Biography of one of the greatest Arab intellectuals. The life, times, and ideas of a leading intellectual historian that supplies an interesting contribution to Middle Eastern history. ( )

On the whole I think that I'm impressed with with this study, and if that sounds like damning with faint praise, it's that, at some points, this work felt a bit labored. In particular, I almost set this book aside before finishing the first chapter, wherein Irwin tries to reconstruct his subject's efforts to process the social collapse around him, and basically traps himself in his own 'City of Brass'; prolix is the word that comes to mind. However, things rapidly improve as the author gets into the meat of study, which is to situate Ibn Khaldun in his time and place as a Muslim man of letters, a courtier, a judge, and a devout believer in Orthodox Islam.

The question for Irwin, in the end, is why did so many Western thinkers feel the need to make over Ibn Khaldun as a proto-social scientist (I was introduced to this figure by Ernest Gellner), instead of recognizing that he was mostly an odd intellectual dead end. My thought there is that the late medieval Muslim world is not the most understandable reality for the typical Western intellectual and that Ibn Khaldun received mistaken understanding and acceptance as "one of us." An all-around fascinating story (once you get over the clunky beginning) of how incomprehension is no bar to cultural appropriation. ( )

Irwin considers the intellectual and political milieu that shaped the work of the 14th c. Arab scholar Abū Zayd 'Abd ar-Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad ibn Khaldūn al-Ḥaḍramī, and discusses the variety of interpretations and meanings given to that work by European and Arab scholars into the present.

Khaldūn is best known for the Muqaddimah (“Prolegomenon”), the first section of his Kitāb al-ʻibar wa-dīwān al-mubtadaʼ wa’l-khabar ("The Book of Warnings and Collection of New Things and Historical Information"), which runs to 3,000 pages in the standard Arabic edition. According to Irwin, Khaldūn had only a meager influence on his contemporaries and immediate successors, and his work was all but forgotten in the Arab world. Leo Africanus, after converting to Christianity and relocating to Italy, tried but failed to introduce Khaldūn to the West; Khaldūn's earliest serious admirers were found among the Ottoman Turks in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Muqaddimah was discovered and publicized in the West at the beginning of the 19th c. (with Khaldūn regarded as ‘an Arab Montesquieu’), and appeared in a French edition in 1858—soon to be ‘looted’ by French colonialists for ethnographic information on the Arabs and Berbers of North Africa. 20th c. Arab scholars and commentators eventually recovered Khaldūn through the works of Europeans.

Irwin’s chapter on “The Strange Afterlife of the Muqaddimah” is a fascinating review of the wildly diverse interpretations given to Khaldūn’s work. The Europeans were mostly unequipped to receive and comment upon Khaldūn’s work before the 19th c., suggests Irwin, and even then (and ever since) they tended to create Khaldūn in their own image. The medieval Arab scholar was/is seen as an historian, a philosopher, a sociologist, rationalist, positivist, materialist—a follower of Aristotle, a precursor to Machiavelli, Vico, Hegel, Smith, Darwin, Spengler, Marx, Herder, Comte or Durkheim, inspiration for Engels, Strauss, Toynbee, on and on. In general, says Irwin, accounts of Khaldūn’s life and work have misrepresented him as a more systematic, more secular, more rational thinker than he really was.

Khaldūn lived most of his life in North Africa, as a teacher, scholar and occasional jurist, reliant upon the patronage of a shifting jumble of sultans, viziers, caliphs, emirs, kings and sheikhs. Rulers surrounded themselves with distinguished scholars as a form of conspicuous royal display; in an atmosphere of constant political turbulence, scholars contesting for political appointments were subject to betrayal, exile, imprisonment and murder. Irwin suggests that Khaldūn the Arab celebrated the ancestry and achievements of Berbers as a way of securing greater scholarly recognition and with it a political promotion (and protection). He won acclaim as an historian, but the Muqaddimah also includes discussions of secretarial skills, dreams, mystical experiences, the occult, and the principles of pedagogy—subjects useful as self-promotion in a superstitious world, if not strictly relevant to the understanding of historical processes. Khaldūn, like other Arab historians, had no belief in the progress of humanity; he was aware that the golden age of Arab civilization was in the past, and he regarded the ruins all around him as symbols of the inevitable desolation that follows from mankind’s moral failings. Irwin doubts that Khaldūn intended his theories to be universally applicable. The historical themes presented by Khaldūn—the vitality of nomads and his enthusiasm for tribal ‘asabiyya, the degeneracy resulting from affluent urban life, the cycle of creation and destruction—were inspired by the mythology of the austere ascetic warriors who founded Islam. Khaldūn’s methodology was not a newly invented sociology but rather a kind of moralizing, says Irwin: the course of history is what it is because mankind—by the sin of pride, the sin of luxury, the sin of greed—has not followed Shari’a.

