Ibn Khaldun: The Philosophy of the Muqaddimah – Discourses on Minerva
Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah is the “introduction” to his seven-volume history of the Arab and Berber people, and history of the world (up to his time and from what he knew of the world via sources and travelling). The Kitab Al-‘Ibar is the full text name, but it is his lengthy introduction (the Muqaddimah) that is fondly remembered by scholars of many stripes: sociologists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, historians and historiographers.
Ibn Khaldun lived in turbulent times: Cordoba had fallen to the Christian Iberians, the once great and mighty Islamic state in Iberia had been reduced to the Emirate of Granada, North Africa was fractured and falling victim to Christian crusades (with Islamic rulers often allying with the Christian crusaders for their own self gain and interests), the Abbasid Caliphate had fallen in the Middle East, the Mongols and their successors (Timurids) were invading the Levant, and the Black Plague had struck the Middle East (we often forget that the Black Plague also hit the Middle East and North Africa, though not as consequential as the Black Plague in Europe). The world that Ibn Khaldun read about was not the world he was experiencing. Ibn Khaldun’s world was one of chaos and tragedy – which should never be lost to readers. He could be, in more modern parlance, classified as a “realist.”
The Muqaddimah serves several purposes: First was a “scientific” approach to history where Ibn Khaldun sought to explain events and the human condition from purely naturalistic means. The first book of Muqaddimah details this in some detail concerning the relationship of geography and environment upon human civilization and races. Though a bit boring and dry, his outlining of the role of environment – what scientists call “environmental conditioning” – is going to become a present theme in the other sections of his work. Second was the attempt to understand why great civilizations all seem to fall: the great Biblical civilizations had risen and fallen, Persia, Greece, Rome, and now it seemed like the great Arab-Muslim civilization was on the cusp. Thus, Ibn Khaldun sought to understand why civilizations experience a “life cycle” of formation, growth, stagnation, and eventual decline. Third, and this is related to the second purpose, is that he sought to understand what was happening from Muslim eyes. Though the work portends to be scientific, it is also motivated from a man who was a sincere Sunni wondering why the promises of success and safety to God’s people seemed not to be coming true in his time.
Ibn Khaldun’s exploration of civilization has been the focus of scholars since the work’s publication. He follows the ancient political philosophers in understanding humans as political animals – that means social animals. Humans are not, as Enlightenment philosophers came to think (e.g. Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, and Rousseau) as solitary and separated (atomized) individuals who only pragmatically place themselves into society to avoid the brutal life of the state of nature (Hobbes, Locke, and Spinoza) or have been forced into society by the dictates of the powerful (Rousseau). Instead, Ibn Khaldun takes the classical view that humans are naturally social which means they are naturally political. Political, in classical Greek philosophy, rooted in the word polis meaning city, entails how to organize a body. People are members of a body and a body needs to be organized.
From this Ibn Khaldun maintains that filial bonds are the primary roots of one’s political animus. In a harsh world, family is the refuge of justice (because there is no natural justice in the world). He says that it is natural to feel affection for one’s family and extended family and that it is natural to seek to defend your family members from harm. This is the root of asabiyyah – or “Group Feeling” (in the Rosenthal translation) which is alternatively called “Group Solidarity” in other explanations of Khaldun’s thought.
Asabiyyah is the wellspring of civilization. It is what unites people and gives them a warlike and sacrificial character in which members are willing to die for others for the continuity of the tribe. Westerners may be more familiar with the idea of the esprit de corps: love of kith and kin which provides the fighting spirit of a community.
This way of life comes from rural geography where life is harsh, and people banded together to survive—though they do not live a life of luxury but a life of basic necessity. Here we return to the impact of geography on politics: Thus, Ibn Khaldun offers an in-depth and penetrating philosophy of geopolitics. Cities do not fall from heaven and represent the start of civilization. Instead, civilization emerges from the margins. Civilization has its roots in the rural regions where the tribe first emerged from, where life was harsh and brutal, where beasts and other tribes constantly threatened one’s survival. As Ibn Khaldun says, “aggressiveness is natural in living beings.” And that includes humans. It is a stark picture that is like the ancient Catholic-Augustinian portrait of humans: Men of sin.
