Int. J. Middle East Stud. 38 (2006), 431451.

Printed in the United States of America

DOI: 10.1017/S0020743806383055
Stephen Frederic Dale
IBN KHALDUN: THE LAST GREEK AND THE
FIRST ANNALISTE HISTORIAN
Despite the attention that scholars have lavished on Ibn Khalduns Muqaddima, the histo-
riographical significance of that remarkable work is still not well understood.
1
Scholars
continue to discuss the Muqaddima largely within the context of Islamic historiography,
even though most of them regard it as an anomaly that differs fundamentally from the
works of other Muslim historians.
2
In certain respects, the Muqaddima belongs to an
Islamic historical tradition, that of al-Tabari and al-Mas

udi. Yet, its dominant intellectual

lineage is the rationalist thought that stretches from the Peripatetic philosophers, and
especially from Aristotle (384322 BCE), through such GrecoIslamic thinkers as al-
Farabi (870950 CE), Ibn Sina (9801037 CE), and Ibn Rushd (11261198 CE) onward to
European philosophical historians and sociologists of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.
It is precisely because Ibn Khaldun (13321406 CE) used the logical apparatus and
materialist assumptions of this rationalist tradition as the conceptual basis for his new
historical science that he can be characterized as the last Greek historian. He can be
considered the first Annaliste historian because the same Greek philosophical heritage
influenced both the sociologist

Emile Durkheim, who wrote his Latin dissertation on
Montesquieu (16891755 CE), and also Durkheims student, Marc Bloch, the cofounder
of the Annales School. This heritage is also visible in an attenuated form in Fernand
Braudels distinction between the longue dur ee and the history of events. Indeed, Ibn
Khaldun developed what modern scholars would identify as a structuralist methodology,
using classical logic to identify enduring socioeconomic realities underlying cultural
phenomena and ephemeral events, what he describes as the general conditions of
regions, races and periods that constitute the historians foundation.
3
Many 20th century scholars in both the Middle East and Europe have alluded to Ibn
Khalduns rationalist inheritance when they observed that he used what seems to be
a preternaturally modern approach to the study of history and society. Sociologists in
particular frequently have claimed himas the precursor, if not the founding father, of their
discipline.
4
Yet, their perception, while valid, constitutes only an imperfectly expressed
intuition rather than an explanation for the similarity in their approaches to the study of
human society. The primary reason why scholars have not parsed out the Muqaddimas
rationalist structure seems to be their preoccupation with the cyclical theory Ibn Khaldun
Stephen Frederic Dale is Professor in the Department of History at Ohio State University, 230 West 17th
Avenue, Columbus, Ohio 43210-1367, USA; e-mail: dale.1@osu.edu.
2006 Cambridge University Press 0020-7438/06 $12.00
432 Stephen Frederic Dale
proposed to explain the chaotic history of 14th century Spain and North Africa. This
compelling dialectical model is the subject of nearly all writing on the Muqaddima from
Ottoman times to the present.
5
Largely overlooked in this understandable fascination
with the theory are the concepts and mode of argument Ibn Khaldun used to generate
the model. Yet, when Ibn Khaldun claimed to be founding a new historical science, he
referred to a methodology that he designed to be universally applicable for all periods
and regions and not one that could only be used to explain the history of his homeland
and era.
Muhsin Mahdi, the author of the seminal intellectual biography of Ibn Khaldun, is
the only scholar who offered at least a partial explanation of Ibn Khalduns approach,
when he said that it was based on the mant
.
iq, the logic of Aristotle and noted, inter
alia, that Ibn Khaldun used logical terminology for subtitles of his text.
6
Mahdi argued
more particularly that Ibn Khaldun relied upon burh an, demonstration or proof, the
premier form of deductive logic that is based upon absolute propositions. However, after
making this crucial observation, Mahdi turned away from a systematic analysis of Ibn
Khalduns methodology to summarize his theory of historical change. Consequently,
his vital insight has made little lasting impression on subsequent discussions of the
Muqaddima, because it is impossible to understand Ibn Khalduns assumptions and
methodology simply by knowing that he believed in the explanatory power of burh an.
Although he used syllogistic logic, Ibn Khaldun also employed an extensive arsenal of
philosophical concepts and logical procedures that were known in the western Islamic
world of the 14th century. These concepts included not only burh an but istiqr a

, inductive
reasoning; a whole range of Aristotelian ideas about the intellect, the physical world, and
human society; and Ptolemys and Galens assumptions about the determining influence
of environment and diet.
7
In using these ideas to forge the template of his methodology,
Ibn Khaldun did invent a new science, as he claimed, or a new subject within science,
by introducing a philosophical approach to historical writing that was absent in the work
of Herodotus (484c. 425 BCE) and Thucydides (c. 360c. 395 BCE). Aristotle would not
have said of the Muqaddima what he pointedly remarked about Greek historical writing,
that it was not a science because it dealt only with particulars.
8
Ibn Khaldun was heir to Greek philosophical thought that encompassed the
works of Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, the neo-Platonists, Ptolemy, and Galen (c. 129c.
216 CE).
9
Although his initial education by his father was a traditional Islamic one that
included Qur

anic studies, hadith, jurisprudence, and Arabic poetry, as a young man in

his teens in Tunis, he studied with Muhammad b. Ibrahim al-Abili, a scholar who had
been profoundly influenced by the thought of Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (850925 CE) and
Ibn Sina.
10
With al-Abili, he studied mathematics, logic, and possibly metaphysics and,
based upon the knowledge of al-Abilis methods, probably encountered many of these
subjects in the works of al-Razi, Ibn Sina, and Ibn Rushd. At least it is known that
Ibn Khaldun studied al-Razi during these years, for his abridgment of the philosophers
work, Lubab al-muhassal fi usul al-din, survives in an autograph copy dated 1351 CE,
when Ibn Khaldun was nineteen years old.
11
His commentary reveals his youthful
attachment to philosophy, because in it he adopts Nasir al-Din Tusis critique of al-
Razis interpretation of Ibn Sina. Apart from this one text, it is impossible to identify
precisely the works he studied with al-Abili. However, based upon his references in the
Muqaddima, it is clear that, before he wrote that work in 1377, he had studied Aristotles
The Last Greek and the First Annaliste Historian 433
thought, quite likely in the epitomes meticulously prepared by Ibn Rushd and Platos
Republic, either through Ibn Rushds commentaries or those of al-Farabi. It is important
to understand that in his Long Commentaries, Ibn Rushd reproduced every word of
Aristotles texts.
12
Ibn Khaldun, in turn, wrote epitomes of Ibn Rushds works. He was
also familiar with al-Farabis logical works and the writings of Ibn Sina. His knowledge
of neo-Platonism may derive from either man. It is also important to recognize that Ibn
Khaldun derived his rationalism more immediately from, as Muhsin Mahdi puts it, the
purer Aristotelianism of al-Farabi . . . and Averroes [than that of Ibn Sina].
13
He also
was familiar with Ptolemys Almagest and Galens De Usu Partium.
14
THE M ETHODOLOGY
When at the beginning of the Muqaddima Ibn Khaldun asserts that history isor should
berooted in wisdom or philosophy (h
.
ikma), he is not merely telling his readers that
historians ought to be learned and thoughtful individuals. He means they must analyze
the past rather than just reporting events and asserts they should do so rationally by using
GrecoIslamic logical methodologies. Ibn Khalduns model was the Muslimrationalists
First Teacher, Aristotle, who said that philosophers should ground the science of any
particular subject, be it biology or physics, in the identification of fundamental truths.
As Aristotle wrote in the Physics:
When the objects of an inquiry . . . have principles, causes or elements, it is through acquaintance
with these that knowledge and understanding is attained. For we do not think we know a thing
until we are acquainted with its primary causes or first principles.
15
Such first principles were the special truths or the universals of each discipline.
Once they were known, Aristotle said, philosophers could move from universals to
particulars, for it is a whole that is more knowable to sense-perception.
16
These
principles or axioms were established through induction, and as Aristotle remarked in
the Nicomachean Ethics, Now induction is of first principles and of the universal and
deduction proceeds from universals.
17
Ibn Khaldun advocates exactly this procedure for his newly defined science of civiliza-
tion or human society. He indicates his intent to create a new science or discipline within
the broader field of philosophical inquiry when, in his opening line, he identifies his
history as a fann, signifying here a new branch or subset of philosophical knowledge.
18
He then applies Aristotelian logic to construct his dialectical model that explains the
underlying realitythe structureof North African and Iberian history. However, his
methodology is not as clear as it might be because neither Middle Eastern commentators
nor European translators systematically explain the philosophical significance of his vo-
cabulary. Just as his opening statement may be understood to mean merely that historians
should be thoughtful individuals, so much of the rest of the text makes sense without
understanding GrecoIslamic philosophical terminology. The Muqaddima, therefore,
must be read with a philosophical glossary such as al-Farabis Lexicon, for many of
Ibn Khalduns terms do have multiple meanings, and the philosophical import of his
vocabulary cannot easily be decoded with a common dictionary.
19
This problem is
exemplified by an abbreviated version of the overall title of the work, the Kitab al-

