Ibn Khaldun: Dialectical Philosopher
A personal perspective on individual and group: Comparative cultural observations with a focus on Ibn Khaldun
Abstract
As the Islamic world declined in the 14th century, Ibn Khaldun wrote the Muqaddimah, a massive philosophical work in which he sought scientific grounds for a universal analysis of human beings. By seeking a global history of humanity, one that was not derived from the particular history of any one group, he was able to offer insight into the importance of group solidarity, assabiyeh. In this essay, I discuss dynamics between autonomous individuality and group identity and offer some cultural comparisons to illustrate more general insights.
Full Text
Introduction
In the contemporary world, groups have achieved preponderant power over the lives of all of us, enmeshing us in webs of nation, race, and gender and stimulating an expanding range of investigations into collective behaviour. In our historical epoch, scientists examine afresh individual ontogeny amid the role of groups. No less than contemporary social research, new natural science investigations pose the question: Is genuine individual autonomy possible?
Beginning in the 17th century and more so in the 18th century, European autonomous individualism began to flower. Men and women1 made unique contributions as they penned masterpieces of art, music and philosophy, wrote magnificent novels, and dared to espouse political tracts declaring freedom of the individual. In the 18th century, European and American revolutions won new freedoms and rights. Today, past accomplishments are systematically eroded as governments claim for themselves new powers, including even the right to decide without due process matters of life and death.2 Such vast historical changes compel us to consider the categories of individual and group viewed over time. Their relationships are not fixed but vary with the rise (and decline) of socially created forces.
Before we assume the parallel character of natural and social phenomena, questions need to be posed about the validity of positivism (the idea that the rules and methods of natural science can be applied to society). Can we rely upon scientific methodology that explicitly extends relationships and laws observed in the natural world to human phenomena? Humans have made history. We have overthrown the rule of kings and queens (or accepted it), but we are not blindly compelled simply to accept royal rule as our only option. Can the same be said of bees? Going further, water boils at 100°C at sea level everywhere in the world. Can any similar constant be uncovered with regard to human relationships? Are any two human beings exactly alike? Are there constant patterns to human interaction that can be compared with the rate of acceleration at which an object falls to earth or to the precise combination of atoms that form specific molecules?
Despite the best efforts of sociologists to postulate ‘iron laws’ and of philosophers to assert that ‘history repeats itself,’ in certain respects society is characterised by change rather than by stasis.3 When change occurs, its character is sporadic and uneven. It is not like the precise repetitive patterns exhibited by some natural phenomena.4 Governments, religions, and even languages change over time, leading many thinkers to conclude that a sharp distinction must be drawn between Geisteswissenschaft and Naturwissenschaft – between the humanities and natural sciences.5
In the following pages, I discuss the views of Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406 AD), a 14th century Islamic philosopher for whom group identity or assabiyeh (translated as ‘group feeling’ by Franz Rosenthal) was the critical element in his understanding of society. Because he was convinced of both the need for investigation and for faith, Ibn Khaldun differentiated between the physical world and the divine world, insisting that philosophy could comprehend history but not divinity:
Man is composed of two parts. One is corporeal. The other is spiritual, and mixed with the former. Each one of these parts has its own perceptions, though the (part) that perceives is the same in both cases, namely the spiritual part. At times, it perceives spiritual perceptions. At other times, it perceives corporeal perceptions. However, it perceives the spiritual perceptions through its own essence without any intermediary, while it perceives the corporeal perceptions through the intermediary of organs of the body, such as the brain and the senses (Ibn Khaldun 1986, 3: 253).
Each of these different parts of human beings was integrated into a whole. Yet for him, change constituted a dividing line between divinity (which ‘lasts and persists’) and the ephemeral fate of the corporeal dimension: ‘Time wears us out…’. Ibn Khaldun understood the realm of spirit as prior to and influencing the world of the body:
…there is something that exercises an influence and is different than bodily substances. This is something spiritual. It is connected with the created things, because the various worlds must be connected in their existence. This spiritual thing is the soul, which has perception and causes motion. Above the soul…is the world of angels (Ibn Kahldun 1986, 1:195).
For Ibn Khaldun, the soul had form and substance since its existence materialized in the exchange of ‘potentiality for actuality with the help of the body and (bodily) conditions’ (Ibn Khaldun 1986, 1:214). A central issue in Ibn Khaldun's philosophy of history was the possibility for human beings to understand forces beyond their control. He sketched an historical process, which in the final analysis, was not simply a history of external events but rather that of human beings becoming who they in essence are. As such, he offers valuable insights into the character and conduct of our species.
