These three books, written by sociologist Syed Farid Alatas and historian Allen James Fromherz, represent the continued academic fascination with the Muqaddimah, the work of the North African Arab Muslim historical theorist Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406). The Muqaddimah has been the subject of an entire library of articles and books since it was first published and translated in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. Written mainly by Westerners and Western-educated Middle Easterners, most of these publications have studied one or another aspect of Ibn Khaldun's dialectical model of tribal state formation, which constitutes the intellectual core of the Muqaddimah. Many authors of these works have also noticed and commented on the similarity of Ibn Khaldun's historical model to Western sociological theory. Relatively few scholars have written about Ibn Khaldun himself. Most but not all of these scholars agree that Ibn Khaldun was a brilliantly original intellectual, but many express different views about the genesis and nature of his ideas and their significance. Alatas and Fromherz provide two contrasting studies. Alatas's two books are closely related sequential studies, devoted to explaining Ibn Khaldun's model and relating it to the social sciences. Fromherz's work is biographical, although he also discusses Ibn Khaldun's theories. Both authors make significant contributions to the understanding of the man and his ideas, while also implicitly demonstrating why Ibn Khaldun and the Muqaddimah will continue to be subjects of research and controversy.

Fromherz published the first of these volumes in 2011 with Edinburgh University Press, which produced an attractively printed volume featuring the author's lovely photograph of the Seville Alcázar on the cover. In explaining his reason for writing the book, Fromherz cites the lack of biographies of Ibn Khaldun, remarking that hitherto only translations of Ibn Khaldun's memoir and sketchy outlines of his life appeared in print. He is incorrect, though, to say at that time that no previous biographies had been written. The Egyptian lawyer and historical scholar Muhammad Abdullah Enan published a thoughtful English language bibliography entitled Ibn Khaldun: His Life and Works (New Delhi: Kitab Bhavan, 1979), which is available online. He is probably correct, however, when he argues that the relative lack of biographical studies of such a major figure reflects scholars’ general agreement with the opinion of Franz Rosenthal, the justly acclaimed author of the three-volume edited translation of the Muqaddimah. Rosenthal thought it was impossible to write a biography of Ibn Khaldun because the historian revealed almost no personal information in his memoir.

Rosenthal's comment raises the issue of the value of Ibn Khaldun's memoir, and it is more useful to characterize it in this way than to describe it, as is commonly done, as an autobiography. It is not an autobiography in the sense of a reflective, retrospective view and explanation of a life, and it is almost devoid of emotion. Fromherz is right, however, to emphasize that it contains a treasure trove of information, including a chronology of the complex, dangerous professional life of an Arab Muslim scholar–official in North Africa, Iberia, and Egypt. It should not be necessary to argue for the importance of this text, but Fromherz is right to lament how little it has been used in past studies. In his memoir, Ibn Khaldun identifies scholars he met, important rulers and officials he knew and worked with, and tribes he recruited, taxed, or lived with at different times. It concludes with an account of his meeting with Temür or Tamerlane—an extraordinary encounter! It is, though, a memoir, and Ibn Khaldun says nothing about what personal experiences, intellectual influences, or political conditions might have prompted him to write the brilliantly original Muqaddimah. Fromherz also argues that the memoir's value lies as much in what it omits as what it includes, although he does not immediately expand on this observation. He also usefully mentions Rosenthal's observation that the Muqaddimah itself contains valuable autobiographical information. Indeed, the Muqaddimah provides considerable personal information of the kind that cannot be found in the memoir or elsewhere.

