Ideas - Meet the original 'Father of Economics' — it's not Adam Smith

Episode Date: July 17, 2025

Adam Smith may be known as 'The Father of Economics,' but 400 years before him, Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun was putting forward economic theories that are now taken for granted. IDEAS explores Ibn Khaldun's famous book, Muqaddimah and the lessons it has for us on the philosophy of history, economics, biology, sociology, and political theory. *This episode originally aired on June 24, 2021.

There are two kinds of Canadians. Those who feel something when they hear this music. And those who've been missing out so far. I'm Chris Howden. And I'm Nile Coxall. We are the co-hosts of As It Happens. And every day we speak with people at the center of the day's most hard hitting, heartbreaking, and sometimes hilarious news stories.

Also, we have puns. Here Why As It Happens is one of Canada's longest running and most beloved shows. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. Weybun Khaldun was a North African Muslim scholar in the 13th, 14th century who became renowned for having written a book.

A book called The Muqaddima, which set him apart from his contemporaries because it called for a scientific approach to the study of history. The Muqaddima, it's a kind of huge critics of historians and scholars who believes narratives without a doubt or a critical approach. The Muqaddimah is an introduction to the history of, well, everything. And that everythingness means Ibn Khaldun has often been seen as all things to all people.

Even Ronald Reagan, when he was president, thought that even Chardon was a precursor and somebody who announced in advance that there could be such a thing as supply-side economics. Perhaps the greatest achievement of the Polymath was to have outlined in the Mocadima a universal and general understanding of how societies change across time. So the Mocadima, it's a kind of introduction to the world history with a critical approach that would set the method of how to think universal.

This episode of Ideas explores Ibn Khaldun's Mouqaddima and the lessons it has for us, even now. Lessons about the philosophy of history, economics, biology, sociology, and political theory. We're calling this episode, Beware of Bitter Oranges. History is a discipline widely cultivated among nations and races. It is eagerly sought after. The men in the street, the ordinary people, aspire to know it. King and leaders vie for it. Both the

learned and the ignorant are able to understand it. For on the surface, history is no more than information about political events, dynasties, and occurrences of the remote past elegantly presented and spiced with proverbs. It serves to entertain large crowded gatherings and brings to us an understanding of human affairs. It shows how changing conditions affected human affairs, how certain dynasties came to occupy an ever wider space in the world, and how they settled the earth until they heard the call and their time was up. Ibn Khaldun, the Muqaddama. Ibn Khaldun was a North African Muslim scholar in the 13th, 14th century who became renowned

for having written a book that was not a classic in his time but became a classic from the 18th century called The Introduction or in Arabic the Muqaddimah. It has been widely cited not only by scholars but by many people in the popular press. And even Ronald Reagan when he was president thought that Ibn Khaldun was a precursor and somebody who announced in advance that there could be such a thing as supply-side economics. So he is, as one person described him, a kind of amorphous polymath who knew a lot of things, wrote a lot of things, and has been cited in many, many areas, both inside and outside the academic world, in and outside the Muslim world. My name is Bruce Lawrence, and I'm a retired professor in religious studies specializing

in the Islamic world from Duke University, and I'm currently also an adjunct professor at, appropriately, Ibn Khaldun University in Istanbul, Turkey. Ronald Reagan wasn't the only one who made a connection between Ibn Khaldun and thinkers who came along centuries later. The reason why the similarities exist between Ibn Khaldun, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Durkheim, all these people is they're all approaching the study of human society

using philosophical ideas and methodologies. That's the reason. So it's very fair to say that Ibn Khaldun developed some important economic theories because, in fact, Ibn Khaldun wanted to develop history. For him, history really meant what we now consider social sciences as well as what is now considered history. He felt it was essential to generalize, that is to say to compare things and draw generalizations because he says, quoting Aristotle, that if you simply narrate events or talk about individual events, that is not knowledge. It's not knowledge unless you show how it's related to other

aspects of reality. So it's perfectly reasonable to say that Ibn Khaldun was the first person to develop an economic theory, a kind of proto-Keynesian economic theory or proto-Adam Smith's economic theory, because he was. That's true. And the reason he was is because he approached the study of human society and including the economic system from using the ideas of philosophy. And Adam Smith came from the same kind of background. Adam Smith was trained by and large in Glasgow over the five years. And in fact, when I was at the University of Edinburgh, where I first went to university,

physics was still in fact listed in the catalog as natural philosophy, even in the 20th century. So that's the reason why it's reasonable to say something like that, but to understand why you can say something like that, you have to understand the philosophical training of both individuals. My name is Stephen Dale. Stephen Frederick Dale is how I usually sign my names on books. I'm an emeritus professor of South Asian and Islamic history at The Ohio State University.

