Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 154 - The Philosophy of History - Ibn Khaldun.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Philosophy of History, Ibn Khaldun. Practically every movie ever made about sports has the same plot. A team of lovable losers gathers around an inspirational leader, overcoming their previous differences and going on what these Hollywood types call a journey of self-discovery. Finally, they must face a seemingly insurmountable foe and are victorious. It's obvious why we like these zeros to heroes narratives. Everyone likes to root for the underdog. But how is it that we find them plausible? Suspension of disbelief is going to be needed if a film like A League of Their Own is going to persuade us that a baseball team featuring Madonna and Rosie O'Donnell could win games, with or without the help of Tom Hanks. We fall for these stories, I think, because we can't help believing in team spirit. Real-world evidence to the contrary, we persist in thinking that togetherness and solidarity can help the underdogs to overcome any height disadvantage in basketball, any fastball-pitching ace, any collection of overpaid mercenaries who play soccer in Manchester. And we're right to believe this according to the 14th century judge, historian, and philosopher Ibn Khaldun. He developed a simple but powerful theory to explain the rise and fall of empires, caliphates, whole civilizations. And the key to his theory is basically team spirit. The Arabic term he uses for this concept is as-sabiya, which comes from a verb meaning to bind or tie together. An as-saba is thus a group of people who are bound together, a league of their own, if you will. When he talked about as-sabiya, Ibn Khaldun especially had in mind the feeling of solidarity and group identity possessed by tribal groups, such as the Arabs who originally spread Islam. Ibn Khaldun believed that this feeling of solidarity is the key to explaining both the rise and the fall of new political powers. Political changes, he argued, come in cycles. At the beginning of each cycle, a group or tribe achieves military and cultural conquest at the expense of some other fading group. They manage this because their feeling of solidarity makes them all but irresistible on the battlefield. Having achieved victory, they hand on power to the next generation which consolidates power. But a taste for luxury sets in leading to inexorable decline. This group becomes the next fading power, ready to be laid low by another tribe, hungry for domination and inspired by their own group feeling. Sound familiar? It should, because what Ibn Khaldun is describing here happened in Andalusia. First, there was the Muslim invasion of Iberia in the early 8th century, powered by Berber military strength. This invasion created a protected realm where the Umayyad Caliphate could survive after the Abbasids rose in the east. The western caliphate succumbed to internal strife and was ripe for the plucking, so the Almoravids came storming from the Moroccan desert to reap the harvest. But within a century, power was wrested from their grip by the next tribal invaders from northern Africa, the Almohads. By the time Ibn Khaldun was born in the year 1332, Almohad control over the western Islamic world, or Maghreb, had already been lost. Christians had succeeded in claiming most of Spain and Portugal, taking the crucial city of Seville in 1248. The south of Spain and the North African lands were still in Muslim hands, but no single power prevailed here. Rather, three groups split control of the lands from Marrakesh to Tripoli. Ibn Khaldun spent much of his very eventful life trying to help someone, anyone, claim unchallenged domination over the Maghreb. At times, he supported the Hafsids, who carried on the Almohad ideology and controlled Ibn Khaldun's home territory of Tunisia. But at one period, he also threw in his lot with the Maranids, who held Morocco. Thanks to a series of political intrigues and embassies, he traveled also to Granada in Andalusia, still under Islamic control. In 1364, he even undertook a diplomatic mission to Seville to meet with the Christian ruler Pedro the Cruel, which coincidentally is what my students call me when they are unhappy with the grades I give them. Ibn Khaldun traveled east too, to Mecca when he made his Hajj, or pilgrimage, and to Damascus. Eventually, he wound up in Cairo, which he recognized as the foremost city of Islamic civilization in his day. He died there in the year 1406. Ibn Khaldun's project as a historian was in part to chronicle and explain the political environment in which he moved. His theory of solidarity, or asabiyyah, has obvious relevance for the rise and fall of successive powers in Andalusia and North Africa. During his own lifetime, Ibn Khaldun thought he might be witnessing the next power to achieve domination through tribal solidarity. At this time, the Mongols were finishing their sweep through the Islamic lands led by the fearsome Tamerlane. Ibn Khaldun even met Tamerlane personally in Damascus in 1401. He expected that Tamerlane's Mongols might invade and crush the existing powers of Northern Africa, just as they had done throughout Central Asia and the Islamic heartlands. Already in 1258, the Mongols had deposed the last Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, and