The principal virtue of Fromherz's fluently written biography is that he has delved deeply into this memoir and used the data he has found there to create a detailed narrative of Ibn Khaldun's life. In addition, he has included extensive, discursive notes, which are particularly useful for scholars of the region, society, and era, and these also offer a testimony to his scholarly erudition on a wide range of subjects relevant to Ibn Khaldun's life. In exploiting the memoir, Fromherz has also led the way in using some selections of Ibn Khaldun's extensive poetical correspondence with Ibn al-Khatib, the Granadan vizier and Arabic literary scholar. Ibn Khaldun prized his own Arabic literary skills and, as evidenced by verse that he so frequently quotes in the memoir, he considered his friendship with Ibn al-Khatib the single most important professional relationship of his life. While Fromherz limits his remarks on this verse to a few examples, his useful citations ought to remind scholars that the verse should be a subject of special study, for both its literary and historical value. When examining the verse and the entire memoir, it is, of course, important to keep in mind that memoirs and autobiographies are the most obvious examples of what the Annales historian March Bloch has termed an intentional source (i.e., writing designed to persuade readers of the virtues or achievements of the author). Taking just the verse, various questions arise. What does Ibn Khaldun wish to demonstrate by including this correspondence? That he was an accomplished poet, that he enjoyed the reflected glory of corresponding with the outstanding Arabic literary figure in the western Islamic world, or merely that he deeply valued Ibn al-Khatib's friendship—or all of the above?

By titling his book Ibn Khaldun, Life and Times, Fromherz lets readers know that he is, first of all, offering them a narrative biography. The first four narrative chapters are largely based on Ibn Khaldun's memoir, and throughout the biography, Fromherz emphasizes the unrealized value of that text. Yet, the enduring scholarly interest in Ibn Khaldun derives almost entirely from his achievement of writing an original work of historical sociology, namely, a dialectical model to explain the cyclical history of North African tribal states. Fromherz too seeks to explain Ibn Khaldun's achievement and, like Alatas, discusses its implications for the modern world. This attempt, which consists of interpretations of the memoir as well as the three final analytical chapters, constitutes the weakest part of the book, as a comparison with Alatas's two books reveals. Questionable speculation, a superficial understanding of the philosophical structure of the Muqaddimah, and mistaken assumptions regarding Ibn Khaldun's notion of civilization mar his explanation.

First, many readers will notice that Fromherz, like many modern biographers, speculates a good deal, since the memoir for all of its factual wealth is impoverished when it comes to matters of bias or motive. His speculation primarily involves attempts to demonstrate that the memoir contains clues to Ibn Khaldun's historical and social theories. Two important examples are, first, his belief that Khaldun suffered from a kind of existential psychological isolation that “may” have led him to develop a model in which kinship, or ʿasabiyah, constituted one of two qualities that empowered tribal conquest (41), and second, his reiterated hypothesis that Khaldun was a Sufi, whose spiritual searches were analogous to, and by implication, the cause of his interest in identifying the underlying structures of society (116, 124–27). Uncritical readers might accept these suggestions as fact because Fromherz presents them with considerable verve and style. Nonetheless, it is impossible to document or in any way convincingly prove these or other speculative arguments regarding the value of the memoir as a guide to or explanation of the Muqaddimah.

Such speculations do have considerable value in stimulating readers to think about the genesis of Ibn Khaldun's remarkable dialectical model—even if they are not and cannot be substantiated. More serious than these presumptions, however, is Fromherz's flawed discussion of the model. While he begins his discussion well, with an important quotation from the Muqaddimah about the determinative effects of a thing's nature or essence and its associated accidents, his subsequent discussion of these ideas and Ibn Khaldun's philosophical intent is characterized, first and foremost, by a failure to explain the significance of this passage. Perhaps for that reason, he does not cite these ideas later to explain the stages of Ibn Khaldun's dialectical model. Instead, following this quotation, he mistakes the significance of Ibn Khaldun's comment about nature or essence and then immediately follows this with the unconnected but erroneous assertion that for Ibn Khaldun “ʿasabiyah was the essential cause of history” (117). In this chapter the reader is left with the distinct impression that Fromherz, devoted to the memoir and to his biographical narrative, was not deeply engaged with Ibn Khaldun's model. This inference is strengthened when he misrepresents Ibn Khaldun's attitude toward cities, which constitutes a fundamental aspect of the Arab historian’s theory.

