has ever been delivered from the mouth of a first-hand witness.[13] But the thought which had been set in motion in Ibn Khaldun's mind by his apprehension of the ruin which the Nomads had brought upon the Maghrib did not come to a standstill here. It moved on, with a gathering momentum, to contemplate the contrast between the Nomadic and the sedentary way of life and to analyze the nature of each; to ponder over the group-feeling or sense of social solidarity or esprit de corps (asabiyah) which is the Nomad's psychological response to the challenge of life in the desert; to trace out a connexion of cause and effect between esprit de corps and empire-building and between empire-building and religious propaganda; and thence to broaden out until at last it embraced, in a panoramic vision, the rises and falls of empires and the geneses and growths and breakdowns and disintegrations of civilizations.[14]
This mighty tree of thought, with its towering stem and symmetrically branching boughs and delicate tracery of twigs was the eventual outcome of the seedling that germinated in the young Abd-ar-Rahman's mind under the early impression of the contrast between present and past in his native Ifriqiyah. But Ibn Khaldun did not begin his career by sitting down to put these burgeoning thoughts into order. It seemed a more pressing task to be putting some rudiments of order into the struggling, chaotic social life of contemporary Ifriqiyah; and this was the task to which the young man found himself called both by family tradition and by personal need of a livelihood. The Macrocosm called him; the Microcosm could wait. And so, at the age of twenty, Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun followed in his forbears' footsteps by plunging into local politics as a courtier and a minister of state.
The Arabic adventurer's own account, in his Autobiography, of his life during the next twenty-two years reminds a modern Western student of history, who re-reads the story in A.D. 1935, of nothing so much as the life of some latter-day Western-style Chinese politician during the equal span of time which has elapsed since the outbreak of the Chinese Revolution. It was, indeed, a life of meeting at night and parting at morning; for, within this span of twenty-two years, Ibn Khaldun saw service with no less than seven different princelings; and from almost every one of these successive royal masters his parting was abrupt and violent. In his native principality of Tunis, where he made his debut, he remained no longer than a few weeks; and thereafter we find him making a series of brief appearances now in Fez and now in Granada (whence his momentary employer sends him, in A.D. 1363, on an embassy to the court of Peter the Cruel in Seville)[15] and now again in this or that city of Ifriqiyah. In all these peregrinations, his only tranquil 'getaway' was the last; and this, too, was effected more sinico.
In the spring of A.D. 1375 Ibn Khaldun had just settled down at Tilimsan (Tlemcen), under the patronage of the local prince, to give public instruction as a change from practical politics, when it pleased the prince to send his accomplished guest on a political mission to a Nomad Arab tribe in the interior.
“As I had renounced public affairs, Ibn Khaldun proceeds, in order to live in retreat, the prospect of this mission filled me with repugnance; but I affected to accept it with pleasure. [On my road], I fell in with the 'Awlad' Arif [who appear to have been a branch of the Duwawidah tribe which Ibn Khaldun had been instructed to visit]; and they welcomed me with gifts and honours. I took up my abode with them; and they sent to Tilimsan to fetch my family and my children. They promised at the same time to represent to the Sultan that it was positively impossible for me to fulfil the mission with which he had charged me; and in fact they induced him to accept my excuses. Thereupon I established myself with my family at Qal'at ibn Salamah, a castle situated in the country of the Banu Tujin which was held from the Sultan by during his creative 'acquiescence' at Qal'at ibn Salamah.” The task of committing to writing the Universal History which was in his mind was not at an end until the Prolegomena had been followed by six further volumes; and we may conjecture that these last six- sevenths of the work might never have seen the light if the successful composition of the prelude, during those four exceptional years of tranquility, had not inspired the philosopher with an impetus to write which persisted through the subsequent years of recurrent turmoil. We must add that the relative value of the different parts of the work as 'everlasting possessions' is not to be measured by any quantitative standard; and that if Posterity were confronted with the cruel choice between losing the first volume alone of Ibn Khaldun's Universal History or saving the Muqaddamat at the price of losing all the other six, we should unhesitatingly sacrifice the six volumes which the author contrived to compose after his re- emergence from Qal'at ibn Salamah in order to preserve the single volume which came to birth in that tranquil retreat. In fact, Ibn Khaldun's life-work is the work which he accomplished in the four years devoted to creation out of half a century spent in a whirl of public activity. And the great philosopher's true return from his brief withdrawal was not the second chapter of practical life in which he emulated the vagaries of the first. In one aspect, the Ibn Khaldun who bade farewell to Qal'at ibn Salamah in the autumn of A.D. 1378 reassumed, at Tunis and in Cairo, the role of the restless politician who had whimsically taken his conge from the Court of Tilimsan in the spring of A.D. 1375. In another aspect, the ephemeral man of affairs re-emerged from his retreat transfigured, once for all, into the immortal philosopher whose thought still lives in the mind of every reader of the Muqaddamat.