ibar, although in this particular case, Muhsin Mahdi analyzed the word

ib ars multiple,
434 Stephen Frederic Dale
related meanings. He only failed to mention that the related term,

ib ara, was one that

Muslim rationalists used to translate Aristotles work on hermeneutics.
20
Then there is the actual muqaddima or Introduction to the Kitab al-

ibar. In the
usual sense, it simply means introduction; and, as noted above, it originally meant just
the Introduction to Book 1.
21
Yet, later in life, Ibn Khaldun himself applied the word
to the entire text now known as the Muqaddima, a suggestive usage as muqaddima in
philosophical usage signifies a premise or proposition. In al-Farabis lexicon the
term has, in various modified forms, sixty-three related meanings such as categorical
and analytical propositions.
22
Although Ibn Khaldun does not explain his title, it seems likely that he had the
philosophical significance of muqaddima in mind when he later gave the word as the
title for the Preface, Introduction, and Book 1 of the Kitab al-

ibar. This seems plausible

because, in the text, he identifies several generally acknowledged truths or propositions
about human society that would justify the title. These propositions can be interpreted
as muqaddim at al-yaqny at, absolute propositions that he proposes as the axiomatic
basis for volumes 2 and 3 of his history. In GrecoIslamic philosophy such absolute
propositions or
Certain propositions . . . are the principles of the theoretical sciences . . . , the universal propositions
that correspond to the existing things that we accept and believe. They are used by every one of
us based on his own [sense of] certainty, as they correspond to [the real] state of affairs without
relying on the evidence of anyone else.
23
In the Muqaddima, Ibn Khaldun asserts that identifying absolute propositions constituted
the first step in developing his new historical science, a science of society that was based
upon an understanding of the real state of affairs in human society.
Ibn Khalduns intent can be more easily inferred from each chapter heading in the
Muqaddima. As Muhsin Mahdi has observed, but without further comment, Ibn Khaldun
punctuated each chapter heading with a technical philosophical phrase. In the first
three chapters, he used phrases that indicate the propositional nature of the following
discussion, which for chapter 1 is premises or propositions (muqaddim at). As a
plural, the word here cannot mean introduction, and in fact, the chapter contains
several widely accepted truths about climate and diet that were givens among Greco
Islamic thinkers and are, as will be discussed below, axioms for Ibn Khalduns subsequent
analysis of civilization. The title of chapter 2 concludes with two words: one of which,
us ul, is a synonym for axioms, and preliminaries or preambles, tamhd at. Whether
Ibn Khaldun used us ul simply as a synonym or whether he used it to convey a subtle
philosophical point is not apparent and might only be determined by an exhaustive study
of how Muslim authors use GrecoIslamic philosophical terminology. In chapter 3, Ibn
Khaldun uses terms that he may have intended as synonyms for the previous chapter
heading, but which in this case seem to be borrowed specifically from mathematical
usage. Instead of us ul and tamhd at, he uses bases, as in geometry (qaw a

id) and
complements or integrants (mutammim at).
He alters his phraseology in the chapter headings for chapters 4 and 5 reflecting,
evidently, the secondary philosophical significance of these sections, whose lesser im-
portance he has already alluded to in his discussion of the organization of Book 1.
24
Ibn
Khaldun concludes these headings with the following terms: antecedents (saw abiq)
The Last Greek and the First Annaliste Historian 435
and accessories or annexes (law ah
.
iq) for chapter 4 and questions or problems
(mas a

il) for chapter 5. In the heading for chapter 6, Ibn Khaldun uses muqaddima
once again, which here is ambiguous, as his initial explanation of mans ability to
think might be seen as just an introduction to the following discussion of disciplines
such as jurisprudence, speculative theology, mathematics, and poetryand alchemy and
sorcery. On the contrary, he might intend it to be the proposition or axiom that is the
necessary basis for these skills. He undoubtedly alludes to them in the second term he
appends to this chapter heading, law ah
.
iq, meaning here as it evidently did in chapter 4,
accessories or annexes.
In the same opening passage in which Ibn Khaldun states that history should be a
philosophical science, he also indicates how his readers could identify muqaddim at, the
fundamental axioms of the world and the bases of further historical analysis. In that
passage, he says that history conducted philosophically involves inquiry or specula-
tion (naz
.
ar), another word that has an everyday meaning as seeing or vision but
which in some contexts means insight or reflection.
25
Ibn Khaldun uses the word
in a technical sense to mean philosophical speculation. Naz
.
ar is thus a manifestation
of the speculative or theoretical intellect, the third and most sophisticated level of
thought that Ibn Khaldun explains in the sections of chapter 6 titled Mans ability
to think and The science of logic.
26
In these sections, he describes this intellect,
the

aql al-naz
.
ar, as the uniquely human ability to acquire true knowledge, that is
the knowledge of Aristotelian universals, (al-

amm) and the essence, (al-dh at) or

substance ( jauhar) of those particular things. One of the critical, logical steps in this
process is the unceasing comparison of things to determine whether they are species of
the same genus, that is, particular aspects of a universal.
27
This process finally results in
the conceptualization of existence (tas
.
awwur al-wuj ud) as a whole or, in the case of
living things, the subject of Ibn Khalduns science of human society, an understanding
of the natures of existent beings ( t
.
ab a

al-k a

in at).
28
These natures represent the
Greek physis, for Aristotle the essence of some living thing, which also has a telos
or form.
29
The fundamental difference between this type of philosophical research and
the methods of narrative historians is that, when the latter reported political news or
stories of events, they described, Ibn Khaldun says, using another GrecoIslamic or
Aristotelian concept, forms denuded of their substance.
30
Having established or perceived the nature of things, philosophical historians could
then move logically to the next step and identify the secondary attributes of any particular
human society. Ibn Khaldun characterizes these attributes, again in Aristotelian terms, as
essential accidents (

arad
.
dh at). Thus, in his Foreword to Book 1, Ibn Khaldun tells
his readers that he has commented on civilization and its essential accidents.
31
Franz
Rosenthal translates the phrase essential accidents as essential characteristics, a
meaningful phrase by itself but another instance in which the philosophical significance
of Ibn Khalduns language has been lost. These accidents are attributes of essences
we know by nature, and for Aristotle and his Muslim acolytes, there were two kinds
of accidents: essential and nonessential. Ibn Rushd illustrated this basic Aristotelian
concept with a geometrical example, the axiomatic science par excellence for the Greeks.
He explained that, although humans perceive instantly or axiomatically, that is induc-
tively, that a triangle is a three-sided figure, they have to learn or reason that its essential
(or proximate) accident is that all its angles add up to 180 degrees.
32
The Iranian
436 Stephen Frederic Dale
mathematician,

Umar Khayyam, explicitly cites Aristotle as his authority when he
discusses this idea. He writes: And it is known from the work On Demonstration
[Aristotles Posterior Analytics] belonging to the science of logic, that every demonstra-
tive art has a subject of which the essential accidents and so on are studied.
33
Nonessen-
tial accidents are adventitious attributes, characteristics not necessarily connected with a
things essencesuch as color. In geometry, an essential accident is a theorem, but for Ibn
Khaldun, the essential accidents comprised royal authority, government, occupations,
crafts, and sciences. Laws for him were also necessary accidents, reflecting as they do,
the peculiarity or nature of a particular human society or civilization. They are, in
effect, what Europeans later termed natural laws.
These are the first two things that historians had to understand: human societies
had particular natures and these natures or essences each had necessary secondary
characteristics, the essential accidents that reflected or manifested their fundamental
natures. If historians knew the nature or essence of a civilization and its necessary
accidents, Ibn Khaldun argues, then they had a basic rule or guide, a q an un, for evaluating
historical information connected with these essences and accidents.
34
Some of these
judgments were a matter of deductive reasoning, most particularly burh an, syllogisms
that possessed primary true, certain universal premises.
35
However, Ibn Khaldun also
cautioned against using logic for proof in the manner of religious scholars. He pointedly
remarked that the process of qiy as or analogical reasoning was subject to error.
36
Ulama in particular, Ibn Khaldun believed, were prone to error, perhaps drawing on
his own considerable knowledge of Malakite law. He pejoratively characterizes their
reasoning as al-qiy as al-fiqh and goes on to explain that, although the ulama too used
speculation to formulate universals, due to their preference for scholarship and their
limited knowledge of politics,

