As we have recently learned all too well, History
has a frustrating habit of not letting up. It's all fine and natural for ancient empires to rise
and fall, but it's no fair when it happens to me. And, as it turns out, even the people who came
before us Big Fancy Moderns realized how drearily unpleasant it is to be suffocated by the Sands
of Time. Although earlier Historians had astutely caught on to the idea that knowing what happened
before you might come in handy in a pinch, it wasn't until the 14th century that a scholar
from North Africa would figure out some of the actual mechanisms behind Why History Can Be
So Thoroughly Miserable To Live Through. This, if I may be so bold, was quite a big deal.
So, far from being Just Another Historian, Ibn Khaldun was the first true Historiographer,
whose writings and insights reshaped the Study Of History us by giving us the tools to better
understand how the past unfolded, why, and what that might mean for the rest of us. So, to see
how Ibn Khaldun took the study of Narratives and transformed it into a study of Systems,
Let's do some Historiography. ... What? That's the correct word in this case! History is just
the narratives, he was doing the bigger thing! I know it doesn't roll off the tongue very well,
I don't care, I'm being accurate!
To understand the life and work of Ibn Khaldun, we need to zoom
out and see what was up in the wider Muslim world. The multicentury Golden Age of Islam that started
in the mid 700s with the Abbassid Caliphate had come to a sudden and startling end with the
arrival of the Mongols and the utter flattening of Baghdad in 1258. What had once been the
world's greatest venue for scholars, philosophers, physicians, astronomers, mathematicians, poets,
musicians, architects, theologians and a whole lot of other smart people was no longer the most
glorious city in the medieval world and a shining beacon of Muslim culture, but rather a burnt husk
of a city left as a warning to anybody who would stand up to the Mongols. Yikes. Aside from the
unsolicited absorption of Persia and Mesopotamia, Islamic states in the west also had a rough go
in the 1200s, as the Christian Kingdoms of Iberia were pushing against the remaining cities in
Al-Andalus, taking Cordoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248. This of course isn't to say that everything
was a broken mess, as, for instance, the Egyptian Mamluk Sultanate was still enjoying high culture,
stability, and great prosperity. But the picture I'm trying to paint here is that the Muslim
world, which had long been the domain of large, expanding states, now in the 12 and 1300s was home
to very much smaller and more fragile states.
And this was the world that our main man Ibn Khaldun
found himself in. His family traced its ancestry back to ancient Yemen at the time of Muhammad,
but followed the expansion outwards and lived in Al-Andalus throughout the Golden Age — which, let
me tell you, when you roll the dice on Places To Live In History, Medieval Muslim Spain is tough
to beat, I recognize that's my personal opinion, but ooh man they had it going good over there.
But, as we just saw, Castile kept on coming, so after Seville changed hands in 1248, the family
hopped over to North Africa to settle in Tunis, where Ibn Khaldun was born in 1332. If we're being
thorough, his full name was actually this, but that's a lot, so he did as many do and simplified
to his family name Khaldun, with Ibn being a standard Arabic patronymic for "Son of". SO, Ibn
Khaldun had the fortune to be raised in Tunis, which at the time was one of Post-Golden-Age
Africa's big centers of scholarship, thanks in part to its community of expats from Al-Andalus.
However, he had the misfortune grow up during the Black Death, which claimed his parents as well as
all of his teachers in the late 1340s.
But Ibn Khaldun wouldn't let a little plague get in the
way of things, because in addition to being smart, he was also relentlessly ambitious, so he
traveled to Fes in Morocco to get a job in the civil service of the Marinid dynasty. The
work was good but a little on the unstable side, as North African politics were shifty and fragile,
with conflict arising between states as well as within them. As we'll see shortly, Ibn Khaldun
had a nasty habit of ending up on the wrong side of political intrigue, sometimes as a result of
a scheme he himself had instigated. So throughout his career working as an administrator, diplomat,
governor, tax collector, or whatever else, he'd eventually end up on the bad side of someone
powerful, and then forced out of politics, exiled, or just thrown in jail, only to be released
when Ibn Khaldun's antagonist of the week was inevitably ousted as well. Whatever the case, Ibn
Khaldun had a hard time holding down a job in any one place for too long, so his career took him all
over North Africa and even briefly to Al-Andalus. During his career he spent a significant amount of
time with the nomadic Bedouin people of the Sahara and became quite fond of them. But while playing
politics was all fun and games until he got thrown in jail again, Ibn Khaldun really wanted to write
a history of North Africa, and it's a little hard to do that when you're looking over your shoulder
every 15 seconds to see who's scheming to take you down. He decided to get away from the racket
and distraction of the big cities, take it easy, unplug, and find a quiet place to write his book.
So he went into the desert!
You know, I joke, but I actually think he was onto something here. In
the small Bedouin town of Qalat Ibn Salama on the far side of the Atlas Mountains, Ibn Khaldun spent
a few years writing his History. And although he was lacking slightly in the documentation one
would typically consult for writing a universal history of the world, he was able to hammer out
the intro. Lucky for all of us, it is one damn fine introduction. Because, just by itself,
Al Muqaddimah is one of the most innovative historical works ever written. Clocking in at
a brisk several hundred pages, the Muqaddimah sets the stage for its accompanying history by
exploring the nature of society and the mechanisms that govern how history unfolds. To that end, the
Muqaddimah's 6 main chapters dig into sociology, politics, urban life, economics, and philosophy.
This was all necessary groundwork for a Universal History, as compared to the more straightforward
and pin-pointed narrative histories we've seen up until this point. He wasn't just explaining
what happened in any one corner of the map, or even why some particular thing happened, but
why things happen in general. This allowed Ibn Khaldun to look much more broadly at processes
like how the environment of agriculture influences the economy of an urban state which in turn can
determine their political prospects.
