Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography By Robert Irwin

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A real intellectual joy, although not a biography in any real sense. More a critique and commentary on Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddima. As such it is a bit of biography of that work, addressing itself to what makes it great but also how it has been read and misread over the centuries. I particularly enjoyed Irwin's tying of the Muqaddima to modern science fiction works, Asimov's Foundation series and especially Herbert's Dune. This will not appeal to everyone but as someone who knew little about Muslim tenants (despite living in Saudi Arabia for several years, shame on me), this was fascinating. Kindle, 0,00 € , Gebundenes Buch, Taschenbuch I lived for three happy years in pre Khadafi Tripoli, Libya. One of my friends was Mr. Durdungi, a Palestinian refugee who wrote the history textbook used in secondary schools in Libya at that time. I had never heard of Ibn Khaldun until Mr. Durdungi showed me his seven volume set of The Muqaddimah, which he had recently purchased from an Arabic publisher in Baghdad. He told me that the seven volumes were only the introduction to world history and we wondered, at that rate, how many volumes it would have taken Ibn Khaldun to complete the entire history of the world!Mr. Durdunji explained to me that Ibn Khaldun placed the nomadic Bedouin Arabs and Arabacized Berbers as a central motivating force in history. Evidence that civilizations come and go was all around us: the magnificent Roman ruins of Leptis Magna and Sabratha were nearby and made a profound impression on me. Ibn Khaldun wrote The Muqaddimah within sight of other ruins in Algeria. The mute testimony of the ruins was all the proof he needed to support a cyclic theory of history.Ibn Khaldun saw the strong tribal bonds of the Bedouin Arabs as necessary for survival in the inhospitable desert. The tribe was basically a family in which all members trace their genealogy back to a single illustrious ancestor. But after a desert tribe conquered a city, the familial and tribal ties began to weaken, succumbing to petty jealousies and lusts for luxury and power. After a few generations, new tribes from the desert would defeat the now decadent dynasty, destroying the infrastructure and organization of the city, and leaving it in ruins again. After three or four generations, the new dynasty would be replaced with yet another tribal incursion, and so it went.Ibn Khaldun’s brilliant insights into the workings of history have given him almost mythic standing among many contemporary scholars. He is credited with being the father of sociology before Weber; of introducing the labor theory of value before Marx; of being the father of the philosophy of history, and so on. Ronald Reagan (wrongly) invoked the authority of Ibn Khaldun to support his supply side, trickle down economics. Ibn Khaldun, a brilliant medieval Arabic scholar, can be used to support almost anything.Enter Robert Irwin and his new book, Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography. It sets the record straight. Ibn Khaldun was an unquestioned genius of the first rank, within the context of his time and place. But his time was the second half of the fourteenth century; the place was mostly in North Africa. And according to Irwin, everything in The Muqaddamah is informed by Ibn Khaldun’s devout Sunni Sufi mysticism and his close reading of the Koran. It was another world from the current events of today, but it is a measure of his greatness that even now he can be all things to all people. Robert Irwin’s book helps us understand why and how that can be. It is a compelling story. Kindle, 0,00 € , Gebundenes Buch, Taschenbuch An enlightening narrative on the richness of global intellectual activities. An excellent narrative of intellectual activities not based on Western European culture or languages. Kindle, 0,00 € , Gebundenes Buch, Taschenbuch eventhough I enjoyed reading the book, it was not what I was expecting. It turned I to be of the author's analysis of the book with very little incerpt of Ibn khaldoon. I was expecting to read some profound concepts of history in 13 14 century.  But got very little of that. This book was of introduction to Ibn Khaldon that introduction to history. Kindle, 0,00 € , Gebundenes Buch, Taschenbuch VERY DIFFICULT TO READ AS AN E BOOK. Be warned I wish I'd bought the hard copy. The book is fascinating and wide ranging, but the author always uses Arabic terms, which makes sense since many (most? all?) of them have no direct parallel in English. But there is no glossary, so if you don't happen to remember what an Arabic word refers to, many pages after its first appearance, you're stuck. The only alternative that I can think of is trying the Index but on Kindle that means making a note of where you are in the text, then going to the Index to find the term, and going back into the text to try to find the appearance of the term when it's first described. But since the Index of course refers to specific pages in the hard copy version, this will be only a vague indication for an e reader. I can only wish that the author and publisher had included a glossary in the Kindle version. At this point (I'm about halfway through) I'm not really prepared to go back to the very beginning to compile my own glossary. So it's all very frustrating, particularly since the book itself is so interesting. Kindle, 0,00 € , Gebundenes Buch, Taschenbuch

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