Ibn Khaldun : An essay in reinterpretation 0714631302

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IBN KHALDUN: AN ESSAY IN REINTERPRET ATION

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IBN KHALDUN An Essay in Reinterpretation

Aziz AI-Azmeh

FRANKCASS

First published 1982 in Great Britain by FRANK CASS AND COMPANY LIMITED 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

and in the United States ofAmerica by FRANK CASS AND COMPANY LIMITED 270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016

Transferred to Digital Printing 2005

Copyright © 1982 Aziz AI-Azmeh

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data AI-Azmeh, Aziz Ibn Khaldim. I. Khaldiin, Ibn - History and criticism 2. Historiography I. Title 907'.2'024 D13.2

ISBN 0-7146-3130-2

All rights reserved. No part qf this publication may be reproduced. stored in a retrieval system. or transmitted in any form. or by any means. electronic. mechanical. photocopying. recording. or otherwise. without the prior permission qf Frank Cass and Company Limited

Typeset by Computacomp (UK) Ltd, Fort William, Scotland

Cover design by Andy Jones Arabesque by Kasturi Sen

ForSH

CONTENTS

Preface

ix

Symbols and Abbreviations

xiii

Figure: Anatomy of the Muqaddima

xiv

Biographical Note Chapter One

The Primacy of the Historical The Criterion of Historical Significance The Structure of the Historical State

9 11 27

Chapter Two

The Problematization of History Anatomy ofthe Muqaddima The Muqaddima: Epitome with Glosses The Analogical Regime

48 51 62 121

Chapter Three The Historicity of Kitdb al- 'Ibar

145

Bibliographical Orientations

166

Index

171

PREFACE

That the absolute difference introduced by the passage of time between us and past authors is a fact of paramount importance in our evaluation of past discourse is one of the foremost scholarly commonplaces of our epoch. The two great strands of historical conception that prevail in our epoch - history as a continuous evolutive process, and history as the succession in time of seedless structures - disagree on everything but that history labours to produce difference. Yet despite explicit general assent, the past is often detemporalized in actual historical practice. This was noted by Arnaldo Momigliano in a memorable lecture on Polybius between the English and the Turks 0. L. Myers Memorial Lecture, Oxford [1974], p. 13): 'We must be free to ask our own questions, to build our own models of the past and make our own evaluation of it. This means that we can no longer accept Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Tacitus and Ammianus as guides to their respective periods. We must measure the exact size of even the greatest of our predecessors; we must understand from what point of view and with what limitations he wrote; and we must ultimately subordinate him to us ... ' Ibn Khaldiin has proved to be what is perhaps the great predecessor most resistant to this act of subordination. Not only is he considered the true historical source of his time; he is also taken as the unchallenged sociological and cultural interpreter of medieval North Africa and much of medieval and modern ArabIslamic culture as well. The validity of his discourse is considered to be so universal as to confer upon his ideas the status of progenitor - or, at the very least, anticipator - of a great variety of modern ideas. So unassailable has this position occupied by Ibn Khaldiin's thought been that the general accepted description of his thought has gone unchallenged even by scholars who took to

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criticizing the undue modernization of his writings. Even these scholars have accepted what is in fact an ahistorical description of Ibn Khaldiin's historical and 'sociological' methods and conceptions. I have studied this Ibn Khaldiin vulgate in detail in another book. And it was in my Ibn Khaldlln in Modern Scholarship that I addressed topics which have so far been considered paradigmatic in Ibn Khaldiin scholarship. I showed that such topics, dictated by the manifest content of Ibn Khaldiin's text and by the orientalist, evolutionist, and positivist myths of our time, are not truly germane to the study of Ibn Khaldiin or of his culture. What has hitherto been considered axial to the study of Ibn Khaldiin - his supposed sociology, the 'incompatibility' between reason and belief as the animating centre of the Muqaddima, the scientificity of his historiography, and cognate topics of the imagination - are only touched upon in this book in so far as such topical proximity is justified by our attempt to subordinate Ibn Khaldiin to history: to historical study as the study of difference rather than of similarity. One specification in the realm of difference is, however, called for. The difference of Ibn Khaldiin is the real determinate difference of his culture, not the difference of a spurious orient from an occidental touchstone. The subordination of Ibn Khaldiin is a subordination to the real requirements of history as articulated by and specified in the parameters of his culture. The historical approach which we might broadly call anthropological and which is adopted in the present essay makes no claims to novelty in method. What is thoroughly novel is the consistent application of the common patrimony of modern historical sciences to oriental material without the intrusion of the mythological patrimony of orientalist categories. As such, this book claims membership of an emergent class of writings which seek to reconstitute all aspects of the Arab-Islamic past in a manner unfettered by the dead weight of received orientalist (or fundamentalist) scholarship. It is precisely given the situation of this book that it is not conceived in monographic terms. It is considered imperative for the more general enterprise within which this book is embedded that principles for the direction of monographic work should be formulated in order to avoid their implicit direction by implicit