It is because the rural way of life fosters a spirit of aggressive love for one’s kith and kin that the rural person is courageous. In this sense, and in this sense alone, the rural dweller (Bedouin in his language) is closer to goodness than other types of humans (e.g. the urban dweller). This is because people who live in cities are self-centered and self-enamored: They only care about themselves in their pursuit for luxurious and pleasurable living – the city turns people into self-seeking pleasure animals (hedonists).
This leads to paradoxes about human civilization. Ibn Khaldun does not apologize for the rural way, so to speak. Urban civilization is grander and superior to rural civilization because it is intricate and refined: The city has libraries, universities, public monuments, great ports, refined clothing and cuisine, paved roads, great cathedrals and mosques; the rural town or tent-encampment has little in comparison and is defined by its simplicity and savagery. That said, the irony of this is the city is doomed to fail because of its self-centeredness.
Returning to asabiyyah, Ibn Khaldun contrasts urban and rural life in a dialectic of conflict. The rural people still retain a strong sense of group solidarity. The urban people, over time, because of their life of luxurious living, become lazy and soft. They lose group consciousness, which, as Khaldun then remarks, “becomes useless.” This represents the beginning of internal division of the nation: urban vs. rural, rich vs. poor, “enlightened” vs. “backward” (tropes we are all familiar with today). Khaldun suggests that two outcomes are possible: the rural people lead a revival of the old ways which injects temporary life into the nation that gives it extra legs; or an outside group that is more savage (committed to group solidarity) arises and overtakes the decadent and weakened nation that has torn itself apart by internal division. Neither outcome is ideal because Ibn Khaldun doesn’t celebrate ancient ways and customs as God’s revelation to the world, but he understands the importance of ancient ways and customs in fostering group spirit and identity that is necessary for a nation to survive. However, even if that revival takes place, the decline and fall of the nation is still going to happen.
In the midst of this commentary we can also identify traces of historical circumstances that he was familiar with. He remarks that nations rarely last when they rule over a multitude of people of different cultures, languages, and religions. Look at Cordoba Caliphate – that grandest of the Islamic caliphates that ruled over Muslims, Christians, and Jews, Arab speakers, Latin speakers, Hebrew speakers, and various Iberian speaking peoples. For all its grandeur it collapsed because there could not be enough group solidarity.
But group solidarity is not something entirely benign either. As the tribe expands from its rural enclaves and grows into a modern and large civilizational polity, there comes a point when marriage into the family isn’t enough to foster group solidarity. This is when tribes turn to propaganda. In Khaldun’s time the most obvious form of this was religion. Religion becomes the new blood identity of the people: We are Muslim, or we are Christian. In more modern times we can see this through new forms of identity politics or ideology: We are liberals, or we are humanists, etc.
At the same time as all of this he gives commentary over political economy. Ibn Khaldun laid out a theory of supply and demand, the division of labor, and taxation that is very prescient. One of the more haunting insights – perhaps for Americans especially – is how at the start of a civilization the tax rates are low, but the revenues are high because of the productivity and willingness for its citizens to fight off invaders. At the collapse of a civilization the tax rates spike, revenue drops, economic productivity stagnates, military protection is outsourced (which demands higher taxes) and the military is enlarged to try and defend its land (which leads to higher taxes also).
Additionally, and very thought-provokingly, Ibn Khaldun also says that urban people are really oppressed despite thinking otherwise. The rise of cities demands a rise in state power and the creation of a political apparatus because people “entrust their property and lives to governors.” People in the city reject taking political responsibility for themselves and push it off to what becomes the political class which then forms the true political dynasties of all nations. Thus, the paradox of the city is that it leads to Leviathan. As Khaldun notes, people subject themselves to the laws and regulations of the city which manages the lives and property of the people which is what they wanted in order to pursue lives of luxury and hedonism. Meanwhile, the rural people remain outside the subject of city politics and are freer because they are self-resilient and reliant. Rather than turn to family and social networks, people in the city turn to the state to provide their needs and solve their problems.
This is why the growth of civilization leads to the expansion of the political order, increased taxes, and, eventually, a stagnation and decline of economics. Furthermore, Khaldun says that urban dwellers are unwilling to make sacrifices because they have grown custom to a life of pleasure and luxury. Rural people are still willing to make sacrifices because they live a life of daily sacrifice: They don’t have luxurious goods, they are not used to eating multiple meals a day, they aren’t used to being “fat cats” in other words. (This only furthers the division between rural “savages” and urban “cosmopolitans.”)
