Outline the contribution of Ibn Khaldin to Islam.
Explanation
He received a classical Arabic education, studying the Quran and Arabic linguistics, the basis for an understanding of the Quran and of Islamic law, Hadith and Fiqh. The philosopher Al-Alibi introduced him to mathematics, logic and philosophy. At the age of 17, Ibn Khaldun lost both his parents to an epidemic of the plague, which hit Tunis. At the age of 20, he began his political career at the Chancellery of the Tunisian ruler, Ibn Tafrakin, with the position of Katib al-‘alamah, which consisted of writing in fine calligraphy the typical introductory notes of official documents. In 1352, 5 Abu Zaid, the Sultan of Constantine, marched on Tunis, and defeated it. Ibn Khaldun’s thirst for advanced knowledge and a better academic setting soon made him leave this service and migrate to Fez. He was the ambassador of the Sultan of Granada to Pedro the Cruel, the Christian king of Castile in 1363. Although once imprisoned for nearly two years, he was blessed with good luck and traveled extensively at a time when few people could find the means to do so. Soon after his entire family died in a shipwreck, he made the Hajj to Makkah. In 1377, in the short period of five months, he wrote the Muqadimmah (or Prolegomena) while secluded at a palace of Sultan Abu Hamu near Tujin (Enan, 1975). Although he added to his work over the next five years, the whirlwinds of political change and courtly intrigue compelled him to set aside his Prolegomena and move to Cairo, where he became a noted professor, judge and sheikh (manager) of Baybars, the greatest Sufi institution of that age. His final work, an autobiography, has yet to be translated into English. Since Ibn Khaldun’s life was so thoroughly connected to historical events, his theory organically links the realms of ideas and actions. Thus to pose the categories of his thought in the scholastic tradition of Western philosophy (particularly the idealism/ materialism schism) completely fails to deal with the unity of these domains in Ibn Khaldun’s system. The prevalence with which Europeans have compared Ibn Khaldun to Western scholars has led Franz Rosenthal, Ibn Khaldun’s translator and one of the principal Arabist scholars in the United States, to coin the term ‘forerunner syndrome’ to describe and simultaneously criticize this tendency (Bruce, 1984). Praise, too, can be a means of obscuring the contributions of Ibn Khaldun. In his three volumes Study of History, Arnold Toynbee calls Ibn Khaldun’s philosophy of history ‘the greatest work of its kind that has ever been created by any mind in any time or place’. For Toynbee, Ibn Khaldun was the ‘sole point of light’ and ‘the one outstanding personality’ of Islamic thought, absurd ideas that illustrate centuries of the West’s utter disregard of Islamic intellectual tradition. His cultural context incapacitated Toynbee, but his own system places Ibn Khaldun within the prevailing Western viewpoint that modern history begins with the Renaissance, an assumption that clearly transposes Western historical conditions onto world history. During the same century that Ibn Khaldun lived, there was not one Christian Arabic scholar in Europe (Southern, 1962). Long before Europeans became acquainted with Muslim thought, Turkish scholars delighted in the treasures they found accessible to them. Despite Europes’s ignorance, Europeans ‘discovered’ the importance of Ibn Khaldun in the nineteenth century, thereby elevating his status from just another ‘footnote to Islamic historiography…. as the foremost Muslim historian of Ibn Khaldun’. M. Talbi remarked, ‘It was in Europe that Ibn Khaldun was discovered and the importance of his Mukaddima realized.’ (Bruce 1984). Once the thought of Ibn Khaldun became known in Europe, however, a growing list of admirers appeared, and fawning admiration and inclination toward the appropriation of Ibn Khaldun into a preexisting system of Eurocentric categories accelerated.