[CTRL] Ibn Khaldun and Our Age

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                          Ibn Khaldun and Our Age

   Political thinkers engage our attention by their presentation of the
   particular features of their own time and place as well as the
   permanent qualities of man in society. We can read Aristotle and
   Hobbes for general lessons, or for the politics of the Greek
   city-state and of European society after the wars of religion.

   As times change so do the thinkers who interest us. Those of our own
   tradition normally interest us most since they illuminate the
   succeeding stages of our own social world. That world is always
   changing, however, sometimes in ways that are not fully continuous
   with its past but bring it closer in important respects to other
   civilizations. The conditions that are westernizing the world's East
   and South also affect Europe and its offspring.. World dominion, which
   orientalized Rome, may end by doing so to us; if so, certain Eastern
   thinkers will become as relevant as those of the West for
   understanding the social setting in which we live.

   Ibn Khaldun,[1] born 1332 in Tunis and died 1406 in Cairo, was a
   thinker who grappled with circumstances similar in important ways to
   the social and political situation now evolving in the West. He was
   superbly qualified for his task, with a vigorous and unconventional
   mind and a knowledge of politics and history that came from descent
   from an ancient family with distinguished political and scholarly
   traditions, profound study, and a varied life of public service and
   political adventure as a courtier, jurist, and statesman in Islamic
   centers from Spain to Damascus. He was admired by scholars and by the
   most ruthlessly practical of men; Pedro the Cruel and Tamerlane wished
   to make use of him, while Grenada's greatest writer, Ibn al-Khatib,
   wrote his life and honored his learning and literary skill.

   His work reflects a mind attracted to practical politics, to
   scholarship, and to mysticism. After failing in efforts to promote the
   public good, he turned to scholarship in an attempt to understand the
   past and explain the necessity that seemed to govern events. As an
   intense participant in the affairs of a great civilization
   irreversibly in decline, he was acutely aware of what was and what
   should be, and neither confused the two nor attempted to encompass one
   in the other.

   The civilization of which he wrote had arisen in a world crossroads
   with a long history of migrations of peoples, conflicting religious
   movements, and foreign conquerors ruling through mercenaries and
   slaves. The societies it comprised were far more diverse and
   fragmented than the comparatively sheltered societies of the European
   and Far Eastern continental margins. Since government can be
   responsible only to a people capable of common action, their
   fragmentation had political effects: "government in Muslim society ...
   was never, or almost never, anything other than superimposed; never,
   or almost never, the emanation or expression of that society."[2]

   Today's mixing of peoples, cultures and ideologies, whether resulting
   from world trade and immigration or improved communication and social
   fission, is moving our world closer in important ways to the one Ibn
   Khaldun knew than the more cohesive one with which we have long been
   familiar. Such changes will affect our politics profoundly in ways his
   writings can illuminate for us.

   If there are no strong overarching loyalties, mixing of populations
   causes men to lose the social cohesion required for the self-rule of a
   free society and to withdraw into small groups in which they can
   maintain a coherent and predictable way of life. Common loyalties firm
   enough to create the civic order of Western Europe needed time and
   stability to evolve. It took 40 kings to make France, and no less time
   to grow what Burke once called the British oak; in the parts of Europe
   subject to invasion from Asia or North Africa nothing similar arose.

   The gifts of the past may not be ours forever. Common loyalties make a
   people, and the common culture and history that support a people's
   identity are needed to make loyalties endure. Success in transplanting
   a British society to America and absorbing European immigrants into it
   is no sign that the American civic order will survive abandonment of a
   common or at least dominant identity; a social setting like the one
   Ibn Khaldun knew will be a more likely consequence. Immigration and
   the end of national boundaries could bring about similar results
   within the European Union by replacing ordered diversity with
   bureaucratically- administered chaos. While such things may not be
   inevitable, powerful tendencies favor them, and a clearer
   understanding of what the resulting society would be like and how it
   could come about may be useful. Ibn Khaldun's thought is an aid to
   such an understanding.