alims sought to make the outside world conform to
their ideas rather than the reverse.
37
If, he suggests from comments elsewhere, that
ulama became familiar with the differences in places and periods and made use of
comparison, or muh
.
ak a, to judge historical reports against such knowledge, they would
have been better historians. Overall then, Ibn Khaldun advocated a methodology that
was a complex interactive dynamic of inductive and deductive reasoning informed at all
times by personal experience and an encyclopedic knowledge of the differences in time
and place in world history.
Methodology and Theory in North Africa
It is not the purpose here to reiterate all the details of Ibn Khalduns cyclical theory.
However, it is useful to understand the outlines of how he applied his methodology to
his particular subject, the human societies or civilizations of North Africa and Spain, for
the implications of his cyclical theory cannot be fully grasped without this knowledge.
It is worth citing Franz Rosenthals prescient observation, derived from his grammatical
analysis of Ibn Khalduns full title, that The grammatical connection is conceived by Ibn
Khaldun as a logical connection, suggesting a causal nexus between early beginnings
and subsequent history.
38
Although Rosenthal here is referring to the entire three-
volume history, he offers a critical insight into the theory Ibn Khaldun outlines in Book
1, which indeed has a sequential logical structure that explains or is the context for his
cyclical model of 14th century North African and Iberian history.
The Last Greek and the First Annaliste Historian 437
Returning first to the muqaddim at of chapter 1, the first propositions or axioms that
Ibn Khaldun used to develop his theory were the deterministic effects of environment and
diet upon human character. Ibn Khaldun derived these from the Greeks, either indirectly
through al-Idrisi, whomhe quotes extensively, or, in the case of diet, directly fromGalen.
In terms of climate, it was in the middle or temperate zones that civilization flourished.
This effect, Ibn Khaldun explains, philosophers attributed to the angle of the sun, which,
he, Ibn Khaldun, then describes and claims to have proved through burh an.
39
However,
more important than that well-known feature of Muslim geographical knowledge are
the muqaddim at that are rarely considered in discussions of Ibn Khalduns theory. These
are his assumptions about the determining influence of local environment and the food
available there that varied with type and relative abundance or scarcity.
40
In brief, Ibn Khaldun argues, desert inhabitants who lack grain and seasonings but
who live on meat and milk and who just eat less are healthier, better looking, superior
in character, and more intelligent than people who eat agricultural products, seasonings,
and fruits. The reason, he hypothesizes, is that excess food produces moisture that causes
obesity and, as the moisture rises to the brain, stupidity. Animals of the desert such as
the gazelle have superior physiques, health, and, yes, intellects, than do those who live
on the plains, such as the goat, where food is plentiful. The same is true of human
beings. People who eat meat and milk, abstain from pleasure and live like ascetics, are
also more religious than people accustomed to luxury. The reason or cause, sabab, for
this is habit (

ada) or custom that becomes part of a persons character or nature,

his/her jins or t
.
ab

a.
41
This assumption, that each environment and its diet determine
physical, mental, and spiritual qualities of the inhabitants, is the propositional basis for
and chronological first phase in his dynamic, dialectical model.
The determining effects of local environment and an environments characteristic diet
gave rise in the 14th century Maghrib to two natural groups, groups with distinct jins
or t
.
ab

a. These were the bedouins and the sedentary and urban dwellers, the ahl had
.
ar.
Ibn Khaldun evidently means these natural groups to be the us ul, fundamental principles
or axioms that he alludes to in the heading for chapter 2. These natural groups constitute
universal or certain muqaddim at, those derived fromsense data, which are publicly
accepted and need no evidence by witnesses.
42
Ibn Khalduns theory is grounded in the
contrasting and inherently antagonistic quality of these two natural groups. However,
it is important to note that he also says that bedouins are older than sedentary society
and prior to it, another phrase that has both a conventional and philosophical meaning.
43
In fact, it has several possible philosophical meanings, including the two that fit here:
prior in nature, and prior in cause to something else.
44
That is, one thing cannot exist
without another or is the cause connecting the two thingsand the first word in this
phrase is, suggestively, aqdam, a derivative from the same root as muqaddima and that
also has this technical, philosophical, meaning. Bedouin, that is, are prior in nature
to urban society; they have a telos, an ultimate object or goal that leads to or causes
urban society.
45
In the remainder of Book 2, Ibn Khaldun elaborates on his earlier muqaddim at as
well as cataloguing the many accidents or a

r ad
.
associated with them. Thus, he analyzes
bedouin and sedentary differences in courage, reliance on laws, and other traits that are
the necessary accidents of each group. However, he also argues that some of these traits
are themselves natural characteristics or axioms, the most fundamental of which is
438 Stephen Frederic Dale

as
.
abyya, family or group feeling, whose intensity varies with environment. After citing
unnamed philosophical works that teach that man is political by naturean apparent
paraphrase of Aristotles famous axiom, Ibn Khaldun then writes that By his [mans]
very nature [authors italics] he needs the cooperation of others to satisfy his needs.
46
This observation is thus the third axiom or fundamental truth that fuels Ibn Khalduns
historical cycles. These three axioms are environment determines character, man is
naturally political (read social), and therefore different environments inevitably or
naturally generate distinct social groups.
47
However, the telos of human society is to
evolve from the simpler and more pure bedouin nature to complex and progressively
more decadent sedentary and urban life.
As part of this inevitable development determined by human beings own nature
kingship or royal authority (mulk) develops, which is the natural end or natural
termination point of

as
.
abyya.
48
Kingship itself is natural for human beings.
49
However, that does not mean that human agency is involved, rather kingship arises
because of the necessity of existence, d
.
ar ura al-wuj ud.
50
These are the propositions
or more precisely the bases (qaw a

id) that informchapter 3. These are not certain or

universal truths or axioms we know innately. Indeed Ibn Khaldun has said previously
that royal authority is an essential accident and remarks in chapter 4 that kingship or
royal authority is to civilization as form is to matter.
51
As form cannot exist without
matter, when civilization disintegrates its form, the dynasty inevitably decays as well.
52
The stages through which a dynasty evolves are also natural, reflecting, as they do,
shifting environmental and social conditions experienced by a bedouin community as
it moves from a rural to an urban homeland. Ibn Khaldun identifies the prestige of
a given ruler as an accidental quality, by implication a necessary accident that evolves
with each natural stage of the dynasty. He also makes it clear in this chapter that he
is constructing a model rather than trying to offer a comprehensive portrait of a culture.
He, thus, remarks in an illuminating aside on government offices that he will discuss
these positions, not to examine their legal status in Islamic law, but only to illustrate how
they are generatedas accidentsby the nature of civilization and human existence
(t
.
ab

at al-

umr an wa-wuj ud al-bashar).

53
Having established these principles Ibn Khaldun devotes chapter 4 to a discussion
of sedentary culture, the culture determined by the nature of this particular type of
civilization, and most of chapter 5 to identifying the accidents of sedentary culture
such as, for example, craftsarchitecture, carpentry, weaving, calligraphy, singing, book
making, and so forth. The last two of these crafts he discusses are particularly impor-
tant for reasons connected with the speculative intellect that he explains in chapter 6.
These are writing and calculation or arithmetic and their broader significance is due to
the fact that each involves abstraction. The process of writing triggers an instantaneous
mental process in which the mind shifts from the letter to the idea being conveyed,
what Ibn Khaldun here characterizes as intellectual speculation (al-naz
.
ar al-

aql),
producing through repetition, an analytical habit or, what he says is an actual increase
in intelligence. Repeated calculation produces a similar mental effect, inducing habits
of reasoning or deduction, istidl al, and speculation, naz
.
ar, that stimulates the mental
processes collectively known as intelligence.
54
These discussions conclude chapter 5
and seamlessly connect it to chapter 6, which Ibn Khaldun begins with an explanation
of human thought, which distinguishes mankind from animals. This explanation is
The Last Greek and the First Annaliste Historian 439
the chapters muqaddima, perhaps simply an introduction but certainly a generally
accepted truththat mans ability to think is a unique trait in the animal kingdom.
Aristotle, Greek Historiography, and the Annales
By developing a philosophical methodology for historical research, Ibn Khaldun both
distinguished himself within the GrecoIslamic rationalist tradition and also anticipated
the scientific methodology of