This includes how political classes rule. The dynasty, which traces its origins back to the original “Founding Father” so to speak, and embodied the ethos of asabiyyah many generations ago, suddenly seeks its own luxury politics. Suddenly, politics turns not to how to organize a body but how to organize luxury. The dynasty becomes concerned with holding onto its wealth and goods and rejects helping others – especially the poor and rural people who grow resentful toward their rulers for having abandoned them.
In the end, the Law of the Jungle prevails. All civilizations are destined to collapse. And the cycle of the rise and decline of civilizations starts anew.
Ibn Khaldun offers so much: Cultural criticism, notes on political economy, class conflict, geopolitics, irony, and a tragic picture that even though civilizations are destined to fail, humans have no other option than to engage in civilizational building even though it will not last. Those who have read Oswald Spengler ought to read Ibn Khaldun, who beat him to the observation of the cyclical nature of the rise and fall of civilizations 500 years earlier.
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Ibn Khaldun was a son of modest aristocratic family that, through merit, had risen to prominent positions within the Hasfid Dynasty in Tunisia. His actual family roots go further back into Islamic Spain but, as the Reconquista gained steamed his family left for North Africa and this set Ibn Khaldun off on a travelling adventure over North Africa and brought him to Egypt. While some would argue against an epochal explanation for Ibn Khaldun’s geopolitical philosophy contained within the Muqaddimah, I believe it is nevertheless important to remember the environmental geography in which Khaldun lived, traversed, and was familiar with: North Africa and the Middle East, regions that combine some fertile and agrarian friendly areas, regions that also contain much desert and fairly useless land for human development, and regions that are prone to significant climate shifts and storms.
Geopolitical philosophy is the sub-discipline within philosophy and political theory that examines the role of the environment (or geography) and its impact upon political and social development. It is also closely linked to the further sub-discipline of environmental conditioning within human nature; that is, examining the role and impact of the environment in shaping human nature. This is not to say human nature is necessarily a byproduct of environmental forces, though it can mean that, but what environmental conditioning is primarily concerned with is how environmental forces shape human action. And this is a long running theme in Ibn Khaldun’s great masterpiece with many implications for us today.
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The beginning of the Muqaddimah includes some dry, but important, comments on the nature of the environment and how the environment impacts human development, biology, and actions. The main theme that runs through the Muqaddimah is how man is not detached from the environment but very much a creature of the environment. Man is, for Ibn Khaldun, as much a terrestrial (or environmental) animal as he is a social animal. In fact, man’s social animus is very much shaped by his experience with nature.
Unlike moderns, who live in comfortable environments, Ibn Khaldun maintains that the world is a harsh one and that this impacts how humans develop and organize themselves. Since the earth that man find himself inhabiting is harsh, and often times dangerous to him, the harshness of the environment is something that drives asabiyyah, or group feeling. That is, man would not be able to survive, let alone thrive, materially on his own. He is not alone in this thinking. The Greek word idiote, which is the root word for “idiot,” was given to Greeks who argued that man could be completely self-reliant and self-sustaining on his own. Living a life completely independent of others would either lead to an uncomfortable and bare minimum life of day-to-day subsistence, or, more likely, lead to death. (Especially given the environmental conditions that Ibn Khaldun was most familiar with.)
There are other reasons for group feeling to emerge, including how humans interact with each other (often in aggressive and domineering manner), but the role of environment also forces the emergence of group feeling. Because of the harsh world families bond together to provide for themselves in this harsh world. Over time the bond of kith and kin leads to the formation of the tribe. But because the world is harsh and often dangerous, this also leads to a conquest ethos within man. Man’s aggressiveness and domineering nature must exert itself if man is to survive.
Here Ibn Khaldun utilizes advances in Islamic science and biology of his era. Tame and meek forms of life throughout the animal and plant world, will often die because of their tameness and meekness. The “law of the jungle,” which dominates animal, and even plant, life, is one in which the strong, aggressive, and predatory (or the case of herbivores, the ever alert and often the strongest of the alert herbivores), survive and thrive. Man, in many ways, is no different than the animals and plants in the zoological world. That is to say that the tame and meek humans, families, tribes, and nations, are the ones that will succumb to death quickest. The humans that are most aggressive, domineering, and exploitative, are the ones who will survive, and ultimately thrive, in this harsh world.