   That thought grew out of his search for historical truth; his great
   theoretical work, the Muqaddimah ("Introduction" or "Prolegomena"),
   was intended as the preface and first book of his universal history,
   Kitab al-Ibar. He was dissatisfied with earlier historians because of
   what he saw as their failure to understand basic principles, a failure
   that made them unable critically to evaluate the accounts they picked
   up from earlier historians and passed on to their readers. Without a
   comprehensive theory of human society that explained the relations of
   things, a historian could not understand events or determine what had
   actually happened. The most common errors, Ibn Khaldun thought,
   stemmed from the failure to take into account the degree to which
   "conditions within nations and races change with the change of periods
   and the passage of time."[3] He thus made it his goal to set forth a
   scheme that would organize as a whole our knowledge of man and set
   forth the sequence of social change and its consequences.

   That sequence was for him a cyclical one. He wrote the Muqaddimah
   during a period of voluntary exile and disillusionment with public
   life, and it expresses a pronounced skepticism as to what can be
   achieved through political action: "[t]he past resembles the future
   more than one drop of water another."[4] History can be understood,
   but it has neither goal nor essential novelty. It is a repetition of
   similar patterns driven by the interplay of the same basic elements:
   human acquisitiveness and aggression, the need for cooperation and
   group solidarity, royal authority, and the corrupting effect of
   dominion and luxury.

   The most distinctive feature of his thought is his emphasis on group
   feeling and solidarity, which he calls "asabiyah" from an Arabic root
   referring to paternal kinsmen. As its derivation suggests, asabiyah is
   found first and foremost among blood relatives. Nonetheless, its real
   cause is not blood but "social intercourse, friendly association, long
   familiarity, and the companionship that results from ... sharing the
   ... circumstances of life and death."[5] It is group feeling, Ibn
   Khaldun says, that makes possible all great social achievements, from
   religious reforms to the founding and defense of dynasties.
   Paradoxically, its necessity also ensures that social achievements
   never last, because success puts an end to group feeling by liberating
   desire and reducing the need for mutual responsibility. If
   fragmentation is the rule and community an exception, all human
   achievements become temporary deviations from chaos; Ibn Khaldun's
   pessimism and cyclical view of history are thus closely related to the
   emphasis on the rise and fall of solidarity within particular groups
   made necessary by the fundamental incoherence of Middle Eastern
   society.

   The Muqaddimah analyzes in detail and in several settings the manner
   in which group feeling leads to dominance and centralization of power,
   which in turn lead to luxury, irresponsible behavior, and decline.
   Most typically, Ibn Khaldun says, group feeling begins with the simple
   life of men in remote rural or desert districts. In their isolation
   they maintain purity of lineage, and lacking an organized government
   they cultivate bravery, self-reliance and loyalty, and accept
   leadership only on the basis of outstanding qualities and mutual
   respect. The difficulty of life accustoms them to struggle, and there
   are no luxuries to detract from the value placed on honor.

   Such men are as a rule unjust to outsiders and impatient of restraint,
   and therefore incapable of governing or even combining to any firm
   purpose. They can nonetheless become a formidable force capable of
   establishing a dynasty if some religious movement restrains their
   injustice and mutual jealousy. If inspired by such a movement they
   establish a new dynasty, replacing one that has become weak and
   vulnerable, the rulers rely at first on the group feeling of their
   supporters in governing, and enlist their subjects on their side
   through moderation and equity. When the dynasty's authority has become
   established and accepted as inevitable fact, however, it finds it can
   dispense with group feeling, popular support, and the measures
   necessary to maintain them. The ruler, giving free reign to natural
   impulses, pursues ease, luxury and a monopoly of glory. He keeps his
   original supporters more and more at a distance, deprives them of
   responsibility and opportunity to exercise their original virtues, and
   buys them off with allowances that allow them to dissipate themselves
   in luxury, retaining most of the wealth for his own projects and
   ruling by preference through men from unrelated groups whom he can
   control more easily.

   The resulting rationalization of government at first increases the
   power of the dynasty, leading to a period of peace and prosperity.
   Eventually, however (Ibn Khaldun says in the third generation), the
   disappearance of group feeling causes the dynasty to weaken
   decisively. The ruler becomes licentious, forgets the requirements of
   his position, and finds that the cost of his pleasures and the expense
   of buying the respect and loyalty he can no longer inspire have
   increased beyond his ability to pay. He raises taxes but the more
   oppressive they become the less they yield. Irregular methods of
   increasing revenue and exacting goods and services are attempted, but
   only make matters worse by disrupting economic activity. Soldiers go
   unpaid, outlying regions establish their autonomy, and officials and
   court favorites usurp royal authority. The corruption extends beyond
   court circles to the people at large, who become dependent on the
   government and enslaved by unnecessary and ever-multiplying desires
   that cause them to forget religion, morality, and even decency.
   Attempts at reform at best delay the inevitable. Unsettled conditions
   and overpopulation lead to famine and pestilence, and eventually the
   dynasty falls from power.