Across and even within cultures, changing meanings of group and individual will be noted. I will observe variable valuations and formulations of group and individuals in Islamic, East Asian, and European cultures. The broad sweep of my cultural comparisons is necessarily philosophical rather than based upon a numerical sampling of behaviour.
Section Notes:
1 Although generally unknown, female artists in 17th Century Europe made significant contributions. Judith Leyster (1609–1670) apprenticed to Frans Hals, was a member of the prestigious Painters’ Guild, and taught male students. Most of her work was attributed to men. Anna Maria Sybilla Merian (1647–1717) produced volumes of flower engravings as well as drawings of insects, which became significant resources for the subsequent classification of species. After moving to Surinam, she produced Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, considered one of the world’s best books of biological illustration. Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750) received more for her art than Rembrandt did for his work. See The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art 1998 (New York: Penguin Books) pp 40–43.
2 Cf. speech delivered by Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City. See http://www.hartford-wp.com/archives/45a/058.html
3 Robert Michel’s The Iron of Oligarchy is the classic example here, and Karl Marx followed in his teacher GWF Hegel’s footsteps by declaring, ‘history repeats itself.’ Depending on the level one deals with, of course, for in other respects, ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’, and we can look at the issue of individuality vs. groups across history. To that extent, we deal with the same questions, which is among the reasons for studying history.
4 And not necessarily unlike the long periods of stasis punctuated by change claimed for biological evolution. See http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium.
5 Such critics of positivism also oppose the notion that history has precise and repetitive cycles. They understand every event in history as unique, an insight noted long ago by Heraclitus of Ephesus and reinvigorated more than a millennium later by GWF Hegel.
Ibn Khaldun’s Perspective
Despite his decidedly disinterested attitude to his own life, Abu Zayd Abdel Rahman Ibn Khaldun was a veritable fountain of original thought. In 1377, in the short period of five months, he wrote the Muqaddimah (or Prolegomena) while secluded at a palace of a sultan in what is today western Algeria (Enan 1975, 51–52). Five centuries before Darwin uncovered evolution, Ibn Khaldun wrote that humans descended from ‘the world of the monkeys’ through an ever-wider process in which ‘species become more numerous’ (Ibn Khaldun 1986, 1:195).6 He attributed human racial characteristics to climate, thereby implying that all humans are related to each other.7 By grounding his analysis in the universal relation of spirit and body, he also provided a basis for the history of our species, not simply for any particular sub-group – a universal history that is only today again emerging as national and ethnic ones prove insufficient in our globalized reality. Nearly half a millennium before Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital, Ibn Khaldun stated that ‘labour is the real basis of profit’ (Ibn Khaldun 1986, 1:303). Four-hundred years before Auguste Comte named his new science of society as sociology, Ibn Khaldun unveiled a ‘science of culture’ (Mahdi 1957).
For Ibn Khaldun, group solidarity, or assabiyeh, played a critical role in the formation of kingdoms and societies. The root of the word is ‘nerve’, the bond by which a group is connected. For him that was as much a gift of god as a historically conditioned phenomenon (Goodman 1972, 256).8 The family is the first and most significant domain in which assabiyeh operates most naturally ‘Compassion and affection for one’s blood relations and relatives exist in human nature as something god put into the hearts of men. It makes for mutual support and aid…’ (Rosenthal 1969, 98).9 For Ibn Khaldun, urban life explains why Arabs lost their group solidarity, ‘Later on, sedentary Arabs mixed with Persians and other non-Arabs. Purity of lineage was completely lost, and its fruit, group feeling, was lost and rejected’ (Ibn Kahldun 1986, 1:267). Extending his analysis, he maintained that the laws of assabiyeh would run parallel to those of history. He sought to explain if – and, if so, how – assabiyeh could be reconstituted at a new level beyond its original emergence.
While Ibn Khaldun emphasized group solidarity, a contrasting perspective on Islamic cultures can be found by examining the work of another Islamic philosopher, Averroes (also known as Ibn Rushd), who lived from 1126 to 1198 – two centuries before Ibn Khaldun. Known as the ‘Commentator’ for his extensive notations on Aristotle (‘the Philosopher’), Averroes emphasized the individual rather than groups. For stressing the role of scientific and philosophical investigation – of the supremacy of individual reason over faith – he faced continual threats from his own fellow citizens in Cordoba. Approaching the end of his life, a ban on his work was issued, and his books were burned in public. He was insulted by a mob. Although reinstated as an esteemed scholar shortly before his death, his writings were prohibited at the University of Paris in 1210 and 1215. In 1231, a Papal edict was issued prohibiting uncorrected reading of his books, and in 1277 the bishop of Paris, concerned about Ibn Rushd’s popularity among Parisian intellectuals, condemned his work (Wahba and Abousenna 1996, 30–47). One result of such continual assaults on intellectual freedom was that during the same century that Ibn Khaldun lived, there was not one Christian Arabic scholar in Europe (Southern 1962, 88). Despite the repression of Averroes’ thought, his life’s accomplishments – especially the creation of a stratum of Latin Averroists, intellectuals who believed in reason over faith – helped stimulate the European Enlightenment (Wahba and Abousenna 1996, 48).
