On Ibn Khaldun

On the occasion of the opening ceremony of Ibn Khaldun University, recently founded in Istanbul, attended by our President and the Tunisian thinker-politician Rached Ghannouchi, we have had quite a chance to listen to Ibn Khaldun this past week. Whatever the occasion, I generally find it positive and valuable that such historical and intellectual figures come onto the agenda and become the subject of renewed debates when they do.

We live in a world in which, one way or another, everyone is in a relationship of prejudices with everyone and everything. Let it not be misunderstood: this is not a criticism specific exclusively to the age or world we live in. What I am speaking of is the general condition of the world in which the dough of humankind was kneaded.

There is no world free of prejudices, nor any place within this world.

By our nature we look at everything with our prejudices, we begin our relations with one another with our prejudices, we understand one another with our prejudices. Indeed, it is ultimately these prejudices of ours that make our understandings possible.

There is no level at which we understand one another in the full sense; at most our prejudices give way to other prejudices of ours. As we think we know one another, our ill thoughts are replaced by our good thoughts, or the reverse. Perhaps these levels of ill and good may differ, but the nature of the matter does not change much.

Symbolic interactionists formulate the matter as follows:

"Our understanding of anything (anyone) is determined by our experiences with that thing. New experiences with that thing can change our perceptions and understandings about those things, but there is never the same level of perception about a thing in everyone."

Who has which perception of Ibn Khaldun, and by which experiences have these perceptions been determined, in this country or in the rest of the Islamic countries? This question alone can be a rather fertile starting point for readings of Ibn Khaldun. In Turkey many very different segments have their own different perceptions of Ibn Khaldun, because Ibn Khaldun has been approached from different stances and different experiences. Ibn Khaldun's life and work are, truly, highly suited to leaving such different and varied impressions.

That a university has been founded in Ibn Khaldun's name is undoubtedly a very good thing. This opening will probably lead to a further diversification of perceptions of Ibn Khaldun. At the very least, it will bring to the fore not a man who receives revelation, as it were, through what he says, or who brings news from beyond with sacred qualities, but a man who draws conclusions within quite measurable limits starting from rather empirical data. When he discovered the existence of certain rules valid in the world and in history and called them "Sunnatullah," he was saying that the possibility of human existence and action also takes place within these limits.

These words of his greatly resembled what would be discovered in Enlightenment Europe as

"laws of nature"

.

But in Europe this discovery was turned into an ideological opportunity precisely to expel God from this world. Yet for Ibn Khaldun, within ancient Islamic wisdom, it had the equivalent of being acquainted with the world of causes in which God created the earth.

Perhaps in this respect he might have landed on the opposite side of al-Ghazali and Ash'arism in general in the debate over how far God can be bound by causes. But the debate still took place within an Islamic consciousness, discourse and field of meaning.

Undoubtedly, what makes Ibn Khaldun important is that he underlined the rules valid in history as

"God's manner of creating and running things"

in the sense of

Sunnatullah

. God Almighty Himself states in the Holy Qur'an that there will be no change in the Sunnatullah. It is not incomprehensible that the methodology of history he applied by adhering to this principle appeals very much to historical materialists. Evidently socialists and positivist sociologists heard in him a voice very close to their own, but this is entirely a matter of their expectations. Truly, Ibn Khaldun does give a part of what they want. But up to a point.

I tried to compare Ibn Khaldun's Bedouin-sedentary theory in my book

"Karizma Zamanları" (Times of Charisma)

with

Max Weber

's sociology of charisma. Indeed, very meaningful similarities can be drawn between

the inevitable exhaustion, in keeping with Sunnatullah, of asabiyya in the process of sedentarization

and

the routinization of charismatic authority or movement

.

Like asabiyya, charisma is not an ultimate and inexhaustible source of energy. What can be thought about, as Ibn Khaldun too dwelt upon, is that this energy be used in a beneficial manner and that its life be extended in the manner of

the Medina style of politics

. It is a long and intricate debate.

Let us know this much. The way to make Ibn Khaldun unproductive and useless is to attribute superhuman qualities to him and to see what he says not as important theses that can be debated and criticized but as findings to be believed without question, as if they were revelation.

This would probably be the greatest wrong done to Ibn Khaldun, who owes his greatest achievement to being aware of his own human-mortal limits. Perhaps it is necessary to continue the Ibn Khaldun lessons whenever there is an opportunity. For example

Why was Ibn Khaldun banned in the Ottoman Empire?

This is a question whose hermeneutic value is as high as its popular value. But that is enough for today.