   Accepting such a view of political change, Ibn Khaldun sees only
   limited value in human activities: "[t]his entire world is trifling
   and futile. It ends in death and annihilation."[6] Westerners may
   place their hopes in reason or tradition, but for him there is neither
   a rational process by which man and society can be perfected nor a
   continuing overall order within which to preserve and extend the
   acquisitions of the past. Civilization and culture arise because we
   want dominion, ease and luxury, and once we attain them they destroy
   us. Nor can the knowledge acquired from the study of history change
   the world, although particular men may find it helpful, for example by
   teaching them not to attempt impossibilities.

   Religion provides no pragmatic solutions. The disenchanted outlook
   natural in a fragmented social world favored an understanding of God
   as Wholly Other, accessible only through mysticism or arbitrary
   legalism. Ibn Khaldun recognizes the necessity of religion for the
   founding of a great state and takes the laws of Islam quite seriously;
   his intolerance of corruption led repeatedly to his dismissal as an
   Islamic jurist. However, he does not believe that religious law can be
   effective socially for any extended time. Like rational political
   principles generally, it can benefit a polity by bringing government
   operations to some degree into a system ordered toward stable ends,
   but its effect can only be secondary and cannot prevent corruption and
   eventual downfall. The Islamic polity was as subject to corruption as
   any other; as the Prophet predicted, his successors governed rightly
   only thirty years before sinking into tyranny.

   From his discussion of Sufism, it appears that Ibn Khaldun believed
   that the chasm between man and God can nonetheless be bridged by
   disciplined cultivation of mystical experience. To the extent God is
   absent from this world mysticism can show us a way to another; it
   follows for him that realization of the "mystical experiences of the
   Sufis ... is the very essence of happiness." Human well-being is thus
   one thing; this world is quite another. Beginning with irretrievable
   social fragmentation, Ibn Khaldun ends with political passivity and
   religious mysticism.[7]

   Ibn Khaldun has been called the father of modern social science,
   although his work was soon largely forgotten and was rediscovered and
   made known in the West too late for it to play a formative influence.
   Many issues with which he dealt had of course been treated by others.
   For example, the devolution he describes results largely from the loss
   of original moral unity and the liberation and diversification of
   desire, a process Plato[8] and the Hebrew prophets also describe
   although in a less naturalistic manner. His views draw on common
   experience as well; it is commonplace worldly wisdom that blood is
   thicker than water, that there is strength in unity, that successful
   men turn against those who helped them on the way up, and that a
   founder's successors eventually lose touch with the things that made
   his enterprise a success. However, his systematic and objective
   treatment of such matters, and especially his emphasis on the role of
   social solidarity, are genuine contributions to thought that give rise
   to what he justifiably calls a "new, extraordinary, and highly useful"
   science.[9]

   The value of that science can be demonstrated in our own times. Ibn
   Khaldun's presentation reflects a time in which group feeling was
   found at its most intense among desert Arabs. He attributes to their
   tribal solidarity, a rather special affair that he says could not long
   survive civilized life, the success of religious movements and origin
   of dynasties. His theory of history is therefore most immediately a
   theory of Arab history. It need not be viewed that way, however; while
   he emphasizes common descent he recognizes that group feeling exists
   no less by convention than by nature.

   He discusses non-tribal forms of group feeling sufficiently to guide
   application of his theory in a variety of settings. He is acutely
   conscious of their comparative weakness. For example, he rejects
   family solidarity as a basis for political society. While fundamental,
   it is not true group feeling because its strength and durability
   depend on the group feeling of a larger collectivity; an aristocratic
   family acquires its self-assurance from its position as part of the
   aristocracy of a people. Nor, he believes, can religious group
   feeling, barring a miracle, produce major and enduring social effects
   on its own, although it can make pre-existing tribal solidarity more
   effective.[10]

   He touches only in passing or leaves altogether out of consideration
   other sources of group feeling that have been extremely important in
   the West, in aspiration or in fact: civic loyalty, class
   consciousness, national feeling growing out of common political life
   and place of residence, and political solidarity growing out of
   struggle for an ideal. Another possibility, loyalty to a universal
   empire, he deals with only in the case of the Caliphate, as an aspect
   of acceptance of a universal religion.

