Muqaddimah
The Muqaddimah, also known as the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun or Ibn Khaldun's Prolegomena, is a book written by the historian Ibn Khaldun in 1377 which presents a view of universal history. Some modern thinkers view it as the first work dealing with the social sciences of sociology, demography, and cultural history. The Muqaddimah also deals with Islamic theology, historiography, the philosophy of history, economics, political theory, and ecology. It has also been described as a precursor or an early representative of social Darwinism, and Darwinism.
Ibn Khaldun wrote the work in 1377 as the introduction and the first book of his planned work of world history, the Kitab al-ʿIbar, but already in his lifetime it became regarded as an independent work on its own.
Etymology
Muqaddimah is an Arabic word used to mean "prologue" or "introduction", to introduce a larger work.Content
Ibn Khaldun starts the Muqaddimah with a thorough criticism of the mistakes regularly committed by his fellow historians and the difficulties which await the historian in his work. He notes seven critical issues:
All records, by their very nature, are liable to error...
- ...Partisanship towards a creed or opinion...
- ...Over-confidence in one's sources...
- ...The failure to understand what is intended...
- ...A mistaken belief in the truth...
- ...The inability to place an event in its real context...
- ...The common desire to gain favor of those of high ranks, by praising them, by spreading their fame...
- ...The most important is the ignorance of the laws governing the transformation of human society.
Against the seventh point Ibn Khaldun lays out his theory of human society in the Muqaddimah.
Sati' al-Husri suggested that Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah is essentially a sociological work, sketching over its six books a general sociology; a sociology of politics; a sociology of urban life; a sociology of economics; and a sociology of knowledge.
Scientific method
Ibn Khaldun often criticized "idle superstition and uncritical acceptance of historical data". As a result, he introduced the scientific method to the social sciences, which was considered something "new to his age", and he often referred to it as his "new science" and developed his own new terminology for it.History of the ''Muqaddimah''
Ibn Khaldun wrote the first version of the Muqaddimah in Qalʿat ibn Salama, where he secluded himself for almost four years after withdrawing from political life. It is the first of three parts of a project he worked on for almost thirty years: his Kitab al-ʿIbar, a massive work of universal history filling seventeen volumes of 500 pages each in its modern edition. A draft of the Muqaddimah was completed in 1377. Manuscripts of the Muqaddimah copied in the lifetime of Ibn Khaldun are extant, and a number of them have autographed marginal notes or additions.In the Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun expounds on a "new science" around which he had maintained secrecy up until his retirement to Qalʿat ibn Salama, a new science for the study of what he calls "ʿumrān". This new science, ʿilm al-ʿumrān, was based on Greco-Arab philosophy and sought to study the evolution of humankind and society throughout history using a method that was essentially historical, empirical, rational, and demonstrative.
The Muqaddimah—shaped by Ibn Khaldun's characteristic moderation with regard to politics and religion—was met without much enthusiasm or clear hostility in the first few centuries after it was written. It was alluded to in the works of two Moroccan writers, Muḥammad Ibn al-Sakkāk and Yaʿqūb b. Mūsā al-Saytānī, but Muḥammad b. ʿAlī Ibn al-Azraq is apparently the only contemporary writer of the Maghreb who clearly approved of his work, quoting from it abundantly in his Badāʾiʿ al-silk fī ṭabāʾiʿ al-mulk.
It was cited more often in works from Egypt, celebrated by disciples including Al-Maqrizi and Ibn ʿAmmār, and met with hostility by others such as Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani and his master Nur al-Din al-Haythami.
In the following centuries, Khaldun appeared prominently, described as an authority on political history, in numerous biographical dictionaries—especially in Ahmed Muhammad al-Maqqari's —but the Muqaddimah remained largely absent.
Ottoman historians including Kâtip Çelebi and Mustafa Naima valued the social and political theories in the Muqaddimah, but did not apply them in the analysis of their own society. The first five out of six chapters were translated into Ottoman Turkish by , and the sixth chapter was translated by Ahmed Cevdet ; the complete translation was published 1860/61.