PREFACE

xi

ideologies and mythologies. This applies not only to the work of Ibn Khaldiin. The tabula rasa presented by the reconsideration of the 'state of the field' of Ibn Khaldiiniana extends to - and is informed by - the 'state of the field' of Arab-Islamic cultural history, with its perspectives limited in scope as well as in orientation by considerations of the type just mentioned. Thus interpretations had to be made of exegetical logic, of the common conceptual patrimony of astrology, alchemy, medicine, and other natural sciences, as well as of notions of historical significance, of temporality, of historical criticism, and of much else, without the benefit of monographic illumination from previous work except to the most limited degree. And such interpretations were vital for the reconstitution of Ibn Khaldiin's discourse and of the historicity of this discourse. Thus the present work is an essay. But its status as essay does not imply that it is tentative; though it might not be quite definitive, it is yet very definite in its interpretive orientations. It starts with a biographical note which does not aspire to more than contribute to the didactic aspect of this book's task by providing the reader with some spatial and temporal orientations, without pretending to dabble into the uselessnesses of psycho history or of the biographical interpretation of ideas. The book then opens with a chapter which analyzes the structure ofIbn Khaldiin's historical discourse in terms of its implicit notions of historical significance, of historical units, and of historical succession, and then demonstrates that it is the conception of the state in its historiographic (and not sociological) physiognomy that dictates the locus around which the Muqaddima revolves. The book then goes on to study the structure of the Muqaddima in terms of the principles of order that govern the succession of its topics, and analyzes the logic according to which, in real terms, the project of the New Science validates its status as an historical Organon. Throughout, an attempt is made to relate ideas that emerge through the analysis to the semantic fields and the paradigmatic contexts within which their cultural incidence is embedded. And it should be stressed at the outset that the term 'science' is used in the general sense of Wissenschaft and denotes every selfconsistent system of statements and complementary concepts which cohere under a rubric ('astrology', for instance) which acts as the repository for scientific legitimacy: a science is also a

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paradigm to which scientific statements have to conform and which is manned by a specialized body of practitioners who conserve its paradigmatic integrity. It is this sense of science that informs the analysis of Ibn Khaldun's relation to his culture. The presence ofIbn Khaldun's culture in his work is not conceived in terms of the moribund notion of 'influence' which tries to track the presence of the discrete ideas of discrete individuals in those of others, although one could probably cite such precedents for all Ibn Khaldun's statements. Rather, this presence is studied in terms of the semantic fields that ideas and terms acquire in the paradigmatic formations where they occur and where they are elaborated. In this way, the historicity of Ibn Khaldun's discourse is analyzed in the only real terms available for the inscription of such historicity: the organized structure of high culture which consists of paradigms, and the floating notions of vernacular vision. In this context, the last chapter of this book locates the eclecticism of Ibn Khaldun and the impossibility of his entire enterprise as illustrated by the immediate impact he made on his contemporaries and others who shared his culture. The consistent utilization of a rational anthropological approach which discounts nothing in the Khaldunic discourse - such as the rational status of irrationality - and which does our great author the courtesy of taking seriously every one of his statements without taking the unfounded liberty of differentiating 'science' from 'fiction', is one which is best designed to historicize not only the discourse of Ibn I

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