Emile Durkheim and, in somewhat more diffuse ways,
that of later historians of the Annales school. Viewed first fromthe perspective of classical
and postclassical Greek historians, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Polybius, Ibn Khaldun
represented the apex of Greek historical thought by insisting that history should be what
Aristotle termed a theoretical science, a search for truth conducted as a logical enquiry
based on axiomatic truths, logic, and an understanding of regional and chronological
peculiarities. Polybius, a man usually seen as the last major Greek historian, may have
refined the critical research methodology of his predecessors, but he was not influenced
by Greek philosophy nor did he fundamentally alter the nature of historical writing. By
characterizing his work as pragmatika historia, political and military history, and by
emphasizing that historians should be practical men who write history informed by their
own experience and personal enquiry, Polybius essentially reiterated the ideas of Thucy-
dides. He improved on his illustrious predecessor in one fundamental way, by insisting
that explanation was the principal task of the historian.
55
And while Thucydides may
have surpassed Herodotus because of his narrative structure, attention to significant
detail, and emotional sweep, he was essentially following Herodotusbut writing
more carefully about a bigger Greek war.
56
He was not interested in ultimate causes.
57
The classical and postclassical Greek historians were most of all historians of Greek
politics; they rarely deviated from this quintessential Greek preoccupation. Consistent
with this preoccupation was their lack of intrinsic interest in other societies, which is
not surprising, given their contempt for foreign languages. Nonetheless, Polybius was
scrupulous about accurately relating the past, whether it was flattering to the Greeks or
not.
58
Greek historians were primarily concerned with accurately chronicling past events.
They may have seen varying patterns in human historyexemplified by Thucydides
belief in the constancy of human naturebut they usually shied away frommetaphysical
explanations.
59
Only the constitutional researches in Aristotles school raised broader
issues, but in the name of philosophy, not history.
60
To the Greeks, therefore, history
was not one of the sciences with clear methods which create a body of undisputed
knowledge.
61
As far as Aristotles influence on Greek historiography in the classical and postclassi-
cal periods is concerned, the classical scholar, Simon Hornblower, wrote the following:
Aristotles own contribution to Greek historiography was indirect, but nevertheless profound. It
took two forms. First, methodological. He defined what history was; it concerned itself with the
particular . . . , by contrast with poetry, which deals with . . . the universal.
Aristotles second contribution was practical. He wrote nothing which is normally (i.e., by Aris-
totelian criteria!) categorized as history; that is no diachronic account of a war or expedition or
of the deeds of an individual. But by the more hospitable standards of a modern structuralists
approach the Politics of Aristotle should certainly count as history.
62
440 Stephen Frederic Dale
Hornblower does not show that Aristotle had any influence whatsoever on Greek histo-
riography, but he does suggest that Aristotle might be seen as a pivotal figure in what
might be called structuralist historiography, whose first known practitioner was Ibn
Khaldun and whose later devotees were philosophically influenced European scholars
of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.
The French geographer Yves Lacoste tentatively identified Ibn Khalduns signifi-
cance within a broader historiographical tradition. Writing as a Marxist in a delightfully
provocative, iconoclastic tone, Lacoste perceptively remarks of Ibn Khaldun that Until
the nineteenth century only Ibn Khaldun had improved upon Thucydides. Thucydides
invented history, but Ibn Khaldun turned it into a science.
63
Lacoste is correct; Ibn
Khaldun conceived of and practiced history as a science, that is, as an object of philo-
sophical inquiry. Yet, Lacoste, for all of his unusual insights into Ibn Khalduns brilliant
innovations, does not describe his work as scientific because he was a GrecoIslamic
intellectual and most of all an Aristotelian. He only alludes to the possibility of a
connection between Ibn Khalduns methodology and Aristotle.
64
Lacoste considers the
Muqaddima to be the first scientific history because Ibn Khaldun . . . can be legitimately
considered the first theoretician which of course he wasbut because of his philosoph-
ical inheritance.
65
Of course it was just the use of theory that

Emile Durkheim later
considered to be the attribute that made sociology scientific.
66
Lacoste is exceptional in that, unlike most scholars who have commented on Ibn
Khaldun, he is not interested in the Muqaddima primarily because of the model it
proposes to explain North African and Islamic history. Rather, he is intrigued by the
work because, in a limited way, Ibn Khaldun has anticipated historical materialism and
has offered certain clues to underdevelopment in North Africaand more generally in
the Third World. Even though he does not exactly say so, it is possible to believe that
Lacoste considers Ibn Khaldun to be scientific because he sees him as a precursor
to Marx, who has indeed been identified as a scientific structuralist.
67
Moreover,
anyone who has even skimmed the abridged version of the Muqaddima can see that Ibn
Khalduns theory is both dialectical and materialistic. It is dialectical in the Hegelian
sense that the historical progression of a particular bedouin lineage into an urban
dynasty inevitably results in its decay and destruction. It is materialistic in that Ibn
Khaldun attributes the fundamental differences between the

umr an badaw and

umr an
had
.
ar to their respective physical and economic circumstances. Another obvious parallel
in the two mens thought is each mans notion of culture as a reflection of some more
substantial reality: Marxs concept of a cultural superstructure reflecting and/or echoing
the socioeconomic substructure; in Ibn Khalduns terms the essential accidents of the
true nature of things. However, Ibn Khaldun and Marx obviously differed first, in that
their societies were so distinct, and because Ibn Khalduns dialectic was cyclical whereas
Marxs was millenarian.
Ibn Khaldun was hardly a Marxist, and Lacoste does not claim that he was. Lacoste
occasionally uses Marxist terminology to oversimplify and even misrepresent some of
Ibn Khalduns ideas, as when he observes that Ibn Khaldun believed that the mode of
production determines broadly similar structures and developments in societies widely
separated by space and time. Among other things Ibn Khaldun believed that the nu-
tritional, psychological, and social consequences of surplus wealthhowever, derived,
from trade or craft productioncontributed to the decay and ultimate collapse of urban
The Last Greek and the First Annaliste Historian 441
societies and their dynasties. However, Lacoste is surely right in his perception that Ibn
Khalduns discussion of economic phenomena is analytical, unlike the analysis of most
of Lacostes own European contemporaries, and not normative.
His notion of property, to which he devotes a whole chapter, relies upon concrete notions and
upon a certain distinction between use-value and exchange value. Ibn Khaldun devotes lengthy
passages to the question of supply and demand and their effects on prices. He also sketches a
theory of value based upon the quantity of labour required for the production of an object.
68
With Ibn Khaldun, we do seem to be in the presence of a very modern economic as
well as a methodological mind.
69
Lacoste is the first scholar to try to place Ibn Khaldun in a broad historiographical
framework outside of Islamic historiographyand he is right to do so. In terms of their
methodology, it is their philosophical training that prompted both Ibn Khaldun and Marx
to search for underlying patterns in their tumultuous environments. However, because
Lacoste is not particularly interested in philosophy, he is not altogether successful
in demonstrating the link between the two men. Yet, in historiographical terms, Ibn
Khaldun deserves to be seen as an heir of Greek and GrecoIslamic philosophersand
as a precursor of Marx and other philosophical historians and philosophically oriented
scholars of enlightenment and modern Europe who had absorbed Greek materialist
assumptions and Aristotles logical apparatus. Durkheim is the major figure in this
traditionas the philosopher turned sociologist and the teacher of Marc Blochbut he
had precursors in both Britain and France.
European Structuralism
In Britain, historians associated with the remarkable 18th century intellectual fluores-
cence known as the Scottish Enlightenment expressed ideas similar in a very general
sense to those of Ibn Khaldun. This is not surprising, because Aristotle influenced some
of these men. John Millar (17351801), a Professor of Law at Glasgow University,
reiterated Ibn Khalduns critique of popular history by denouncing traditional histori-
ans preoccupation with that common surface of events, which occupies the details of
the vulgar historian.
70
Dugald Stewart (17531828), first a Professor of mathematics
and then of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, invented the term conjectural
history to describe a kind of history writing by analogy and comparison to determine
uniformities in human nature and institutions. Scots of the period participated in a
European intellectual culture, and this is one of the principal reasons why some of them
embraced the rationalism usually associated with continental philosophy rather than
British empiricism.
71
They directly derived some of their ideas from Europes most
formidable philosophical historian, Montesquieu, and it is especially Montesquieu, the
influential enlightenment figure, who was the precursor of Durkheim.
Montesquieu was familiar with Aristotles works and those of other Greek thinkers,
including Galen, although his commentaries on Aristotle have been lost.
72
The formative
Greek philosophical influence on Montesquieu seems unmistakable in the basic pattern
of his argument in Esprit de Lois. First, he argued for the determining effect of climate
and environment on the development of social types.
73
Second, as Durkheim observed,
Montesquieu was the first person to understand that social phenomena were actual
442 Stephen Frederic Dale
realities, and that religion, law, morality, trade, and so forth can only be understood in
connection with the nature of a particular society. Like Millar and Ibn Khaldun, Mon-
tesquieu dismissed the importance of episodic history, and very much like Ibn Khaldun,
he concentrated on determining causal relationships by identifying the conditions that
give rise to institutions. Laws, he wrote, are necessary connections which followfrom
the nature of things. They are, in other words, Ibn Khalduns necessary accidents.
Thus, Montesquieu laid the basis for the new science that

