Guerrilla History - Ibn Khaldun - "The Father of Sociology"

Episode Date: April 8, 2022

In this impromptu episode, Adnan teaches Henry and the audience about the great 14th-15th Century scholar Ibn Khaldun, who is sometimes called  the "father of sociology".  Ibn Khaldun also revolutionized the methodology of historical analysis in his time, and provides an excellent subject for us to discuss! Your hosts are immunobiologist Henry Hakamaki, Professor Adnan Husain, historian and Director of the School of Religion at Queens University, and Revolutionary Left Radio's Breht O'Shea. Follow us on social media!  Our podcast can be found on twitter @guerrilla_pod.  Your contributions make the show possible to continue and succeed!  Please encourage your comrades to join us, which will help our show grow. To follow the hosts, Henry can be found on twitter @huck1995, and also has a patreon to help support himself through the pandemic where he breaks down science and public health research and news at https://www.patreon.com/huck1995.  Adnan can be followed on twitter at @adnanahusain, and also runs The Majlis Podcast, which can be found at https://anchor.fm/the-majlis and the Muslim Societies-Global Perspectives group at Queens University, https://www.facebook.com/MSGPQU/.   Breht is the host of Revolutionary Left Radio, which can be followed on twitter @RevLeftRadio cohost of The Red Menace Podcast, which can be followed on twitter at @Red_Menace_Pod.  You can find and support these shows by visiting https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/. Thanks to Ryan Hakamaki, who designed and created the podcast's artwork, and Kevin MacLeod, who creates royalty-free music.

You don't remember Den Bamboo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm your host, Henry Huckimacki, joined by

one of my co-hosts for a very impromptu, unplanned, unscripted episode, which hopefully we'll see how it comes out. I'm joined by Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing? I'm well, Henry. It's great to be back with you. I'm sorry, I missed the last episode. It was a great one, but we're going to do some free-form chatting today, and I'm really looking forward to it. Yeah, this is the Rev. Sorry, the guerrilla history version. I wish this was Rev left. This is the guerrilla history version of free-form jazz, really, because we had showed up for recording one topic, and for a certain reason, we're not able to record about that topic right now, and so we just decided on the fly that we would. talk about something completely unrelated, which I am absolutely unprepared for. But fortunately, Adnan, you will be able to teach me along with the audience. So what are we going to be talking about today during this episode? Well, Henry, I want to talk just a little bit,

perhaps about a figure from the 14th, early 15th century, North Africa, who was a pretty profound historical and social thinker that most people will not have heard of named ibn chaldoon his full name was abu zaid abdharman ibn muhammed ibn chaldoon al hadrami and he died in 1406 um and you can find for example a statue of him if you're in tunis downtown in front of the french embassy there's a really interesting statue he's uh facing the french embassy And he's a celebrated figure who was kind of discovered in some ways in the 18th, 19th centuries. His work, although he wrote, obviously, in the 14th and early 15th centuries, may not have been, you know, much consulted. But he's the author until, you know, more modern times.

But he's the author of a really remarkable work of history. It's a kind of universal chronicle. focus is a lot more on North Africa and the Middle East, but there was a genre and a tradition in the pre-modern world of these global or universal world histories that were written. You know, great empires want to celebrate themselves and situate their kind of dispensation or their sort of culture and civilization within some broader span, and they know about the Romans and the Persians, and they look to these prior precedents as you know a certain age of history into which they fit and are the new dispensation and so every one of

these major kind of big profound cultural turns generates these kinds of forms of writing that's also the case of course in the Islamic world where there were many universal chroniclers and universalist historians writing particularly in the era of the Abbasid period when the caliphs ruled in Baghdad a vast world empire that was the largest of its time as a land-based empire until the Mongol invasions of the 13th century and the Mongol world empire of the 13th century and it stretched the Abbasid empire stretched from basically what is today Morocco so the Atlantic all the way into Central Asia beyond the you know Oxus and Jacksardis rivers and parts of what is today, you know, Persia, Afghanistan, a bit of North India, perhaps, and between.