Thus, man’s aggressiveness which is essential to his nature is something brought out by the environment itself. Because man has his origins on the margins (in the deserts, or the jungles, or the plains), man’s aggressiveness is ingrained in his DNA. Man, until very recently, did not begin his life “in the city.” Man began his existence in the bleak and harsh world, devoid of all the refinement, comfort, and intricacies of city life. This is something very important for Ibn Khaldun because that ultimately means that group feeling, and the roots of every nation, begin in the margins of the environment. Long before Oswald Spengler said the same in Decline of the West, Ibn Khaldun recognized that nations have their origins in the “heartlands” rather than the metropolitan centers of the nation.
Because man has his origins in these harsh outlying regions of the nation, and because group feeling first manifests itself to combat the harshness of the world, those people who remain living in the desert plains, the open and rolling hill and countryside, etc., are the ones who retain the highest level of basic human instinct: aggressiveness, savagery, and group feeling (or more explicitly group loyalty). The world around them demands that they are ever present, aware of their surroundings, working together with others, and confront all threats that may befall them, because that is all necessary for human life to continue in these harsh environs.
Conversely, the environs that have been “pacified” or “tamed”, so to speak, lead to a pacified and tamed man. While those who engage in the pacification, or taming, of nature do not lose their aggressiveness (because they know from experience what the “real world” is like), their progeny are the ones who are conditioned by this benign and pacified environ. As such they lose the ethos of group feeling that was first necessary for man to survive. They do not know how to work together or sacrifice for others because the world in which they now inhabit doesn’t demand this of them.
The problem is that the nation covers many different environs. As a result, a dialectic emerges within the nation between peoples that is, in many ways, the result of the different environs that make up the nation. Those who have the strongest sense of group feeling (loyalty), those who have the strongest communitarian ethos, and those who are “aggressive” and “savage” are the people who live in those open, harsh, hilly, and “desert” environs. In other words, the “rural people.” Those people who have the strongest ethos of self-centeredness, those who pursue luxury, and those who do not share the ethos of group feeling, are those who live in the urbane, metropolitan, and comfortable cities. In Ibn Khaldun’s own words, the “city-dwellers.”
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An important aspect of Ibn Khaldun’s philosophy is the geopolitical dialectic that defines the “politics” of a nation. This is the dialectic that I just outlined above. For Ibn Khaldun, national politics (if we anachronistically apply that term back onto Khaldun), and the dialectic of life more generally, is between those who live in harsh environs and those who live in comfortable and luxurious environs. This is the real origins of “class conflict” according to Khaldun, or rather, that Ibn Khaldun’s understanding of class conflict is one not of material oppression between the capitalist and worker (a la Marx) but between urban and rural which contain the seeds of “rich” and “poor” and “metropolitan” and “nationalist” (so to speak) because of the environs in which they live.
Because the city emerges from a tamed and pacified environ, in which group feeling can be discarded and the people who live there are “free” to “pursue their own interest,” and because the rural way is still situated in a much harsh and angst-filled environ in which group feeling remains strong and communitarian ties necessary for continued life, the division that opens up in this dialectic of conflict is one in which rich vs. poor and “patriot” vs. “traitor” are the product of geography itself. And since group feeling first emanates from the harsh countryside, or the environ that was at once harsh, it is these regions that the populace retains that high level of group feeling but are materially less well off than those who live in cities where group feeling dissipates and, eventually, totally disappears and now the nation is fractured between those who have a retention of group feeling and those who regard group feeling as something backward, barbaric, and “uncivilized.”
Ibn Khaldun does something very interesting in that he doesn’t fit the tradition geopolitical dialectic of Antiquity (found in the writings of Thucydides) or of the more modern European period between land and sea powers. Rather, there is an intra dialectic of just land vs. land. While the people of tamed and pacified land very much end up being similar to people of the sea, they are not actually sea-fearing peoples or powers.
Within the Muqaddimah the dialectic of geopolitical philosophy is very important and is something that defines human society and life. This is why many regard Ibn Khaldun as among the first modern “scientific historians” in which natural and environmental processes can be understood and that they help explain human history (which is something ultimately cyclical which follows the life-death cycle). When this dialectic hits full steam what happens is not the pacification of land anymore, but the pacification of the particular peoples of particular environs.