LARSON I think it reduces both Adam Smith and Ibn Khaldun to kind of monikers of themselves, because in a sense Ibn Khaldun was not so much a father of economics as he was a father of civilization theory. So economics for him was always tied to social theory, to politics, to religion. But above all, I would argue to literature or to what's called adab, A-D-A-B, that if you don't think of him in the broader sense of the disciplines that he knew and the subjects on which he commented and the book which he wrote, it's much broader than economics, although if he had not included economics, he would not be linked either to Adam Smith or to any of the other great thinkers and philosophers over time with whom he's often identified. Ibn Khaldun was a great scholar and he was one of the most interesting philosopher, historian, and ethnologist.

I think he was similar of his peers because as El-Ghashandi in Cairo, for example, he was a scribe and writing on the methodology and how to do a good governance and how to think and to write about the history. So somehow it's not so exceptional. But what is exceptional is that he tried to think further on the methodology, on the way to think about good governance, because he was in charge of the HESPA treaties and commentaries of this good governance like other scholars, but he did it in a way that was new at his time because he tried to think in a way, in a trans-regional way and in a universal way. So I think for that, this trans-regional dimension

is very exceptional, I think, for this time, perhaps because of his life, his family was exiled and he travelled a lot between Cairo, Fez, Guarani, Oran, Andalusia, Damascus. And he has a very interesting vision and a critical vision of the society. My name is Nora Laffy. I am a Nigerian and a French scholar, historian dealing with the history of the Ottoman Empire from Tunis to Tripoli, he was always looking for something more than the surface or assumed answer to any question on any topic. And if you want to put him in some box and say he was sociology or anthropology or comparative civilization or even economics, you can do that. But to say he's first is, I guess it has a double meaning. First in a chronological time, I mean, he was the originator,

but first in the sense that he was not only in time but also in importance. One of the first is probably accurate because in terms of comparative history and history thinking about causal rather than descriptive categories for doing history and looking at society, he was not only first in terms of being the 14th, 15th century, but also first in terms of setting out a methodology that some people would say and I would argue with them is still relevant today. The best known of Ibn Khaldun's work is the Muqaddima. It was meant to be a detailed opening to a more in-depth study of world history, but it went on to become a book in its own right.

Moqatima in Arabic, well, in English means an introduction. It was a genre in literature. So the Moqatima was published in 14th century, and it's a seminal example of this intellectual legacy. The Moqatima, it's a kind of huge critics of historians and scholars who believe narratives without a doubt or a critical approach. So the mokkadima, it's a kind of introduction to the world history with a critical approach that would set the method, the kawaii, the method of how to think universal. He tried to propose a typologization, a typologies of

geographical milieu, of populations, of social organizations, and of a structure of power. So with this work in Muqaddima, he proposes an analytical framework for the study of human societies. And I think it's very important to stress that because the Muqaddima is not just a genre, like I just said, but a way to rethink the universal vision of the world.

This is a complicated text. It really is, I say it contains three things. One is this kind of summary of knowledge of all kinds, including mathematics, including literature. It's a criticism of traditional historiography of that, it's how Muslim historians wrote about things. And then finally, it's a course, it's Ibn Khaldun using his own ideas about historical sciences to analyze North African politics. And it's from those ideas he develops this kind of dialectical theory in which a tribe conquers a city like Marrakesh, they settle down in the city.

So all of the things which made them an effective military force, which allows them to conquer these cities, begin to disappear as soon as they settle down in the cities. So that is, Ibn Qasbun essentially argues about this, that the nature of the nomadic tribes, the Bedouins, is one thing. They are purer, they have fewer indulgences, they are of course militarily trained the way all Bedouin tribes are, all these characteristics. It allows them to overrun these cities. As soon as they settle down in cities,

all of these characteristics decay. And by the fourth generation, it's all over with. So they've adopted all of the characteristics of people in urban societies and their tribal sheikh, who is at one time a viable and respected leader of a tribe, becomes a sultan and takes up all the bad habits of sultan the world over. He values luxuries, starts to have wonderful parties, wild parties, you name it. He extracts more taxes from the cities so he can pay for all these expenses. Expenses like decorative but inedible fruit, especially fragrant bitter oranges. For Ibn Khaldun, they were signs a ruler had become

ineffective and corrupt in his lavish and sedentary ways. Ibn Khaldun's observations about society and the rise and fall of power weren't based simply on theorizing. As a civil servant in the court, he interacted with people daily, understood their grievances and how they viewed their relationships to each other and to the people who ruled over them. He was working in the court as a civil servant. He has to write the decrees of the government. He has to write the petitions, the ara'at.