So, you know, and from in the north, you know, it was on the borders with Anatolia and to its south, you know, the, you know, Yemen and, you know, parts of North Africa. And so it was this global, really large scale, Afro-Eurasian empire. And so there were historians who thought this was universal. in scope and they wrote these kind of histories of the world all culminating of course with the formation of this new empire and this new age. Ibn Khaldun is writing several centuries later at a period where there had been some more fragmentation and localization and no longer was the Abbasid empire integral and whole and ruled by a caliph in Baghdad but there had been many

regional formations and what had happened in North Africa which is where he was from is that there have been successive waves of various movements that had incorporated the berber tribes people of indigenous to north africa i mean we shouldn't really even call them berber this is just the old language that was used for the indigenous peoples of north africa but the amaziz and others these indigenous figures in the atlas mountains and so on were uh tribal formations that became islamized and themselves became important progenitors and founders of new uh dynastic states in the region. Sometimes they conquered parts of Spain, but they definitely integrated most of what we call the Maghrib, that is basically from Libya, Tunisia, to Morocco.

And Ibn Khaldun was himself an administrator, somebody who worked in government, who had experience of working with then the Hafsid state, which was centered in what is modern-day Tunisia, govern parts of Libya and Algeria at its height. And he was intimately involved with managing, in particular, relationships with tribal groupings that had been the foundation of the Almohad state. That is the Al-Muahidun, a movement that emerged in the 12th century, had a kind of religious ideology, but was built upon these tribesfolk of the Atlas Mountains and established a dynasty. you know, and a polity, a state in most of North Africa.

And this Hefzid state was a sort of successor state in the 13th and early 14th centuries. And he worked with it. And he was part of partisan politics and there were factions and so on. And at a certain point, he was sort of on the outs, politically speaking, and he lost sort of his government position. And he retired to a kind of small town area and decided to write this monumental work of history. But interestingly, before getting into the actual retelling of events and, you know, successive dynastic movements and placing them within the context of larger Islamic and other civilizations, he felt that it was important to have some kind of a methodological statement. And that work, the introduction, al-Muqadima, and that's what it means in Arabic is the introduction. The introduction to his Universal Chronicle has become a classic of historical theory to the extent that he is sometimes called the father of sociology or the father of the social sciences.

And so that's why he's kind of significant and important. And I've been thinking a little bit about this question of the relationship between history and the social sciences. If people are interested in becoming a patron, you know, they will find that recently I've been posted. posting short little readings and discussions on the question of the relationship between history and social science by reading William H. Sewell Jr's logics of history, social theory, and social transformation. To kind of think about these methodological questions,

this is very much an academic type work of thinking about academic institutions and the formal professional study of history versus anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists and economists and whether there is some kind of dialogue that could be established methodologically to help us understand social theory in a more fulfilling, historically dynamic way. And I would say this is what Marxists themselves actually have to be very concerned with, is how do we understand the structures of society and of domination, and how do we

understand how social change and transformation takes place over the course of time. Somebody like Marx was a brilliant kind of historical materialist as well as a social scientist. And he was writing at a time when these disciplines were just starting to emerge as separate kinds of disciplines. And so if we are to rethink in our own age, what's the relationship between the insights that are coming from sociology, economics, political economy, anthropology, with history and the desire and hope for informed lessons of the past to see how transformation could take place in our age and in the future, this is a kind of interesting set of issues of how do you think of those in relationship to one another?

Yeah, I'm going to cut you off for just a second at none, and let me address two things. The first thing, there was some beeping in the background, and I will let our listeners know that that is our other co-host, Brett O'Shea, of Revolutionary Left Radio, who I forgot to introduced during the introduction of the show. But that's what the beeping is. So there's the shout out for Brett. We wish you were here, et cetera, et cetera. Same thing we always say when somebody's not here. The second thing is, man, Adnan, you were a real pro. We did not rehearse the questions that I was going to ask. I did not even know the topic of this discussion more than 10 minutes before we hit record. And yet the first three questions that I have written down, you addressed all

three of them. So I'm just going, that's okay. I mean, like I said, you're a real pro. You knew exactly what I was going to be putting out there. But let me throw them out there anyway in the way that I was going to ask them, just in case there's something that you would like to add before we get into a little bit more of Ibn Khaldun's ideas themselves. So the first thing that I wanted to ask about, which again, you addressed at least in part, is what was, was the field of history and historiography like at this period of time that he was around. And again, you did talk a little bit about this. But if there's anything that you want to add, feel free.