Like Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Rushd owed his status in large part to his service as a jurist and interpretation of judicial doctrines (Uvroy 1993, 109). Both men believed that individuals are corruptible while intellectual knowledge is eternally true – an illuminating product of human thought that each honoured in ways their anti-intellectual contemporaries did not. Each also understood the corruptibility of ruling elites as lasting through three generations. Ibn Rushd described the internal corruption of the Almoravids as beginning with rule by law, to the next generation’s rule for love of money, and finally to the third generation’s hedonism, during which the regime perished.10
Before and during Ibn Khaldun’s life, various rulers rose and fell in the Maghreb (the land of the sunset across Northwest Africa). In the heartland of Arab/Islamic culture and learning far to the east, Baghdad had fallen to the Mongols in 1258. The Fourth Crusade had overrun Constantinople, another great centre of medieval learning, in 1204. Wholesale Venetian looting of the Second Rome not only included the most salient artifacts adorning contemporary St. Mark’s Square but also libraries of books and hundreds of scholars and architects – all of which contributed to the Italian Renaissance generally dated to more than a century later.11 The Mongols slaughtered 800,000 citizens of Baghdad, nearly extinguishing the magnificent intellectual legacy Baghdad’s scholars could have passed to new generations.
Ibn Khaldun is likely to have known of the European cultural revival (the Renaissance) underway during his lifetime. Although he had faith that one day Constantinople would be an Islamic city (which it became in 1452), his own experiences convinced him of the need to ground scientifically his analysis of human beings in order to transcend the particular histories of any one group. His Prolegomena is an attempt to produce a history at a universal level, one that would not be situated in the narrative history of any particular ethnic group. In the fourteenth century, the Islamic world – particularly in North Africa – was in decline from its glorious past, and Ibn Khaldun attempted to understand the causes of the changes around him.
He sketched an historical process that, in the final analysis, was not simply a history of external events but rather that of human beings in the process of becoming their future. He comprehended specific actions as occurring within an internal and invisible rational structure through which external facts could be understood. For him, narrative history, i.e. the recounting of specific events, was inferior to philosophical history through which the inner causes and remote origins of events could be comprehended.
His view of human beings was unambiguously negative. ‘Man is ignorant by nature…’ (Ibn Khaldun 1986, 1: 215, 266). Royal authority, a ‘natural’ quality of humans, was necessary to insure proper behaviour (Ibn Khaldun 1986, 1:92). What of a transforming process through which humans might elevate themselves? For him, the unchanged individual might ascend to glimpse the realm of angels but could never be transformed into an angel. While history might have a direction, a perpetual cycle of growth and decay operated, a natural transition of three generations for dynasties. At best, Ibn Khaldun hoped governments would rule as uncorrupted representatives of divine laws, a belief that earned him a reputation as a harsh purist while he served as a judge in Cairo. He believed authority was one of the four attributes that distinguish humans from animals (the others being thought, labour and civilization), a view that flows from his perspective that individuals were ‘savage’ and the mass ‘stupid’.
Before we judge his authoritarianism too harshly, we should consider similar contemporaneous cultural prejudices in Western Europe that were subsequently challenged with the emergence of the ascendancy of the individual—notably during the Renaissance and Reformation. During these periods, individual entrepreneurs, no less than self-motivated artists and freethinking Protestants, embodied a new psychology—that of the individual bent on conquering the world. As Alfred van Martin characterized the enormity of the shift beginning with the Italian Renaissance, ‘Blood, tradition and group feeling had been the basis of community relationships as well as of the old domination. The democratic and urban spirit was destroying the old social forms and the ‘natural’ and accepted divine order. It thus became necessary to order the world starting from the individual and to shape it, as it were, like a work of art’ (Von Martin 1963, 2). Aesthetic principles of Renaissance art such as scientific perspective and realistic portrayal of light from the viewpoint of a solitary artist prefigured the preponderant future role of individual religious perspective in the Reformation, solitary scientific speculation in the Enlightenment, and principles of individual liberty in the American and French revolutions.