He has to write the minutes of the assemblies. And this is why for me it's very interesting because I'm right now trying to do a program of research on deliberation. And he was the one who even photo how to write deliberations. And because of his job, he wanted to make it as a knowledge, a scholarly knowledge in order to transmit and to teach this knowledge, ilm. And this is very, very important.

And I think we can learn a lot from him because in his writing, he was also thinking about moral treaties. It's a long tradition of treaties on Hespa, the good governance, and he was adding on what he learned from his great professors, and he was aware to transfer this knowledge. So this is why he tried to think about principles, for example, principles to teach to the other students and to the future scholars how to stop to make mistakes, for example, and to act for the good and for a good civil behaviour.

And I think it's a fundamental rule of good governance and this is what we learn from him because he teaches us the nature of a civilization and it was his fundamental knowledge of the nature of civilization. It's a civilization and I think the nature it's analyzed by him in the great way, because he understood people, because he met the people, he heard them, a woman, a man with a petition bringing to the court and saying what's going on at home or in the street or in the street, or in the city, or in the village, he didn't have just theoretical knowledge on society. He tried to build this theoretical knowledge, but based on a very, very direct relationship with the society. And he tried to insert this knowledge on the long duration of knowledge of Hispah. And this is very important, this good governance and text that sometimes scholars translated,

they forget that they are texts and treaties made for a purpose. And this purpose was to go beyond what we know about the good governance of cities. The writing of history requires numerous sources and much varied knowledge. It also requires a good speculative mind and thoroughness, which lead the historian to the truth and keep him from slips and errors. If he trusts historical information in its plain, transmitted form, and has no clear knowledge of the principles resulting from custom, the fundamental facts of politics, the nature of civilization, or the conditions governing human social organization, and if, furthermore, he does not evaluate remote or ancient material through comparison with near or contemporary

material, he often cannot avoid stumbling and slipping and deviating from the path of truth. Ibn Khaldun, the Muqaddama It's always tricky talking about intellectual debts and inheritances. Sometimes we can draw straight lines between thinkers across different ages. But more often, the lines zig and zag. Stories and texts show up and disappear only to reappear decades or centuries later. For Ibn Khaldun, the line extending to him from the ancient Greeks was fairly straight. He was from an upper-class family and highly educated. Learning Greek philosophy was the norm for

men of his social status. The important thing is that really by the ninth century, which is 500 years before Ibn Khaldun, there was already in the Muslim world a great acquaintance with Greek learning which had been translated from Syriac into Arabic. So it had gone from Greek to Syriac to Arabic. It's called the translation movement. So it wasn't as if Ibn Khaldun discovered Aristotle, or he was the only Muslim who ever read any Greek writing about politics or society or human nature. In one sense, everybody who was an educated person, no matter what their pursuit in the

Muslim world, especially in the Maghreb, which is the Western world where Ibn Khaldun was, there was a great interest in all forms of learning. So when he talks about great civilizations, which he often does, he says the first great civilization was the Persians. So actually he was very indebted to the Persians and a whole range of Persian thinkers, but also to the Greeks and Romans. So he acknowledges every one of the major civilizations that came before and contributed to what he describes as the Ilm-i-Umran or the science of civilization which entails Islam. He, along with many others, thought of Aristotle as the first teacher. In fact, that was a title that Aristotle had from really Roman times through Iranian

Sasanian civilization then on into Islamic civilization that Aristotle was the first teacher of logic and of the human sciences. At the time of Ibn Khaldun, quoting Aristotle or Plato was a must because it's your master. And it means that you are a great scholar when you quote such wonderful scholars who wrote before you. So indeed he didn't hide that he read Platon or Greek scholars, on the contrary. He said, well, this knowledge we know from this period, and there was this translation, and this is how knowledge was understood at this time. And I think this is fantastic for scholars and historians to remember that we are not geniuses like that because we are the best. No, we learn from the past, from the scholars. And I

think this is what he tried to implement in his methodology. It means that your knowledge doesn't come from nowhere, and you have to quote, and this is very important even for today, you have to quote where you arrived to this result. And I think this is very, very important to stress to the students, to the scholars, that when at this time we say that, well, the great master Platon or Aristote wrote this, we do translate this and we learn this and we try to go further by thinking and to have a critical approach on these narratives.

