Mahdi presents here a fascinating triptych of intellectual history, consisting of (1) a biography of the 14th c. Arab historian Ibn Khaldûn (who once had an interview with Tamerlane), (2) a discussion that situates Khaldûn in the evolution of Islamic philosophy and historiography, and (3) an interpretation of Khaldûn’s major work The Muqaddimah, or Principles…etc. etc. etc…

Mahdi’s methodological approach (influenced by Leo Strauss) proceeds from a recognition of the principles accepted by an author, then to an attempt to uncover the author’s motivations and intentions, and finally a venture into interpretation and judgment of the author’s work. First principles first, then (or, what Khaldûn “knew”): the Islamic community owed its origins, its Law, and its character to a revelation and a prophet. The Law provided final and definitive dogmas about the attributes of God, the creation of the world, and the world to come. It prescribed which acts were obligatory, recommended, permitted or forbidden, and described the rewards and punishments such acts entailed. The divine legislator was not bound by the limits of theoretical reason; what he announced must be accepted and never doubted, even when contradicting what had been known by human reason. Believers were urged not to waste their efforts exploring the rational truth behind the dogmas taught by the Prophet, as this inevitably leads to ‘a gorge in which the mind wanders to no avail.’

Khaldûn’s chief motivation, according to Mahdi, was a desire to understand the nature and causes of the conditions (general decline and disintegration) prevailing in the Islamic world during his lifetime, and to learn the lessons they could teach him on the nature of human history. Khaldûn proposed that particular traditions could be studied as expressions of an underlying universal order of things, an order that could be ascertained by observation and valid reasoning. Khaldûn thought that the attempt to study history in this manner was new and that he had originated it, but such novelty was not true of science or philosophy in general, writes Mahdi. Philosophy had come to the Arabs from the Greeks, but had been in decline since the time of Averroes (d. 1198). Khaldûn would revive it.

The discovery of Greek philosophy stimulated the development of Muslim philosophy, but in a context within which philosophy had to coexist with the divinely-inspired Law. The earliest Muslim thinkers started from religious dogma, then formulated a rational system based upon principles and methods of proof which led to conclusions identical with those dogmas. Later thinkers (Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, all inspired by the Greeks) produced a shift in Islamic philosophy, arguing that reasoning could be false without a corresponding falseness of nature/dogma. By Khaldûn’s time, the only philosophy in the Islamic community was a mishmash of speculative theology, mysticism, and the ideas of Farabi, et.al. Khaldûn had first to expose and refute this combination before redirecting philosophy to its proper end. His critique was not aimed at philosophy per se, then, but at the pretenders to philosophy, among whom Khaldûn counted Farabi and Avicenna. (Mahdi’s footnotes in this section are dense with explication and illustrations from the relevant works of various writers. Speed-readers beware.)

In Khaldûn’s view (as related by Mahdi), the philosopher, untangling himself from speculative theology and mysticism, should assert that much of what the Law brings forth cannot be known by reason—‘the universe is too wide to be embraced exhaustively in its totality.’ Khaldûn followed closely the Posterior Analytics of Aristotle to critique the school of Islamic dialectical theology (kalám) that had denied the existence of essential attributes and viewed universals as mere mental constructions with no counterparts outside the mind. He made a distinction between philosophic sciences (which man can know by the nature of his thought and human perception) and positive sciences (which are based upon the traditions communicated from the divine legislator). Khaldûn carefully omitted discussion of the history of practical sciences in Islamic philosophy so as to avoid having to commit himself to the opinions of other philosophers (Farabi’s Platonic position, for instance) or to impede in any way his relation to the community (by putting himself at odds with some faction or another). Nonetheless, Khaldûn’s acceptance of the principles of Islamic politics was implicit in his discussion of the most important issues that practical philosophy had to explore: the nature of prophecy, the nature of the social order, and the role of knowledge in society. Khaldûn’s purpose in the third, according to Mahdi, was “to protect the Law and philosophy, and the many and the few, against possible confusion between their functions and ends.”

The distinction between the many and the few was reintroduced into Islamic philosophy through the Aristotelian theory of the methods of demonstration, which Averroes integrated with the Platonic idea of the political significance of the few and the many as explained in The Republic. In propounding his theory of esoteric writing, Averroes argued that a philosopher should protect the many by supporting and praising the Law, and by refuting and silencing all who attempt to mislead them through questioning the Law or raising doubts about it. Khaldûn’s goal in his discussion of the various sciences, according to Mahdi, was to disentangle and expose the mixtures of positive and philosophic sciences—in refutation of dissenting sectarians, dialecticians and mystics who, being ignorant of the true purpose of the Law and the true nature of philosophy, had attempted in vain to reconcile them.

It was common in Islamic mystical and philosophic literature to deliberately exclude the undesirable reader with a style of writing that was difficult and ambiguous. In contrast, says Mahdi, Khaldûn chose to write for all people. History seemed to him the ideal subject through which ideas could be communicated both to the few and the many: Khaldûn’s exoteric-esoteric writing style enabled him to communicate the externals of history to the many, and the nature and cause of historical events to the few. Mahdi reviews the indirection, cryptic phrases, and obscure allusions that mark Khaldûn’s idiosyncratic style. Writing ‘history’ also gave Khaldûn additional intellectual and political cover: Mahdi notes that, in order to avoid being condemned as a philosopher, Khaldûn avoided mentioning the sources—philosophic tradition or particular authors— from which he derived key concepts.