[1] The famous description of the life of Primitive Man in the State of Nature which is given by Thomas Hobbes. in Leviathan, part i, ch. 13. For the history of the Arabic Civilization into which Ibn Khaldun happened to be born, see I. C (i) (6), vol. i, pp. 70-2, with Annex I, above.
[2] The education which he received from his masters of whom he gives an account in his Autobiography seems to have been exceedingly thorough but entirely scholastic. (see Ibn Khaldun: Muqaddimah, translated by de Slane, McG. (Paris. 1863-8, Imprimerie Imperiale, 3 vol..), vol. i, Introduction, pp. xix-xxvi.)
[3] The Muribits.
[4] The Muwahhids.
[5] See II. D (v), vol. ii, p. 204, above.
[6] By origin, the family were Yamania from the Hadramawt who had migrated to Andalusia, after the Umayyad conquest, in one of the military colonies which were then drafted out to the Iberian Peninsula from the live garrison of Arab troops in Syria (de Slane, op. cit., vol. i, pp. ix-x).
[7] Ibn Khaldun, in his Autobiography (translation in de Slane, op. cit., vol. i, p. xv), mentions that his ancestors migrated from Seville to Ceuta some twenty year. before the fall of Cordova (A.D. 1236), Carmona (A.D. 1243), Seville (A.D. 1244), and Jaen (A.D. 1246).
[8] In Ihe language of Arabic political geography, the Maghrib (i.e., 'the West') means in a general way the whole of the Arabic World west of Egypt, though the term is apt to be confined to the Arabic domain in North-West Africa to the exclusion of the Arabic domain in the Iberian Peninsula (Andalus). Maghrib aI-Aqsa (i.e., 'the Far West') means Morocco. Ifriqiyah (an Arabization of the Latin name' Africa') means a region of rather wider extent than the modern Tunisia in which urban and agricultural life had the ascendancy over nomadism The successive capitals of Ifriqiyah have been Carthage, Qayrawan, Mahdiyah, and Tunis.
[9] Ibn Khaldun: Muqaddamat, translation by de Slane, vol, i, p. 312. Cp. pp. 66-7.
[10] The Syriac culture had been planted on the coasts of North-West Africa and Spain by Phoenician colonists from about the ninth century B.C. onwards. The interval of alien rule between the end of the Carthaginian regime and the beginning of the Umayyad regime had lasted in Spain from the close of the third century B.C. to the beginning of the eighth century of the Christian Era, and in Africa from the middle of the second century B.C. to the middle of the seventh century of the Christian Era.
[11] Ibn Khaldun: A History of the Berbers = A Universal History, vols. vi and vii, French translation by de Slane (Algiers 1852-6, 4 vols.), vol. i, p. 28. The passage here quoted is taken for the text of his tenth chapter by Gautier, E. F. : Les Siècles Obscurs du Maghreb (Paris 1927, Payot). See further Marçais, G.: Les Arabes en Berberie du XI au XIV. Siècle (Paris 1913, Leroux)
[12] Ibn Khaldun: Muqaddamat, Bk. I, section ii, ad fin. The chapter-headings speak for themselves: 'Every country that is conquered by Arabs rapidly goes to ruin'; 'In general, Arabs are incapable of founding an empire unless they have received a tincture of religion of a certain strength from some prophet or saint' ; 'Of all peoples, Arabs are the least capable of governing an empire.'
[13] The indictment is the more remarkable when we consider that the particular Nomads at whose expense Ibn Khaldun makes his argumentum ad hominem shared the name of Arab with the author himself; but perhaps it is actually this ostensible kinship which inspires Ibn Khaldun with his animus against the Banu Hilal; for the House of Khaldun had not only been bourgeois for centuries; there was no Nomadic chapter at all in their past; for the peasantry of the Hadramawt is just as sedentary as the bourgeoisie of Mecca or Medina or San'a. The very accent and argot of the Banu Hilal set Ibn Khaldun's teeth on edge. (For this, see the passages quoted by Gautier in op. cit., p. 387.)
[14] See, further, Annex III, below.
[15] This was how' Abd-ar-Rahman ibn Khaldun visited, for the first and 1st time, the home of his ancestors. 'When I arrived at Seville', he writes, 'I remarked a number of monuments of my ancestors' greatness'. Peter received' Abd-ar-Rahman with honour, and actually offered to reinstate him in his ancestral property if he would consent to enter his service-an offer which' Abd-ar-Rahman politely declined. (See the relevant passage from the Autobiopaphy in de Slane a translation of the Muqaddamat, vol. i, p. xliv.)