The second part, which again, you also addressed was, you know, we had kind of this monolithic historical narrative or at least way of thinking about history at this time. And yet we have Ibn Haldun breaking free of this. And I was just curious, what were the influences on him that would have allowed him to make this major break? Because, of course, this also goes along with not having a great man of history kind of thinking. Like, these great ideas did not come out of nowhere. Like, it's not just like somebody was put down on earth from heaven one day and these great ideas came into their minds. Like Marx did not come out of nowhere.

Marx took the ideas of former thinkers like Hagel, for example. Even Haldun was not placed on earth by some greater power either. So it's really interesting, like what would have influenced him to have allowed him to make this major break from the established norm in terms of what we were thinking about history itself, as well as the methodology of history. Very interesting. And the third thing, which you only briefly mentioned, is you mentioned that he mentioned that his, his universal chronicle really became a seminal work. I'm wondering, were his ideas that he put forth widespread still during his life? Or was this something that was really adopted afterwards?

So that was my third question. And then we can kind of go into the ideas that were put forth in the Universal Chronicle and how they had changed the perception of history and the methodology of history. But yeah, those are my first three points. What was what was history and historiography like at the time? what influenced him and were his ideas widespread during his life or was it something that only came around either shortly after or way after he was dead? Yeah, no, those are great questions and I don't think I really fully dealt with them.

I might have glancingly touched on some of them. So it's really great that you pose them because I think it's important for people to understand that while the historian's profession had a long history of its own in the sense that there are chronicles and, you know, written and preserved from, you know, antiquity. Of course, everyone is familiar with, well, I don't know if everyone is, but, you know, if you've heard of the discipline of history's sources in ancient Greek writing, in other kinds of chronicles from different societies and cultures in the ancient world, you would have heard of Herodotus, you would have heard of Thucydides. And so know that there is kind of the telling of stories.

And in fact, in some ways, the telling of stories is itself has a whole long, you know, history from the origins. People have told stories about themselves. And sometimes they were, when we talk about epic, there is a sort of historic time. I mean, it's literary, but it's also meant to deal with a historical people. So this is definitely, you know, something that has always, you know, been there in settled culture and civilization. But when people actually went to write chronicles, what they would do, you know, is kind of, tell the story of the great figures, and usually they focus and center on political powers and political leaders and, you know, kings and nobles and so on. That was, you know, telling the story

of, you know, rule and rulership and their activities and retailing, you know, narratives about them. And so that's what most of these kind of chronicles are about, is going through, you know, about the rise of particular leaders with decisions that they made, challenges that they faced. And so one explanatory mode, you know, if there is, you know, more than just telling stories, is, you know, kind of the moralizing historical, you know, orientation. Good rulers mean justice and, you know, things being flourishing, you know, in that era, right? And it's usually put down to the fact that the ruler was a good ruler, a good person. They were wise.

They had the right character and morals and intentions, right? And bad rulers introduced tyranny and oppression and raised taxes and cause wars and so on. And so it was about these great figures. And if anything, in terms of explanation, it might be about this moral kind of character core that is the engine for whether, you know, you know, things will be good, whether there will be wars, et cetera, and so on. Allow me to butt in for one second. And sorry if I hope that this doesn't sidetrack you from everything else. But I'm curious also on this note, how prevalent or how prominent rather, religion and spirituality were within the existing mode of thinking as well as within Ibn Haldun's mode of thinking.