And this is science. And I think those who wrote negatively on, well, he didn't bring something new, I think it's wrong. And we should not forget that most of the translators of Ibn Khaldun started to work on it mainly for at the time of the colonization, even if in the 15th century, you can find great treatise in the Vatican in Rome, for example, and with translation and in Istanbul, because in Ottoman Empire,

they wanted to know more about these scholars. And I think the reception of Ibn Khaldun was totally different from each period. The legacy of Ibn Khaldun was totally different from each period. The legacy of Ibn Khaldun changed each time. And this is why I reacted very strongly to this, oh, he didn't bring something, because it's always the way to have a negative approach on what was before in order to control more the society

during the French colonial period, when the French colonized the former Ottoman provinces in 1830. They just took manuscripts and knowledge and trying to translate it, but for a purpose. And this purpose should be contextualized. And it's a contextualization of domination. And this is very, very different when you approach Ibn Khaldun at the time of Renaissance or when you approach Ibn Khaldun at the time of a new empire like the Ottoman one.

And I think this should be stressed. Ibn Khaldun's immersion in Greek philosophy taught him that to truly understand something, one had to understand its essence. Only then could you understand how it could evolve. He used that approach to study the nature of human society. And he says the most important thing to understand, the most important place to start is you have to determine the nature

of peoples of the society that you're studying. By the nature of society, he means its essence or traits, you might say. And those ideas continue right on through the Middle Ages in Europe until you get to 18th century, until you get to Montesquieu, Adam Smith, other Scottish people who are regarded as people who develop social science ideas, Durkheim, and the Nile School, that is these famous historians in France in the 20th century are part of this tradition.

And they're all studying David Hume in Scotland, the most famous Scottish British philosopher in the 18th century. His whole principle of philosophical work deals with human nature. And that's not an accident because that's what people who were involved in the studies of human nature who were influenced by philosophers had been doing since pre-classical Greek times. Ibn Khaldun was a deeply religious man, but he was absolutely clear that theologians had no business studying history. He said they lacked experience of the real world and believed

the outside world should conform to their own ideas of right and wrong. He says there's a difference between religious studies, historical studies, and philosophical studies. He said religious studies vary because there are different kinds of religion. He said historical studies differ because there are different kinds of sources. He said that philosophical studies never vary. They're always concerned with the same things. And by that, he's referring to the idea of nature. They're always concerned with the same things and guess who also says that? St. Augustine. He says, in fact, he says the rationalists among us are always concerned with the ideas of nature. But in fact Augustine and other Christian

theologians who have been influenced by philosophy use philosophy themselves in developing and in defending the tenets of Christianity. For example, one of the ideas that Ibn Khaldun says, he said after you understand that you have to study things nature, you also have to understand that there are a number of things which he calls accidents. And this is an idea that comes right out of Aristotle. And it's an idea which is very close to what Marx usually talks about in the 19th century, the ideas between structure and superstructure, right?

Same kind of idea. He says, first of all, what you have to study is nature and understand that everything else is what you would consider an accident. An accident is something which is determined by nature. And he gives examples, Aristotle gives these kinds of examples. You know, the substance of a chair is that it's all, it's made out of wood or something.

An accidental quality of a chair is that it's a brown or black or white or whatever. When Ibn Khaldun talks about accidents, he talks about almost everything, almost everything is an accident except society. He says the state is an accident. By that he means that the state is a reflection of the society which it governs.

And then beyond that, when he talks about those two ideas, he says that the critical sort of mental approach that philosophical historians have to have, they have to generalize, right? If you simply narrate events and give an example of what happened here and then what happened next and what happened after that, that's not knowledge. You have to be able to generalize. And so the phrase he uses in the Mocatum is you have to recognize the genus from the species.

And so he says the same thing about human society. So for example, when he talks about the tribes in North Africa, he doesn't usually talk about individual tribes that much. He talks about Bedouins. Bedouin is a generic, is a genus for the species of individual tribes. When I was writing my book, when I talked, I have a whole chapter on 18th century, and I was talking about the Scots such as Adam Smith and others in Scotland who developed the social sciences there. I said when they

talk about the Highland tribes, the Scottish tribes in the Highland, I myself in fact I said Ibn Khaldun would label those people Bedouins because they're tribes. Because he's generalizing about a phenomenon. And then of course he also says you have to use the logical arguments that Aristotle developed in his works on logic. By that I don't mean that the Muqaddam is constructed like a syllogistic text. That is, you know, syllogism is a famous one is all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore the conclusion is Socrates is mortal, right?

