Ibn Khaldun

Ibn Khaldūn is one of very few pre-modern scholars whom we continue to take seriously as a thinker with insight for our own theorizing about the workings of human society. To be sure, his views from a past time can’t wholly explain the workings of society today, which are different in detail and structure, but there are audible echoes of his ideas in the relation of tribes to states in many regions of today’s world and also in patterns of migration to North America, which both threaten the old order and also, ironically, contain the seeds of its renewal. It is therefore surprising that Robert Irwin’s study of Ibn Khaldūn seeks to keep his thought confined to his own time, especially since the focus is on the intellectual life of Ibn Khaldūn (it being impossible to contain ideas wholly within particular times and places). As the author says in the preface (p. xiii), ‘When I read the Muqaddima, I have the sense that I am encountering a visitor from another planet—and that is exciting’. Such a statement arguably reveals more about the circles the author keeps than it does about the thought of Ibn Khaldūn

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