The city comes to dominate the rural areas, which is to say the city folk dominate the rural folk because of their material wealth and centers of political power (which arise in the cities rather than the more decentralized political order found in rural areas). For many reasons, from fear of invasion, from need of aid, and from simply sharing in the spoils of conquest, the rural people become subjugated to the city. This leads to only further divisions within the nation because of the retention of group feeling among rural people and the dissipation of group feeling among city people which results in the now subjugated rural people feeling “betrayed” by their metropolitan masters and elites.
What happens next is twofold (befitting dialectical philosophy). Either the nation completely withers away and dies (having been taken over by a younger nation or foreign people who have a strong sense of group feeling that is able to overcome the fractured and divided nation in which group feeling has largely dissipated outside of a few areas), or there is a revival of group feeling that begins from the rural areas and spreads into the cities which gives an extra shot of life for the nation. Now, for Ibn Khaldun, this extra shot of life doesn’t avoid the inevitable death that all nations will face. However, it is something that will allow a nation to endure longer than nations that completely lose their group feeling.
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Within the geographical dynamics at play in Ibn Khaldun’s work is also how the environment inculcates certain ways of living. That “traditional” way of life: Working the land, living in a close-knit community where people rely on each other (and know each other as a result), a strong sense of communal belonging (group feeling), and, while not being “one with nature,” have a certain appreciation of nature and nature’s way because of how often they live and depend upon nature’s good fortunes (and also know nature’s destructive hand which leads to a respect of nature’s power), is inculcated in the rural regions and the harsher environs. Thus, life is simple, unrefined, non-intricate, but people are basically people (as they have always been).
The lusher and tamed environs, in which cities spring up, leads to a new way of living. This way of living, shall we say metropolitan life, is characterized by its luxury, refinement, intricacy, technology, and grandeur. It is the material life crystallized whereas the “desert life” is the human life enduring. While Ibn Khaldun is quick to point out the flaws of the metropolitan life (the life of the “soul” of humanity which is lost in metropolitan life), he still positively reflects on the refinement, culture, and grandeur of the material greatness of such ways of living. As he recounts in Chapter 4, it is predominately in the cities where great works of architecture, the most beautiful mosques (and such religious buildings reaching up to the heavens), art and artisan life, etc., flourish. The simplicity of the rural way of life simply doesn’t compare.
Here again we see another dialectic at play: Simplicity and Humanism vs. Intricacy and Materialism. The environs which have been pacified lead to greater and greater refinement, intricacy, depth, but this is all largely manifested in material things: Clothing, food, architecture, roads, and so forth. The harsh environs lead to humanity toiling away as it has always done. The clothing, food, architecture, and roads of the “simple rural town” (so to speak) are precisely that: simple. The difference is, for Ibn Khaldun, that the simple and traditional way of life, though lacking material grandeur, is one of deep human substance and character. People work hard. They depend on each other. They have deep bonds with other people and respect for nature. Metropolitan life, while it has tremendous civilizational grandeur (to which Ibn Khaldun states that sedentary civilization is superior because of its refinement and material splendor), nevertheless creates shallow humans. People care only for themselves. They are alienated from each other (worst being the alienation from their fellow compatriots) as well as being alienated from nature. They lack deep bonds and, as a result, as he says in numerous places in Chapter II and Chapter III, the people who have adopted the metropolitan way of living are inferior (humanistically) to the simple rural folk.
The reality of the world, for Khaldun, is both ways of life, both of these “civilizations,” exist in the world. They also often exist within the nation. And this dialectical dynamism leads to tension within a nation. These tensions are only exacerbated when nations have multiple cultures, languages, and peoples, which add to national fracturing and discontent (as he elaborates upon in Chapter III). The tragedy in this dialectic that Ibn Khaldun sees is how the metropolitan way sees itself as superior in every aspect to the rural way and seeks to subjugate the rural way of life by breaking down group feeling through various means.