And Ibn Khaldun says you have to argue that way, but the Muqaddam is not set up like that. But neither is anything that Aristotle wrote. But what Ibn Khaldun does say many different times is I approve this by using these methods. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. Hey, I'm Jill Deacon and I'm excited to share my new podcast with you. A Love Affair with the Unknown is conversations with smart, funny people navigating life's unknowns with courage and candor, something we could all use during these wildly uncertain times. Me and I started to cry and I realized I haven't dealt with anything. My family's motto was, I'm not going to be able to handle that. That's your family's motto.

Listen and subscribe to A Love Affair with the Unknown wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop every Tuesday. Ibn Khaldun was a medieval scholar from North Africa whose career as a civil servant in the court allowed him intimate access to the stories of everyday people from the cities and beyond. It was a kind of fieldwork that allowed him to develop deep insights about history and politics that he went on to publish in his seminal book, The Muqaddima. This episode about Ibn Khaldun and his life's work is called, Beware of Bitter Oranges.

I think one of the important things to recognize is that when one says politics, the word in Arabic is siasa, but the really dominant word in all of Ibn Khaldun's writing is daula. So daula means the state, and so the state, which is something that is a kind of integral part of organized or urban society. So the major thing that Ibn Khaldun does, which nobody before him had successfully understood,

was to see that the state or daulat, which would be roughly translated as the political entity of his day, that the state was not independent of its many resources, especially those that were outside the realm of the state or preceded the state, which are called Madawa or rural or, if you will, nomadic or Bedouin society. But that was often linked with the term Bedouin, which of course comes from Bedouin. So he saw the people who were not urban or sophisticated, not the leading members of the state, if you will, the illiterates rather than the literates as contributing to what became civilization. So the typical urban reflex of people even to today is to say, oh, if you aren't educated,

if you don't know how to read and write, if you haven't got a certain position in society, if you haven't had the ability above all to travel, to see other people either in your mind or in real life, different from yourself, that you're not an educated and you're not a civilized person. For Ibn Khaldun, civilization had many parts and one of the parts was being a nomad where you didn't have literacy and you didn't have urban rights or urban benefits, but you still had a certain notion of collective integrity. And in fact, when he looks at society and looks at society over time, he says that this instinct for Badawha, for having what some people call barbarian or pre-urban or non-urban instinct and way of life, that

that's an essential corrective to the opulence and the corruption which he sees in urban society. So for his philosophical view, he didn't privilege his own status as one that was the ultimate outcome and the benefit and the irretrievable acme of society, he saw a constant interaction between what he was not, which is this rural, nomadic, desert-like presence of a past and a present group of people different from himself, and then all the urban societies stretching from North Africa all the way to Central and South Asia, which he knew about and wrote about in the Muqaddimah,

which are important, but they themselves are dependent on and sometimes subject to abuse by barbarian elements. When mankind has achieved social organization, as we have stated, and when civilization in the world has thus become a fact, people need someone to exercise a restraining influence and keep them apart, for aggressiveness and injustice are in the animal nature of man. The weapons made for the defense of human beings against the aggressiveness of dumb animals do not suffice against the aggressiveness of man to man, because all of them possess

those weapons. Thus, something else is needed for the defense against the aggressiveness of human beings toward each other. It could not come from outside, because all the other animals fall short of human perceptions and inspiration. The person who exercises a restraining influence, therefore, must be one of themselves. He must dominate them and have power and authority over them so that no one of them will be able to attack another. This is the meaning of royal authority. Ibn Khaldun, the Muqaddama So civilization in this case Islamic civilization for Ibn Khaldun Was something which which was not different from other civilizations that had to have an organizing principle

But it also has to have a sustaining Core and that sustaining core is what he calls Asabia A S A B I Y orA, asabiyah, which really means if one thinks of the body, the interconnectedness of the nerve system of the body, if you don't have the nervous system interconnected, the body can't function. So the asabiyah is the nervous system, if you will, of the body politic or the body of civilization. And so Ibn Khaddam was very interested in how that nervous system, if you will, the asabiyah of larger groups in major civilizations, how that both grew,

strengthened, successful for a period, but always weakened, and always in past civilizations disappeared. So even though he wasn't predicting the end of Islamic civilization, he was saying if it doesn't retain a sense of Asabiyah, of this kind of solidarity, as some people have translated Asabiyah, solidarity, or I would prefer to say this interconnectedness and interdependency. If there wasn't this interconnected interdependency of people, there would not be a successful state or a successful civilization. So the basis for the Muqaddimah is to say how do these things begin, how do they grow, how do they weaken, and then how, when they disappear, do other forms of civilization reappear in the next phase of