Like was this something that really was foundational? fundamental to either or both of these or one more than the other? Or was this something that just kind of was ubiquitous at this time? Well, I think you're right that that's an excellent question. I mean, it was sort of ubiquitous that there are some presuppositions framing this in, if we're talking about Christian and Muslim pre-modern historians and chroniclers, they are presuming a kind of theology of history in some sense that divine, you know, there's a divine hand in history and so that's helping also possibly to explain things or at least marking off new dispensations and this is like you know situating in the Muslim era and that there was some kind

of you know divine framework in which you would understand you know human progress as you know unfolding with more you know guidance of you know these different religious communities succeeding one another and then now this is the age of the Muslim world and so that's the kind of framework overall and of course one would also you know think about questions like you know you know predestination and you know whether things are preordained versus how they unfold with human decisions and you know how does God's will work itself out in history so definitely there was a kind of theological backdrop and I think somebody like Ibn Khaldun kind of presupposes that but he kinds of interestingly enough moves beyond either just retelling stories with no kind of explanatory framework or rationale or you know those who

want to see a moral kind of question that might be even tied with like you know divine will and so on in everything he kinds of tries to bracket both of those and suggest that there are you know human social forces that are explanatory for why certain groups come to dominate others, how states are formed, you know, and on what basis and why they, you know, last only for as long as they do and are replaced by others. He was, you know, positioned in North Africa and saw so many successive changes of different, you know, tribal groupings coming together, seizing cities and then, you know, establishing a dynasty but after a three four or five generations kind of losing power to another group coming from the countryside coming from you know the harsh conditions where tribal you know uh identity

was the sole manner of subsistence and survival and he decided and so this is you know kind of what distinguished him is he actually had personal experience trying to manage sort of tribal policy for the huffst of governors so he spent time among these people and he could see, these people are ready to eat the lunch of these, like, you know, sophisticates at the court and who are now, you know, enjoying the luxuries of city, urban civilization who are totally unprepared for the warlike, you know, kind of folk that are ready to come in. And so he was very impressed with the power that is created from a military perspective by what he considered the harsh conditions of existence in the country.

in the mountains and in the wilderness and that it bred people whose interdependence with one another was very strong. And I think that kind of an insight, that's something like maybe what an anthropologist would have about tribal solidarity and structures, he started to theorize that this was the basis for dynastic power, that it wasn't how large your military was versus, you know, another army, it was this idea of assabia, of group solidarity or group feeling. And the group, you know, a particular group that had strong group feeling or strong assabia, he felt always had a material and military advantage that would overwhelm those whose group feeling became more attenuated. And how did it become attenuated?

Is when you settle in a city, you have the intermixing of peoples, you have greater interdependence of society and segmentation of, you know, labor, he actually comes up with a theory, essentially, of a kind of social division of labor. That is how he analyzes, you know, urban sociology. And he says, urban sociology weakens those tribal affiliations where your consanguinity and all of that are very clear, and it disperses it in a broader population. And as a result, it's harder to mobilize people with strong group feeling together. And that ultimately over several generations you end up having the weakening of the military base that exposes them to new groupings from the countryside who come in.

And so this was kind of a kind of, you know, he combined a sense of urban sociology and political economy with a sense of anthropology and tribal relationships to understand how is the state formed and how is it kind of ruled and governed on this kind of life. cycle of a dynastic kind of cycle and you know that that he thought was the engine of history that's how you explain you know history and the rise and fall of political dynasty so it was a kind of secular in some ways i mean he did it's interesting he did sort of have a theory of how religion participates in this but his theory was to think of religion as galvanizing and enhancing social bonds and relationships and giving a grouping a kind of ideological purpose. So he understood

it in a kind of social scientific way of what function religion, you know, it didn't think this is the sum total of religion, but what is the function socially speaking that a religious movement might play? And he thought that the strongest kind of forces were when you combine tribal asabia in its more pure form coming from the countryside with a galvanizing religious ideology that intensified, that sense of group feeling and gave it a kind of mission in history to achieve ideologically, that that is when you have really long-lasting kinds of new dispensations. And that's how he located the origins of Muslim civilization, is that he said, Muhammad combined a kind of religious ideology with the Bedouin tribal kind of group solidarity,

Asabia to make a kind of super asabia, supergroup solidarity that was able to establish a long lasting kind of new culture and civilization that other groupings kind of had to work within the Islamic world once it had been created. Well, you know, you said he created this like super asabia, which it's really funny. I just unmuted myself to say he's almost thinking of this in the terms of it being a superstructure, right? Like, yeah, in very much, like, I don't want to say in Marxian terms, but in terms of the way that Marxists formulate base in superstructure, his formulation of religion fits pretty neatly within that. It's not the way that religion was thought to kind of supersede base in superstructure in the way that many of these other early historical and political theorists thought of it.