   Some of these omissions seem unimportant. Universal empire as an
   object of sustaining loyalty is not an immediate prospect today, and
   twentieth century experience suggests that class consciousness and
   solidarity in struggle may enhance group feeling but are less reliable
   as sources of it than many once hoped. Civic consciousness and
   territorial nationalism are a different matter. These things have been
   fundamental to our history and culture, contributing enormously to
   making us what we are. They have enabled Western states to establish
   an order that is public rather than tribal or dynastic, capable to an
   extraordinary degree of combining freedom with stability, and (at
   least seemingly) progressive rather than cyclical. In addition,
   political ideals of nationalism and civic unity have spread far beyond
   the West and now exert a universal influence.

   However, his neglect of these principles of solidarity affects the
   value of his theory less than at first appears. For reasons touched on
   at the beginning of this discussion, civic consciousness and
   territorial nationalism, however great their value or widespread their
   appeal, are likely to have difficulty maintaining themselves in the
   future. Ibn Khaldun did not need to discuss them because for him they
   did not and could not exist, and in a world that is increasingly like
   his it will be hard for them to retain their importance.[11]

   A variety of trends, taking somewhat different forms in different
   countries, foreshadow their decline. The American situation is
   particularly worth noting because of the size of the country and its
   leadership in many aspects of modernity. The trend that has attracted
   the most attention and patronage in that country is multiculturalism,
   an attempt to embrace social fragmentation and use it to increase the
   power of the managerial state. However, the growth outside respectable
   discourse of secessionist and radical libertarian views is at least as
   important because of their greater theoretical and practical
   coherence, their greater popular appeal, and the resemblance between
   their aims and leading features of Middle Eastern society.

   Although despotic, the traditional Middle Eastern state was very
   loosely organized. Government responsibilities did not go much beyond
   the maintenance of public order; other public functions were
   discharged by kinship groups, religious and ethnic communities, and so
   on. Educational and social welfare activities were generally carried
   out by religious foundations, while most functions of urban government
   were dealt with by local communal institutions within the separate
   gated quarters into which Middle Eastern cities were divided.

   American society is developing in a similar direction. The long-term
   trend toward withdrawal from national organizations and reduced
   confidence in government, especially the Federal government, is clear
   and powerful. In education, the trend toward racial integration
   reversed years ago, and the official emphasis on diversity and
   difference has found an unlooked-for echo in the homeschooling
   movement. In religion, mainstream churches stressing unity with and
   within the larger society have long been declining, with support for
   their national offices declining most of all. The vital and
   fast-growing groups have been those with a strong congregational
   orientation that make serious demands on their members, and so tend to
   constitute them as separate societies. Religious separatists such as
   the Hasidim, Amish and Hutterites are thriving. Meanwhile, among
   political activists resorting or preparing to resort to arms, the
   militias and the Unabomber alike categorically reject the centralized
   managerial state and the ideologies and institutions that support it.

   Urban and suburban neighborhoods are beginning institutionally to
   resemble the separate quarters of a traditional Middle Eastern city.
   More than thirty million Americans now live in privately-owned common-
   interest housing developments, increasingly equipped with walls and
   gates, that provide the equivalent of municipal services and often
   exercise extraordinary control over residents. In the South and West
   almost all new private residential housing is part of such
   communities.[12] In aging cities throughout the country existing
   residential neighborhoods are forming similar arrangements within
   municipalities that have shown themselves unable to provide services
   and protection, closing off streets to discourage outsiders and
   establishing community crime patrols or hiring private security forces
   for public safety.[13] Such neighborhoods are presently organized
   mostly for such mundane purposes as safety, maintaining property
   values and administering common facilities, but the Kiryas Joel
   case,[14] in which the Satmar Hasidim were able to establish a
   separate incorporated village in upstate New York and may yet succeed
   in constituting that village as a separate public school district,
   suggests the possibility of a far larger role.

