Living together: Ibn Khaldun's society

Look at the expectation: it asks for positions on questions about association and government. Write one question about living together, then find the place in the record that touches it.

Reconstruct an argument. The record of umran gives Ibn Khaldun's reasons for holding that people must live together. First, the power of the individual falls short of obtaining his sustenance alone, so cooperation is necessary ². Second, people need to defend themselves, and to have a restraining authority (wazi') that holds some of them back from others, because of the aggression in their natures ². He also notes that the obligation of prophethood is known through the Law, not through reason, and attributes this to the doctrine of the early generations ². Write the claim, the two reasons, and the step by which the second reason leads from society to authority. Then say which step a critic would attack first.

The place where the records let Ibn Khaldun speak of his work's purpose is the conclusion of the Muqaddima. He apologises for any digressions, says that whoever comes after him, whom God supports with sound thought, will dive deeper into its questions than he wrote, and says that it falls to the one who draws out a discipline to fix its place and arrange its chapters, while later scholars add questions bit by bit ³. The Encyclopaedia of Islam holds that nothing up to then showed he would be remembered as a founder of disciplines ⁴. The records give no statement of why he held that human association is the subject of a science.

The Encyclopaedia of Islam reports that his life has been judged variously and rather severely, since he openly records his changes of allegiance and has been accused of fickleness and lack of patriotism ⁴. It argues that such charges presuppose an idea of allegiance to a country that scarcely existed then, and that he should be judged by the standards of his own time ⁴. It also suggests, without claiming proof, that his adventures could be read as a calculated search for a group feeling strong enough to save a civilization he thought dying, and adds that his Autobiography gives no way to know his real intentions ⁴.

The records show the Muqaddima in pieces. The record of the book describes it from its conclusion ³. The record of umran draws on two passages ^2 5, and says that the number of a verse it mentions needs a further source. The map of the whole comes from the Encyclopaedia of Islam, which sets out six long chapters: human society and the influence of environment; nomadic civilization; states, government and institutions; urban civilization; crafts and economic affairs; learning, literature and culture ⁶. The first of them concerns human society in general.

In the six chapters the Encyclopaedia of Islam describes, an account of human society comes before the account of states. If a historian begins from why people must live together, what changes in the way he writes about rulers and wars? Take a position: how would you answer the strongest objection, that a chronicle of rulers and wars can be written without any theory of society?

• Ibn Khaldun: his life, the judgements on it, and the Encyclopaedia of Islam's account of his method.
• Umran: human association as the subject of his science, with his reasons for it.
• Al-Muqaddima: the book, as its conclusion describes it.