The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History

When the Muslim Arab groups first conquered Persia and the Byzantine lands of Syria and Egypt, they gained access to some of the most dynamic intellectual centers of the late ancient world, including Christian Alexandria in Egypt. They had access to Mesopotamian science dating back to ancient Babylon, Egyptian knowledge, and the Hellenistic synthesis of these traditions with Greek philosophy and science. Muslims continued these intellectual traditions and built upon them. Islam created elements of a shared intellectual culture spanning thousands of miles within this new empire, including promoting Arabic as a common language of scholarship. This context created the framework in which Ibn Khaldun could develop and transmit his ideas.

In the Dar al-Islam, religious scholarship and other disciplines largely existed in fruitful harmony. The Islamic madrassas (advanced schools) focused on religious science but approved of, and supported, work in disciplines such as geography, history, astronomy, and medicine. Often these disciplines overlapped. Ibn Sina (also called Avicenna), for example, is most famous in Western circles for his development of Aristotle’s philosophy and for advances in medicine, including guidelines on experimentally testing drugs for efficacy. He also touched on politics, ethics, astronomy, and music, and wrote The Divine Pearl (al-Jumāna al-ilāhiyya), an extended poem praising the oneness of God and meditating on how that connects to creation. The Aristotelian metaphysics of Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd did attract increasing criticism from religious conservatives in Ibn Khaldun’s time. Limits existed when philosophy clashed with common religious viewpoints; Ibn Khaldun makes clear that he thinks Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd went too far but he, like most Muslim scholars, did not reject philosophical science wholesale because of it.

Within this range of traditions and scholarship, Ibn Khaldun also acknowledges his debt to Greek thinkers, especially Aristotle. He calls Aristotle “First Teacher” (400) and lauds his logical achievements, although offering caution about his metaphysics. When Ibn Khaldun claims to be inventing an entirely new science, he explicitly acknowledges substantial overlap with what he has learned from Aristotle but claims the Greek philosopher “is not exhaustive” and does not use “all the arguments it deserves” (41). His theories do indeed go beyond what Aristotle had written and provide new arguments. At the same time, he directly borrows important ideas, such as humans as rational and political animals who gain knowledge from sense perception, the distinction of crafts from sciences, and the intellectual tools of logic.

Other aspects of Ibn Khaldun’s work, such as his cosmology and geography, can be traced back through Muslim writers to Greek Christian scholars and, ultimately, the achievements of pre-Christian ancient Greeks. Within his contemporary setting, Ibn Khaldun’s engagement with the thought of earlier Muslims, such as Ibn Sina, opens a window into the dynamism and contours of intellectual debates in the 14th-century Muslim world.