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The Muqaddimah, an introduction to a universal history up to the author's own day (the 14th century AD) is repetitive, clumsy in places, has some curious choices of material, is maddeningly inexplicit occasionally, and entirely incredible. It is a true landmark in the study of history.

I first heard about this book as a student. It was a lead in to a lecture hall joke, the work had apparently been reconstructed from students' lecture notes after Ibn Khaldun's death (pause for punchline after the lecturer scans the faces of the students before them), and this explains the repetitiveness. If an idea is important, it's worth explaining it more than once and very slowly so that everybody can note it down. Some things remain the same apparently.

It's entirely deserved landmark status come from its bold originality. Ibn Khaldun is interested in the social structures that drive patterns of events in history. Actually he falls short here, but he explains a certain type of pattern of events that was central to Ibn Khaldun's experience of history, the rise and fall of dynasties from desert or nomadic tribes to dominance of urban civilisations which in turn decline and fall.

The idea of explaining historical events with reference to social and economic structures is familiar now but in his time was something new. A quick comparison to contemporary European historical writings shows nothing like the self-conscious interest in the structures of civilisations that form the basis of Ibn Khaldun's work: group identities, forms of agriculture, forms of economic activity (including business profits and discussions on taxation), or the developmental pattern of state administrations. Although Ibn Khaldun's work is thoroughly Islamic, Sunni and indulgent to Sufism, his interest is in the human and material causation of events. Geography and Human cultures are the direct driving forces here.

For Ibn Khaldun the harsh conditions of the desert or of a nomadic lifestyle created a unifying sense of group identity. Their poverty and desire for the goods that urban civilisations produced would draw such groups into conflict with settled communities, which when the latter were in decline they would overcome. The richer resource base of a more urbanised civilisation would allow the group to expand, the increasing sophistication of the ruling family would lead it to become isolated from the rest of their original group over time, this would lead to the decay and weakness of the state making it vulnerable to the next incoming group of nomadic peoples.

As an explanatory formula for the recent North-African history of Ibn Khaldun's day, or for that matter the rise of the original Islamic Caliphate, the barbarian invasions of the western Half of the Roman Empire, or the advent of the Mongols or Manchus in northern-China, it was brilliant and insightful. His notion of cyclical cycles of growth and decay remind me of Weber's theory of political leadership which posits the possibility of a cycle from charismatic leadership to bureaucracy to stagnation. But it is not a universal formula for historical change. Maddeningly at one moment he implies that Islamic civilisation is undergoing a relative decline while the European Christian and Chinese civilisations are in a phases of upward growth but the idea is not explored explicitly. Irritatingly he often repeats a kind of Buddenbrooks rule that a ruling dynasty can only endure for a fixed number of generations before collapsing (although the number of generations varies). This is an organic vision of human social life. Societies and ways of life are born, grow, mature, and die as much as people. Reading Ibn Khaldun one needn't restrict this idea to political entities either, the same processes occur everywhere.

Given Ibn Khaldun's family background and occasional spells of time working in Muslim Spain it would have been deeply satisfying (at least for me) if he had looked at the phenomena of the Reconquista in the light of his theories. Later in his career, on a diplomatic mission to Castile, he was even invited by Pedro the Cruel to work for him - an opportunity which he declined. Unfortunate as I find the loss of a discussion on the decline of Muslim Spain this did leave him free to meet Timur the Lame whose rise and rule drawing on the group feeling of the Chingisids, the descendants of Genghis Khan, falls neatly into the framework set out by Ibn Khaldun.

Ibn Khaldun goes further, because the cyclical succession of dynasties that he analyses do not merely effect political history but also impact on social and economic history. Initially the incomers are a destructive influence on agriculture and the built environment, but as they become acculturated to urban civilisation they change. A civilisation in decline, with a declining tax base will wither in other areas of economic and intellectual life, while a growing, expanding civilisation will have an expanding tax base, a richer eco-system of economic activity and have a higher level of cultural attainment in the arts and sciences. This gives the analysis an interplay between the moral simplicity and military strength of the incomers against all that urbanised civilisation has to offer, but ultimately it is the features of urbanised life and its labour specialisation that sustain human life.

This is a work that is rich, fertile, and irritating by turn. Inspiring in its creativity, and maddening that it didn't inspire a North-African medieval Annales School. I'm sure that the Muqaddimah has more to offer to someone much more familiar with the rise and fall of the early Islamic dynasties than I am, but it is none the less clear that this is a major work of historical theory.





PS according to Ibn Khaldun Euclid was a carpenter. I think I would have found school maths easier if the questions had been posed as practical carpentry problems.