Emile Durkheim consciously
espoused, unaware of Ibn Khalduns achievement.
Montesquieu (16891755) was the subject of Durkheims Latin thesis and a
formidable influence in the evolution of what has come to be classified as social
scientific thinking.
74
It is difficult to determine which ideas Durkheim derived from
Montesquieu and which directly from Aristotle. As a student of philosophy Durkheim
was intimately familiar with most of Aristotles works.
75
Indeed, Durkheim himself
reported that his teacher,

Emile Boutroux, had told him of Aristotles assertion that
each science had to have its own special subject of investigation, the argument Ibn
Khaldun cites when justifying his new historical science.
76
There is, as Donald Nielsen
has remarked:
Little doubt that Durkheim was thoroughly familiar with Aristotles writings, including the
Nichomachian Ethics, Metaphysics, and Politics. There is clear evidence from his lectures on
the evolution of educational thought that Durkheim was quite familiar with the Organon, that is,
Aristotles logical writings, which included Categories, Topics, and so forth.
77
He referred in his 1888 lecture on sociology to The illustrious example of Aristotle,
who was the first to see society as a natural fact, [and] remained almost without imi-
tators, but also went on to say, In the eighteenth century the same idea was indeed
reborn with Montesquieu and Condorcet.
78
Durkheims familiarity with Aristotle and Montesquieu explains why his approach to
the study of social life was similar to Ibn Khalduns analysis of human society. Both
men were pursuing the same goal with the same philosophical training. That is, both
Ibn Khaldun and Durkheim wanted to establish a science of society using Greek and
predominantly Aristotelian logical methodology. Indeed, Durkheim wrote in his 1909
essay the Sociology and the Social Sciences that the ultimate goal of sociology was the
philosophical part of the science.
79
In that essay, he outlines the Principal Divisions
of Sociology and says that the principal goal of his first category, Social Morphology,
is the study of the geographic base of various peoples in terms of its relationships with
their social organizations.
80
Durkheims social morphology is not formally expressed
in axiomatic terms, but his formulation is remarkably close to Ibn Khalduns when he
remarks that whether rural or urban:
This territory, its dimensions, its configuration, and the composition of the population which
moves upon its surface are naturally important factors of social life; they are its substratum and,
just as psychic life in the individual varies with the anatomical composition of the brain which
supports it, collective phenomena vary with the constitution of the social substratum.
81
Elsewhere, Durkheimsays that the goal of sociology is to explain social phenomenon in
terms of their hidden essences, and that societies, like the rest of the world, are subject
to laws that derive necessarily from their nature and that express it, an argument that
The Last Greek and the First Annaliste Historian 443
is a virtual paraphrase of Montesquieus observation that laws express the nature of
things.
82
Durkheims emphasis on hidden essences and the nature of societies also virtually
reproduces Ibn Khalduns ideasor those of Aristotleand when he discusses col-
lective phenomena or what he also calls social facts he is talking about necessary
accidents. These phenomena are Durkheims principal concern; they are the subjects of
sociology. He identifies them as life itself, or more particularly, as the various aspects
of what he terms social physiology: religion, morality, law, economics, linguistics, es-
thetics, and so forth. Durkheimcoined this termbecause he believed that these collective
phenomena were to geography or social morphology as physiology was to biology, and
his explanation uses the idea of structure in a physical sense that anticipates its later use
in history and the social sciences. In biology, he writes, while anatomy (also called
morphology) analyzes the structure of living beings and the mode of composition of
their tissues and organs, physiology studies the functions of these tissues and organs.
83
In the case of society Durkheims view. . . was largely shaped by Montesquieus idea
that society is a structural system[authors italics] composed of individuals or subgroups
behaving in certain kinds of ways.
84
Durkheims ultimate goal was to see in species
of various classes of social facts the unity of the genus, that is the particular in
the universal, and he wanted to establish general laws of which the very diverse laws
established by the special sciences are only particular forms.
85
It is not surprising, given Durkheims philosophical training, that he like Ibn Khaldun,
invokes comparison, a form of inductive reasoning, as a fundamental part of the logical
method that scholars must use to determine the truth about societiesand in the 20th
century, sociology is the comparative discipline par excellence. Durkheim believed
that only through comparison, more particularly through comparative history, could
sociologists study the various institutions that concerned them. We have only one
way, he wrote:
To demonstrate that a logical relationship (for example a causal relationship) exists between two
facts; we would have to compare cases in which they are simultaneously present and absent to see
if the variations which they present in these different combinations of circumstances.
Experiment, he concludes, is fundamentally just a form of comparison; it consists in
making fact vary, of producing it in various forms which are subsequently methodically
compared.
86
It is not the purpose here also to point out the many differences in the situations
and theories of Ibn Khaldun and Durkheim, men so widely separated by centuries and
such revolutionary natural philosophers as Isaac Newton. It might be noticed that rural
Frenchmen of the late 19th century were not empowered by the cavalry of pastoral
nomads to threaten or even overwhelm Bordeaux, Paris, and other cities, so Durkheims
perception of the particular problems of social solidarity in his era was inevitably differ-
ent from Ibn Khalduns insight into the social relations of his day. These particularities
would have to be different, because the social essences and, therefore, the necessary
accidents in each case were quite distinct. Indeed, it is not clear whether Durkheim
believed, as Ibn Khaldun did, in a kind of complex cyclical teleology, that is, a dialectic.
He accepted that primitive societies evolved into more complex ones, but it is not obvious
444 Stephen Frederic Dale
that he thought, as did Ibn Khaldun, that the two coexisted, as for example, in the rural
and urban France of the late 19th century.
87
In viewof Durkheims philosophical training and preoccupation with social solidarity,
it is to be expected that the programof the Annales school, especially that of Marc Bloch,
seems like a recent if only partial reprise of Ibn Khalduns goal for a new historical
science. The Annales School has, in fact, been characterized in a peculiar formulation
as the most scientistic historical school, often without authors specifying exactly what
scientistic means.
88
Perhaps it means, as it meant for Ibn Khaldun, the combination of a
rigorous critical methodology with sophisticated conceptualization born of philosophical
training. Neither Marc Bloch nor Lucien F` ebvreespecially F` ebvrewas as explicitly
scientific as Ibn Khaldun or Durkheim in the sense of consciously establishing a new
field of study on Aristotelian scientific that is philosophical principles.
89
Moreover,
Bloch is well known for emphasizing the study of individuals and their motivations.
However, Bloch in particular, and especially in his later work, was strongly influenced
by Durkheimian sociology and has been characterized by some scholars as a historical
sociologist.
90
In 1939, he said that he was among the historians who were accustomed
to a greater or lesser degree to expressing ourselves in sociological terms, even though
in later life he also criticized Durkheims attempt to fashion a human science.
91
The
influence of sociology and also historical geography on Bloch and later members of
the ambiguously defined Annales school may be the reason why some 20th-century
historians have found both Ibn Khaldun and also some Annalistes antihumanistic because
of their attachment to the explanatory power of structure, the hallmark of philosophical
history and its intellectual offspring, sociology.
92
Structure seems to mean for these
critics exactly what essence meant for Aristotle and Ibn Khaldun, an idea that reduced
social attributes such as law, not to speak of daily human activities, to the status of
necessary accidents.
In any case, Marc Blochs Feudal Society is a book Ibn Khaldun might have written
had he lived in Europe of the 14th or the 19th century. Exhibiting Blochs Durkheimian
concern for social facts, the books central concern, as its title suggests, is social
cohesion.
93
In this quite distinct environment Ibn Khaldun, like Bloch, might have
largely ignored towns when discussing the evolution of European society from the
9th through the 12th century. Bloch, instead of contrasting rural and urban societies,
as he might have done if he had been writing of the medieval Middle East with its
great cities of Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, Samarqand, and Cordoba, studies the nature
of social cohesion almost entirely outside of towns. Beginning with The Solidar-
ity of the Kinship Group he goes on to discuss Vassalage as a Substitute for the
Kinship Tie, and The Transformation of Human Relationships in the later manorial
system. He concludes by discussing the beginning of the evolution of the feudal polit-
ical order into nation states, but his central concern remains Feudalism as a Type of
Society.
As part of his attempt to define the nature of European feudalism, Bloch raises the
very question of genus and species that Ibn Khaldun or any logically trained historian
with a speculative intellect would want to answer. That is, was the social, juridical,
and political system known in Europe as feudalism unique to Europe or a regional
variant of a broader human phenomenon? In trying to answer this question, Bloch turns
to the comparative method advocated by Ibn Khaldun and Durkheim, a basic logical
The Last Greek and the First Annaliste Historian 445
technique for defining universals.
94
In the penultimate chapter of Feudal Society
titled Feudalism as a Type of Society, Bloch includes A Cross-Section of Compar-
ative History that he devoted to pointing out the commonalities between European
and Japanese society.
95
Yet, this common logical means of generalizing, of moving
beyond the species to the genus, was just one aspect of comparison that interested
him.
In his last and incomplete work, The Historians Craft, he discussed comparison
in a different sense, one that Ibn Khaldun also advocated as the essential mental tool
of the critical method for establishing the truth or likelihood of a particular historical
report.
96
The historian, Ibn Khaldun said, must compare similarities and differences
between the present and the past [or distantly located conditions]. He must know the
causes of the similarities in certain cases and of the differences in others. . . . He must
check transmitted information with the basic principles he knows.
97
Characterizing
comparison as the dialectic of historical criticism, Bloch demonstrates the useful-
ness of comparison in a way reminiscent of Ibn Khalduns discussion. Bloch writes
. . . rightly understood, critical comparison is not content to collate evidences from the
same plane of time. A human phenomenon is always linked to a chain which spans the
ages.
98
The scientistic nature of Marc Blochs work is best understood, therefore, not by the
false positivism that he ridiculed, but by a kind of diffuse Aristotelianism mediated
through