   These tendencies raise issues that neither libertarians nor
   multiculturalists grasp adequately. It may be that no adequate
   response is possible, but awareness of the possibilities and dangers
   should make political thought more realistic. Ibn Khaldun tells us
   that radically fragmented societies are ruled by a series of groups
   that become capable for a time of effective collective action through
   intense internal solidarity. On such a view, current trends are likely
   to lead to inter- group struggles for power followed by the unstable
   dictatorship of the strongest. The abstract order provided by the
   market or the bureaucratic state can provide no answer, if only
   because neither market nor bureaucracy can call forth the loyalty
   required to defend and sustain its power in the face of serious
   opposition.

   The modern consumer welfare state can be understood as an attempt to
   diminish the risk of intergroup struggles by promoting individual
   opportunity, material prosperity, equality, and (except in relation to
   ruling bureaucracies) personal autonomy. Such things, Ibn Khaldun
   would tell us, weaken group feeling and so make a society more easily
   governable. Some group feeling would still be needed for government to
   function, but bureaucratic techniques may reduce the amount necessary,
   and when force is called for training and weaponry can make up to some
   degree for loss of the natural group feeling and bravery that
   distinguished the effective armies of earlier times. The necessary
   minimum of group feeling might be generated, consistent with
   fundamental social commitments, through cooperative engagement in the
   struggle for national prosperity and social justice.

   The outlook for such societies are bleak. Universalistic ideologies
   can be no better than universalistic religions for grounding social
   order. The intended means of keeping group feeling weak will fail if
   it is impossible, as seems certain, to keep delivering ever-greater
   opportunity, prosperity and equality. Solidarity is based on
   connections of a sort that prosperity weakens and careerism and
   equality deny. We feel solidarity with those on whom we durably rely
   and with whom we share something specific. As a practical matter, the
   basis of solidarity in a modern consumer welfare state is therefore
   likely to be the ruling elite's will to power rather than a
   cooperative struggle for economic ends. However, basing solidarity on
   the struggle for dominion of a small ruling group that defines itself
   by ideology creates the risk of ever-growing radicalism, separation
   from the rest of society and eventual loss of power.

   Even if these dangers can be avoided, Ibn Khaldun's prediction that
   whatever group feeling is achieved within the ruling elite will soon
   degenerate into individual pursuit of the perquisites of office is
   quite persuasive. In the current system centralization of power and
   individual self-seeking have already led to decline in both the ruling
   group and society at large. The symptoms of decay Ibn Khaldun
   predicted are evident: emphasis on image and display, subsidies and
   transfer payments increasing beyond ability to pay, revenue
   shortfalls, weakening property rights, economic problems due to taxes
   and other burdensome government obligations, falling birth rates,
   appointment of socially marginal incompetents to high government
   office, loss by the people of the capacity to defend and look after
   themselves, and a widespread decline in honesty and religion.

   The failures of the consumer welfare society have led to renewed
   interest in conservative and communitarian proposals to maintain
   social order by renewed commitment to civic virtues and traditional
   values. The prospects for such proposals are doubtful. Conservatism is
   ill- suited for resisting general historical trends because it
   dislikes grand theories and strategies. It looks for isolable causes
   for things it dislikes, but such causes are hard to find.
   Self-proclaimed communitarians are more inclined toward comprehensive
   action to reshape society, but it is unlikely that the top-down
   measures they envision can promote the necessary devolution of
   responsibility and growth of local loyalties, especially in view of
   their reluctance to break decisively with welfare-state liberalism. It
   is hard to assess the strength of historical trends except in
   hindsight, however, so the possibility remains that some combination
   of cultural activism, elimination of government policies that promote
   fragmentation, and adoption of policies favorable to community will
   make a difference.

   If all remedies fail, we will find ourselves in the world of Ibn
   Khaldun. In that world, history as a meaningful progression
   disappears, leaving behind only the rise and fall of ruling groups and
   the replacement of those that fail by others with more cohesion and
   determination. Circumstances determine the specifics. We have no
   Bedouins waiting to seize control; group feeling is weaker today and
   rises from a broader variety of sources. In recent times it has
   usually been found at its most intense among ideological factions,
   which have played a role similar to Ibn Khaldun's desert tribes. When
   so viewed, communist and fascist societies follow his account
   reasonably well; the main difference is that their collapse has been
   faster than the 120 years he proposes as the typical life of a
   dynasty, possibly because ideological group feeling is less natural
   than tribal solidarity. Like dedication to a pure Islamic society,
   dedication to socialism lasted no more than 30 years; the symptoms
   mentioned above suggest that the consumer welfare state is reaching
   the end of its life as well.

