“There are already so many books on Ibn Khaldun that I have been hesitant to add yet another to the list,” writes Robert Irwin in his preface, adding that the 14th-century scholar himself held that one of the great impediments to knowledge is an overabundance of books. Irwin does not tell us explicitly what made him overcome his hesitation, but the answer soon becomes evident enough.
Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) is an appealing figure for many reasons. His fame rests primarily on his extraordinary (and sui generis) attempt to create a science of history, the Muqaddima, but he also lived a full life of travel, scholarship, and intrigues both tribal and courtly. He famously maintained a cyclical view of history in which, to simplify, rural or nomadic groups possessed of a strong degree of solidarity and cohesion are able to conquer and replace existing dynasties, which have become corrupt and weak due to urban luxury and dissipation. Once urbanized, though, the same fate awaits the conquerors. The slippery nature of the Muqaddima has permitted not just various interpretations of the book, but often vastly differing portraits of its author, often reflecting one's own predilections. Thus Ibn Khaldun has been a rationalist philosopher (according to Muhsin Mahdi), a committed believer with rigorous fidelity to tradition (H.A.R. Gibb), a materialist proto-Marxist (Yves Lacoste), a modern sociologist (Ernest Gellner), and an orientalist construct (Aziz Al-Azmeh).
Irwin does not play this game. He is more interested in observing it and seeing what such divergences of opinion might tell us about Ibn Khaldun and his thought (as well as what they reveal about orientalist scholarship). Irwin's monograph distinguishes itself in a crowded field by being a study of the historian in his political and intellectual milieu. As far as his own approach goes, he holds that, to understand Ibn Khaldun, one must understand his world of 14th-century North Africa and Andalusia. Whatever his indisputable uniqueness, Ibn Khaldun was first and foremost a man of his age, a product of a world far removed from Irwin and his potential readers. Rather than see in him an avatar of some modern mode of thought, Irwin treats him as a 14th-century Maliki judge and historian. I am not sure to what extent this constitutes a conscious methodology, but he states, “When I read the Muqaddima, I have the sense that I am encountering a visitor from another planet—and that is exciting” (p. xiii).
Not one to dwell on any topic he finds boring, Irwin conveys that excitement to the reader. Following an introductory chapter, the first half of Ibn Khaldun provides a biography intertwined with discussions of the Muqaddima. Irwin surveys what we know about Ibn Khaldun's family background, education, his eventful career in government, and his important friendship with the Andalusian vizier and man of letters, Ibn al-Khatib. The third chapter discusses nomads and Ibn Khaldun's views on them, while the fourth looks at the main principles put forth in the Muqaddima. These sections are excellent, accessible introductions to Ibn Khaldun's life and work, and they point to some of the difficulties in grasping his thought as a coherent whole and some of the apparent contradictions between his own experience and the theories he put forth.
Irwin gives a good account of his subject's strengths and weaknesses. As many have already noted, when Ibn Khaldun did write his own history, the Kitab al-ʿIbar, he failed to live up to the high standards of history he called for in the Muqaddima. This is not surprising for two reasons: first, his standards were impossibly high and second, however lofty his own ambitions, he remained dependent on the works of his predecessors. His view of nomad life is somewhat idealized; Irwin notes that 19th- and 20th-century accounts of Bedouin tribes indicate chronic undernourishment and high rates of disease. Similarly, his portrait of urban decadence cannot be entirely accurate: “It is unlikely that water-sellers, tanners, bathhouse stokers, and chicken farmers felt themselves to be succumbing to the evil effects of luxurious living” (p. 51).
Ibn Khaldun painted with broad abstract strokes, and he was concerned with the elites and with grand causes rather than individuals. For all his glorification of the nomads, he shows no interest in the details of their lives. Although his experiences in the revolving door politics of the Maghreb must have inspired to some degree his cyclical vision of history, little of this seems to inform directly the theories of the Muqaddima.
Chapter 5 treats Ibn Khaldun's time in Mamluk Cairo, from 1383 to his death in 1406, and benefits from Irwin's deep acquaintance with the period. The remaining sections treat Sufism, economics, the occult sciences and education, followed by an especially interesting survey of “The Strange Afterlife of the Muqaddima.”
The Muqaddima is obviously the work of an extraordinarily independent, singular thinker, but Irwin argues that in most respects, Ibn Khaldun's thoughts and opinion were those to be expected of a Maliki qāḍī of the time. His most consistent trait, in Irwin's view, is religious moralizing. From a 21st-century vantage point, he could be coolly rational and surprisingly credulous. He was seriously interested in the occult. He maintained a distinction between “secular” topics and religious ones, some susceptible to reason and others to faith only. Travelers’ tales of the desert “City of Brass” he dismissed as nonsense; similarly fantastic tales in the Qurʾan he accepted without reservation. There is nothing so unusual about this, as Irwin stresses.
The Muqaddima is not the only cyclical theory of history, and it shares with other such theories (Polybius, Vico, Spengler) an essential pessimism about the future and the possibilities of progress. In Ibn Khaldun's case, as Irwin perceptively notes, such a gloomy outlook fit well with one of the great themes of Arabic literary culture: nostalgia for the past, be it the Prophet's community in Medina or the poet's weeping at the beloved's abandoned campsite. Ibn Khaldun may have rejected travelers’ tales of the “City of Brass,” but that story, as it appears in the 1001 Nights, is a memento mori that conforms to his moralistic worldview and his condemnation of luxury and ease.
Such thematic observations are one of the many factors that make Irwin's Ibn Khaldun more than a fine introduction to its subject. He does an exemplary job of putting Ibn Khaldun back in the 14th-century Arab-Islamic milieu whence he came, never forgetting that the history of scholarship on the Muqaddima is almost as curious as the Muqaddima itself. Irwin's erudition is matched by his engaging and readable style, making this book truly one that will appeal, as they say, “to the specialist and the general reader alike.”