According to Irwin, piety and the need to deliver religious warnings were the primary motivation behind what Khaldūn wrote. Khaldūn’s readiness to analyze, theorize and derive generalizations based on the evidence gives his writing the appearance of modernity, but he had little praise for anything except conformity to the religious law. He had greater affinity with the anti-philosophic arguments of al-Ghazali than with the philosophers al-Farabi and Ibn Rushd. Khaldūn wrote that reason and philosophical speculation are useless when contemplating the Oneness of God, the world of the unseen, the nature of prophecy, divine attributes, or other similarly holy matters. He defined theology (kalam) as the science ‘that involves arguing with logical proofs in defense of the articles of faith and refuting innovators who deviate in their dogmas from the early Muslims and Muslim orthodoxy.’ Khaldūn was an Ash’arite (things only appear to have continuous existences over time because at every instant God wills their continued existence) and belonged to the Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence, which takes into account istislah (regard for the public interest) when interpreting Shari’a, and which Khaldūn thought was closest to the simplicity of the (idealized) Arabian desert dwellers. Evidence also indicates that Khaldūn was a Sufi, which he described in chapter six of the Muqaddimah as an approach ‘based upon constant application to divine worship, complete devotion to God, aversion to the false splendor of the world, abstinence from the pleasure and property to which the great mass aspire, and retirement from the world into solitude for divine worship.’ Irwin writes that Khaldūn presented the mystical lessons of Sufism in the manner of a religious lawyer, rejecting the monism and emanationism he encountered among heterodox mystics and charlatans in Egypt.

The best bits here are Irwin’s discussion of the irrational elements that crop up in Khaldūn’s work. Khaldūn credulously repeats without comment the Qur’anic report that ‘Ad, the ancient Arab ancestor whose people came after the deluge, had lived for 1200 years and fathered 5000 children. In the course of discounting alchemy and the possibility of transforming base metal into gold, Khaldūn nevertheless conceded that the spontaneous generation of scorpions, bees and snakes did occur. He accepted the reality of the monstrous races of Gog and Magog. He said that he had heard that Egyptians had actually succeeded in teaching donkeys and other quadrupeds to speak. He believed that eating too much food caused excessive moisture to circulate in the body, which creates ‘putrid humors, pallor, ugliness and stupidity.’ Khaldūn inhabited a world that took for granted the reality of the supernatural: djinns, sorcerers, “rippers” who could tear apart the stomach of an animal or a garment just by pointing at it, talismans, magic letters, the divinatory power of dreams. (Khaldūn was careful to distinguish the occult sciences from the pseudo-sciences of astrology and alchemy). He believed in the stories told about the two most famous pre-Islamic soothsayers, one of whom ‘used to fold up like a garment, as he had no bones except for his skull;’ when inspired to prophecy he would inflate himself and thus be able to stand. The Muqaddimah also features geomancy, catoptromancy (divination from reflections) and ornithomancy (the drawing of auguries from the chance sighting of animals).

Irwin reminds us that Khaldūn’s world had more in common with that of the Qur’an and The Thousand and One Nights than it does with modern historiography or sociology. Though he thought deeply about big questions and tried to approach them logically, this did not make Khaldūn a philosopher. According to Irwin, much of what makes the Muqaddimah so fascinating is that its author, starting from medieval premises and working on medieval data, went on to create a powerful theoretical model to explain how things worked in the world he lived in. To modernize Khaldūn and to disregard the strangeness of his thinking is to ‘denature’ him. It is precisely Khaldūn’s irrelevance to the modern world that makes him so interesting and important. We do well to remember that there have been other ways of looking at the world than the one we mostly take for granted today. The works of Khaldūn allow us to dive deep into the strange, and resurface with fresh eyes. ( )