I could be misreading it. I mean, feel free to disabuse me of that notion if I'm wrong. But the way that you explained, it really did sound like thinking of it as in Marxian terms as part of the superstructure. Yeah, no, that's a very interesting analogy because I think he is somebody who appreciates structural conditions. I mean, he wouldn't describe them in the same way that a modern social scientist would look at structures, but he's looking at social relations. He's looking at conditions that can be abstracted from the particularities of one society to another. So he has a kind of concept of something like urban society and what are the structures within it. And then he also has a kind of theory, you know, or at least a sense of the relevance of culture and ideas and how they fit into it.

And that's, of course, where he locates religion and seeing the interplay between, as you were putting it. it, kind of super structural culture and ideology and its relationship to, you know, more kind of embedded, durable social structures, except that, you know, what's very interesting about it is that he's a theorist of change. So he's very historically inclined. He doesn't want to just describe kind of structures in society and study them in that manner. He's interested in their emergence and rise and also what undermines them. So he's very interested in, historical change and in that fashion I think he's like you know like you know marks or like you know I was reading William Sewell's logics of history is you know he's interested in how do you

understand and theorize social and political change he might you know he might he does have quite a lot of substantial discussion of the division of labor and the interdependence of society as a result he ends up you know I mean he agreed with and actually develops Aristotle's idea that, you know, Aristotle said, you know, humankind or is a political animal, right? What Ibn Haldun suggests is that it's a, that it's a social animal. That is that the interdependence of human life requires cooperation, requires affiliations and social relations, and that's what he's interested in studying and how that progresses in and through history of the,

these bonds being created and how they are dissolved in order to explain change in history, political dynasties coming and going, and so on. So I think that's an important and good insight to think about it. One could think about it as the more complex readings that one would have of Marx and base and superstructure. Likewise, you can't isolate the two completely in Ibn Khaldun's thinking. There's a more sophisticated interrelationship between kind of these cultural forms religious forms what we would think of as ideological forms and you know base basic social structure and material kinds of conditions he but it's interesting he's interested in explaining things you take into account the material conditions so you know he has

one passage where he talks about victories in battle and how you have to think about this you know it's terrain it's like numbers it's all these things but he thinks you're missing out decisively on this other component if you don't take into account the social relations and so in some ways you might say that he sort of socializes kind of aristotle's you know in trying to elevate history or at least invent a form of study of history that would conform to what he thought of as a scientific or philosophical I mean science in the old sense of like a form of knowledge and as a philosophical discipline. And maybe that's something that's worth mentioning

is looking at the passage where he talks a little bit about Aristotle. But let me just stop there. That was tremendous. And I'm sorry for taking you on these diversions. I'll give you the opportunity now to go back to briefly talk about if you want to expand on any of the original questions that I posed with regards to his influences historiography at this time

and how widespread his ideas were. If there's anything that you want to add on that before we move on, because I know that I did sidetrack us pretty badly there. No, not at all. That was stuff I definitely wanted to discuss about his thought. So they were definitely very useful questions and perceptive questions. You know, just all I would say about the reception is that while his work wasn't, you know, a kind of classic, you know, in its time that everybody read the moccadima on his universal history,

nonetheless, like his reputation succeeded him, you know, even during his lifetime he was known as somebody who had claims anyway for how to understand progress of history and dynastic succession and power in the world through social means, the sort of secrets in some ways of history, what he himself calls the inner history that is behind just the, you know, the discussion of events that happen is like the causes of why things happen. that's what he thinks of as inner history and you know in this kind of culture these are considered sort of exoteric and esoteric that a surface or inner kinds of understanding and so to the extent that he had enough of a reputation that timur tamer lane as he's known in in the west um great world conqueror