Emile Durkheim, less clearly articulated than Ibn Khaldun no doubt, but based
on the same assumptions, at least in his later work. However, in the case of Blochs
disciple and most prominent successor, Fernand Braudel, scientific refers only to the
conduct of research while the philosophical core of Durkheims and Blochs work
becomes so diffuse as to almost disappear. Braudel proclaims his intellectual debt to
Blochno aspect of his work is foreign to mebut Blochs influence seems most
evident in Braudels commitment to the importance of geography rather than to Blochs
or Durkheims philosophical inheritance. In the Mediterranean he constructs a tripartite
argument that has the appearance of the philosophical method of Ibn Khaldun, but it
lacks Ibn Khalduns logical rigor. Thus, Braudels division of the Mediterranean into
environmental structure, social conjuncture, and narrative of events seems to echo the
distinction that Aristotle,

Umar Khayyam and Ibn Khaldun make between essences,

accidents, and meaningless events narrated for the crowd. However, Braudel does
not attribute his distinction between structure and conjuncture to philosophy, but to
economics.
99
He generously attributes the phrase lhistoire ev enementielle to the French
historians Paul Lacombe and Francois Simiand. He presents his three sections as logi-
cally independent entities as he surveys the Mediterranean worlds environment, social
structure, and finally its military and political events, but he never argues that one
caused or determined the other. Only in very minor and passing discussion of the en-
vironment does Braudel use the philosophical language of Ibn Khaldun and Durkheim,
but curiously enough he does so when discussing transhumance, remarking, Any log-
ical study should begin with this basic agricultural situation, for all transhumance
is the result of a demanding agricultural situation.
100
However, Braudel is probably
using logical here in the common rather than the philosophical sense, for ultimately
the Mediterranean remains, as the French critic Claude Lefort has said, a work of
pointillism.
101
446 Stephen Frederic Dale
CONCLUSION
Despite that Bloch and other members of the Annales school did not and do not make
explicit their philosophical or theoretical assumptions, historians now associate certain
geographic, social, and economic notions of structure or structuralism with that
loosely knit group of scholars.
102
It is hardly surprising that structuralismin linguistics,
anthropology, literature, and historyshould first flourish in France, given that countrys
tradition of aggressive rationalism. The termstructuralismis nowused so commonly that
its philosophical origins and assumptions have been almost completely forgotten, just as
modern sociologists have, as Robert Bellah observed, forgotten the philosophical roots
of their discipline.
103
The philosophical roots of Ibn Khalduns discipline are identical
with those of French scholars and Western sociologists, as many Islamicists have intuited
but not explained, but in Ibn Khalduns case, these principles have not been so much
forgotten as they have remained unappreciated. These roots are Aristotelian logic and
Greek environmental determinism, the first left him with a desire to understand and the
intellectual tools to interpret historical change, whereas the second provided him with
axiomatic truths about human society. Perhaps the one Aristotelian distinction that best
illumines the common philosophical debt of Ibn Khaldun and French sociologists and
historical structuralists is that between axiom and theorem or fundamental truths and
accidental qualities, the distinction, as noted earlier, that yields the concept of natural
law. This distinction is fundamental to what is identified as structuralist thought, and
both Ibn Khaldun and French scholars believed it to be the starting point for historical
explanation.
104
As Bernard Guen ee has written: The study of structures seemed to me to
be irreplaceable. It illuminated the past with marvellous coherence.
105
Seven centuries
earlier, Ibn Khablun asserted that these structures, these axioms or fundamental truths,
these general conditions of regions, races, and periods that constitute the historians
foundation provided the basis for explaining the otherwise inexplicable chaos of his
time.
106
NOTES
Authors note: The author is indebted to Bahram Tavakolian of Denison University, Lisa Balabanlilar of
Ohio State University, and the anonymous IJMES reviewers for their helpful critiques of this article.
1
Originally, the Muqaddima constituted the first book of his history, the Kitab al-

ibar, which had its own

muqaddima or Introduction, one that was typical of earlier Muslim historians. However, even during the
authors lifetime, the word muqaddima was given as a title to the separate volume in which Ibn Khaldun outlined
his new historical science, and offered his cyclical theory to explain North African and Iberian politics of
his day. In his autobiography, Ibn Khaldun titles the first book of the three-volume history as the Muqaddima.
This work also contains Ibn Khalduns original Introduction. See Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, trans.
Franz Rosenthal (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958), 1, lxviii. As Rosenthal points out, Ibn
Khalduns work was known to his contemporaries and to some 15th-century Arab scholars. See ibid., lxvi.
2
M. Talbi expresses this view, which reflects the attitude of many scholars he quotes or cites in his
bibliography, when he concludes his Encyclopaedia of Islam article by remarking that Ibn Khaldun was
Certainly a solitary genius, he does not belong to any current of AraboMuslim thought, Encyclopaedia
of Islam, new edition, ed. B. Lewis et al. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971), 3:83031. This is, however, an extreme
statement of this position; many modern historians have discussed Ibn Khalduns legacy from earlier Islamic
scholars, however, without explaining his profound debt to the rationalism of the GrecoIslamic philosophical
tradition. See n. 40.
The Last Greek and the First Annaliste Historian 447
3
M. Quatrem` ere, Prol egom` enes DEbn-Khaldoun (Paris: Benjamin Duprat, 1858) I, 50. This is the text to
which Rosenthal keys his English translation. In this article, European structuralism refers to the sociological
and historical variant of Durkheim, Bloch, and their intellectual heirs. Christopher Lloyd describes the varieties
of structuralism in his book Explanation in Social History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), and remarks that
the geographical, economic and social current of structuralism is broadly synonymous with the Annales
School of Historians, 24041. See also his discussion of the Annales School, 24354. For an early discussion
of structuralism as a 20th-century Francophone movement by one of its principal theorists, see Jean Piaget,
Le Structuralisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires De France, 1972).
4
For a recent example, see Fuad Baali, Society, State and Urbanism: Ibn Khalduns Sociological Thought
(Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1988). Another scholar who does not discuss Durkheim
at length but who sees Ibn Khaldun as the first non-Western sociologist is Mahmoud Dhaoudi in his article,
Ibn Khaldun: the Founding Father of Eastern Sociology, International Sociology 3, 31935.
5
There is a vast, erudite, and stimulating scholarly literature devoted to analyzing this theory or model and
discussing its applicability to the Middle East and Central Asia. For the Ottoman case, see Cornell Fleischer,
Royal Authority, Dynastic Cyclism and Ibn Khaldunism in Sixteenth Century Ottoman Letters, in Ibn
Khaldun and Islamic Ideology, ed. Bruce Lawrence (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1984), 4669, and Z. Fahri Fndko glu,
T urkiyede ibn Haldunizm, 60 [Altmsnc] Dogum yili M unasebetiyle Fuad K opr ul u Armagan, M elanges
Fuad K opr ul u (Istanbul, 1957), 15363. In the late Ottoman period, a copy of the Ottoman translation of
the Muqaddima was included in the 1862/63 waqf or endowment of the mother of Sultan Abdulaziz. See
J. M. Rogers, Empire of the Sultans (Alexandria, Va.: Art Services International, 2000), 82. Bruce Lawrence
discusses colonial-era Muslims from the Middle East and elsewhere who were influenced by Ibn Khaldun
in his essay Ibn Khaldun and Islamic Reform, in Ibn Khaldun and Islamic Ideology, ed. Bruce Lawrence,
6989. Valuable modern studies are Walter Fischels Ibn Khaldun in Egypt (Berkeley, Calif.: University of
California Press, 1967), Aziz al-Azmehs, Ibn Khaldun: An Essay in Reinterpretation (London: Frank Cass,
1981), and Yves Lacostes, Ibn Khaldun: The Birth of History and the Past of the Third World (London:
Verso, 1984). Lacoste, whose French text was first published in 1966, offers the most original interpretation
of Ibn Khalduns ideas in which he suggests comparisons of these ideas with the Greek past and European
future. Aziz al-Azmeh includes a useful critical bibliography, which should be supplemented by the numerous
footnotes to the articles in Lawrence ed., Ibn Khaldun and Islamic Ideology, references in Hans Daiber,
Bibliography of Islamic Philosophy (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1999), 2:22330, and M. Talbis bibliography in his
essay Ibn Khaldun, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 82531.
6
Muhsin Mahdi, Ibn Khalduns Philosophy of History (London: George, Allen & Unwin, 1957). See
especially pp. 12425, 16062, and 17287 and especially p. 172 n. 1. Apart from Mahdi, few other scholars
have shown an interest in Ibn Khalduns philosophical assumptions. One of the few to do so is the 20th-
century Moroccan philosopher, Muhammad Abed al-Jibri in his dissertation Falsafat al-tarikh

inda Ibn
Khaldun (Rabat Morocco: 1970), published as Fikr Ibn Khaldun: al-tarikh al-Islami (Casablanca: Dar al-
Thaqafah, 1971). See also

Abed al-Jibris essay, Arab-Islamic Philosophy, A Contemporary Critique, trans.

