Ibn Khaldun is one of the outstanding thinkers about the nature of society and politics in the pre-modern Arab world. This volume presents the political writings of the fourteenth-century philosopher, stressing their enduring relevance and exploring how his theory fits our own times.
Ibn Khaldun is one of the outstanding thinkers about the nature of society and politics in the pre-modern Arab world. This volume presents the political writings of the fourteenth-century philosopher, stressing their enduring relevance. Arnold Toynbee used to say that Ibn Khaldun's work was the most impressive endeavour to build a theory out of history ever undertaken before the nineteenth century. However, translators and historians discovered Ibn Khaldun at the time when new revolutionary economic and political conditions were dismissive of his philosophy. In this edition, Gabriel Martinez-Gros brings Ibn Khaldun's political thought to the forefront, exploring his theories in the context of his era, but also emphasizing their profound resonances with modern society. Far from the caricature of Ibn Khaldun as a 'tribal philosopher', Martinez-Gros shows that Ibn Khaldun's thought is about creating wealth in an agrarian society, concerned with economic concepts, demography, war and violence.
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Presents the political writings of the fourteenth-century philosopher Ibn Khaldn, stressing their enduring relevance.
General Introduction: Ibn Khaldn: A Theory for Our Time?; Part I. On
History:
1. History is a branch of philosophy;
2. Errors to which historians
are prone; Part II. On Combat Solidarities:
3. Man is a social animal;
4.
Bedouins are naturally courageous, much more so than sedentary peoples;
5. On
combat solidarities, and the conditions in which their strength declines;
6.
Bedouin nations are more skilled at conquest than other nations;
7. As long
as combat solidarities exist among members of the same nation, the monarchy
will remain in that nation's control, even if power changes hands between its
various branches;
8. When the Arabs take control of cultivated territories,
they quickly bring about their ruin; Part III. On The State:
9. States and
universal dynasties are built by tribes and combat solidarities;
10. A
religious cause endows a nascent dynasty with force in addition to the combat
solidarities derived from the number of its supporters;
11. Every dynasty
controls a finite number of domains and territories, which cannot be
exceeded;
12. It is natural for the sovereign to isolate himself in his
glory, seeking peace and comfort;
13. The leader of the dynasty puts his
clients and those whom he has reared before his kin and his own combat
solidarities;
14. The caliphate; the kingdom of the Jews; and the pope and
the emperor in Christendom;
15. On war;
16. On taxation;
17. The dissolution
of a dynasty;
18. A nascent dynasty cannot overthrow the sitting dynasty in a
single blow; victory must come in time; Part IV. Cities:
19. States precede
cities and capitals; the latter cannot exist without the prior existence of
the state;
20. On the construction and organization of cities;
21. The
superiority of urban centres and cities, the prosperity of their inhabitants,
and the amount of spending in their markets are based on the size of their
populations;
22. On prices in cities;
23. Sedentary civilization is the
highest and final degree of any civilization; for this reason, it is destined
to decay and disintegrate;
24. On military and civil functions, and their
respective roles in the rise and fall of capital cities; Part V. Earning a
Living;
25. On the true meaning of 'subsistence' and 'profit'; commentary on
these two terms; profit as the value of human labour;
26. Happiness and
profit generally go to those who are skilled at flattery and know when to
bend the knee;
27. Crafts and professions cannot fully flourish if sedentary
civilization and population growth are not flourishing as well; Part VI.
Sciences:
28. Sciences are concentrated in centres of high population
density, where sedentary civilization is firmly entrenched;
29. The
categories of the intellectual sciences;
30. The burden of the sciences in
Islam fell primarily upon the shoulder of the Persians;
31. Learning a
language is like mastering any other craft; Part VII Texts from Ibn Khaldn's
Universal History;
32. On the origins of the Hill invasions;
33. Succession
in Tlemcen: the assassination of the sultan Ab amm and the accession of
his son, Ab Tshfn (1318);
34. The history of the kingdom of Granada
(12381492);
35. A short history of Islam.
Gabriel Martinez-Gros is Professor in the Department of History at the University of Paris Nanterre. In 1999 he founded and co-directed the Institute for Islam and Islamic Societies Studies (in French, IISMM), the main Department of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes dedicated to Islamic Studies. He has published twelve books, four of them inspired by Ibn Khaldûn's thought. His most recent publication is La traîne des empires (2022). Anna Bailey Galietti is a translator and scholar of Arabic literature. Her previous translations of French academic writing on topics related to the Near East include Antoine Borrut's Between Memory and Power: The Syrian Space under the Late Umayyads and Early Abbasids.
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