It seems most likely his error originated with a reading of Rosenthal's mistranslation of the word ʿumran as “civilization” rather than “society” or “population,” which is the translation European scholars commonly give. Many other scholars have accepted Rosenthal's translation without too much damage to their argument, but Fromherz then falsely characterizes Ibn Khaldun's model as fundamentally opposed to the Greco-Roman view that civilization meant the culture of people who live in cities. Yet, the phrase “bedouin” or “tribal civilization” is for Ibn Khaldun, a contradiction in terms, as Ibn Khaldun regarded tribes, whether Arab bedouins, Berbers, or Central Asian Turks, as those who destroyed urban culture. Thus when Fromherz writes that Ibn Khaldun rejected the Greco-Roman equation of cities with civilization and instead offered a new idea of “rural civilization,” he is mistaken (140). Tamaddun, not ʿumran, is the word Ibn Khaldun uses for “civilization.” He is equally mistaken to suggest that Ibn Khaldun regarded tribes as the “original source of civilization” (141). Tribesmen, who in the countryside were barbarians, but vigorous ones, conquered cities and only then developed civilized traits. Ibn Khaldun forcefully and repeatedly asserts that civilization occurs in cities, where people such as Ibn Khaldun mastered both material and intellectual crafts. In his view these skills were then adopted by tribal conquerors as they became civilized.

In contrast to Fromherz's focus on Ibn Khaldun's memoir and his engagement with Sufism, Alatas devotes only a few pages of his two books to the memoir in order to summarize the historian's life. He critically analyzes Ibn Khaldun's attitude toward Sufism in Ibn Khaldun but does not suggest that Sufi piety or mysticism influenced his methodology or dialectical model. He is principally interested in Ibn Khaldun's social theories, and his two books are devoted to explaining them and analyzing Ibn Khaldun's contributions to sociology. Alatas, whose father introduced him to Ibn Khaldun, probably has studied the vast corpus of scholarship on Ibn Khaldun more thoroughly than any contemporary scholar. He has conducted research on Ibn Khaldun in Tunisia, Egypt, and Istanbul and read much of the enormous library of works on the historian/sociologist. He wrote these two books for different audiences. The first, titled simply Ibn Khaldun, attractively published by the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies in their Makers of Islamic Civilization series, represents “an introduction to Ibn Khaldun's new science, focusing on his theory of the rise and decline of states” (ix). It is the best general introduction in print, distinguished by the author's erudition and comfortable familiarity with the subject; direct, clear style; sophisticated, cogent argument; and admirable annotated bibliography.

In the short Oxford Press volume, following a brief introduction to Ibn Khaldun's “autobiography” and character, Alatas moves directly to consider Ibn Khaldun's new science of history (chapter 2). First summarizing Ibn Khaldun's critique of Muslim historians, he concludes with the same passage on essence or nature that Fromherz quotes, but goes on to provide a lucid discussion of Ibn Khaldun's philosophical assumptions and his use of these ideas to formulate a new historical science. Throughout his exposition, he cites Ibn Khaldun's terminology, which even though it might be daunting for first-time readers, is important for precisely rendering the Muqaddimah's arguments. In particular he correctly says that Ibn Khaldun based his theory on a series of axioms or premises known as muqaddimat. In the course of this discussion he accurately translates the phrase ʿumran badawi as “nomadic/bedouin society” rather than “nomadic civilization,” and in the index he indicates that tamaddun is the term Ibn Khaldun uses for “civilization.” He accurately summarizes Ibn Khaldun's dialectical model, emphasizing environment as a determining factor, and lucidly analyzes the nature and varieties of ʿasabiyah. This is all very well done, and only a few changes are in order for future editions of this valuable book.

