Ibn Khaldun viewed himself as primarily a historian, albeit one deeply steeped in Islamic learning and jurisprudence. His day job was as a court politician, who worked as an advisor to and judge for various sultans, sheikhs, and warlords. As such, he was sometimes in positions of great power but, when the winds of fortune shifted, he was also often sent to prison or into exile. It was in 1375, during the start of a four year semi-self-imposed exile, that he began his greatest work, the Muqaddima. “Ibn Khaldun sought the protection of a powerful tribe in the hinterland and, for reasons that are mysterious, the Alad ‘Arif, the leading clan of the Suwayd Arab confederacy in western Algeria and the subjects of the Merinid ruler, welcomed Ibn Khaldun with open arms and lent him a castle, Qal’at Banu Salama…. In the Qal’at Banu Salama, far from libraries and intellectual companionship, this Arab Prospero was to write for the next four years before returning to Tunis where he could check his facts in the city’s libraries…. His withdrawal from politics could be compared to the Sufi practice of khalwa, a temporary withdrawal from society in order to meditate, though Ibn Khaldun’s meditations were focused specifically on how God worked in the world through social processes…. Though he started with a study of the Berber and Arab tribes of North Africa, subsequently the Muqaddima and the ‘Ibar expanded into a comprehensive account of civilization and social organization.”
Ibn Khaldun was a conservative and an elitist, even for his time. He looked back to the period of Muhammad and the first four Caliphs with nostalgia and reverence. “The most famous and perhaps the central thesis of the Muqaddima is that, in the harsh conditions of desert life, tribal groups of necessity develop a special kind of group solidarity which Ibn Khaldun called ‘asabiyya…. ‘Asabiyya was defined in medieval Arabic dictionaries as “a strong attachment, which holds several persons closely united by the same interest or the same opinion.”” Ibn Khaldun admired the Bedouin way of life. Although an urbanist himself, he praised the rustic spartanism of nomadic culture as opposed to the decadence of cities. Foremost, he celebrated tribalism. “Ibn Khaldun argued that group solidarity, together with the tribesmen’s hardihood and courage gave the tribes who possessed [‘asabiyya] a military advantage…. But within a few generations, perhaps three, maybe four, these conquering tribesmen lost their ‘asabiyya and became civilized. They succumbed to luxury, extravagance, and leisure. Soft urban life led to degeneracy…. [The ruler’s] regime would fall to an assault by the next wave of puritanical tribesmen from the desert.” This was the cyclical nature of conquest and rule that Khaldun expounded in the Muqaddima. Anthropologist Ernest Gellner summed it up, “Characteristically the tribe is both an alternative to the state and also its image, its limitation and the seed of a new state.”
For Ibn Khaldun, all history derived from Islamic precepts. All life was consumed by religion. “Ibn Khaldun defined theology (kalam) as the science “that involves arguing with logical proofs in defence of the articles of faith and refuting innovators who deviate in their dogmas from the early Muslims and Muslim orthodoxy.”” He was a doctrinaire Ash’arite, who traced his scholarly lineage back generations. “Ibn Khaldun, who was an Ash’arite, also described al-Ghazali as an Ash’arite—that is to say a scholar who followed the tenth-century theologian Abu a’l-Hasan al-Ash’ari in using rational argumentation in favor of Islamic orthodoxy…. According to Ash’arite doctrine, God’s omnipotence meant that “everything good and evil is willed by God. He creates the acts of men by creating in men the power to do each act.”” Although tempted, Khaldun tried to steer clear from any causal hypotheses. Instead, Khaldun admonished, “We were forbidden by the Lawgiver (Muhammad) to study causes. We were commanded to recognise the absolute oneness of God.”
Out of the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence, Ibn Khaldun subscribed to Maliki law. “Fez was the chief center of the teaching of the Maliki madhhab. A madhhab (literally “way followed” or “doctrine”) is a school of fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence…. Malikism was the dominant madhhab throughout the Maghreb and Andalusia…. The Maliki madhhab’s name derived from its founder, Malik ibn Anas (d. 796). In his treatise, the Muwatta’ (The Well-Trodden Path), Malik, a practicing judge, had summarized and systematized the views and practices of the jurists of eighth-century Medina…. The Muwatta’ contained some 1,700 hadiths.” According to Khaldun, “[Malik] was of the opinion that by virtue of their religion and traditionalism, the Medinese always necessarily followed each preceding generation of Medinese, in respect of what they cared to do or not to do.” This chain of knowledge was all important to Khaldun, who respected the verbal wisdom of past scholars more than book learning or self-mastery. “Independent judgement no longer had any role in Islam, if it ever had, and adherents to a particular madhhab simply had to obey what was handed down by tradition.” Khaldun stated, “It should be known that the science of the principles of jurisprudence is one of the greatest, most important, and most useful disciplines of the religious law.”
Finally, although never mentioned explicitly by Khaldun himself, Irwin makes the case that Khaldun was probably a Sufi. “Sufis who belong to tariqas (Sufi orders or brotherhoods) trace the origin of their tariqa through an initiatory chain of mystical shaykhs, all the way back to ‘Ali and through him to the Prophet…. The earliest Sufis were individual ascetics and there were at first no Sufi tariqas. The tariqas started to form around the early thirteenth century…. In fourteenth-century North Africa Sufism was so pervasive that it came close to becoming Sunni orthodoxy.” Khaldun wrote in the Muqaddima, “The Sufi approach is based upon constant application to divine worship, complete devotion to God, aversion to false splendour of the world, abstinence from the pleasure, property, and position to which the great mass aspire, and retirement from the world into solitude for divine worship.” He also compared the relationship of a Sufi obedient to his shaykh as “like a corpse in the hands of its washer.” Ibn Khaldun, pessimistic to the end, maintained, “The purpose of human beings is not only their worldly welfare. This entire world is trifling and futile. It ends in death and annihilation.”
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