history. Ibn Khaldun says that Asibiyah, that is this kind of group cohesion or fellow feeling, he says the only place you can really see it, he said, is in Bedouin, that is tribal societies. By tribal, it means both nomads and people who live off in the countryside, that is to say people who are farming off in the countryside. And he said there are two things which produce Asibiyah. farming off the countryside. And he said there are two things which produce asebia. One is kinship. And the second is though is cooperation that is day-to-day cooperation in the society. He specifically says, for example, and we're talking about this, he says, it's not true that kinship alone will generate this sense of fellow feeling. That is simply realizing

that you have all these relatives scattered around as we all do these days, simply saying that you have all these relatives here, there, and everywhere as you and Adlai do and I do and other people do, wouldn't generate this sense of sense of asibir, this social cohesion. I mean, he says it's only really among the better ones that you have that feeling strongly represented. And it's because the Bedouins have this experience of common action. Of course, one of the things he's thinking of is raiding urban communities or fighting with other tribes because the people in these tribes would have that experience of not only

of being related to all the people they're fighting with, but they also have the experience of fighting with them. And then the sheikh or the tribal leader in that situation, he says, had superior asabiyahs. The reason why they're the sheikh or the tribal leader is they have a heightened sense of the solidarity. The asabiyah, it's the way you react in society within the group you belong to. And I think it's very important, this is why it's universal, because it doesn't have a color or a religion.

You belong to a group, and the group has some principles and reactions vis-à-vis another group. And this hasabiyah is the way the group is made, and this is the way he functions. So you defend those who are from your groups, even if you know that you could not defend them. So it's something that's very human and it's very well studied in sociology for these belongings from a group and how we need it and how we construct our identity from having a different relationship from another group. So this haszebiyah, it's the differentiation from a group to another one, and how it's made a society, and how these groups have a common way to behave in society.

When we know how this function of this azebiyah, of this functioning of how to belong from a group, how to belong from a group, we know better how to avoid errors. Ibn Khaldun saw matters of identity as central to understanding the essence of any society. Understanding how individuals saw their place in a group and that group's relationship to other groups was key for good governance. Any state that couldn't grasp these fundamental relations was bound to fail, and the signs of that imminent failure were obvious. Well, the first instance of a society having run its course is that it forgets its own history, that it neglects the fact that it itself came from humbler roots and that it was only through the sacrifice and the self-awareness and the good fortune of predecessors of previous generations that one created oneself.

So the first mark of dissidence or dissolution and decadence, all the D's that ultimately lead to the death of a society or a culture or a particular polity is lack of self-awareness and lack of any connection to one's own history. And the way that often plays out in terms of politics is that the people who become the heirs of great wealth and great power, they are not themselves trained to be in touch with others who have given them this power. So they lose the ability to manage others either in a bureaucracy or in the army or in the larger society of those who produce the goods, the produce of vegetables and fruit, and also

of different skill sets of what Ibn Khaldun calls crafts, when one loses a sense of all the other people who contribute to what is called the circle of justice by Natusi in the 12th century and Ibn Khaldun quotes that circle of justice, if you lose any notion of the circle of justice, of everything that has to be included in order for societies to succeed, that is the beginning of decline and it doesn't necessarily happen overnight, but it happens over generations, and it eventually leads to not only decline,

but the dissolution and disappearance of groups that seemed incomparable and unconquerable generations earlier. Social cohesion and group solidarity sound wonderful, but Ibn Khaldun didn't see this in-group identity as a good thing, per se. He understood that it could lead to all kinds of chaos and conflict. We understand this principle keenly in our own societies today, where there's a social and political

competition between various groups displaying a form of ʿasabiyyah, or group-based self-interest. Ibn Khaldun saw the figure of Tamerlane, the great Mongol conqueror and founder of the Timurid Empire, as the embodiment of asabiyah in all its good and bad. One of the things that I think most defines him historically is the very end of his life, the last four or five years of his life, had an encounter with Timor-Lane otherwise known as Tamer-Lane when Tamer-Lane was invading the world and the Mongols were Recreating a new world beyond what any Muslim ruler had ever imagined or any European had ever thought because Russia also Fell prey to the Mongol invasions. So Tamer-Lane was an amazing

historical figure and Ibn Khaldun actually interviewed him and in some ways saw him as an embodiment of this asabiyyah from the periphery as it were the Ummulun al-Badhawi, the barbarian civilization that then redefined what was ilmhadari or the civilizational principle of society in the urban sphere. So in a way, Ibn Khadun lived long enough to think about principles of society and the contrast between the soft opulence of the city and the hard rigor of the periphery, and to see in Tamerlane somebody who combined them, because as he himself said, once Tamerlane conquered the city, he himself wanted to be the greatest urban architect.

