The Logos Scripture · The Book of Ibn Khaldun
The Book of Ibn Khaldun 1 · Written by himself, from the Muqaddimah and his autobiography
Ibn Khaldun, born 1332 at Tunis, died 1406 at Cairo, aged seventy-three. His family had come from Andalusia and had held office for generations. He entered service in his twenties and afterwards worked in Tunis, Fez, Granada, Bijaya and Cairo, under seven or eight masters; accused of conspiring against a ruler, he spent close to two years in prison. Between 1375 and 1378, in retreat at the castle of Ibn Salama in what is now Algeria, he wrote the Muqaddimah as the first volume of his universal history. In his last years he served as chief Maliki judge in Cairo, dismissed and reinstated repeatedly. His wife and children took ship to join him and were lost when the vessel went down off Alexandria. In 1401, when Tamerlane besieged Damascus, he was let down from the wall by a rope, spent some five weeks in the conqueror’s camp in conversation with him, and wrote out for him a description of the Maghrib. He also left an autobiography, a rare thing for his time. This volume rests on what he wrote himself: the Muqaddimah and the autobiography. The refutation of the six hundred thousand in chapter one — the ground cannot hold them, the march cannot hold together, the grain cannot be brought — is his own reckoning in the Muqaddimah. The faults listed in chapter two — weighing the speaker rather than the statement, partiality to one’s own side, failure to see impossibility because one does not know how the business works, and the love of the marvellous that carries a story far — are also his. The asabiyyah of chapters three and four, rendered here as the thing that binds a group together, and the decay across five generations, are from the Muqaddimah. Chapter five follows the autobiography. What this volume adds is a step the scripture lacked. It already holds men who say go and look — Su Shi (cf. The Book of Su Shi 1.15) and Chekhov (cf. The Book of Chekhov 4.9) — and one who says look from several sides at once, Leonardo (cf. The Book of Leonardo 2.8). But all three treat matters one can go and look at. A statement about four hundred years ago cannot be gone and looked at: the men are dead and the ground has changed. What Ibn Khaldun establishes is the method for exactly that case — do not ask who reported it, ask whether it could be done. Verse 2.9 matters most: doubt alone will not overturn a falsehood, you must understand the trade the claim belongs to. Read it beside The Book of Semmelweis 2.14 — you may not call an explanation wrong until you have tested it; Ibn Khaldun goes a step further and says you may not call it wrong until you understand its business. The Order records two things and will not be vague about either. First, Ibn Khaldun was a Maliki judge and a believer. In the Muqaddimah, what concerns human affairs he explains by causes throughout; but miracles and revelation he himself sets outside that method, holding expressly that human intellect and divine revelation do not run by the same road. The Order takes the part in which he reasons about human affairs. The boundary he drew, the Order does not draw. This follows the pattern of Newton, Faraday and Maxwell (cf. The Book of Newton 4), with one difference: their two rooms stand in two different books, and Ibn Khaldun’s two rooms stand in the same book. The Order records that as it is and does not paper it over. Second, he changed masters often and went into Tamerlane’s camp and drew maps for him. Verse 5.9 is him setting that down himself — some say this was serving the enemy, I do not argue, I set down what I did — and the Order does not argue for him either. And what verses 5.13 and 5.14 establish the Order holds to be the weightiest thing in the volume: that a man sees such a thing clearly usually because he stands outside it, and that this was both his ability and the thing his life lacked.