It was a great pleasure to read Robert Irwin's “intellectual biography” of Ibn Khaldun. For me it was as if I had picked up a stack of letters from an old friend who has recently moved away. Almost eight years ago I published a biography entitled Ibn Khaldun, Life and Times (Edinburgh University Press). I am familiar with Irwin's challenge and his accomplishment. Irwin's gripping prose, use of learned anecdote combined with careful scholarship makes Ibn Khaldun: an Intellectual Biography an excellent choice for the classroom and for the general reader alike. Beyond this praise of Irwin's book, which he deserves, I cannot help but address some specific questions and challenges to my interpretation of Ibn Khaldun. “Recently Allen Fromherz, assistant professor [now I am ranked at Full Professor] at Georgia State University in Atlanta, in his biography of Ibn Khaldun has emphasized and perhaps overemphasized both the importance of Sufism in his life and its role in shaping his philosophy of history.” He claims this is an unlikely theory since, “if this is so obvious, why has no one seen it before?”

I respect Irwin's scholarship and his opinion. In a way, it is flattering to be engaged in this debate. By way of defence, I must admit that Ibn Khaldun seems to do something strange to his would-be biographers. He often throws dust on the window to his mind, obscuring the more complex depths of his own autobiography. In fact, he did it to me, at first. Ibn Khaldun's autobiography, the main source for both Irwin and for me, seems first to reveal a real stick in the mud. Read superficially, it seems to be only about a man who writes boring sermons about Maliki law and tries his hand at bad courtly poetry. If read on the surface level, the Ta'rif is just about a typical man of Marshall Hodgson's “Middle Period” of Islamic culture, a man who was a part of a web of Islamic cultural continuity that existed despite political division. If we only had his autobiography, we might mistakenly put Ibn Khaldun's life in the same old dusty box historians generally used for typical sticks in the mud, the box for some of the hundreds of names the populate works like the Tabaqat Hanabilah. But in fact, as anybody who had read the Muqaddimah and compared it to contemporary works, from Froissart to Ibn Marzuq, knows, he was no stick in the mud. Far from it. He was a revolutionary thinker. He sought to do something new. He knew it.

It is thus strange to read Irwin, who recognizes the uniqueness of Ibn Khaldun and praises his import, throwing Ibn Khaldun's autobiography into a box of discarded lives, dismissing the work as largely unhelpful or unrevealing. Ibn Khaldun's work, especially The Muqaddimah, or Introduction to History, appears so unusual, so confident and so refreshing in its search for what he calls the “hidden meaning” of history that it must break us out of the typical mould of thinking about Islamic historiography. It compels us to read the autobiography of Ibn Khaldun again, to rethink our assumptions and to link the Muqaddimah to the autobiography, to show that they are, in many ways, telling a linked story. At times, Irwin seems close to something deeper. He then hesitates. We learn, for instance, that Ibn Khaldun thinks history should be pursued in depth as a branch of philosophy and but then that he also dismisses philosophy. How can this be so? We get no satisfying answer from Irwin. We learn that Ibn Khaldun seems to embrace the vigour of the desert and the Bedouin but then simultaneously seems to condemn them as the ruin of civilization and order. What does that mean? We learn that Ibn Khaldun says one thing but then another, a contradiction sealed within a counterfactual. But we learn nothing as to why this might be so. Why, or for whom, is Ibn Khaldun writing both his Muqaddimah and his autobiography? Why is he being deliberately, so blatantly, self-contradictory? We get no satisfying answers to these mysteries at the heart of Ibn Khaldun's writing. Irwin seems to dismiss the question of a layered audience repeatedly, and the possibility that Ibn Khaldun might want to display one side of himself to some readers (such as conservative jurists who dismiss philosophy and rulers and rivals who might want to imprison him) and a hidden side to others, such as those of his own intellectual circle who are sympathetic to a philosophical or even, shall we say, a Sufi interpretation of history. The truth was revealed in layers.

In many ways Ibn Khaldun's autobiography does read like a “CV”, in the words of Irwin. But there are also moments of profound emotional gravitas and hidden drama. Ibn Khaldun is completely stripped naked in the desert by the very sort of marauding robbers and tribes he so praises for their strength and force. He describes multiple personal crises when he realizes that he will never be able to reach the spiritual enlightenment of his father. The most dramatic of all is Ibn Khaldun's experience of the plague; his admission that the plague and the killing of his parents and other members of his family and community hit like a rock falling from the sky. Ibn Khaldun says: “It was as if the whole world had changed”. It was because of this profound experience, and the continued memory of his deceased father, himself a mystic Sufi, and not because of Ibn Khaldun's official duties as a qadi or his typical work-a-day life, that the Muqaddimah emerged from the mind of Ibn Khaldun. For a writer, it is odd to see him delete or discard dramatic, important and revealing scenes in the life story of Ibn Khaldun.

Ibn Khaldun is like a hypnotist. He seems capable of transforming his biographers into dreamers. Irwin says: “… Writing this book has been the culmination of a necromantic pursuit. I have spent most of my life communing with a man who has been dead for over six hundred years … It has been a kind of séance and, as is so often the case with séances, it has sometimes been difficult to interpret the messages coming across the centuries” (p. 205). Irwin's book is a welcome addition to Ibn Khaldun scholarship. It has answered many questions that I and other scholars had failed to address. I only wonder, however, that if Irwin had awakened somewhat from Ibn Khaldun's hypnotic pull, Might he have realized that while Ibn Khaldun was capable of holding secrets, he left abundant clues that pointed to something beneath the surface telling of his life? As Irwin should know, sometimes the unseen is obvious and the obvious unseen.