The Extraordinary Ordinariness of Ibn Khaldun: The Great Medieval Islamic Historian in Context

22 Historically Speaking January/February 2007 American politicians have become almost frighteningly efficient in enforcing message discipline through the domestic media, diey are arguably less successful than ever at controlling perceptions of America throughout the world. For, as MacLeish argued in proposing the "strategy of truth," the less credible die message coming from the U. S. government and media, the more people in other nations turn to other sources—whether good or bad. MacLeish, like William James, his intellectual forefather in the American pragmatist tradition, believed that "thoughts were things." He regarded ideas not just as derivatives of material forces but as material forces in their own right—precisely the sort of force, one might say from our contemporary vantage point, that flies airplanes into tall buildings. To rediscover Archibald MacLeish, then, is to take seriously George Santayana's other, more famous, aphorism about the relationship between history, memory , and present-day life. Justin Hart is assistantprofessor of history at Texas Tech University. He is the author of "Making Democracy Safefor the World: Race, Propaganda, and the Transformation of U.S. Foreign Policy during World War II, " Pacific Historical Review 73 (2004): 49-84. The Extraordinary Ordinariness of Ibn Khaldun: The Great Medieval Islamic Historian in Context KurtJ. Werthmuller For most instructors of history, particularly those who are given the unenviable task of shepherding glassy-eyed, first-year majors through Introduction to History courses, the name of Ibn Khaldun is a familiar one. His major work, The Muqaddima, the introduction to his multi-volume, universal history, stands as a unique example of premodern historiography. It is articulate and thorough , laid upon a philosophical foundation that is pivotal to our understanding of the formation of premodern historiography. He is also the only Islamic historian with whom most traditional undergraduates are likely to be familiar. However, despite die widespread and well-deserved acclaim for Ibn Khaldun's unique panorama of history, some of the most enlightening lessons of his career are often passed over in favor of our exclusive focus on his historical philosophy . He was a creative thinker and a curious traveler. But he was not alone in the medieval Islamic world in his passion for history, nor was he unique in his penchant for globetrotting. As an Islamic scholar of the High Middle Ages, in fact, Ibn Khaldun 's life and work were most extraordinaryin their ordinariness: they represented a wider Islamic tradition of historiography and an extraordinary geographic and cultural mobility that many of his contemporary uhma ("learned ones," "scholars") colleagues enjoyed throughout their careers . 'Abd al-Rahman Abu Zayd ibn Muhammad ibn Muhammad (not a typo) ibn Khaldun al-Hadrami was born in 1332 into a family of Yemeni ancestry, which had in generations past setded in al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) until the fall of Seville to die Spanish Christian reconquista in the mid-13th century, when they fled to die North African city of Tunis. This scholar-to-be thus grew up in one the most cosmopolitan regions of the Middle Ages, a crossroads of die Mediterranean diat bordered an emerging Europe to the north and a mature Islamic world to the south A portrait of Ibn Khaldun. Ibn Khaldun, Terceme-i mukaddeme-i Ibn Haldun bul, 1858) and east, and which had subsumed many of the Muslim and odier communities forced out of Spain. Ibn Khaldun came of age within diis unique cultural and intellectual context, eventually entering the prestigious field of jurisprudence (fiqh), a complex and dynamic discipline diat had experienced, by diat time, several hundred years of tradition and elaboration. Of utmost importance to his eventual legacy, he discovered in diis tradition a world of like-minded Sunni jurists (fuquhd) that stretched from India to Iberia. He also became well-versed in all die areas of knowledge diat his field and social status expected of him: his role as a jurist required a sound knowledge of Qur'anic and hadith (traditions of the Prophet) studies, but he was also an adib, a cultured man of letters who was as comfortable analyzing poetry and prose as he was interpreting sources of Islamic law. Ibn Khaldun was an excellent scholar in this regard, adding to his...