by depose, I mean that they wrapped him in a carpet and had an elephant trample him to death. Ibn Khaldun was nothing if not unsentimental in his appreciation of conquest, so despite the legendary brutality of the Mongol conquerors, he looked forward to the prospect of a united Maghreb under Tamerlane's leadership. It was not to be, thanks to the so-called slave rulers of Egypt the Mamluks who stopped the Mongol invasion, thus preserving the thriving culture that Ibn Khaldun enjoyed in his last years in Cairo. Ibn Khaldun's theory of political cycles, powered by Asa Bia, fits Andalusian history so well that it can easily seem a just-so story, a theory designed to fit a specific historical setting. But he thought it could also explain the fading of the Greeks and the Persians, and perhaps most importantly, the original Islamic conquests in the generations after the prophet Muhammad. The theory is explicitly based on close observation of history, but also meant to be universal in its applicability, and even to have predictive power. Indeed, when you read Ibn Khaldun, you often have the impression that more recent political leaders could learn something from him. He was, for instance, doubtful that one can impose a unified political authority on ethnically and religiously diverse populations. Such power will inevitably be destabilized by expressions of Asa Bia, group solidarity. Had the architects of the new political orders in the wake of World Wars I and II been careful readers of Ibn Khaldun, the rest of 20th century history might have been very different. So, just in case any of you out there are going to be in charge of drawing the borders of a new country anytime soon, let's have a closer look at Ibn Khaldun's theory. It is set out in a lengthy treatise called the Introduction, or Muqaddimah. What it introduces is an even lengthier treatise called Kitab al-Ibar, or The Book of Observations. Ibn Khaldun wrote this monumental history in response to the upheaval of his age. The world as he knew it had just been reshaped by the coming of the plague earlier in the 14th century. It was a good moment to take stock, following the lead of several other historians admired by Ibn Khaldun, such as the earlier At-Tabari and Al-Mas'ud. They likewise authored vast histories that survive today, and give us the basis to produce our own reconstructions of Islamic history. Though Ibn Khaldun does mention such figures with respect, in general he is rather unimpressed by what passes for the writing of history in his day. Too often, it just uncritically repeats fabulous legends. Even the respectable al-Mas'udi tells of how Alexander the Great had himself lowered to the bottom of the sea in a glass box to look at the monsters dwelling there. Ridiculous, says Ibn Khaldun. Not only would anyone who tried to do this run out of air, but even if Alexander had formulated such a plan, he obviously wouldn't have been so foolhardy as to risk his royal person by getting into the box himself. With such passages, Ibn Khaldun attempts to purge history writing of that most familiar of intellectual sins in the Islamic world, taqlid, or the uncritical acceptance of authority. When we are assessing historical reports, common sense is a more important check than the reputation of the sources we are consulting. History should not, in other words, be verified through chains of transmission like reports about the prophet gathered by hadith scholars. It is rather a science. Indeed, Ibn Khaldun himself answers a question you may have been pondering while listening to this episode by telling us why he belongs in this series of podcasts. He insists that history is a branch of philosophy. It shares something with both rhetoric and political theory, but is a unique discipline and one that has never really been practiced correctly, at least until Ibn Khaldun came along. The very fact that he undertook to write a lengthy theoretical introduction to his history is telling. He presents himself as the first historian who has reflected explicitly on what it means to write about history, and who has explained how it should be done. His introduction explains why and how civilizations arise, the factors that explain variation between one society and another, the structures of leadership that inevitably emerge, the cultural practices that arise once people have settled in towns and cities, and so on. Thus, the introduction has a good deal in common with works like Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics. Ibn Khaldun's account of how dynasties rise and fall is reminiscent of Plato's classification of the types of city, corrupting from one type of constitution to another as the generations pass. At a more detailed level, he agrees with Plato, for instance, that the expansion of cities is inextricably linked to luxury. But even if his introduction can be read as a work of political philosophy, Ibn Khaldun is not in the business of arguing for any particular political arrangement. This is not a normative account, an explanation of the best way to run a society. Rather, it is relentlessly descriptive, with Ibn Khaldun occupying the role of the all-seeing detached observer rather than the role of political advocate. This is particularly striking, given that he spent so much of his own life advocating one or another political power in the Maghreb. So, I prefer to see Ibn Khaldun not so much as a political philosopher as a kind of natural philosopher. Searching for the causes that underlie dynastic change, he anatomizes society and history with a practiced empirical eye, the way that Aristotle investigated animal life in his zoological works. Indeed, he frequently stresses that the phenomena he describes are natural. As Aristotle had said, the human is a political animal, solitary life is impossible, or nearly so, for humans. Furthermore, all the key elements of Ibn Khaldun's theory of rise and fall are natural to humankind. It is natural there should be a contrast between the sedentary folk of the city on the one hand and rootless country-dwelling folk like the Bedouin on the other. It is natural that social groups, especially the latter kind who are bound by tribal loyalty, will develop and draw strength from asa bia, the feeling of solidarity. It is natural that single leaders within such tribes will emerge as kings. It is even natural that, once the generation of tribal conquerors has settled down and begun to indulge in city life and its attendant luxuries, decline should set in. Hence, the entire cycle of dynastic change unfolds in accordance with human nature. We can expect each dynasty to go through five stages. First, conquest on the basis of group solidarity. Then, the emergence of a single ruler, followed by a period of wise rule in which the king looks to the good of his tribe. Then, a period of over-confidence and luxury as rule passes to a new generation, and the final inevitable collapse of the dynasty with a new tribal group waiting in the wings to seize control. Ibn Khaldun provides many examples to illustrate his theory. As you might expect, the first generations of Islam provide his favorite example of a nomadic tribe that achieves military conquest. Their success was especially due to religious fervor, an ingredient that can intensify and focus the already potent force of group solidarity. Here, the charismatic leadership of Ibn Tumart, who inspired the Berber Almohad movement, would have provided Ibn Khaldun with another obvious case. But Ibn Khaldun says far more about the early Muslims, dwelling not just on their commitment to the cause of Islam, but also on their unrefined virtue and their illiteracy, which he takes as a hallmark of the earliest generation. Remember that the Qur'an was at first always recited from memory and only later written down under the rightly guided caliphs. At one point, Ibn Khaldun tells of how the early Muslims were nonplussed the first time they encountered a pillow which they took for a bundle of rags. Like an underdog sports team, united by indomitable spirit, these unsophisticated Arabs were able to overcome seemingly impossible odds, time and again defeating far larger military forces. But their unity was short-lived. A story about the fourth caliph Ali makes the point. When critics asked him why the first rightly guided caliphs had ruled by universal agreement, whereas his own leadership was hotly contested, Ali said, Alongside the developing political fractures within the Islamic community, there was an increasing tendency to settle down. This was no coincidence. According to Ibn Khaldun's theory, the victorious group inevitably becomes more sedentary as power is consolidated, often by occupying the cities and towns of the previous fallen dynasty and taking over their customs. This is the cue for the equally inevitable political decline. Illnesses are apt to breed in the bad air of urban centers. And when you see citrus trees growing, says Ibn Khaldun, the end of the dynasty's fortunes cannot be far off, since this presupposes a well-established sedentary culture. In the halls of power, too, it will be clear that the leadership is running out of juice. The ruler will indulge in luxury and seclude himself from the people, wishing to speak only with intimates who have been chosen for their loyalty rather than their ability. The military, of course, likewise weakens, something Ibn Khaldun has observed in the case of the Muslims of Andalusia, who have gone from the conquerors to the vanquished as their armies have shrunk in size. All this may seem to contradict my earlier claim that Ibn Khaldun is merely describing political processes rather than evaluating their merits. The contrast between the harsh virtue of the nomads and the soft decadence of the city-dwellers may seem to be an endorsement of the former and condemnation of the latter. But sedentary culture brings many good things with it, too. In particular, the arts and sciences cannot flourish among the warlike nomads. Philosophy and the other intellectual disciplines are most advanced in the cities that have enjoyed the longest periods of stability. In a previous era, this would have been Alexandria or Baghdad, but in Ibn Khaldun's own day it was Cairo. No surprise, then, that he wound up living there at the end of his life. Conscious though he was of the political vulnerability of urban culture, Ibn Khaldun was an outstanding product of sedentary society. Indeed, he would encourage us to see the history of philosophy itself as an illustration of his theory. It is no surprise, he says, that among Muslims the greatest figures in philosophy and other disciplines, like grammar, have been non-Arabs. Overlooking Al-Kindi and thinking instead of Persians like Avicenna, Ibn Khaldun says that the Arabs were too nomadic to contribute to such a quintessentially sedentary art as philosophy. Because the arts and sciences are a hallmark of the sedentary life, Ibn Khaldun has much to say about them in his introduction. Some of what he says comes as a surprise. So far he has seemed a committed rationalist, an Aristotelian of history who uses empirical observation to devise a universal theory. Yet, he also speaks of such occult phenomena as divination by dreams and prophecy, and states unequivocally that those who enjoy such insight have a resource that outstrips human reasoning. He's highly critical, in fact, of thinkers like Avicenna who try to give naturalistic explanations of prophecy. This fits well with another aspect of Ibn Khaldun's intellectual outlook, his attitude towards Sufism. Here, our evidence points in two apparently contradictory directions. On the one hand, he issued a legal ruling, or fatwa, against recent Sufis like Ibn Arabi, stating that their books should be burned. On the other hand, in his introduction he frequently speaks positively of the Sufis, admiring their ability to achieve a special perception of divine truth closed off to philosophers. He was also linked to Sufi orders and even buried in a Sufi cemetery. There's been a good deal of controversy about this among modern-day scholars. I think the conflict can be resolved by seeing his judgement of Sufism as analogous to his theory of history. He admires the early Sufis, who led lives of simple asceticism like the prophetic companions and kept to themselves any supernatural insights they achieved, but he condemns more recent authors who have spoken openly of the mystical path. This is a corruption of what should have been an honest, straightforward intimacy with God, another slide into decadence and self-indulgence. So, despite his critique of Ibn Arabi and friends, Ibn Khaldun has a good deal of sympathy with the Sufi approach. He even proposes a general critique of rationalistic philosophy that could help vindicate mysticism. According to the Aristotelian philosophers, rational science means thinking universally about things that we have perceived with the senses. Because philosophy always operates with these universal mental conceptions, we can never be sure that there is a perfect match between philosophical teaching and the world of particulars outside. In any case, natural knowledge depends ultimately on our sensory experiences of individual things, so that rational philosophy can never rise above the level of sensation. To do that, an entirely different path is needed, the higher one traveled by saints and prophets. It may seem strange that the relentlessly empirical and critically-minded Ibn Khaldun should favor mystical insight to reason in this way. Yet even his treatment of Islamic history acknowledges the limits of reason. He admits that, however well his theory may describe the rise of Islam, it must make allowance for the genuinely miraculous nature of Muhammad's revelation. He lays down a general rule that tribal forces will be able to overwhelm fading powers only after years of preparation and struggle. It took a decade before the Abbasids were even ready to clash with the Umayyads, for example, so it was a sign of divine intervention that the early Muslim conquests were achieved so rapidly. Only after Muhammad and his early followers passed from the scene did the miraculous character of early Islamic history cease, allowing the usual cycle of dynastic change to play out as normal. In this respect, Ibn Khaldun's introduction gives us a good, well, introduction to the way philosophy will play out in later Islamic history. On the one hand, we will see rational philosophy pursued along Avicenna's lines, with all the intensity of a squad of athletes fired up by a great half-time team talk. On the other hand, philosophers will display the same penchant for skepticism found in Ibn Khaldun, and often on the same basis. Exploiting Avicenna's own rigorous distinction between mental and actual existence, they will wonder whether our mental concepts are an adequate match for things in the outside world. Such skeptical arguments will help make room for the higher kind of perception discussed within mysticism. The abiding question of the later tradition, as we'll see, is not philosophy, yes or no, but rather philosophy, how far can it take us and what will carry us the rest of the way? It would, however, take us too far to turn already to that eastern tradition. We've had a pretty thorough look at philosophy among Muslims in Andalusia now, but that is, at most, half the story. Muslim-controlled Spain and Portugal provided a context in which Jews, too, could contribute to the history of philosophy, and contribute they did. In fact, we are going to need more episodes to cover Jewish thought in Andalusia than we have spent on the Muslim thinkers. We'll be exploring rational Aristotelianism as espoused above all by Maimonides, a resurgence of Neoplatonism in figures like Ibn Gabirol, and a different strand of the mystical tradition in Kabbalistic literature. So, join me again as we take our next Spanish steps by turning to Jewish philosophy in Andalusia, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.