of like the 14th and early 15th centuries um happened to be besieging damascus uh i think it was 1402 and ibn haldun was in the city he had been sent on some kind of diplomatic mission or some kind of administrative mission he happened to be you know in the camp that opposed timor but he himself took the trouble of sneaking out you know for an evening uh in order to have a famous meeting with tamerlane um who was interested and heard of him because um he thought that ibn haldun had worked on the question of what made dynasties, you know, powerful and successful. And he, you know, saw himself as a sort of world historical figure himself. And why wouldn't you if you ruled, you know, a territory that stretched from Central Asia to Anatolia to Syria. And so he had a

meeting with him. So it's clear that, like, you know, his reputation as somebody who had a theory of power, you know, was known at his time. Yeah, super, super interesting stuff. There's a lot of threads that I could take here. But I guess the one that I'll take right now, that way we can talk a little bit more about his thoughts, specifically is that you mentioned that his work led him to be called the father of sociology.

Can you take us through how? why that is the case? Like, why do people call him the father of sociology? What things did he do that would warrant such a title? And how are they big advancements over what was taking place prior to him? Like, why would this be the birth of a field? Yeah, I mean, a great issue here. I think the reason one could sort of justly say that he was the progenitor of a different way of thinking, and an inventor in some ways of social science, is that because he made and had the aspiration to make a scientific or philosophical study

of human society, that all the diversity, behind the diversity of forms of culture and social relations, he believed you could identify certain principles and almost what we might say as laws, you know, normative kinds of theoretical conclusions that would be applicable across history and different societies and cultures. And that's essentially turning the study of society into a kind of scientific or philosophical discipline, is that are there, beyond just particulars, are there regular explanatory principles of human social interaction that help

you explain the nature of social relations, the nature of social power, how social structures exist. And in other words, the forms that society takes, the particular forms, can they be derived and understood as being related to some broader form of explanation? And that's what he was attempting to do. And he's, you know, that's, I was alluding to, you know, how he, you know, he said that, you know, that although Aristotle didn't recognize history, because of it's just the study of particulars rather than of universals or general principles that nonetheless history did have, human societies did have in his mind, certain principles that could be identified through appropriate study. And that's what he endeavored to do. So what he did was kind

of invent in some ways a rationalist approach to studying human society. And that's why he's sometimes credited with developing social science, sociology, and the different branches of the social sciences, but the idea that you could apply a kind of logical reasoned approach to understanding society, that they weren't arbitrary differences, there weren't, you know, just arbitrary particularities, you know, that couldn't be explained. He thought you could explain them in an endeavor to do so as a way to then study history and to be able to also determine what's true in history and what's not. Like one of the kind of key problems of his time was that many of the historians he

criticizes of his own age are people who will retail stories that they can't verify that have been transmitted and they will uncritically retell them and include them. And he thought you have to be able to have a mechanism or a method for telling what could be true and what's not, what's fanciful. and how do you how you needed a theory in order to do that so one is of course a physical theory things that are impossible physically of course you would discount but what about socially are there things that socially speaking you could say you know um or causal uh in society that if somebody makes a somebody tells you tells you an account of somebody's rule um that you could analyze and determine whether

that this is really a true report or not, whether it made sense or not, by judging it against sets of principles of what social action looks like, of what, you know, social relations might be. And so that's the way in which he was approaching his study of history was through trying to figure out whether there were like inner laws or inner principles and guiding kinds of norms that could be identified. Yeah, really interesting. So, I understand that he was very, very influential, both shortly after his life as well as, you know, even now people are still reading him, although as you kind of mentioned, maybe not as many people as we would like. I certainly haven't read him, so I'm not going to claim