Aziz Abbasi (Austin, Tex.: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 1999) where, in chapter 5, he describes Ibn
Rushds admiration for Aristotles axiomatic or demonstrative method and concludes with a discussion of
Ibn Khaldun. Mikl os Mar oth is one of the few scholars who has taken Mahdis reference to Aristotelian logic
one step further and specifically attributed Ibn Khalduns particular style of logical argument to Galen. See
his article Aristoteles und Ibn Khaldun, Zur Entstehung Einer Aristotelischen Geschichtsphilosophie, in
Aristoteles Werk und Wirkung, ed. J urgen Wiesner (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1987), especially 397, 399400, 408.
7
Ibn Khaldun specifically mentions using istiqr a

when discussing the Arabic language. Quatrem` ere,

Prol egom` enes, 3:301.
8
Aristotle makes this comment in his Poetics, where he writes: Hence poetry is something more philosophic
and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those
of history are singulars. Jonathan Barnes ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle (Princeton, N.J.: Bollingen
Series LXXI, 1984), 2:2323.
9
For an accessible introduction to Islamic philosophy, see Oliver Leaman, An Introduction to Classical
Islamic Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
10
Nassif Nassar, Le Maitre dIbn Khaldun: Al-Abili, Studia Islamica 20 (1964): 109, 113. See also Mahdi,
Ibn Khalduns Philosophy of History, 3337.
11
P. Luciano Rubio, Lubab al-muhassal fi usul al-din de Ibn Khaldun (Tetuan, Morocco: Editora Marroqui,
1952).
448 Stephen Frederic Dale
12
Alfred L. Ivry, trans. and ed., Averro es Middle Commentary on Aristotles De Anima (Provo, Utah:
Brigham Young University Press, 2002), xiii. For a fuller discussion of Ibn Rushds philosophical engagement
with Aristotle, see Gerhard Endress and Jan A. Aertsen ed., Averroes and the Aristotelian Tradition (Leiden:
E. J. Brill, 1999), including Ivrys article, Averroes Three Commentaries on De Anima, 199216. For
al-Farabi, see Richard Walzer, ed. and trans., Al-Farabi on the Perfect State, Abu Nasr al-Farabis Mabadi

ara ahl al-madina al-fadila (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) and Walzers article Aspects of Islamic Political
Thought: Al-Farabi and Ibn Xaldun, Oriens 16 (1963): 4060.
13
Mahdi, Ibn Khalduns Philosophy of History, 77, n. 2 and 109, n. 1.
14
For an introduction to Galen, see P. N. Singer, Galen: Selected Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1997).
15
Barnes, The Complete Works of Aristotle, 1:184a, 1015.
16
Ibid., 2425.
17
Barnes, II:1139b, 2834. See also T. H. Irwin, Aristotles First Principles (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1992), 5.
18
Fann (pl. fun un) for Ibn Khaldun signifies a special field or scientific (philosophical) discipline. I am
indebted to an IJMES anonymous reader for this observation.
19
Now available in a splendid edition authored by Ilai Alon, Al-Farabis Philosophical Lexicon, 2 vols.
(Warminister: E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Trust, 2002).
20
Mahdi, Ibn Khalduns Philosphy of History, 6371.
21
See n. 1.
22
Alon, Al-Farabis Philosophical Lexicon, 1:693702.
23
Ibid., 2:695; see also 1:69372.
24
Quatrem` ere, Prol egom` enes, 1:68.
25
Ibid., 1:2.
26
Ibid., 2:365.
27
Ibid., 3:109, t
.
ab

a.
28
Ibid., 2:365 and 1:9, 320. See also Ivry, Middle Commentary on Aristotles De Anima, 15253, for a
discussion of tas
.
awwur and Quatrem` ere, Prol egom` enes, 1:9, where Ibn Khaldun uses the phrase the natures
of existing things (al-t
.
ab a

al-m uj ud at). It is likely that Ibn Khaldun derived his ideas about the intellect
directly from Ibn Rushd, who discussed it in his treatise on Aristotles De Anima and in other commentaries
on the intellect.
29
Douglas F. Challenger, Durkheim Through the Lens of Aristotle, Durkheimian Postmodernist and Com-
munitarian Responses to the Enlightenment (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994), 2425.
30
Quatrem` ere, Prol egom` enes, 1:4.
31
Ibid., 1:6.
32
Ivry, Middle Commentaries on Aristotles De Anima, 5. For Aristotles statement that the sum of these
angles is an accidental property, see Barnes, The Complete Works of Aristotle, 1:1025a, 1434.
33
R. Rasheed and B. Vahabzadeh, Omar KhayyamThe Mathematician (NewYork: Biblioteca Persica Press,
2000), 218.
34
Quatrem` ere, Prol egom` enes, 1:329.
35
Alon, Al-Farabis Philosophical Lexicon, 2:578.
36
Quatrem` ere, Prol egom` enes, 1:58.
37
Ibid., 3:26869.
38
Rosenthal, Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, 1:13, n. 28. The full title is Kitab al-

ibar wa-diwan al-

mubtada

wa-l-khabar fi ayyam al-

Arab wa-l-

Ajam wa-l-Barbar wa-man

asrahum min dhawi al-sultan
al-akbar.
39
Quatrem` ere, Prol egom` enes, 1:82.
40
Ibn Khaldun derived his geographical information, his division of the world into seven climatic zones,
and the environmental determinism stemming from the climate and agricultural products of those zones
from many sources. The Arab geographer al-Idrisi (11101165 CE) was evidently his principal source for
his geographical knowledge, and for al-Idrisi, see among many studies, S. Maqbul Ahmad, Cartography of
al-Sharif al-Idrisi, in J. B. Harley and David Woodward ed., Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South
Asian Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 15774. Al-Idrisis maps were in turn primarily
based upon those of Ptolemy. Ibn Khalduns notions of the ways that climate affects human character may
have been derived at least in part from Galens works, which he apparently encountered first in the writings of
The Last Greek and the First Annaliste Historian 449
al-Mas

udi. See Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, 1:175 where, however, he criticizes both scholars explanation
of emotionalism in Negroes. Greek theories concerning the determining effects of environment may also be
found in earlier sources, including Aristotles treatise on Physiognomics. See Barnes, The Complete Works
of Aristotle, 2:806b16, and Aristotles series of questions: Problems Connected with the Effect of Locality
on the Temperament, ibid., 2:909a13910b9.
41
Ibid., 1:15765. Solomon Pines suggests that Ibn Khaldun might have derived his ideas on necessity and
luxury from Plato. See his article The Societies Providing for the Bare Necessities of Life According to Ibn
Khaldun and to the Philosophers, Studia Islamica 24 (1971): 12538. Ibn Rushd does paraphrase Platos idea
when he writes, the human desire for wealth, pleasure, and comfort leads to a transition of the regime. . . .
Oliver Leaman, Averroes and his Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 131. However, see also Erwin
K. Rosenthals work Political Thought in Medieval Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968),
267 n. 5, where Rosenthal rejects the idea that Ibn Khaldun knew of Ibn Rushds commentary on Platos
Republic, a likely source suggested by Pines. I am indebted to Patricia Crone for the reference to Pines article.
For Ibn Rushds commentary, see Charles E. Butterworth, Philosophy, Ethics and Virtuous Rule: A Study
of Averroes Commentary on Platos Republic, Cairo Papers in Social Science. 9, (Spring 1986) (Cairo:
University of Cairo Press, 1986). The idea that environment had a determining effect on human character
circulated in 5th century BCE Greece, and in the 4th century BCE, the notion that luxurious indulgence led to
military and political decline was fully developed. See Josef Wiesh ofer, Ancient Persia (London: I. B. Tauris,
1996), 7983.
42
Alon, Al-Farabis Philosophical Lexicon, 1:35758.
43
Quatrem` ere, Prol egom` enes, 1:223.
44
Alon, Al-Farabis Philosophical Lexicon, 1:342.
45
Ibn Khalduns termbedouins is often translated simply as pastoral nomads, camel-herding transhumants.
However, he repeatedly indicates that bedouins practiced agriculture and, when discussing crafts, states
[Agriculture] is a Bedouin craft which is not practiced or known by sedentary [i.e., urban] people. The
Muqaddimah, 2:357. Peter von Sievers forcefully makes this point in his article Back to Nature: The
Agrarian Foundations of Society According to Ibn Khaldun, Arabica 27 (1980): 71.
46
Quatrem` ere, Prol egom` enes, 2:368.
47
As the Greeks had no separate word for social, Ibn Khalduns citation of Aristotles dictum can be taken
to mean social in this context.
48
Quatrem` ere, Prol egom` enes, 1:264, 256. (Note:

ilm al-gh ayut means mathematics.)

