The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History

The one person whom Ibn Khaldun respects without reservation or critique is Muhammad (d. 632 CE), the founder of Islam. Muhammad was an Arab from the town of Mecca who also spent time as a child with the desert Bedouin. According to Islamic tradition, he began to receive revelations from the angel Gabriel around 610 CE Although illiterate, Muhammad miraculously wrote down God’s word from Gabriel’s mouth verbatim and this became the Qur’an, the holy scripture of Islam. This message, centered on the oneness of God and mercy toward believers, put the final seal on earlier, supposedly corrupted revelations preserved by Jews and Christians.

Muhammad’s preaching provoked resistance and eventually open warfare. Muhammad’s first community of Muslims triumphed. He conquered Mecca, removing the old polytheistic religion from it. Then he united the Arab tribes through a combination of diplomacy, preaching, and war. After Muhammad’s death, his successors reconquered the tribes that tried to break away. They then turned their armies toward the neighboring Byzantine and Persian empires, spreading the new religion across ancient, rich centers of civilization and ensuring its continued growth.

Muhammad served as religious and political leader of his new community. He also served as peacemaker, judge, and arbitrator of social norms. For Ibn Khaldun and other Muslims with legal training, this aspect of Muhammad is particularly important. Understanding the traditions (hadith) about how Muhammad acted and his decisions serve as the foundation for understanding what a just society would be, how to deal with the vices embedded in human nature, and to envision what a community of believers would look like if it had the true oneness of community that would reflect the oneness of God. While Muhammad’s doctrines about the oneness of the community of believers (ummah) are specific to the Islamic community, it is possible to see parallels of it in Ibn Khaldun’s assertion that a group’s strength lies in its sense of unity through its group feeling.

Aristotle (384–322 BCE) is the philosopher to whom Ibn Khaldun is most indebted. He was Plato’s greatest student and the teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on myriad topics including politics, ethics, physics, metaphysics, and poetics. His careful work on logic became the basic rulebook for philosophy in the Mediterranean world and beyond for centuries. Despite some speculation that later turned out to be erroneous (particularly in physics), Aristotle’s influence on later thought and the development of a systematic, rational approach to the world cannot be underestimated.

It would be difficult to list all Ibn Khaldun’s debts to Aristotle and later Aristotelian philosophers. His epistemology (theory of knowledge), described at the beginning of Chapter 6, comes largely from Aristotle. His understanding of human nature as rational and as needing political organization also draws on Aristotle’s arguments. Beyond these major points, the influence of this “First Teacher” can be traced in some way through every chapter of The Muqaddimah.

The two most important Muslim philosophers to expand upon Aristotelian philosophy were Ibn Sina (980-1037 CE) from Bukhara in Central Asia and Ibn Rushd (1126-1198 CE) from Al-Andalus. In Franz Rosenthal’s translation of The Muqaddimah, they appear as Avicenna and Averroes—the Latinized versions of their names that were more commonly used by European scholars from the Middle Ages through the late 20th century. Both scholars sought to harmonize Aristotle’s theories with subsequent advances in knowledge and with the tenets of Islam. Ibn Rushd’s deep commitment to Aristotle’s metaphysics and critique of certain kinds of Sufi theology prompted heated debate.

The standard narrative in intellectual history says that the Islamic world rejected this Islamic Aristotelian philosophy, although European Christians made extensive use of it in their great scholastic syntheses. More recent scholarship has nuanced this view and Ibn Khaldun’s work supports it. Two centuries after Ibn Rushd’s death, Ibn Khaldun is still debating that philosopher’s ideas with contemporary “speculative theologians” who (in his view) subordinate divine revelation to philosophical speculation. While Ibn Khaldun finds philosophy inadequate to discuss the transcendent nature of God, he remarks approvingly on other aspects of the scholarship developed by these two latter-day heirs of Aristotle’s legacy.

Sufis practice what is often called Islamic mysticism. Through self-discipline, constant prayer, fasting, and other forms of asceticism, a Sufi attempts to strip himself or herself of attachment to worldly vice and open the soul to God. A Sufi’s ultimate goal is to directly experience God and achieve an ineffable mystical union with him. Many Sufis organize themselves into orders, in which masters gradually mentor disciples. Some subscribe to more radical philosophies in which they interpret their ecstatic experience as evidence that all things and creatures are literally one with God. This contradicted the normal Islamic doctrine of the utter transcendence of God.

Ibn Khaldun strongly believes in the connection between simplicity of life and virtue. He personally claims to have met mystics who had managed to achieve an angelic life practically without food. Stories of Sufi miracles and prophecy preoccupy him in a number of discussions throughout the book. In short, he admires and supports Sufis but is wary of excess. He sees some of their extreme statements about becoming one with God as possible to interpret correctly but likely to be taken the wrong way by the general population. He cautions against Sufis trying to seek supernatural gifts. While he accepts the possibility that God will grant them to holy men, he carefully seeks to distinguish them from the miracles of prophets like Muhammad. Prophecy is rare and deserves absolute acquiescence; blurring that with the contemporary numerous seekers of holiness invites confusion.

“Berbers” refer to the Indigenous peoples of the Maghrib, who prefer the term Imazighen, or the singular Amazigh. Traditionally, the “Berbers” or Imazighen were the people of the rougher interior with different customs from the cities of the Mediterranean coast. After the Arab conquest of the region, these people mostly converted to Islam. In Ibn Khaldun’s time, “Berbers” controlled the most important states once again, though Arab heritage remained an important part of the region.

The “Berbers” include a diverse range of tribes and smaller groups within the broad category. Some were nomadic pastoralists of the desert. Some lived in settled villages in the highlands. Some lived in sedentary civilization. With Arab people, the “Berbers” constitute one of the two major ethnic groups around which Ibn Khaldun constructs his full three-book history.