to be an authority on him or anything like that. Like I said, we really only discussed this for about 10 minutes before we hit record. So, but yeah, what I want to ask now, and feel free to take your time or go on any routes that you want to take this with because it's it's a it's both specific but there's a lot of things that you could say about it as well a lot of different routes that you could take out of this so as we mentioned previously nobody exists in isolation we all draw ideas from other people and as you mentioned he was very influential but I'm curious if there's anybody that would be considered to be like a Haldunian or something along those lines, either shortly afterwards or, you know, what was there like a tendency

that followed his line of thought that developed and were kind of affiliated with his ideas in the way that we have some of these other philosophical and political tendencies? Like, was there actually a movement that built out of this in terms of a way of. thinking about it, were there any prominent thinkers that would have fit this mold? And then the other part of this question, which is somewhat related, is looking today, a lot of his ideas would have been supplanted by now, right? This is, we take ideas, we adapt them, we advance them, and then we come up with new ideas based on those previous ideas.

And this is a process that continues and continues and continues. And at the end, you may not even see much of the original material that you were basing your current ideas on, but through the iterations over decades and centuries of refining and advancing those ideas, those, the current way of thinking would not have been possible without having those previous ways of thinking, even if we don't really necessarily see the remnants of it. But on the other hand, we also have some ideas that have stood the test of time like very explicitly. You know, they were put forth in form X and there's been minor modification to but they're very much the same.

So is there anything that specifically has been taken that we can take from Ibn Haldun as being useful for analyzing history today, analyzing the world around us today, or are the ideas that he put forth that were so prominent and so useful at the time, are these things that were very useful at the time but have been advanced to the point by now that we don't really see the explicit form that he put them forth in, but really we're just kind of continue building on these ideas is the fundamental building blocks that we no longer see, the foundation of the building.

Yeah, I mean, I would say it's a little bit more the latter in the sense that, one, there wasn't like a sort of school of Ibn Haldunian history that emerged and then had continuities to the modern day. he's sort of somebody who stands somewhat alone in that he developed this approach but it wasn't necessarily continued in the precise sort of way in which he developed it was more rediscovered later and people found inspiration and saw connections with new kinds of thinking that were emerging in scholarship in these emerging social sciences in the 19th and early 20th centuries and so in lots of ways of course his particular insights you know have been developed further or other kinds of theories i mean

he's not somebody who stands for current kind of status of the social sciences that have been so much development so much scholarship and research done and also let's remember is that the societies that he's attempting to explain and this is something that's very important to think about the relationship between theory and history and why you know also you know when it comes to Marx is that as like capitalism changes is that there may be insights that stem from you know analysis that Marx had in the you know second half of the 19th century but that as it developed and change theory has to of course be revised in relation to the new forms that unfold because it is dialectical you know it is a historical process and you know theory is in relation to the history

of its time and likewise the theory that he develops is of course very much much based on you know tribal groupings in north africa and the kinds of city city culture and civilization that developed in you know what we could think of as the islamicate world and the mediterranean of his of his age 14th and early 15th century so he has a lot of deep insights and it's but it's more the methodological question of trying to think about the relationship uh you know how to explain what where how do you have causation in history and how how do you understand and make human society the object of a kind of analytical study that applies reason to understand how it works? That's, I think, a very deep and important insight

that we take now for granted, but I think was an important new direction at the time. So it's really more that method of trying to think through how to understand history, how to understand society in a scientific sort of perspective I mean he's very conscious of doing that not only as a prologomena to how you evaluate historical reports and tell what's true and what's not true in history but also you know just to you know make society the object of study and so he's very conscious of trying to make the case for that and engage Aristotle and, you know, as a kind of the founder in some ways of the form of philosophy that, you know, was his tradition,

and show that history could, you know, could be studied in this kind of scientific or philosophical way as having regular principles of explanation beyond just the retelling of particularities. In other words, history wasn't just for moral edification of previous examples, or entertainment, right? I mean, these are the kind of ways in which it could have been seen. I think that's how somebody like Aristotle saw it as as not contributing to a substantive philosophical knowledge, and he tries to develop a way of thinking about human society

in a very serious, serious way. Excellent. So I know that you have a meeting that you have to get ready for relatively soon, so let me just open the floor for you. Is there anything else that you want to say? say or have the audience know about Ivan Haldun or his thought, things that you want to direct the listeners to in terms of further reading. If they're interested, anything that you want to say, Adnan, now is the time.