We can understand the geopolitical humanism and philosophy of ways of life as this: (1) The rural way of life is traditional, harsh, and simple whereby people foster and maintain deep social and communitarian (and filial and national) bonds, the people are and hardy and hardworking people despite their simple-nature, care about honor and loyalty, and have a certain appreciation and respect for nature; (2) the metropolitan way of life is refined, intricate, complicated, governed by material pursuits and many laws and regulations, the people lose their bonds with each other as they pursue their own economic interests which leads to the dissolution of group feeling, they care only about themselves and scoff at notions of honor and loyalty – and yet, metropolitan civilization is grand and splendid (but only on the material surface). Is there a way to synthesize the grandeur and splendid ways of both? Not for Ibn Khaldun. However, Ibn Khaldun has a conflicted view of both the urban and rural ways of life, both have their pros and cons, but in some way, Ibn Khaldun seems to suggest that the rural way is the more virtuous even if it is marred by low culture, low civilization, and lack of grandeur because they retain a (primitive) humanism while the urban way turns humans into commodities and cogs which we, today, erroneously call (refined) humanism which isn’t humanism at all but a hollow corruption of what it means to be human: have intimate ties with others, especially your family.
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One of the major concepts that Ibn Khaldun discusses in his great work Al Muqaddimah, besides the role of environment and geography upon people and shaping the human condition, is the notion of group feeling and its role in history, the formation of societies, and how this too is shaped by the environment. One could say that Ibn Khaldun is the first systematic geographic and geopolitical philosopher in that almost all of his core ideas are tied to the environment. So what role does group feeling and intimacy play in Ibn Khaldun’s magnum opus?
Since all life starts at the margins, or the “desert,” e.g. the harsh world before progressing, humans need intimate bonds in order to survive, and eventually thrive. Humans instinctively and naturally turn to their immediate family for the first structure of support and justice in their lives. This is because, as Ibn Khaldun says, love of family and one’s own is natural in humans except in the most debased and sinful of men, “Respect for blood ties is something natural among men, with the rarest exceptions. It leads to affection for one’s relations and blood relatives, the feeling that no harm ought to befall them nor any destruction upon them.” Biologically, and geographically, this love is inculcated through this double enforcement. It is natural to care for one’s blood family because they are, in some sense, you. You come from the same parents. Geographically this love and intimacy felt by family members is reinforced by the harsh stages of life where one is dependent, or looks, upon family for their refuge. Over time the immediate family expands outward to secondary family. Fathers turn to their brothers. Brothers turn to their brothers and their families. This is how a tribe emerges. Together, through this intimate bond that Ibn Khaldun calls group feeling, do people begin preserve themselves and overcome their environs. (Now don’t confuse Ibn Khaldun for sounding a lot like Thomas Hobbes or John Locke or Benedict Spinoza. For Hobbes, Locke, and Spinoza all deny this intimate bond of family, blood, and tribe in their states of nature; humans are not social or seeking justice as Ibn Khaldun claims, they are already atomized and a-social and entirely self-interested consumers.)
The emergence of this group feeling in the form of tribal solidarity is what gives a group, or tribe, its power. This intimacy felt for others is what leads to other members of the group being willing to die for their tribesmen. They understand, at this point, that it is not about them. It is about the group. If I must die for the group to survive, and thrive, then this is the ultimate and most noble sacrifice I must make. This is why Ibn Khaldun says that although the Bedouin lack intricacy and refinement, although they lack sophistication, though they are not cosmopolitan and generally unlearned (in the sense of being well-versed and well-read), they are “closer to being good than sedentary people.” This is because the harshness of rural life forces people to be moral; it forces people to have close ties with each other in order to survive. This is played out in many ways, even culturally, where rural people—“backward” as they may be—stop to help people in need more than city folk do.
In fact, Ibn Khaldun, being the learned and educated man, implies that “learned” people who regard the Bedouin as backward are themselves unlearned, for their feelings and emotions about what ought to be, as opposed to what is. The true educated man understands what is, and what Ibn Khaldun is telling us about the what is, is that group feeling, solidarity, and tribal loyalty and self-sacrifice is very real, it is the very building bloc of human society, and when this feeling of togetherness, intimacy, solidarity, loyalty, and self-sacrifice is lost, a society is lost – the society collapses. Though, again, Ibn Khaldun is not without seeing the benefits of sedentary civilization: Its intricacy, refinement, centers of learning and education, libraries, its grand mosques (or cathedrals), its paved roads, houses, etc.; this leads to the paradox and tragedy that runs throughout Ibn Khaldun’s text. The culture of the city is superior to the culture of the rural Bedouin, but the humanness of the Bedouin is superior to the lack of humanness exhibited by the urban city dweller.
