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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.