49
Ibid., 1:259.
50
Ibid., 1:364.
51
Ibid., 2:264.
52
Ibid., 2:94.
53
Ibid., 2:3.
54
Ibid., 2:36263.
55
Peter Derow, Historical Explanation: Polybius and His Predecessors in Greek Historiography, ed.
Simon Hornblower (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 86.
56
Hornblower, Greek Historiography, 24. Lenn Evan Goodman compares Ibn Khaldun with Thucydides,
but not their methodologies, in his article Ibn Khaldun and Thucydides, Journal of the American Oriental
Society 92 (1972): 25070.
57
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, What Thucydides Saw, History and Theory 25 (1986):10.
58
Derow, Historical Explanation, Greek Historiography, 8485.
59
Ibid., 79, and Arnaldo Momigliano, Greek Historiography, History and Theory 17 (1978): 7.
60
Hornblower, Greek Historiography, 3335, and Momigliano, Greek Historiography, 9.
61
Momigliano, Greek Historiography, 9.
62
Hornblower, Greek Historiography, 33.
63
Yves Lacoste, Ibn Khaldun, 142.
64
Lacoste, Ibn Khaldun, 159. The possible link that Lacoste identifies, Aristotles notion that movement
is an essential characteristic of all things, was not a major aspect of Ibn Khalduns methodology.
65
Ibid., 149.
66
Warren Schmaus, Durkheims Philosophy of Science and the Sociology of Knowledge (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1994), 4344.
67
Lloyd, Explanation in Social History, 10.
450 Stephen Frederic Dale
68
Lacoste, Ibn Khaldun, 156.
69
Joseph J. Spengler discusses Ibn Khalduns economic ideas against the background of Islamic economic
thought, but he is careful to state he cannot trace any of Ibn Khalduns ideas to a particular source. Ultimately
Spengler attributes Ibn Khalduns economic observations to his practical knowledge. Economic Thought of
Islam: Ibn Khaldun, Comparative Studies in Society and History 6 (1964): 268305.
70
Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution (Oxford: Blackwells, 1969), 67. See among other articles,
H. M. Hopfl, From Savage to Scotsman: Conjectural History in the Scottish Enlightenment, Journal of
Scottish Studies 17 (1978): 1940, and, for its discussion of Aristotles influence among these Scottish
thinkers, Andrew Skinner, Economics and Historythe Scottish Enlightment, Scottish Journal of Political
Economy 12 (1965): 122.
71
It is impossible within the page limits of this article to discuss contrasting European attitudes toward
Aristotelian thought. However, it is worth noting that, while some Europeans denounced Aristotelian meta-
physics, nearly all Europeans, including British empiricists, internalized Aristotelian logic that held sway in
Europe until relatively recent times.
72
Robert Shakleton alludes to Montesquieus study of Aristotle and Galen in his definitive biography
Montesquieu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 264, 303.
73
W. Watts Millar, ed., Miller and Emma Griffiths, trans., Montesquieu Quid Secundatis Politicae Insti-
tutuendae Contulerit (Oxford: Durkheim Press, 1997), 48c.
74
See especially, Douglas F. Challenger, Durkheim Through the Lens of Aristotle: Durkheimian, Postmod-
ernist, and Communitarian Responses to the Enlightenment (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994).
75
For an especially forceful presentation of Aristotles influence on Durkheim, see Donald A. Nielsen,
Three Faces of God. Society, Religion and the Categories of Totality in the Philosophy of

Emile Durkheim
(Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1999), 21.
76
Nielsen, Three Faces of God, 22.
77
Ibid., 22.
78

Emile Durkheim, Course in Sociology, Opening Lecture, in Emile Durkheim on Institutional Analysis,
ed. Mark Traugott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 45.
79
Durkheim, Sociology and the Social Sciences, in On Institutional Analysis, 82.
80
Ibid., 83.
81
Ibid., 79.
82
Schmaus, Durkheims Philosophy of Science, 58, 60.
83
Durkheim, Sociology and the Social Sciences, in On Institutional Analysis, 80.
84
Challenger, Durkheim Through the Lens of Aristotle, 147.
85
Durkheim, Sociology and the Social Sciences, in On Institutional Analysis, 82.
86
Durkheim, Sociology and the Social Sciences, in On Institutional Analysis, 85.
87
Traugott ed., On Institutional Analysis, 1314.
88
Richard J. Evans, In Defense of History (NewYork: Norton, 1999), 258. For another view, see the authors
extended discussion of scientific history in chapter 2, History, Science and Morality. Susan W. Friedman
also uses this term but is more precise when she says that Marc Bloch was not a law-seeking sociologist.
Marc Bloch, Sociology and Geography Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), 173. J. H. Hexter discusses the different implications of the word science in his article
Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudelien . . . in J. H. Hexter, On Historians (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1979), 90.
89
Friedman writes in her book, Marc Bloch, Sociology and Geography that Blochs interest was never to
carve a domain for a logically independent discipline, 183.
90
Ibid., 174.
91
Quoted in ibid., 179.
92
Hayden V. White makes this comment about Ibn Khaldun in his essay Ibn Khaldun in the World
Philosophy of History, Comparative Studies in Society and History 2 (1959): 11028. James A. Henretta
makes an analogous point about structuralism in his article Social History as Lived and Written, American
Historical Review 84 (1979): 1293322. See also Johan H. Meuleman, La causalit e dans la Muqaddimah
dIbn Khaldun, Studia Islamica 74 (1991): 10539. See especially Section 5.3 La place de lhomme dans
r eflexion dIbn Khaldun, 13536. Lloyd, in contrast, criticizes the individualist approach. See Explanation
in Social History, 1719, 37. He also cites Braudels dismissal of individual agency, 251.
93
Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, L. A. Manyon, trans. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), 1819.
The Last Greek and the First Annaliste Historian 451
94
Ibn Khaldun discusses this aspect of comparison when explaining the science of logic. Ibn Khaldun, The
Muqaddimah, 3:138.
95
Friedman explains Marc Blochs evolving attitude toward the comparative method. Marc Bloch, Sociology
and Geography, 178. She does not, however, mention his discussion of the method in The Historians Craft.
See also William H. Sewell, Jr., Marc Bloch and the Logic of Comparative History, History and Theory 6
(1967): 20818.
96
Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, 1:15, 56.
97
Ibid., 1:56.
98
Marc Bloch, The Historians Craft, 122.
99
Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip 2, Si an Reynolds
trans. (New York: Harper Torchbook, r. 1976), 353. These two aspects of reality [structure and conjuncture
are always present], as economists are well awareindeed it is to them we owe the original distinction . . . .
See also Braudels discussion of the term structure in History and the Social Sciences, in On History 29,
and History and Sociology, in On History, 70 and n. 22.
100
Braudel, The Mediterranean, 95. Braudel does not mention Ibn Khaldun in this work, which represents
Arab Muslims in orientalist terms. He learned of the cyclical theory later, but it never captured his interest.
See the references to Ibn Khaldun in Fernand Braudel, Autour de la M editerran ee, ed. Roselyne De Ayala and
Paule Braudel (Paris:

Editions de Fallois, 1996), 116, 329.
101
Claude Lefort, Histoire et sociologie dans loeuvre de Fernand Braudel, in Cahiers internationalaux
de sociologies 13 (1952), quoted in Hans Kellners article Braudels Menippean Satire, History and Theory,
18, 124.
102
A point made by Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval and Modern, 37172.
103
Quoted by Douglas Challenger, Durkheim Through the Lens of Aristotle, back cover.
104
See Lloyds introductory discussion of causation among structuralists. Social Science History, 710.
105
Jacques Le Goff, After Annales: The Life as History, Times Literary Supplement (1420 April 1989),
394 and 405.
106
See n. 3.
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