Thus, we can also understand what Ibn Khaldun is saying about life in general. Meaningfulness and power in life is related to intimacy. This is not unique to Ibn Khaldun. The importance of intimacy in one’s life, and in political life, is already attested to by Aristotle in Politics, Cicero in Republic and On Duties, and by Christian philosophy more generally. The inverse of this is also true. The spiral into exhaustive nihilism and meaningless, the growth of self-centeredness and selfishness, all reflected by the leisure-seeking self-pleasuring hedonism of the urban dweller, can only come about by the loss of intimacy (the end of group feeling).
Why is this so?
Intimacy leads to the development of those “unwritten” rules of ethics and filial piety. Duty, honor, loyalty, etc. These ideas, beliefs, or feelings are inscribed into men by group feeling. One feels like they must honor their mother and father who helped them in their time of need. While we know our parents in their prime, there will come a time (as they age) in which they will become weak and we are strong and in our prime. Just as they helped us in our weakness, we feel obliged to help them in their weakness. Thus, I am forced to put “my interests” aside to take care of my parents. I love my brother and sister. I seek to protect them from the harm I know is out in the world. When they are harmed, I seek, essentially, revenge on those who have harmed my kin. In doing this I must also put ‘my interest’ aside to tend to the matter that must be addressed.
The bond of intimacy is what gives a group its self-sacrificial ethos. Intimacy is what binds people together: In love, in family, in protection, in fulfilling duties and obligations to others just as they had done to you. Intimacy invokes union. It invokes togetherness. By that token alone intimacy is the great barrier to atomization, alienation, and the road to leisure-seeking self-centeredness.
Thus Ibn Khaldun is also implying throughout the work that the loss of intimacy is the sign of the end of the nation. Since the nation is the extension of group feeling writ large, a nation in its early stages of life exhibits and embodies group feeling. Towards its death stage group feeling, and therefore intimacy between persons, is lost. This drift from intimacy also leads to revulsion of the actions and ethics of ancestors. As Ibn Khaldun says, the last generation(s) of the nation look back upon their ancestors and deplore them, they hate them, they don’t want anything to do with them. This is because not only have they lost group feeling, that intimate bond that connects us with people (but also connects us with the past), it also leads us to make foolish conclusions like not believing that our ancestors faced a difficult and harsh world where their actions were often necessary for survival while we, enjoying the fruits of the pacified and tamed environ, accustomed to lives of luxury and softness, believe this is how the world always was and will remain. When people are no longer willing to take care of their parents, when people come to despise their ancestors for their actions, one can identify the transition toward the decline stage and the coming emergence of an entirely selfish and atomized civilization according to Ibn Khaldun.
Thus, what Ibn Khaldun is telling us is that civilization, society (social, it’s in the word), and the struggle for life is a group effort. It depends upon intimacy, bonds of social and filial solidarity and commitment. Together we are strong. Divided we are dead. When groups collide, and they inevitably collide – civilizations do war with each other – the group, or civilization, with the strongest esprit de corps, or group feeling (asabiyyah) emerges victorious.
Furthermore, the destruction of the bonds of intimacy is what allows our self-centered material pursuits to explode within city life. This is why the city is inferior to the Bedouin tribe encampment in terms of humanism. The rural way is the human way. It is humanity in its most basic, natural, and biological form. The city way, by contrast, is the consummation of the dream that men have dreamt, a life of leisure, luxury, and endless self-want and consumption; but Ibn Khaldun says it comes at the cost of group feeling, intimacy, and our natural humanness (reflecting in those intimate bonds exemplified by the Bedouin).
This is why tragic irony appears again in Ibn Khaldun. The consummation of the city is, in some way, the consummation of what the Bedouin do, in fact, desire. For the city is the place where the harshness of the world is no longer a threat. The city is the place where justice, at least in name, rules supreme. The city is the place where we no longer need to labor 16, 17, or 18 hours a day just to survive. But again, lack of human foresight means that the consummation of the city – of that sedentary civilization and way of life – will destroy our own humanity. The success of the city, which brings about the demise of nations and humans, is what life itself struggles for. For all life must die. And when life begins to die it deteriorates from the outside exterior to the central core (now the city). Lifeforms allow their less important exterior elements go first in false hope of sustaining its core. This is why, as the nation is heading to its final stages of life, it abandons the rural regions. Those areas are deemed “not important” for the life of the city, which is now like the central core, or heart, of the nation. This represents the loss of those intimate bonds to “those people” whom the city folk, as Ibn Khaldun says, begin to regard as backward and uneducated.
