Ibn Khaldun is one of the most fascinating figures of the premodern Muslim world and perhaps the one whose thoughts more than any other continue to intrigue readers and scholars. As Robert Irwin notes in the preface, much has already been said and debated on the subject of Ibn Khaldun in the last two centuries so that he was hesitant to add yet another book to the canon. Irwin's motive however, was to explore the philosopher from the perspective of “another planet” rather than looking for the “modernity” of his thoughts as many others have already done.
In eleven chapters Robert Irwin's book redraws the intellectual profile of Ibn Khaldun. Of course it is mainly through Muqaddima or Introduction that he scrutinises Ibn Khaldun's intellectuality, reiterating the established view that although the chronicle, the ʿIbar that follows the ‘Introduction’, provides new information (Chapter Three), it remains conventional historiography.
Quite appropriately, the first chapter is ‘About Ruins’ and deals with nostalgia, a decisive feature not only in the historiography of Ibn Khaldun but in the Arabic cultural tradition and its view of the world altogether. It deals with the vestiges of the past in the literature of mirabilia, notably the Muruj al-Dhahab of Mas'udi which had a significant impact on Ibn Khaldun in spite of the scepticism and critiques he expressed about it. Beginning with the Koran, the ruins of the past have inspired pessimism about history and led to admonition about its interpretation. Here and again in several other passages in the book, Irwin notes that Ibn Khaldun's analysis and attitude towards causality is not consistently rationalistic. Although he rejected many supernatural phenomena he never questioned those related to Muslim faith.
Having defined Ibn Khaldun's conceptual background, Irwin dedicates a chapter to his Biography, his life in the Maghreb, his interaction with the political situation there and his experiences with his teacher al-Abili, a master of rational sciences and with his much admired and beloved friend Ibn al-Khatib, a pessimistic critical historian and a Sufi. The third chapter revisits Ibn Khaldun's views in the Muqaddima and the ʿIbar on the virtues of the Nomads, specifically the Berbers, and his famous concept of the ʿasabiyya, emphasising again his nostalgic-pessimistic attitude.
In a chapter on the methodology of the Muqaddima, Irwin tries to situate Ibn Khaldun between philosophy, theology, Sharia and Sufism. Although Ibn Khaldun rejected Greek philosophical thinking, Irwin describes him as a philosopher in the sense of possessing the capacity to reason abstractly and to generalize about social and historical phenomena (p. 78). His philosophy of historical cycles does not divert Ibn Khaldun from the Ashʿari concept of God as the omnipotent creator of history.
Following Chapter Five, which documents Ibn Khaldun's career in Egypt and his experience with Timur — showing that in spite of acknowledged admiration, he remained an outsider in Egypt described by his fellow Mamluk historians in not very flattering terms, Irwin returns to Ibn Khaldun's Weltanschauung. He identifies him as an orthodox Sufi with reservation against esoteric extremes and heterodoxy. This was in fact the form of Sufism predominant in Egypt and the Maghreb. The following long chapter is dedicated to Ibn Khaldun's obsession with occultism and his urge to foresee future history. In this part of the book Irwin describes Ibn Khaldun as an intellectual puzzle, whose rational thinking did not prevent him from believing in numerology, lettrism, astrology, miracles and some forms of religious divination. Following a short Chapter Ten on Ibn Khaldun's views on language, Irwin, who had already referred to parallels between Ibn Khaldun and European thinkers, discusses the afterlife of the Muqaddima in western scholarship.
Ibn Khaldun's inconsistent scepticism and rationality, rejecting some but not all forms of magic and sorcery, (p. 140) coupled with consistent religious faith is the leitmotif of Irwin's intellectual portrait drawn from “another planet”. But is not this portrait consistent with the world of a medieval thinker? Would not any further rationalism be utter heresy? Ibn Khaldun's conditional rationality prompts Irwin to join those who reject the view of Ibn Khaldun as ‘precursor’ of modern ideas. In the epilogue, coming back to the perspective from “another planet” announced in his introduction, Irwin candidly and refreshingly admits that he could not always understand Ibn Khaldun. Although he was one of the most outstanding figures of his age, Ibn Khaldun's thoughts remained beyond the grasp of his contemporaries. Robert Irwin sees him as a strikingly bleak and lonely figure (p. 208), standing between the exceptional and the conventional, beyond categorisation. Irwin's portrait of the philosopher is beautifully written, intriguing, stimulating and movingly intimate.
