Ibn Khaldoon: the founding father of sociology

Ibn Khaldoon was born in Tunisiain 732 A.H. to a fairly well-to-do
family who had earlier migrated from Seville in Muslim Spain. His
lineage goes to Yemen which land our hero's family had left in the
company of the army that conquered Spain.
During his childhood in Tunis, IbnKhaldoon must have had his share in
his family's active participation in the intellectual life of the
city, and to a lesser degree, its political life, the household in
which Ibn Khaldoonwas raised was frequented by thepolitical and
intellectual leaders of Western Islam (i.e. North Africaand Spain),
many of whom took refuge there and were protected against angry
rulers.
Ibn Khaldoon led a very active political life before he decided to
write his well-known masterpiece on history. He worked for rulers in
Tunis and Fez (in Morocco), Granada (in Muslim Spain) and Baja (in
Tunisia) successively. At the age of forty-three, Ibn Khaldoon finally
succeeded in crossing over once more to Muslim Spain, not with
ambitious designs of his youth, but as a tired and embittered man with
no purposesave escaping the turmoil of North Africa." Unfortunately,
the ruler of Granada caused Ibn Khaldoon's friend, Ibn Al-Khateeb, to
flee to North Africa. When he learnt of Ibn Khaldoon's attempts to
help his friend, he was expelled from Granada. So he went back to
North Africa to spend four years in seclusion to do some thinking in
peace.
Intellectually, Ibn Khaldoon was well-educated, having studied (in
Tunis first and Fez later) the Quran, Prophet Muhammad's Ahadeeth and
other branches of Islamic studies such as dialecticaltheology,
Shari'ah (Islamic Law orJurisprudence, according to the Maliki
School). He also studied Arabic literature, philosophy, mathematics
and astronomy. Butwe can safely say that Ibn Khaldoon learnt very much
from the school of life in which he actively participated, moving from
place to place and from oneroyal court to another, sometimes at his
own will, but often forced to do so by plotting rivals or despotic
rulers.
Ibn Khaldoon learnt much from his meetings with all sorts of rulers,
ambassadors, politicians and scholars, he came in contact with in
North Africa, Muslim Spain, Egypt and other parts of the Muslim World.
All of these circumstances and experiences seem to have contributed to
the formation of his views on history,culture and society, neatly
expressed in his book on history and concisely summed up in his
well-known master-piece"Al-Muqaddimah ('Prologue')."
The revolutionary views of Ibn Khaldoon have always attracted not only
Arab scholars' attention but the attention of many a Western thinker
as well. In his study of history Ibn Khaldoon was a pioneer in
subjecting historical reports to the two basic criteria of (1) reason
and (2)social and physical laws. He considered the following four
points worthy of consideration instudying and analyzing historical
reports:
1. Relating events to each other through cause and effect.
2. Drawing analogy between the past and the present.
3. Taking into consideration the effect of the environment.
4. Taking into consideration the effect of inherited and economic conditions.
But Ibn Khaldoon's work was more than a critical study of history. It
was, in fact, a study of human civilization in general, its beginning,
factors contributing to its development, and the causes of its
decline. Thus, unwittingly, Ibn Khaldoon founded a new science: the
science of social development or sociology, as we call it today.
"I have written on history a book in which I discussed the causes and
effects of the development ofstates and civilizations, and I followed
in arranging the material of the book an unfamiliar method, and I
followed in writing it a strange and innovative way." These are the
words of Ibn Khaldoon indicating the new interesting method he
followed in the study of history, whereby he created, ineffect two new
sciences: Historiology and Sociology at the same time.
Due to his emphasis on reason and its necessity in judging history and
social events, it has been claimed that Ibn Khaldoon tried to refute
conventional religious knowledge and substitute it with reason and
rational philosophy. The claim is founded on a false premise or
assumption, i.e. that religion and reason are necessarily in conflict
with each other. Naturally, it is true that some religions do
teachthings which are irrational in nature. But this is certainly not
true of Islam which has always encouraged observation and thinking and
condemned the non-believers for not using their reason and thinking.
There are many verses in the Qur'an to this effect.
The close relationship between Ibn Khaldoon's views and Islam are
clearly seen in his remarks on the role of religion in unifying
theArabs and bringing progress and development to their society. We
also see that connection in his opinion on the close affinity between
religion and the state, pointing out that injustice and despotism are
clear signs of the downfall of the state. On philosophy, Ibn Khaldoon
points out that metaphysical philosophyhas one advantage only, which
is to sharpen one's wits. For knowledge of the metaphysical world,
especially in matters of belief, can only be derived from the divine
revelation, i.e. the Quran and the Sunnah.
In education, Ibn Khaldoon was apioneer when he remarked that
suppression and use of force are enemies to learning, and that they
lead to laziness, lying and hypocrisy. He also pointed out to the
necessity of good models andpractice for the command of good
linguistic habits.
Because the era of Ibn Khaldoon was an age of decline for Muslim
civilization, and most of the efforts of scholarship were directed to
collecting, summarizing and memorization of the body of knowledge left
by the ancestors, he severely attacked those unhealthy practices that
led to stagnation and to the stifling of creativity onthe part of
Muslim scholars.
But if Ibn Khaldoon made some interesting contribution to education,
he certainly made a major and pioneering contribution in the fields of
sociological and historical studies. For it was he who pointed to the
necessity of subjecting both social and historical phenomena to
scientific objective analysis. He noted that those phenomena were not
the outcome of chance, but were rather controlled by laws that had to
be discovered and applied in our study of society, civilization and
history. Historians, he remarked, committed errors in their study of
historical events, due to three major factors:
(1) Their ignorance of the naturesof civilization and peoples, (2)
their bias and prejudice and (3) their blind acceptance of reports
given by others.
Ibn Khaldoon pointed out that true progress and development comes
through correct understanding of history, and thelatter can only be
achieved by observing the following:
1) Absolute objectivity, which means that the historian should not be
in any way show prejudicefor or against anyone or any idea.
2) Confirmation and scrutiny of reported information. One shouldlearn
all one can about the historians whose reports one hears or reads. One
should check their morals and trustworthinessbefore accepting their
reports.
3) Not limiting history to the study of political and military news or
to news about rulers and states. For history should include the study
of all social, religious and economic conditions.
These were but a few of the many interesting views left by Ibn
Khaldoon in his famous Al-Muqaddimah ('Prologue') and his book on
history, two masterpieces that have left clear marks on human thought
and its development.

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