It is important to remember that Ibn Khaldun sees these life cycle patterns as unavoidable. He is the true intellectual insofar that he describes what is rather than how it should be. This is why Ibn Khaldun is considered a pivot to modern philosophy. It is not, so to speak, that classical (or ancient) philosophy wasn’t concerned with the what is. It most certainly was. But classical philosophy was also concerned with ideas like summum bonum (the good life), the ideal life, perfect forms and perfect regimes (and whether we could ever attain such things). In Ibn Khaldun within the Islamic tradition, and then come Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, and the “Enlightenment” philosophers in the Western tradition, we see such concerns as the good life, ideal life, highest good, perfect forms, and so on, disappear in their philosophical works. It is no longer a concern of the modern philosophers. Rather, the modern philosophers have turned to the mechanical and mechanistic universe and simply ever seek to describe the what is
Yet, even with this turn, the modern philosophers notoriously disagree. Just as is evidence with the acceptance from classical philosopher in Ibn Khaldun that man is a political (social) animal with deep intimate bonds. Man struggles to fulfill duties and obligations. But is endlessly tempted with selfishness which, when acted upon, destroy those intimate bonds (group feeling) and duties and obligations to others. This erodes society. The erosion of society is the downward movement to death. But this, Ibn Khaldun says, is the way of the world. It is the law of life.
For Ibn Khaldun, the most important thing a person can do is to recognize what stage of life within the nation he or she is living in. The easiest way to do this is to look at the closeness of human bonds, intimacy, and solidaristic relations between people; between family and between countrymen. When family atomizes itself, the nation will follow soon after. When family lacks intimate bonds, the nation will soon after also lack intimate bonds. When the lack of intimate bonds grows, one knows they are living in the decline stage of the nation.
This is not to say that all individuals and all families will lack intimate bonds. No. Most of the people and families who live on the peripheral borderlands, who remain living in the desert or the rural zones, will retain their intimate bonds. But since the transfer of power moves from the rural to the urban through the rise of nations and construction of cities, it is of little use that these regions still retain such bonds since the centers and organs of power are no longer in these regions. As such, as Ibn Khaldun also says in his work, these regions are the first to slip away from the dying nation as they are swallowed up by the new emerging nation, or civilization, which is resolutely filled with group feeling, solidarity, and determination.
Therefore, in moments of crisis, which often happen during the decline and death stage, the lack of these intimate bonds leads to the people of the declining nation to abandon their duties and obligations. It is “every man for himself.” They desert. They are unwilling to fight. They allow their work, their city, and their history to be overtaken by the new power on the rise. That new power on the rise is one filled with strong intimate bonds, courageous group feeling, willingness to sacrifice and die so that the group may live on. And so the cycles of history, the rise and fall of civilizations, begin anew.
There has long been discussion about Ibn Khaldun and whether his deterministic and fatalistic, or pessimistic view can be overcome. Is it possible to retain that group feeling, and if so how can it be done? The reason for this is simple: It is the end of group feeling whereby Ibn Khaldun sees the road to weakness and death. Retention of group feeling, he also says, is what gives extra life to dynasties that experience such “revivals” of group feeling. Thus, can group feeling be retained to avoid death? While Ibn Khaldun doesn’t see a way to prevent the inevitable decline, readers of Ibn Khaldun have long wondered if it is, in fact, possible to keep perpetuating those “revivals” to keep the life of the nation going. Ibn Khaldun, however, definitely says No! To wishfully hope for that is to hope for what ought to be, rather than acknowledge what is.
In the Muqaddmiah, Ibn Khaldun lays out a comprehensive sociology of civilization and history of philosophy. His enduring contributions relate to geographical determinism and environmental conditioning, how our environments impact human society and civilization, and his thesis on asabiyyah, group solidarity, being the spirit of all civilizations as they ebb and flow through time.
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Paul Krause is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is writer, classicist, and historian. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of Muses of a Fire, Finding Arcadia, The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and religious studies (biblical studies & theology) from the University of Buckingham and Yale, and a bachelor’s degree in economics, history, and philosophy from Baldwin Wallace University.
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