The Muqaddimah was first printed in 1857 at the Bulaq Press in Cairo in a standalone volume made by, with crucial support from Rifa'a at-Tahtawi, and as the first volume in a seven-volume set of Kitab al-ʿIbar a decade later.
Abdesselam Cheddadi concludes that "the strictly scientific contribution of Ibn Khaldūn to the field of history and the social sciences was not fully recognised in the Muslim world until the late nineteenth century."
The Muqaddimah was first discovered in France through the partial Turkish translation of . In 1858, the year following the first publication in Cairo, Étienne-Marc Quatremère printed an edition of the Arabic text of the Muqaddimah in three volumes in Paris under the title Les Prolégomènes d’Ebn Khaldoun. William McGuckin de Slane published a French translation in three volumes in 1863 that Aziz al-Azmeh regards as the best translation of Ibn Khaldun's text.
An English translation was published by Franz Rosenthal in 1958.
Sociology
ʿAsabiyyah
The concept of "ʿasabiyyah" is one of the best known aspects of the Muqaddimah. As this ʿasabiyyah declines, another more compelling ʿasabiyyah may take its place; thus, civilizations rise and fall, and history describes these cycles of ʿasabiyyah as they play out.Ibn Khaldun argues that each dynasty has within itself the seeds of its own downfall. He explains that ruling houses tend to emerge on the peripheries of great empires and use the unity presented by those areas to their advantage in order to bring about a change in leadership. As the new rulers establish themselves at the center of their empire, they become increasingly lax and more concerned with maintaining their lifestyles. Thus, a new dynasty can emerge at the periphery of their control and effect a change in leadership, beginning the cycle anew.
Economics
Ibn Khaldun wrote on economic and political theory in the Muqaddimah, relating his thoughts on ʿasabiyyah to the division of labor: the greater the social cohesion, the more complex the division may be, the greater the economic growth:Ibn Khaldun noted that growth and development positively stimulate both supply and demand, and that the forces of supply and demand are what determine the prices of goods. He also noted macroeconomic forces of population growth, human capital development, and technological developments effects on development. Ibn Khaldun held that population growth was a function of wealth.
He understood that money served as a standard of value, a medium of exchange, and a preserver of value, though he did not realize that the value of gold and silver changed based on the forces of supply and demand. Ibn Khaldun also introduced the labor theory of value. He described labor as the source of value, necessary for all earnings and capital accumulation, obvious in the case of craft. He argued that even if earning "results from something other than a craft, the value of the resulting profit and acquired must include the value of the labor by which it was obtained. Without labor, it would not have been acquired."
Ibn Khaldun describes a theory of prices through his understanding that prices result from the law of supply and demand. He understood that when a good is scarce and in demand, its price is high and when the good is abundant, its price is low.
His theory of ʿasabiyyah has often been compared to modern Keynesian economics, with Ibn Khaldun's theory clearly containing the concept of the multiplier. A crucial difference, however, is that whereas for John Maynard Keynes it is the middle class's greater propensity to save that is to blame for economic depression, for Ibn Khaldun it is the governmental propensity to save at times when investment opportunities do not take up the slack which leads to aggregate demand.
Another modern economic theory anticipated by Ibn Khaldun is supply-side economics. He "argued that high taxes were often a factor in causing empires to collapse, with the result that lower revenue was collected from high rates." He wrote:
Laffer curve
Ibn Khaldun introduced the concept now popularly known as the Laffer curve, that increases in tax rates initially increase tax revenues, but eventually the increases in tax rates cause a decrease in tax revenues. This occurs as too high a tax rate discourages producers in the economy.Ibn Khaldun used a dialectic approach to describe the sociological implications of tax choice :
This analysis is very similar to the modern economic concept known as the Laffer curve. Laffer does not claim to have invented the concept himself, noting that the idea was present in the work of Ibn Khaldun and, more recently, John Maynard Keynes.
Historiography
The Muqaddimah is also held to be a foundational work for the schools of historiography, cultural history, and the philosophy of history. The Muqaddimah also laid the groundwork for the observation of the role of state, communication, propaganda and systemic bias in history.Franz Rosenthal wrote in the History of Muslim Historiography: