Why do societies change? Ibn Khaldun's answer

This lesson asks you to outline and compare the key ideas of major theories that explain social change, and to describe the conditions such theories rely on. The curriculum's examples are modern schools of thought, such as functionalism, conflict theory and feminism. The museum offers only one thinker of the medieval Islamic world, Ibn Khaldun, so your class will add the other theories. ¹

Look at the two expectations: they ask for a theory's key ideas and for the conditions it names. For each theory you meet, ask what is changing, what it says makes it change, and what it says holds a society together.

Read one chain of cause and effect closely. In a chapter of the Muqaddima that the museum records, Ibn Khaldun holds that aggression against people's property takes away their hopes of gain, so that their hands recoil from striving ². In his view, when people sit idle from making a living, the markets of settlement go slack, people scatter across the horizons, the population of the region thins, its cities fall into ruin, and the state is disordered; he explains this by saying that the state is a form of settlement that decays with the decay of its matter ². Injustice, for him, is more general than taking property: whoever usurps someone's work, demands something from him without right, or imposes on him what the Law has not imposed, has wronged him ². Notice what he names as the condition, what people hope to gain, and what he names as the change, the ruin of settlement and state.

The records preserve Ibn Khaldun's stated purpose in his opening. He says that the art of history is a noble discipline with many benefits, which makes known the conditions of past nations, prophets and kings, and he takes as the subject of his new science al-Umran, the necessary human association ³. The record of the Muqaddima describes it as a book on the value of the science of history, the verification of its methods, and awareness of the errors that historians fall into ⁴. The Encyclopaedia of Islam article judges that his central concern is the causes of the death of civilizations, and ties this to his sense that he was witnessing a tremendous change ^{5 6}. It adds, of his political adventures, that his Autobiography gives no way to know his real intentions ⁷.

Was he a first? Richard Yeomans counts him the first historian to develop a sociological explanation of history, analysing geographical, climatic, social, economic and moral factors ⁸, and the Mawsu'at A'lam al-Ulama' wa-l-Adaba' calls him the author of the first book on the philosophy of history and human society among the scholars of Arab-Islamic civilisation ⁹. The Encyclopaedia of Islam says more. It says his well-known cyclical scheme is not original in itself, and that although a sentence of his on generations and economic ways of life is often compared with Marx, it is difficult to regard him as a forerunner of materialism, because his explanations are also psychological ⁶. It reports Brunschvig's view that he had no forerunners or successors in Arabic until the contemporary period ¹⁰.

Sort the layers. The first is his own words: the opening and the conclusion of the Muqaddima, and the first-person account in the Ibar of his years of writing for sultans ^{11 12}. The second is later report: al-Sakhawi quotes divergent views of him, including sharp criticism of his judgeship and his history, as others' reports ^{13 14}. The third is modern scholarship: the Encyclopaedia of Islam says that studies of his life and work have produced very varied and even contradictory interpretations ¹⁵, and that no truly critical edition of either work yet existed ⁵. The museum's record of asabiyya describes the bond among the pre-Islamic Arabs from al-Raheeq al-Makhtum and says that the book does not elaborate Ibn Khaldun's theory of the term.

The Encyclopaedia of Islam singles out asabiyya as his most fruitful concept ⁶, and in the chapter above he holds that aggression against people's property ends in the ruin of settlement ². The same article finds in his treatment of conflict a dialectical movement, and says his explanations are also psychological ⁶. Take a position: is one condition, such as injustice or group solidarity, enough to explain why societies change, and what is the strongest objection to your position?

• Ibn Khaldun: his life from Tunis to Cairo, and the judgements passed on him.
• Al-Muqaddima: the book and its conclusion, in which he expects later scholars to add questions bit by bit.
• Asabiyya: the bond of descent and blood, as al-Raheeq al-Makhtum describes it for the Arabs of the Jahiliyya.
• Injustice that ruins settlement: the chain of effect in his own chapter.

Read the records of Ibn Khaldun and of Asabiyya. Write two lines: what Ibn Khaldun says holds a group together, and what he set out to study in the Muqaddima. Then choose a modern theory from your class and write the same two lines.