I have been interested for more than a decade, in a somewhat casual and amateurish way, in the thinking of Ibn Khaldun, the 14th century Islamic (more specifically, Maghrebian) jurist, politician, and thinker. His great work, the work by which he is remembered, is the Muqaddimah, a massive three-volume work on the nature of history and how human societies are born, flourish, decay, and die. What's amazing is that the Muqaddimah is actually only the "Introduction" or "Preface" to a much longer history of the world. (Hardly anyone has read that, as it is quite dry and seemingly only distantly informed by the vision laid out in the Muqaddimah.)
Khaldun's work is available in English, to a degree, and I believe his thought is relatively accessible in the translations that I have encountered, as well. The three-volume English translation (by the great Orientalist Franz Rosenthal) of the entire Muqaddimah came out in the 1950s, and is now hard to get; the one-volume paperback abridged edition of that translation, however, is readiliy accessible. In a civilized world, every college student would encounter this in their education. (Of course, my sense of an adequate undergraduate education would take most of us eight or so years to complete.) There are a number of nice summaries or introductions to Khaldun's work, such as this piece in the UK journal "Philosophy Now" from a few years ago. And there are a number of nice books about Khaldun in English now, too (though I think there has been historically much more in French). Here is a brief Q&A with Robert Irwin, who recently wrote a biography of Khaldun (usefully reviewed in the NYROB by Malice Ruthven, if you can get it from behind the paywall). I agree with one of the reviewers that Irwin's book is a bit too historicizing of Khaldun, that "Irwin has snatched the Muqaddima from the modernists and returned it to the medievalists," which is a polite way of saying that Irwin is a grasping and vinegary medievalist who doesn't want anyone to think that they could learn from Khaldun and apply it to their own world. Which, of course, is precisely what Khaldun wouldn't have wanted. But the way that historicism is radically self-consuming is a topic for another post.
Here what I wanted to do is suggest a really wild analogy, the kind that would make Irwin's head explode. Here it is, in brief: Khaldun's basic story (not structurally dissimilar from Polybius, in fact) is that there is a cyclical dynamic process of emergence, flourishing, stagnation, decay and collapse that marks human social orders. Others (like Polybius) noted structural patterns like this as well. Where Khaldun is very distinctive, however, is in the role he ascribes to different agents in this process. Urban populations are the center of civilization and decay, specatularly opulent, gifted, and refined, but caught in corruption, anomie and lassitude. Tribesmen and nomads on the edges of society, fuelled by fellow-feeling (a huge conversation on his analysis of this fellow-feeling--which he signifies by the philosophically and Quranically important word asabiya--could be had here, but let's not have it), are the dynamic energies that finally kill old orders and initiate new ones. So there's a constant churn, from the edges to the center, in Khaldun's account.
This is all so massively quick that I'd pull out my hair if I had any hair to pull out, but stay with me. (I'm not even talking about him about cities, which is another thing of interest.) For now, two points, one in passing and one not.
One thing in passing: This pattern is really interesting, and there is an interesting way in which ibn Khaldun noted a process that Homi Bhabha (in his The Location of Culture) made famous in the 1990s with his proposal that creative activity happens at the margins and moves to the center. (If that is a fair account of one stream of Bhabha's work. And you can find a similar account in Borges's analysis of the value of being a geographically marginal writer in his essay "The Argentine Writer and Tradition," from the 1930s. Some postcolonial theorists have realized this, but more remains to be done on that front. Borges is amazing; I wonder if he ever read ibn Khaldun, I bet he would have delighted in him.)
But the big thing is this. Khaldun's picture of the dynamics of social order emerged in the Maghreb, right as the trans-Saharan gold trade was about to decline. The Portugese were about to use naval power to get around the Sahara via the Atlantic--another kind of desert altogether--and get at the gold from the south. That meant that the Saharan tribes, which had heretofore had a central role in Mediterranean littoral civilization--at least as an essential force for trade--and thus had wealth and power, were now cut out of the network. Left to sit in the sand, rot in the desert, die on the vine. They became unimportant, from the 15th century on, and no more rebellions fuelled by asabiya emerged from the desert after that. The social story Khaldun tells, that is, is the story of his world's past, but not its future.
But the past that his story tells is not just the past of the Maghreb--it may be the past of humanity on the Eurasian landmass more generally.
Here's why this is interesting to me. Consider the rise of large historical accounts, such as Janet Abu-Lughod's Before European Hegemony from 1991 and John Darwin's After Tamerlane from 2007. These books (and others like them) have had immense impact in re-situating the course and significance of history. By de-provincializing European history and setting it in a larger context spatially (Eurasia) and temporally (back to the end of the first millennium AD, often), they allow us to see things in a bigger context. What do we see in that bigger context? Many things, but in part how small is the tidal pool of Europe on the Great Barrier Reef of Eurasia. And how much events we thought were cthonic and organic to Europe were actually epiphenomenal on other things, far away in space or time. It's a great practice to re-read history in this way; I recommend those books (and I recommend reflecting, as they tacitly invite you to, on what exactly "history" is supposed to teach us).
But specifically for me, what is especially interesting in this kind of new historiography is the way it suggests a powerful dynamic at work in Eurasia: the dynamic of center and periphery. Here I found Chris Beckwith's Empires of the Silk Road enormously, perhaps dangerously, suggestive. He argues that the "nomadic tribes" and peoples of the interior of Eurasia, from the Scythians through the Mongols, were actually really important and wealthy people, and the marginal communities--China, India, the Middle East, Europe--flourished only on terms largely set by the central peoples. This was because the marginal peoples had to use the central peoples as the "middlemen." Then, in the fifteenth century, everything changed; with the rise of Portugese long-range navigation, ships could bypass Central Eurasia, circumnavigate the mass of Africa, and offer direct contact between, say, Lisbon and Macau. Ever since then, we've seen the withering of the Central peoples as the marginal peoples have been able to enrich themselves, using the highway of the oceans.
In other words, Khaldun's account is an analysis, in part, of Eurasia before Henry the Navigator changed it entirely. Now we live in another kind of world entirely.
Ibn Khaldun, the great theorist of Eurasian premodernity? Anyway, it's something to think about.