First, it is important to tell readers that Ibn Khaldun argues that ʿasabiyah (social cohesion of tribesmen) is not generated merely by blood ties but requires prolonged, common experiences of tribal members. In his view, tribesmen's knowledge of genealogies did not, by itself, generate ʿasabiyah. Second, in Ibn Khaldun's theory, it is the house (banu) rather than the tribe or tribal confederation (qabilah) where ʿasabiyah is initially found, although Ibn Khaldun does not make that clear. Third, there is a minor confusion in the chapter about the translation of ʿawarid dhatiyya; the important phrase is incorrectly translated first as “essential characteristics” (29), but then accurately rendered later as “essential accidents” (44). Fourth, the discussion of the speculative theologian notion of atomism does not make clear that Ibn Khaldun defended this idea in his theological discussion, although he based his methodology on diametrically opposed Aristotelian notions of causation (76). Finally, some readers might be confused by the explanations of Ibn Khaldun's historical sociological model. Initially he attributes the evolution and decay of tribal dynasties to the psychology of successive generations of rulers (62–63), while subsequently he explains it by the shifts in ʿasabiyah (70). In fact, Ibn Khaldun leaves the connection between these two distinct but related causes unexplained, and readers have to decide for themselves how to integrate the two arguments.

In Alatas's second and more recent book, Applying Ibn Khaldun, he recapitulates his previous account of Ibn Khaldun's science in chapters 1 and 2, and while some of the issues raised above remain unanswered, he writes with even greater clarity and precision than in his first book. The focus of the second book is, however, quite different. In it Alatas laments that Ibn Khaldun, who is widely acclaimed as a pioneer of historical sociology, should be ignored in most modern studies of the discipline. He argues not only that western sociologists should integrate Ibn Khaldun's ideas into their accounts of sociology, but also that the ideas should be applied to “specific historical and contemporary aspects of Muslim societies in North Africa and the Middle East” (preface). He is persuasive when arguing that the Eurocentric nature of the sociological discipline explains the neglect of the Muqaddimah, and he sets out to demonstrate how Ibn Khaldun's ideas may be applied to study the state formation of kin-based social groups. Historians, in fact, have sometimes tested Ibn Khaldun's model in the Middle East or Central Asia, where tribes were numerous or powerful enough to form and administer states. Still, little of this has appeared in print.

In his illustration of how an Ibn Khaldunian sociology might be created, Alatas uses the historian's model to study the Ottoman and Safavid empires. These are promising subjects, but the effectiveness of his argument is diminished somewhat by trying to demonstrate that in these two instances the Muqaddimah is consistent with the archaic Eurocentric notion of the Asiatic mode of production. He is not correct to argue that invoking Marx is necessary because Ibn Khaldun's theory lacks a concept of an economic system. One of Ibn Khaldun's contributions in the Muqaddimah is his systematic analysis of the urban economics of sultanate governments, although his comments are scattered over many pages and he does not explicitly characterize his analysis in those terms. In any case, as Alatas's quotation from Rudi Matthee on the applicability of Ibn Khaldun's paradigm to an analysis of the Safavids illustrates (129–130), it is not necessary to become entangled in Asiatic mode of production theory to demonstrate the relevance of the Muqaddimah to the analysis of Iran or any other region, such as Central Asia, where tribes like those in North Africa repeatedly established states. Alatas might also add that Ibn Khaldun's ideas about tribal/rural and urban societies are far more useful than Durkheim's notions of mechanical and organic societies.

The disparate nature of these two books suggests why, despite the blizzard of publications on Ibn Khaldun, much remains to be said. Fromherz's biography rightfully draws attention to the value of Ibn Khaldun's underutilized memoir, which could still be exploited to a greater extent and combined with the Muqaddimah to create a more satisfactory portrait of the man, even if neither text can satisfactorily answer the question of how Ibn Khaldun came to construct his dialectical model. Alatas has illumined the Muqaddimah's dialectical model with refreshing clarity and persuasively argued for Ibn Khaldun's inclusion in surveys of sociological theory. Both scholars also devote considerable space to discussing the contemporary relevance of Ibn Khaldun the man, as well as that of his great work, the Muqaddimah. These issues are too complex to be discussed here, but it is worth mentioning that many of those who attended the recent Ibn Khaldun conferences in Istanbul are acutely conscious of his immense prestige among Middle Eastern or Muslim intellectuals, who invoke the Muqaddimah for a number of different reasons associated with the contemporary Middle East or other Islamic societies.