The Renaissance replaced previously dominant communal ideologies according to a perspective on the world individually visualized and organized on rationally calculable principles. The ‘crowd’ became a derogatory word. Even in the declining period we call Romanticism, people escaped to the ‘tranquility of a private existence’ (Von Martin 1963, 58). In a phrase, with the ascendance of western capitalism, assabiyeh was shattered. Capital as a self-expanding value permeated all membranes and distorted all relationships – including that most primal one to Ibn Khaldun – blood ties. Despite Europe’s claim to being modern, we can see the revival of blood ties and group identity in the first half of the 20th century, when fascism reinforced ancient bonds: Mussolini sought to restore the glory of the Roman Empire and Italians, while Hitler’s ‘master race’ reshaped Germans’ group identity. In both cases, an individual leader became all-powerful only because he represented the nation. The changing relationship of group and individual in both the East and West provide insight into the possibility of different formations of these universal dimensions. If indeed, East and West offer us different cultural productions of these same essential categories, what does this tell us about the character of human phenomena? At this juncture, comparing the behaviour of human beings to that of other life forms becomes again a vital question.
Section Notes:
5 Such critics of positivism also oppose the notion that history has precise and repetitive cycles. They understand every event in history as unique, an insight noted long ago by Heraclitus of Ephesus and reinvigorated more than a millennium later by GWF Hegel.
6 To be sure, his theory had no precise notion of natural selection or branching evolution. Ibn Khaldun’s ‘evolution’ was just the Great Chain of Being, not a unique notion at the time and derived from Aristotle.
7 In contrast, the polygenist Lucilio Vanini (1585–1619) asserted that ‘negroes’ descended from apes because of their skin color while other races did not.
8 Following Galen, Ibn Sina (Avicenna; 980–1037) had identified nerves as the consolidators of perceived pain in the muscles, as unifying agents as it were, analogous to group solidarity.
9 The work of Peter Kropotkin on mutual aid should be considered in this regard.
10 From a longer perspective, we understand today that the decline of Islamic world was due in no small reason to European discovery of sea route around Africa and establishment of direct trade with China and the East. The excision of merchant profit in the Middle East led to its precipitous decline, one which, intellectually at least, has yet to be reversed by the creation of a handful of oil-rich oligarchic states in the 20th century. Evidently, the variegation of social life produced by robust forms of economic activity creates intellectual and artistic possibilities that the mere acquisition of wealth cannot. Thus, hopes to stimulate a revival of ‘the golden age of Islamic intellectual civilization’ through the translation, publication and discussion of classical philosophical texts appears to be of less value than hoped for.
11 There is debate as to the beginnings of the Renaissance. Some scholars refer to the Renaissance of the late Medieval period beginning about 1100 – a period of the early Crusades, the building of monumental cathedrals, the founding of the Hanseatic League, the rise of towns and the development of Gothic art. Kenneth Clark called this period Western Europe's first ‘great age of civilization’ and traced its beginning to around the year 1000. See Kenneth Clark’s The Gothic Revival (1928). A major contribution to the rise of Italian power and its Renaissance was the Venetian-sponsored Fourth Crusade’s sacking of Constantinople in 1204. Others date the beginning of the Renaissance to Florence in 1401 or to when Greek scholars fled Constantinople in 1452 following the Ottoman conquest of the city. One can also argue that the period from 962, the crowing of Otto as Holy Roman Emperor, to 1452 (i.e. the High Middle Ages), was qualitatively a different world from the Renaissance. It included the Crusades, the Lateran Council and the heyday of Scholasticism. Even in the time of Bracciolini (who discovered the Lucretius manuscript that helped inaugurate Christian humanism in 1417), the Church’s control over life made the notion of an individual almost incomprehensible. Curiosity was sin then.
Individual and group in the work of Ibn Khaldun
For Ibn Khaldun, those groups with a strong sense of assabiyeh were destined to be strong and to rule – at least as long as they were able to maintain their sense of identity and solidarity. Thus, groups composed of blood relatives (as in the case of many Bedouin communities) have the strongest possible ties since they are based on kinship, while urban settings (in which settlers from many locales congregate and group homogeneity decreases) predispose urban dwellers to an eventual weakening of group feelings. Having committed himself to an understanding of political power as resting upon group strength, Ibn Khaldun went on to portray groups in stereotypical fashion. Not only did he formulate his notion of the individual and the specific nature of groups in rigid categories, but his philosophical framework precluded the self-conscious transformation of individual and group identity. Individuals and groups were tragically stuck in predetermined fates.
