Who read Ibn Khaldun before the Ottomans?

RABAT. Since the talk turned to Ibn Khaldun. Whoever is waging whatever battle immediately tried to have Ibn Khaldun carry a bit of it too. Everything happened exactly as I said in my piece on how much and in what way it is possible to understand Ibn Khaldun from today. No one is really trying to fully understand what Ibn Khaldun says. The rush to work out how they can benefit from him prevails over the effort to understand.

Even so, there is Ibn Khaldun's enormous work. A work that has withstood the ages, transcended the ages and been able to say something to people in every era, and that has earned its classic value by the sweat of its author's brow. Whatever meaning or external message anyone loads onto him, there is in him a powerful word that he says by his own strength and that no one can ignore.

One of the most frequently voiced subjects on Ibn Khaldun in recent days is that his value was not known by the Ottomans and that his work was even banned. At first glance, it is not hard to predict that such a sentence will find an incredible number of takers. Most of these takers, of course, have a quarrel with the Ottomans. For a fantasy of a "dark age" in the Ottomans that was to be remedied later with the process of either Westernization or secularization, this is always priceless news.

But let us say at once that this is, first of all, a rather stale claim of 19th-century Orientalists who were seized by the delusion that they themselves had discovered Ibn Khaldun. In 1806 Silvestre de Sacy announced the excitement of this discovery with a translation of a small part of the Muqaddimah. In doing so he had also begun to work out the thesis that they had "discovered a great treasure whose worth the Orientals could not appreciate." As if the East would understand anything of work, of gems, of beauty!

For a long time the Orientalists convinced themselves of this thesis. Yet this was not the case. What drew de Sacy's own attention, and what made it possible for him to discover Ibn Khaldun, was the translation of Ibn Khaldun made in the Ottoman Empire nearly seventy years before him.

Last week I said that in my Ibn Khaldun lectures, which I said would continue, we would focus on why and how Ibn Khaldun was banned in the Ottoman Empire.

The truth is that that question should not have been asked so simply. Because the banning of the Muqaddimah in the Ottoman Empire has turned into a galat-ı meşhur (a widely known error) whose nature is not exactly known.

While preparing my mind for this piece, my path happened to take me to the Maghreb lands where Ibn Khaldun spent an important part of his life.

We are in Rabat to congratulate Saadeddine Othmani, Morocco's new Prime Minister, who formed the government by fulfilling the task of forming a government entrusted to him after a 6-month government crisis. Before this post, Othmani was Foreign Minister and one of the former presidents of the Justice and Development Party. We have an acquaintance from earlier visits to Morocco and from the conferences and events we attended together during his visits to Turkey. He is a medical doctor, but also has expertise in the field of Islamic jurisprudence. He gives us an iftar at his own modest home. Mohamed Beddy Ebnou from the Paris Institute for Epistemological Studies is also at the iftar, and after the meal we plunge into a deep conversation. At one point the talk turns to Ibn Khaldun. Ebnou has serious studies on Ibn Khaldun. Without leaving any room for hesitation, he says that the discovery of Ibn Khaldun definitely belongs to the Ottomans.

He explains that although he gave his works in Arabic, he was left to be forgotten in the Arab world, especially until Pirizade Mehmet Sahib Efendi translated the work into Turkish (1749). So much so that, had it not been for this translation by the Turks, neither de Sacy nor anyone afterwards would probably have known Ibn Khaldun. Of course he does not neglect to add that this finding is not his own but a basic piece of knowledge agreed upon by everyone versed in the literature on Ibn Khaldun. Indeed, the finding of Franz Rosenthal, who translated the whole work into English, and of all Ibn Khaldun scholars points in this direction. Far from neglecting him, the Ottomans discovered Ibn Khaldun before everyone and made him an occasion for reflection on the structure, survival and future of the Ottoman state. Moreover, this discovery could even be regarded as dangerous for itself, because within Ibn Khaldun's theory there were very cautionary theses for the Ottomans, whether in terms of the lifespan he prescribed for states or of asabiyya's being on the verge of exhaustion. That the Ottomans found and brought out such a thesis is, in one respect, a tremendous expression of self-confidence.

After Pirizade's translation, interest in Ibn Khaldun never ceased among the Ottomans, and it was again the Ottomans who first read him and gave him due value. The influence and interest of Ibn Khaldun on Katip Çelebi, Naima and Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, who completed and had printed the Muqaddimah that Pirizade had left incomplete, is very evident.

Those who criticize the Ottomans, to whom he owes almost his second birth and his transmission to the present, for not appreciating Ibn Khaldun's worth: are they falsifying the Ottomans, or Ibn Khaldun, or both?

People's perceptions and interpretations of certain names, books or ideas can of course differ. But if the beginning of the matter is the result of utter ignorance, one should not start speaking without remedying this lack of knowledge. Even when the lack of knowledge is remedied, no one can guarantee that perceptions will be equalized. Because are differences of opinion among people not caused by a lack or excess of knowledge? Is knowledge approached as an illuminating light, as a tool, or as a source of power? This is more decisive in differentiation.

The Ottoman intellectuals who first translated and read Ibn Khaldun, such as Naima and Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, found in the history he interpreted a lesson and cautionary signs for a methodology of history. But the Young Turks or Unionist ideologues, who, instead of drawing these lessons from Ibn Khaldun, reduced him to a cheap propaganda tool for opposition to, even insult of, Abdulhamid II, were falsifying and slaughtering him. Of the voluminous Muqaddimah, so full of lessons, in which his beautiful theory of history is set out, all that remained on their tongues were sloganistic prophetic sentences announcing to his enemies the downfall of Abdulhamid. In this form the Muqaddimah had already long since left its own course.

Even so, in this period there is no information beyond a widespread rumor that the Muqaddimah was banned. The whole source of this rumor rests on a sentence in the İslam Ansiklopedisi published by the Ministry of National Education, the entry of which was written by Adnan Adıvar. By contrast, Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, who completed and published the translation of the book, served in the most respected position as Abdulhamid II's Minister of Justice until 1895. Again according to Adıvar, even in that period the Arabic, French and Turkish editions of the work were easily found in libraries.