An insight into the medieval Muslim mind

At a press conference in October 1981, Ronald Reagan quoted Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) in support of what is known as supply-side economics. Although the 14th- century politician and thinker wrote extensively about economics and was almost unique among medieval Arab writers in so doing, it is quite ‘marvellous’ writes Robert Irwin, the author of a new intellectual biography of this famous North African, that he ‘should have anticipated American Republican party fiscal policy’.

Irwin wears his immense erudition lightly and gives an often very funny account of how orientalists, historians and modern Arab nationalists have interpreted Ibn Khaldun’s most famous work, the Muqaddima (also known as the Prolegomena) more often than not to suit their particular assumptions. Six centuries after his death, the man of whom the French orientalist Émil-Félix Gautier declared‘il est unique, il écrase tout, il est genial’ continues to be all things to all men. Irwin quotes Michael Brett, an expert on medieval African history who had come to the following conclusion: ‘That Ibn Khaldun continues to mean all things to all men is a measure of his greatness as well as of his ambiguity.’ Ibn Khaldun’s readiness to analyse, theorise and produce generalisations based on evidence gives his writing ‘the perhaps deceptive appearance of modernity’.

The early 19th-century Austrian orientalist Joseph von Hammer believed Ibn Khadoun was ‘an Arab Montesquieu’. Gautier, who taught at the university of Algiers a century ago and deeply despised Arab and Berber culture, stripped Ibn Khaldun of what he saw as his ‘superficially medieval identity’ to reveal him, as Irwin puts it, to be ‘in reality a modern Frenchmen and one moreover who would have approved of the French empire in North Africa’. Needless to say, this is a complete travesty of a deeply religious man who throughout his life expressed great admiration for Berber culture and the Berber monarchs he served in Tunis, Tlemcen, Fes and Granada.

The historian Arnold Toynbee developed the idea that civilisations develop or fail according to a cycle of challenges and responses and found Ibn Khaldun’s pessimism as attractive as his moralising portrait of the inevitable cycle of political decay brought about by luxury and greed.