So even if there is a shift between the rural periphery and the urban core, there's going to be a mixture of the two in what results in Tamerlane and Samarkand. If one wants to see the end result of this mixture of the Elm Hadadi and Elm Badawi, one only has to look at Bukhara and Samarkand, if one wants to see the end result of this mixture of the Elm Hadadi and Elm Badawi, one only has to look at Bukhara and Samarkand, both of which are creations of Tamerlane. Little effort is being made to get at the truth. The critical eye as a rule is not sharp.

Errors and unfounded assumptions are closely allied and are familiar elements in historical information. Blind trust in tradition is an inherited trait in human beings. Occupation with the scholarly disciplines on the part of those who have no genuine claim to them is widespread. But the pasture of stupidity is unwholesome for mankind. No one can stand up against the authority of truth, and the evil of falsehood is to be fought with enlightening speculation. The reporter merely dictates and passes on the material. It takes critical insight to sort out the hidden truth. It takes knowledge to lay truth bare and polish it so that critical insight may be applied to it. Ibn Khaldun, the Muqaddama.

So he was trying to see how there's a pattern where Muslim civilization has strengths that some of its predecessors didn't. And of course, as somebody who's a judge, who's somebody who's very grounded in jurisprudence or fiqh, and who practices what's called Sharia or Muslim law, he thinks of this as the basis for Asabiyya and Islam and is providing a glue, if I can use that metaphor of glue, that keeps society together, but only if there's the integrity and the self-awareness that comes from looking at first principles and not simply at one's privileges. So what was different about him is he was very self-critical

and he uses the term akhla, a-q-l, which literally means intellect, not just as intellect in terms of understanding and providing knowledge and information, but also as self-criticism. Akhila is naqd, the other word in Arabic is naqd, N-A-Q-D. So akhila is also being naqd as criticism, not just of others, not just of past generations, not just of your own contemporaries whom you like or don't like, but also being self-critical and seeing the limits of what one can do in any place in any time. And always when he gets to the point where he's arguing something he says, well I think this is what I believe, he says, wa'ala'alamu s-sawaab, and God alone knows what is the truth. That is a kind of refrain that comes up again and again. And when people do the translation or

they say, well he had this great principle of history, he was kind of the first Adam Smith, or he was the precursor of Max Weber, who was the first sociologist, or he was Arnold Toynbee before Toynbee was ever born. Everybody who wants to put him as the first forgets that he's always also himself first and foremost a Muslim and a devout Muslim. Some people question whether he was a principled Muslim or what people call an orthodox Muslim, but there was no doubt that he was a devout practicing Muslim whether you agree with his creedal and ritual observances or not.

Ibn Khadun's work was taken up selectively, often quietly, well after his death in 1406. The Ottomans used his analysis of civilizational decline as a way to stave off their own. His work shows up often unsighted in Renaissance Europe on historiography. His work is cited by philosophers and sociologists down through the centuries. Economist Arthur Laffer notes Ibn Khaldun's early work on what became known as the Laffer Curve, which illustrates the relationship between rates of taxation and government revenue. Yet for some reason, Ibn Khaldun fails to show up as part of the Western canon. Well, I think there are two reasons. One that's really pretty evident is that he's a 14th,

15th century figure. So when anybody hears 14th and 15th century, they said, oh, that's the medieval ages. Nobody from the medieval ages, other than Copernicus and Galileo, maybe Michelangelo, who are all Western figures, should be retained. And Aristotle, because he's from a classical ancient period, can be retained.

But what I found, even though I've been retired from teaching at Duke now for a decade and still teach out in Istanbul, it's harder and harder to get students to recall all the intervals of history that aren't already well known, like Aristotle from the Greek period or like Ibn Sina or Abbasenna from the early Muslim period. So Ibn Khadun is somebody who if you read anything about Muslim history, as you say, if you're interested in global studies or comparative studies, you will come across Ibn Khaldun. And even somebody like Mark Zuckerberg, when he was trying to do, as he did for a while, Book of the Month Club on Facebook, he had the

Muqaddimah and it got a lot of hits, but most of the hits were people saying, why did you bring this up? Who cares about a 15th century North African thinker? So even Zuckerberg, who after all has a bigger audience than you or me, even he had a hard time getting people to say, listen, take him seriously. He's really a pioneer historian. He really has thought about things differently and more broadly, and with some contemporary application that we all need to understand. There are very few people in the Arabic speaking world, in the Islamic world anywhere who was familiar with his works. The people who were most influenced by them were the Ottomans.