Sure. Well, I mean, I just, you know, I hope people find it interesting that there is a 14th century Muslim figure who really was thinking about things in this way. And it tells us that in the pre-modern period, it wasn't that people, you know, weren't really interesting and intelligent. It's just, of course, the world that they were dealing with, which was quite. different from our own. So gaps between what we would see as his form of thinking and explanation and our own in kind of late modern capitalism in the 21st century, there are going to be

differences. And it's not as if reading him is like looking at, you know, Emil Dirkheim or Max Weber or, you know, anything like that. But you can see roots and foundations of a kind of critical analysis of one's own society. That's what we're all trying to do. That's what we need to do. And he can be at least an inspiration in that. If people are interested, his work has been translated into English. You know, I wouldn't recommend the three-volume full edition of the muqadima. That's pretty long.

But there is a good single-volume excerpted digest of some of his ideas. And if you want to understand something about 14th century Muslim societies in the greater Mediterranean world, he's not a bad place to start. And he's just a very interesting. and fruitful, you know, a fruitful figure to think with if you're interested in earlier history and in thinking about how you relate historical change to social structure. I think people might find it interesting. Well, I really enjoyed the conversation. I learned quite a bit.

I was a bit hesitant to, you know, hit record not having done really any background research for this because, like I said, we only planned to do this about 10 minutes before we hit record. but I really did learn a lot and I really enjoyed the conversation. So thank you for teaching me, Adnan. And I'm sure the listeners are also saying the same thing right now. How can the listeners find you and the other excellent work that you do on your own podcast, which I pitched on the last episode and I'm going to pitch again right now because the listeners really do need to check out the muddlets? I heard that and I really appreciated it.

It was definitely an episode that was connected with the topic last, last. time about the French elections and Islamogoshism. So do check that out on the M-A-J-L-I-S. That's available on all your podcast platforms. And we have a recent episode with Juan Cole about peace movements in Islam, a recent book that he edited. And he talks about his contributions and those of others. And also, of course, you can follow me on Twitter at Adnan-A-Husain, H-U-S-A-I-N. Yeah, and the episode with Juan Cole, as a... all of the conversations that you and I think I also had one with Professor Cole have has been excellent. So it was a great episode. Listeners should definitely check that out. And I do want to

mention, well, I can see your face that because I mentioned this on the last episode, but you weren't here. When you look for the Mudge List listeners, do not pick the one by radio free Central Asia. Do not pick the CIA funded podcast about Central Asia. Pick the one. Pick the one by our own professor Adnan Hussain, which I believe if you look at the author, it's by MS. What is it? MSGPQU. Yeah. So if you just don't pick the right one, okay, that's all I'm going to say.

For our other co-host who's not here today, I will do the pitch. So our other co-host is Brett O'Shea, who is host of Rev Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. You can find all of his work on Revolutionary Left Radio.com. We will be recording with him again very, very soon. And the next episode that we have out will be one that Rev Left listeners will really enjoy, I think. And I know Adnan, you and I are both Rev Left listeners. And so it's something that we're excited to talk about. As for me, listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995, H-U-C-1-995.

You can follow the show on Twitter at Garvey. G-R-R-R-I-L-A-U-E-R-I-L-A- underscore pod. And you can support the show. Keep the lights on at Guerrilla History by supporting us at patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A. And I will mention that because I don't think that I remembered to mention this when we set it up. On our Patreon, we set up some annual membership discount thing.

So if you pay for a full year's membership on the Patreon, you get, I think, a 10% discount. So you get like just over a month for free, basically, if you sign up for the full year up front, which, yeah, you know, they gave us the option. So we figured why not. It'll save you money and it'll get some some money in our pockets as well, such as it is. So until next time, listeners, solidarity. So, I'm going to be able to see

I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.