Although his own life was intricately interwoven with the great political and military dramas of his times, his autobiography (al-Ta‘rif), supposed to be the ‘most elaborate autobiography penned by a Moslem intellectual’, is ‘lacking in human interest’ (Hitti 1971, 242). He failed to mention his marriage to the daughter of a Hafsid general in 1345, even though she remained his primary wife until her death nearly four decades later in 1384 (Hitti 1971, 241). His only mention of his mother is when she died from the plague along with his father.
It was not only Ibn Khaldun’s autobiography that failed to touch upon his most intimate relations. The paramount significance of the group in both Arab and Islamic civilization appears to have blocked the emergence of the autonomous individual. The very word ‘Islam’ means submission of the individual to god. Franz Rosenthal informs us that autobiography in general is ‘not highly developed’ among Arabs (Lawrence 1984, 19). Even the name by which Ibn Khaldun has become known in history is not his own, but his father's. Arab patriarchy militates against the construction of autonomous individual identity today as much as it did 600 years ago, at least if we judge by the many names derived from Abu (father) and Ibn (Bin, or son). Further to the east and centuries later, a similar denigration of individuality can be seen in Stalinist communitarianism.
In evaluating the status of the individual in Islamic civilization, we might ask: While the group feeling of Muslims is surely one of Islam's noteworthy dimensions, what is the status of the individual? Is there a relation between the Arabic-Muslim prohibition of the human figure in art and Ibn Khaldun's understanding of the individual? Is assabiyeh a mechanical negation of the savage individualism of which Ibn Khaldun was so critical? Was his unwillingness to thematise rigorously the individual simply a reflection of the prevailing cultural values of his historical context?
Within an elaborate web of familial identities, strict social conventions, and cultural obligations, individuals in Islamic societies remain bound by collective forms whose power has long since been diminished in the West. Social community and cooperation exist within the Ummah (the community of Moslems) in ways that simply do not occur in everyday in much of the West. To be sure, individuals emerged in the Arab world, but he/she was dependent upon family ties and confined in life-options and social possibilities. Pedagogy in the Arabic world leans largely on memorization and recitation. Ibn Khaldun himself recommended memorization as the first step toward understanding poetry and for acquiring literary taste. Even in love-poetry, ‘the realm of private sentiment, etiquette and courtesy reigned, and the poet's aim was to handle public images with grace and splendor’ (Hodgson 1974, 2:303; Hourani 1991, 75). Of course, one consequence of poetry designed for public recitation – not private reading – is the forging of group solidarity and shared experience. According to Bernard Lewis, other cultural links can be found: impersonality and collectivism are recurring features of Arab prose literature (Lewis 1966, 142).
In a contemporary example of what might be considered savage individualism—individuals who sacrifice themselves through actions like the ‘revolutionary suicide’ of car bombers—we find group feeling as a primary motivation. As with kamikaze pilots, one result of such actions is the destruction of the individuals who undertake them. Such actions embody subordination of the individual to the group – in this case, in the struggle to kill an externally defined enemy. The tragic effects of plundering the planet for individual greed and the imperialist conquest of peoples defined as ‘other’ should be included at this juncture, as should the oft-neglected capacity of colonizers to unite their group identities at the same time as they divide their subjects and pit them against each other.
Discussion
In exploring the future potential of human freedom, it is important to distinguish between individuality and individualism. The former refers to a harmonious relation between the single human being’s inward life and group relationships with others while the latter denotes the individual as an isolated monad held in check by repressive groups (in which he/she may or may not claim membership). The determinate negation of individualism is the metamorphosis of individualism into individuality. Similarly, collectivism can be sublated into self-conscious collectivity. The transformation of groups who deem themselves superior to the rest of humanity requires an immanent self-consciousness that they are part of the human family, not simply an identity defined in opposition to external Others.
Ironically, the very scourge of the West – its savage individualism – may also contain a contribution to global civilization. Finding the good in the bad, we might simultaneously locate the seeds of autonomous individuality in the West (understanding the role of the individual in history as forging rights and imagination) alongside the pursuit of wealth and power. Similarly, a contribution of Islamic civilization is the potential of a universal group feeling and cooperation among human beings that transcends racial, ethnic and even gender divisions – a force so strong that it overnight transformed Malcolm X (Malcolm and Haley 2001). A dialectical sublation of Islamic group feelings synthesized with the determinate negation of Western individualism might result in an individuality that is simultaneously that of an autonomous thinking person who is part of a species-cognizant group.
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