When the Ottomans conquered Egypt, among other things, they got their hands on manuscripts, perhaps even before that. And the Ottomans were interested in Ibn Khaldun's ideas because Ibn Khaldun believed that the sultanate, the sultanate was a principle form of government his day, and the sultans were people he identified as not people who were also religious leaders of the community.

Sultans were for Ibn Khaldun, and this is the first analysis of this phenomenon. Sultans were for Ibn Khaldun, people who come to rule through power and money or through power and force, as he sometimes puts it. One of the principal reasons they're interested in is they thought that Ibn Khaldun's ideas about the decline of the sultanate over four or five generations

might possibly predict the decline of the Ottoman Empire, which didn't make them feel good about the situation Honestly, even though Immanuel is often described as a philosopher of history I think it's a mistake that is to say is he claiming this is valid for all societies at all times and the answer is no I Think this I think the I think myself is the best identity to give him in a modern sense is an historical sociologist. That is to say someone who is looking at a particular, who is

developing a model of a particular social and political system. That is to say that it was just in North Africa because he specifically says that that same dynamic did not exist in the great Islamic cities in the East by which he meant Cairo, Damascus, etc. So in saying that you can see that he's not making the claim that these ideas are valid everywhere. He never talks about historiography in other traditions. He only talks about historiography in the Islamic world. As far as I know, he didn't know Persian, he didn't know, he certainly didn't know Latin or Greek. So his kind of frame of reference is the Arabic-speaking world. But there's no doubt about how we felt about this in his own ideas. So I say he's a

historical sociologist because he's developing a model. That's what sociologists do, right? That's what social scientists do. They develop models to explain certain societies. Some scholars of Ibn Khaldun see a bigger message in his work, one that resonates for them in the kind of multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies common in today's West and around the world. It's a lesson about rethinking alterity or otherness. I would say one of his legacies was also an invitation for us to rethink alterity. Again I said alterity it's very very important and I

live in Berlin, in Europe and I can say that what about those refugees that arrived here in Berlin in 2015? Some of them, because I'm specialized of Aleppo, some of them like Ibn Khaldun of Andalusian descent, they came from Aleppo, but even from Aleppo they have these ancestors from Andalusia, They have these ancestors from Andalusia, and they arrived in Berlin, and there were many Andalusian families in Aleppo after exile. So I think that it's a must to rethink Ibn Khaldun's work. And what I mean is that Ibn Khaldun's life and work invite us to critically discuss and deconstruct existing categories and dichotomies vision of alterity, identity, and otherness. And I think we have to do that. It's an effort, but to reread and to rethink Ibn Khaldun in this way, for our present and for our future,

it's a really a nice invitation. And I think it's good that you asked me about this rethink. And it's very, very important to read again in French, in English, or in Arabic it's better, or even in Turkish, Ibn Khaldun with these new eyes and understanding. And it's very, very important to deconstruct all these categories that was built for a purpose. that was built for a purpose, and again now I use the methodology of Ibn Khaldun to have a critical approach of this construction of categories of societies

and to think why and for what, because it's very very important and I'm very grateful about the work of Ibn Khaldun because al-Tahriti is a way to rethink even our life today and the way we want to build a life together. And I think it's very important, so living together reshaped by a new way to read Ibn al-Hadun. You've been listening to Beware of Bitter Oranges. Thanks to Stephen Dale, Professor Emeritus of South Asian and Islamic History at Ohio

State University. Nora Laffey, Berlin-based researcher on Ottoman history at Leibniz ZMO and professor at Frey University. And Bruce Lawrence, retired professor in religious studies from Duke University and currently an adjunct professor at Ibn Khaldun University in Istanbul. Readings from the Muqaddima, an introduction to history by Ibn Khaldun University in Istanbul. Readings from the Muqaddima, an introduction to history by Ibn Khaldun,

translated by Franz Rosenthal, edited by N.J. Dawoud. This episode was produced by Nahid Mustafa. Technical production, Danielle Duval and Nick Bonnen. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso, senior producer Nikola Lukcic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas and I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC podcasts go to cbc.ca slash podcasts