Not content to simply explain How The World Works, Ibn Khaldun
also took aim at his colleagues in the field, whom he thought were all far too lazy in their
treatment of sources. He called out historical partisanship, overconfidence in sources without
actually questioning whether theyÕre believable or not, failures to understand authorial intent,
and simplistic views of cause-and-effect. Now, versions of those arguments had been made before,
with even Herodotus and Thucydides weighing in on how History should be conducted, but no one
had gone so far as to distill Human Society into a science to aid in Historical analysis.
Whaddya doing writing about the rise and fall of empires if you canÕt even figure out how economics
affected the Roman political system, ya goof!
In practice, one of Ibn Khaldun's key insights was
Asabiyya, an Arabic term that roughly translates to social cohesion. The idea behind it is that
"teamwork makes the dream work", especially when the "Dream" in question is an Imperial Dynasty.
According to Ibn Khaldun, nobody had stronger Asabiyya than the Bedouin nomads, because there's
no way you're surviving in an inhospitable desert climate without some serious group solidarity. And
he cited this off-the-charts Asabiyya as the main reason Bedouin tribes were often so successful in
going out and conquering cities and states in the sedentary world. But while a cooperative
spirit is the foundation of all success, its unraveling was the ultimate source of failure,
as Ibn Khaldun explains how a settled nomad group would slowly begin to prioritize comfortable
living over good teamwork and, essentially, become weak. As generations passed, kings got up
in swankier palaces and stopped paying attention to the needs their people, so the state became
fragile, making easy prey for another group with stronger Asabiyya to come in and knock them over.
This Generational model traces a rather clean arc: where a group first creates a dynasty, then the
next generation builds it up and takes it to its peak, the third gets content to coast and let
the state decline, and the last is powerless to stop it from shattering at the slightest
inconvenience, whereupon a new group starts the cycle over. That's the way History goes:
Build, Peak, Decline, Fall; Build, Peak, Decline, Fall, on and on, into eternity. This applies most
overtly to the politics of North Africa, where nomadic people are always at the periphery of
the sedentary world, but that general model does a scarily good job of describing the course of
most of the rest of History. In some situations, a state might be lucky enough to swap in "Fall" with
"Reform" and buy themselves one more go-around, but not everyone can be the Byzantine Empire.
Of course, in the centuries since Ibn Khaldun, historians have massively expanded on this model,
developing full theories of economics, politics, culture, and technology to answer the questions of
Why History Does The Thing — But early versions of those fields-of-study do also contribute to Ibn
Khaldun's analysis; So let's not mis-characterize the Muqaddimah as just chalking up historical
successes and failures to the direct and exclusive function of Magic Teamwork Juice, because we have
to appreciate Ibn Khaldun's novelty of thought and sheer genius to have basically slam-dunked
Historiography right out the gate. Overall, he viewed history as cyclical, operating in seasons
of bloom and decay. While at first it seems like he doesn't allow for meaningful progress, he did
distinctly account for turning points that had rippling effects throughout history. In his case,
the Mongols and the black death were two massive (though distinctly related) shocks that
fundamentally transformed the landscape of history. For Ibn Khaldun, the inevitable rise
and fall of states was perhaps more a seasonal happening than a strictly cyclical one.
So,
after completing the most transformational work of historiography this side of Thucydides,
yeah I said it, Ibn Khaldun returned to Tunis to work on the actual history book that had the
honor of accompanying the Muqaddimah. Four years later when the work was all done, he had slipped
back into his old habit of making enemies, so, in the interest of bouncing right the hell out of
there as politely as possible, he requested to go on pilgrimage to Mecca, and then spent the rest
of his life as a judge, scholar, and teacher in the Egyptian Mamluk Sultanate — He might have
gone back to his old political shenanigans, but he retired after the tragic death of his
wife and children in an accident off the coast of Alexandria. Although Ibn Khaldun went on record
as saying Egypt was the pinnacle of Islam's power and generally a sweet place to be, even it was
not fully spared the wrecking ball of fate, as the turn of the century brought the self-declared
Genghis Khan 2.0 AKA Tamerlane AKA Timur the Lame AKA Timur the Jerk AKA Bad News. He had rolled
up to the city of Damascus threatening to trample the place like it was 1258, so Ibn Khaldun got
dispatched to negotiate, and spent nearly two months in Timur's camp. The two of them got on
well, at least, as well as you can with the guy who's about to burn your city, as recounted
extensively in Ibn Khaldun's autobiography (which, I should say, is why we're lucky enough
to actually know anything about the man.). And although Ibn Khaldun could hardly convince
Tamerlane to just pack up and leave, he was at least able to secure himself safe passage home to
Egypt to live out the rest of his days in peace.
And that's the surprisingly turbulent life
of Ibn Khaldun. In perhaps one of History's clearest cases of Lived-Experience informing
someone's Written-Work, the Muqaddimah shows a deep understanding of society's fragilities
and its constant capacity for renewal, while deliberately opening the door for later scholars
to expand on his system. So what if the Islamic Golden Age ended over a century ago, catch our
boy over here writing the most subject-defining work since the classical period! If our modern
practice of History has any scientific merits, we should give the credit where it's due.
Thank you for watching! I'd like to thank our friend and fellow YouTube educator Al Muqaddimah
(yes, same name as the book) for helping with my script as well as the visual inspiration for this
episode's maps. If you're interested in learning more about the long and varied history of Islam,
it's definitely worth your time to check out his channel. As for this video here, it was also nice
to relive the fun of when I had read part of the Muqaddimah for a college social science course.
And, as Ibn Khaldun shows us, all things must eventually come to an end, so it's fitting that
this video will wrap my 2020. I'm really looking forward to making some great videos for you
all in the coming year, so I'll see you then.