Before discussing Khaldûn’s historical approach, Mahdi surveys the nature, purpose, and method of history in Islamic thought. Before the Umayyad Caliphate, historical reports were transmitted orally, and subsequent written reports were justified by the sciences of biography and authority-criticism in order to establish a chain of transmission back through time to past events. Various critiques of historians’ assumptions forced an historiographical shift in the 9th & 10th centuries toward a more systematic formulation and defense of the assumptions made in the collecting and arranging of information about the past. Because not all historical reports could be traced back to the time of their occurrence through a reliable chain of transmitters, Tabarî (d. 923) and others relied on the Prophet when necessary, but also had to resort to the Old and New Testaments, Jewish historians, and Persian chroniclers. The Mu’tazili school was first to question the traditional history represented by Tabarî and the prevailing principles of authority, insisting instead that historians’ convictions be based on rational grounds and not solely on tenuous chains to the past. Following Aristotle, the Muʿtazilah also denied that history was a science, since its subject matter is mutable and changing, and thus subject to interpretation.

Islamic historiography and philosophy developed in parallel, then, as dialectical philosophy (kalám) emerged to defend the traditional religious-bound approach against the charges of the Muʿtazilah and their philosophical progeny and to show that its own underlying assumptions were rationally tenable. The defense of kalám was based upon an ontology and a theory of knowledge according to which all objects exist as a result of continuous creation by God, and all perceptions and reasoning consist of separate accidents directly created by God in the substance that is the knower. For the dialectical theologians, a causal relation was merely the relation between accidents, and all explanations were at best probable. “History,” regarded as an extension of sense perceptions, was only what had been experienced directly. Kalám thus reaffirmed and defended the traditional reliance on a chain of authoritative transmitters, and excised all historical knowledge derived from reasoning.

Here is where Khaldûn’s science of culture comes in.

Khaldûn began The Muqaddimah with a discussion and critique of Islamic historiography that serves as preparation for the subsequent development of his new science of culture, through which Khaldûn intended to provide a systematic investigation of the problems of human association, with the ultimate aim, according to Mahdi, of rectifying previous historical reports. Khaldûn was careful to distinguish the new science of culture from history: the knowledge of particular events (concerns of the historian) are not an end but a beginning from which to discern and formulate universal judgments (the science of culture). The subject matter of the science of culture comes after history.

A science of culture, wrote Khaldûn, presupposes the existence of collective habits and actions, the results of relatively stable causes which in turn can be discerned under specific environmental and social conditions. (Culture can only come into being in certain geographical regions.) Khaldûn thought that cultural habits were the product of human desires and reason, so that the phenomenon of culture could be made the object of a rational science. On such a line of thinking rests Khaldûn’s reputation as one of the originators of social science (though, as Mahdi points out, the foundations of Khaldûn’s science of culture are different from those of modern social science). Primitive cultures satisfy basic human desires necessary for survival, wrote Khaldûn, but the human soul harbors latent desires, no less rational and necessary, which can only be satisfied in civilization (‘the city’). The characteristic attribute of civilized culture is a dynamic process of growth, the attainment of natural limits, and finally dissolution.

In The Muqaddimah, the evolution of culture coincides with the rise (and fall) of the state, the pursuit of political power, and the development (and decline) of communal solidarity and the idea of the common good—all of which Khaldûn saw through the lens of Islam. Because Islam legislated the institution of holy war in order to spread its message, the religious leader also had to concern himself with political power and the means of making war. Muslim philosophers, including Khaldûn, understood the regime of the Law, brought into existence by the Prophet, as essentially a political order. But, while acknowledging that a common system of laws and coercion exercised by an undisputed ruler was necessary to insure peace and order in society, Khaldun’s science of culture reached the limits of its usefulness upon asking the question of ultimate ends in human society. The new science was unable to provide a universally compelling formulation of the common good, or the proper amount of justice and moderation for the regime of reason. Khaldûn had to admit (to the few) that there were lessons that history could not teach. And so, the science of culture gave way in the end to political philosophy—a turn that would have been recognized only by those versed in (Greek) political philosophy.

In his assessment of The Muqaddimah and the tradition within which Khaldûn worked, Mahdi concludes that Islamic philosophy was capable of being more secular, political and realistic than usually assumed. The conventional contrast between the more Platonic character of Farabi and Averroes and the more Aristotelian approach of Ibn Khaldûn is overstated. According to Mahdi, we should read Khaldûn as a disciple of the Islamic Platonic tradition. His goal had been to resolve the confusion that undermined philosophy while defining the proper sphere and object of philosophy. With a writing style that concealed as much as it revealed, Khaldûn succeeded in producing a work that was a commentary on itself, an illustration of philosophy qua philosophy, a means to an end that was not the End. ( )