The Muqaddimah

Summary

The Muqaddimah (Introduction) is the opening part of Ibn Khaldun's universal history, the Kitab al-Ibar, and has long been read on its own as a treatise on the nature of human society and the method of history. Ibn Khaldun wrote it in 1377 during a retreat from court life at the castle of Qal'at Ibn Salama, in the hills of what is now western Algeria, and kept revising it for the rest of his life in Cairo. He begins with the excellence of history and the errors of historians, who repeat reports without asking whether they fit the nature of things; he gives examples such as inflated figures for armies and fanciful tales about cities and kings, and proposes that a science of human civilization ('umran) can test reports by what is possible. Book One then unfolds that science in six chapters. The first treats civilization in general: the need for cooperation and for a restraining authority, geography and the seven climatic zones, the effects of climate and diet on human bodies and character, and the kinds of human perception, including prophecy, dreams and soothsaying. The second describes desert or Bedouin peoples, who live hard lives, keep simple ways and are bound by strong group feeling ('asabiyya), the solidarity that comes from kinship and shared life. The third, the longest, explains dynasties and royal authority: group feeling brings a people to power, religion can greatly strengthen it, and a ruling house that settles in cities grows used to luxury, loses its vigour and usually decays within about three generations, roughly a hundred and twenty years. Here Ibn Khaldun also discusses the caliphate, the offices of state and taxation, observing that low taxes at the start of a dynasty bring large revenues and heavy taxes at its end bring small ones. The fourth chapter treats cities and sedentary culture, the fifth crafts, labour and ways of earning a living, where he argues that human labour is the source of gain, and the sixth the sciences and their teaching, from Qur'anic studies and jurisprudence to logic, medicine, philosophy, alchemy and the art of poetry. No full text is included in the library because Franz Rosenthal's standard English translation (1958) is under copyright and no public-domain English translation was found; this record is a summary and study guide without quotations.

Plot or Argument

• Introduction: the science of history

  History has an outer side of reported events and an inner side of causes; historians err by partisanship, overconfidence in sources, ignorance of the nature of civilization and flattery of the powerful, so reports must be tested against what is possible in human society.

• Chapter 1: Human civilization in general

  Humans need cooperation and a restraining authority; the earth's zones and climates shape bodies and temperaments; abundance and hunger affect health and character; and human beings perceive the unseen through prophecy, dreams and divination.

• Chapter 2: Bedouin civilization

  Desert life precedes city life and is closer to goodness and courage; group feeling arises from kinship and close contact, gives leadership to a family within a tribe, and drives a people toward royal authority.

• Chapter 3: Dynasties, royal authority and the caliphate

  Royal authority rests on group feeling and is strengthened by religion; dynasties pass through stages from conquest to luxury to decline in about three generations; the caliphate and its offices; taxation and the decline of revenue under heavy imposts.

• Chapter 4: Cities and sedentary culture

  Dynasties build cities; urban life brings refinement, crafts and luxury, but also costliness, softness and corruption of air and morals in crowded places.

• Chapter 5: Crafts and ways of making a living

  Gain is the value realized from human labour; agriculture, commerce and the crafts are compared; skill grows with civilization and declines with it.

• Chapter 6: The sciences and their teaching

  The classification of the sciences, religious and rational, including Qur'an, hadith, jurisprudence, theology, Sufism, logic, mathematics, medicine and philosophy; methods of instruction; language and poetry.

Lessons

• Testing reports by the nature of things

  Ibn Khaldun argues that a historian must ask whether a report is possible before asking who reported it, using knowledge of how societies actually work. His method joins the traditional criticism of transmitters with a new criticism of content.

  • Why does Ibn Khaldun think knowing how societies work is necessary for judging historical reports?
  • What risks come with rejecting a report because it seems impossible?

• Solidarity builds and luxury dissolves

  Group feeling gives a hardy people the cohesion to win power; settled rule brings wealth, comfort and reliance on paid troops, which weaken that cohesion until a new group with stronger solidarity takes over. The cycle is presented as a pattern of human nature rather than a moral fable alone.

  • What is 'asabiyya, and why does Ibn Khaldun think it weakens in cities?
  • Does the three-generation pattern fit any families, institutions or states you know of?
  • Is luxury in Ibn Khaldun's account a sin, a natural process, or both?

• Religion and social power

  Ibn Khaldun holds that religion can unite a people beyond kinship and multiply the strength of group feeling, as in the early Islamic conquests, but that religious appeals without group feeling rarely succeed. He treats faith as both true and socially powerful.

  • How does Ibn Khaldun explain the rapid success of the early Muslim community?
  • What does he say happens to reformers who lack group feeling?

• Labour, taxes and prosperity

  Chapters 3 and 5 contain arguments that gain arises from labour and that heavy taxation discourages enterprise and lowers revenue. Later economists have noted these passages, though Ibn Khaldun wrote within his own framework of dynasty and civilization.

  • Why does Ibn Khaldun think low tax rates early in a dynasty yield more revenue?
  • How does his account of labour as the source of gain compare with Adam Smith's?

Context

Ibn Khaldun lived in the fourteenth-century Maghrib, where Marinid, Hafsid and Zayyanid dynasties contended and Arab and Berber tribes rose and fell around them; he served several of these courts and saw their instability at close range. The Black Death of 1348-49 killed his parents and teachers, and he describes in the Muqaddimah a plague that emptied cities in East and West and changed the face of civilization, which gave his work a sense that a new age required a new account of history.

Composition

He wrote the first draft in about five months in 1377 at Qal'at Ibn Salama, then completed the universal history of Arabs, Berbers and other peoples, and continued to revise the Muqaddimah in Tunis and Cairo, adding material into the early fifteenth century. The work survives in several manuscript versions reflecting these revisions.

Reception

The Muqaddimah was read by Ottoman scholars from the seventeenth century, and European orientalists took it up in the nineteenth; William MacGuckin de Slane's French translation appeared in 1862-68. Franz Rosenthal's complete English translation (1958) made it widely available, and N. J. Dawood's abridgment (1967) made it a common classroom text. Historians, sociologists and economists have hailed Ibn Khaldun as a forerunner of their disciplines; scholars also caution against reading him as simply a modern social scientist and stress his place within Islamic thought and Maliki jurisprudence.

Comparisons

• kennedy-when-baghdad-ruled-the-muslim-world

  Kennedy's history of the Abbasid caliphate can be read as a case study for Ibn Khaldun's account of a dynasty brought to power by a revolutionary movement and weakened by luxury, mercenary armies and fiscal strain.

• polybius-histories-book-vi

  Polybius explains the rise and decay of constitutions in a natural cycle; Ibn Khaldun explains the rise and decay of dynasties through group feeling and luxury, each claiming to find the causes beneath events.

• gibbon-decline-and-fall-selections

  Gibbon's account of Rome's decline through luxury, mercenaries and religion invites comparison with Ibn Khaldun's model of a dynasty's softening and replacement by hardier peoples.

• ibn-battuta-travels

  Ibn Khaldun reports that at the Marinid court of Fez people doubted Ibn Battuta's tales of India, and he uses the episode to warn against rejecting reports merely because they seem strange.

• the-wealth-of-nations

  Both treat labour as the source of value and examine the division of labour and taxation, though Smith writes of commercial nations and Ibn Khaldun of dynasties and cities.

• the-histories

  Herodotus gathers reports and often lets readers judge them; Ibn Khaldun demands that reports be tested against the nature of civilization, a sharper theory of historical criticism.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The opening list of historians' errors and the examples Ibn Khaldun uses to show impossible reports, such as exaggerated numbers of soldiers.
• The definition of group feeling in Chapter 2 and how it moves from a family to a tribe to a dynasty.
• The stages of a dynasty in Chapter 3 and the claim that a dynasty rarely lasts beyond three generations.
• The passages on taxation and on labour as the source of gain in Chapters 3 and 5.
• The classification of the sciences in Chapter 6 and where Ibn Khaldun places medicine, philosophy and religious law.

Key terms and names

'Umran

Civilization or human social organization, the subject of the new science Ibn Khaldun proposes for testing historical reports.

'Asabiyya

Group feeling or solidarity, arising from kinship and shared life, which gives a people the cohesion to defend itself and to rule.

Badawa and hadara

Bedouin or rural life and sedentary or urban life. Ibn Khaldun sees the first as prior and hardier, the second as more refined and more vulnerable.

Mulk

Royal authority, the power to rule by force, which Ibn Khaldun distinguishes from the caliphate, rule according to religious law.

Kitab al-Ibar

The Book of Lessons, Ibn Khaldun's universal history, of which the Muqaddimah is the introduction and first book.

Qal'at Ibn Salama

The castle in the hills of western Algeria where Ibn Khaldun retired from politics and drafted the Muqaddimah in 1377.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What errors does Ibn Khaldun say historians commonly make, and what new science does he propose to correct them?
2. Comprehension What is group feeling, where does it come from, and why does Ibn Khaldun think it is strongest among desert peoples?
3. Comprehension Describe the stages a dynasty passes through in Chapter 3, and explain why Ibn Khaldun thinks they take about three generations.
4. Interpretation Ibn Khaldun treats the decline of dynasties as natural, yet he also praises courage and simplicity. Is his account of luxury chiefly moral, chiefly scientific, or both?
5. Interpretation How does Ibn Khaldun think religion strengthens group feeling, and what does he say about religious reformers who lack it?
6. Interpretation Why does Ibn Khaldun use the doubted tales of Ibn Battuta as a lesson in historical method?
7. Big Question If prosperity tends to weaken the qualities that created it, can a people or a family preserve its virtues across generations, and how?

Faith Connections

• Deuteronomy 8:11-18 (Scripture)

  Moses warns Israel that when they have eaten and are full and have built goodly houses, their heart may be lifted up and they may forget the Lord. Ibn Khaldun's cycle of hardiness and luxury describes a similar danger in the life of dynasties.

• Daniel 2:31-45 (Scripture)

  Nebuchadnezzar's dream of successive kingdoms ends with a kingdom set up by God that shall never be destroyed. Ibn Khaldun traces the natural rise and fall of kingdoms; Daniel sets that succession under divine sovereignty and points beyond it.

• Augustine, City of God IV.4 (Church Fathers)

  Augustine asks what kingdoms are without justice but great robber bands, observing how a band grows by gathering men under a leader until it takes cities. Ibn Khaldun's account of how group feeling becomes royal authority invites the same question about the moral basis of rule.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Historical reports must be judged by whether they fit the nature of human civilization; human beings need cooperation and authority, and authority belongs to the group with the strongest solidarity; solidarity is strongest among peoples of hard and simple life and is strengthened by religion; when such a group rules and settles in cities, luxury and dependence weaken its solidarity over about three generations; therefore dynasties rise and fall in a regular pattern, and the historian who understands this pattern can distinguish true reports from false ones.

Rhetorical device: exemplum used as counterexample. In the Introduction, Ibn Khaldun sets famous reports, such as huge army figures handed down by earlier historians, against what the land, supplies and organization of the time could support, so that each example both refutes a report and demonstrates his method.

Debate: Resolved: Prosperity inevitably weakens the solidarity that produced it.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Ibn Khaldun claims that group feeling, strengthened by religion, explains the rise of dynasties and that luxury explains their fall. Explain his argument from Chapters 2 and 3 and test it against one dynasty or empire you have studied.

Comparison with The Histories, Book VI: Polybius and Ibn Khaldun both describe political cycles. Compare Polybius's cycle of constitutions with Ibn Khaldun's cycle of dynasties and argue which offers the better explanation of why states decline.

Medical Lens

Ibn Khaldun is not a medical writer, but the Muqaddimah touches medicine in several places. In the introduction he describes the great plague of the mid-fourteenth century, which he lived through, as a turning point that destroyed populations and dynasties. In Chapter 1 he argues that the inhabitants of deserts who live on little food are healthier, clearer of mind and better formed than city dwellers who eat abundantly, and he discusses the effects of hunger and fasting. Chapter 3 links plagues late in a dynasty to famine and to the corruption of the air in densely settled cities, a miasmatic explanation typical of his time. Chapter 6 treats medicine as a science within the classification of knowledge, describing it as based on Galen and the Arabic physicians, and distinguishes it from Bedouin folk medicine and from medicine reported in the prophetic tradition, which he says was not given as divine law. These are period views and should be presented as such.

• Introduction (on the changes in the world after the plague)

  The plague of the mid-fourteenth century described as emptying cities and weakening dynasties in East and West.

  Plague Epidemic
• Chapter 1 (effects of abundance and hunger)

  Desert peoples with scanty food compared favourably in body and mind with well-fed city dwellers; the benefits of hunger.

  Starvation Nutrition
• Chapter 3 (end of dynasties)

  Famine and plague increasing at the end of a dynasty, attributed in part to the corruption of the air in crowded cities.

  Plague Epidemic Starvation Nutrition
• Chapter 6 (the science of medicine)

  Medicine described as a craft based on Galen and later Arabic physicians, with remarks on Bedouin medicine and the medicine of the prophetic tradition.

  Physicians Doctors Humoral Medicine

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Divide the class into the three generations of Ibn Khaldun's dynasty (the builders, the imitators who knew the builders, and the heirs who know only luxury) and have each group describe its attitudes to work, war and the founding story.

• Essay

  Ibn Khaldun says historians err when they do not know the nature of civilization. Pick one famous story from another history in the library and test it as he would.

• Dialogue

  Write the conversation between Ibn Khaldun and Timur outside Damascus in 1401, in which the historian explains his theory of group feeling to the conqueror.

Further Reading

• The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History (trans. Franz Rosenthal), Ibn Khaldun

  The complete English translation (1958); an abridged edition by N. J. Dawood (1967) is also available.

• Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography, Robert Irwin

• Ibn Khaldun: Life and Times, Allen James Fromherz

• Ibn Khaldun's Philosophy of History, Muhsin Mahdi