   It need not follow that communism, socialism or liberalism will be
   replaced by other ideological movements. The age of self-confident and
   cohesive political movements must come to an end when repeated failure
   causes men to lose faith in such things, and there are signs that
   faith is already dead or dying. The most likely outcome may be a
   period in which no group is able to establish dominance. Ibn Khaldun
   tells us that society can continue in some form with very little group
   feeling. While solidarity is needed to create a dynasty, it can die
   out and be forgotten while the dynasty continues out of habit; as he
   points out, the less group feeling that exists in society the easier
   it is to govern.[15] In times of political dissolution, when the group
   feeling supporting the center weakens, what group feeling there
   is--typically local allegiances, family feeling, and the like--becomes
   the dominant force. At such times, as in Spain during the period of
   the reyes de tafas, his theory suggests a decline in overall
   civilization and rule by locally important families and factions.

   Accordingly, Ibn Khaldun's theory suggests that barring unforeseeable
   developments our world is headed toward a period of political
   fragmentation and drift, with occasional attempts to unify at least
   portions of it on an ideological, religious or ethnic basis that will
   not come to much. The tendency toward drift will be made all the
   stronger by the modern tendency toward the mixing of peoples; as he
   comments, dynasties have difficulty in establishing themselves firmly
   in lands with many different tribes and groups.[16] Factors external
   to politics, such as population growth, environmental degradation and
   epidemics, may make order yet more difficult to establish, as was
   indeed the case in North Africa in Ibn Khaldun's day.

   Our political prospects thus seem limited. Nonetheless, our future can
   offer more than decline and drift. The civil order of Europe and
   America has shown itself remarkably adaptable and may survive and
   rejuvenate itself through some combination of inner strength, good
   luck, and cultural or political remedies. Obvious measures toward that
   end include restrictions on immigration and on international
   organizations and enterprises, and a reversal of the bureaucratization
   of social relations. The attempt to help a great civilization survive
   is worth making, especially if the civilization is one's own; only
   experience can show how much can be achieved by the means available to
   us.

   If all remedies fail, and we move decisively into a post-civic
   political environment, all need not be lost because politics is not
   everything. While penetrating and perceptive, Ibn Khaldun is not
   infallible, and one of his errors is treating civilization and culture
   as wholly dependent on government. In his view, dynasties create the
   towns and cities that provide the only setting for civilized life, and
   cultural continuity exists only because subjects imitate their rulers
   and a new dynasty imitates its predecessors. He thus slights the
   extent to which civilization depends on cultural factors having little
   to do with political power and so can be carried forward and developed
   by institutions independent of the state.[17]

   His outlook is colored by Islam, which, as an essentially urban faith
   whose beginnings coincided with its greatest worldly triumphs, treats
   religion, society, and state as one. A different outlook is supported
   by the example of the communities not dependent on politics our
   ancestors built to carry the traditions by which they lived.
   Christianity developed as a powerless and often persecuted minority
   faith, and for millennia Judaism has survived and often achieved great
   things as the same. To be an heir of either is to accept (as Ibn
   Khaldun did not) that the good can enter the world visibly, in
   communities of the faithful, with a transforming power wholly
   different from worldly dominion, and that the reign of necessity,
   although real, is not so universal as to leave room in this world only
   for power politics, mysticism, and very rare miracles.

   Those who wish to carry a definite religious or cultural tradition
   forward through the coming period of political and social disarray can
   hope to do so if it offers sustenance and they do not rely on politics
   to do the job for them. The decline of government in a time of moral
   chaos can only make the task easier, since it will reduce the ability
   and ambition of the state to manage the details of ordinary social
   life. If Ibn Khaldun describes our future truly, it will once again,
   as after the fall of Rome, be politically marginal communities of
   faith that preserve civilization and ultimately give rise to renewed
   social order, and building such communities will be the most important
   task of those who care for those ends.

Footnotes

   [1] Abd-ar-Rahman Abu Zayd ibn Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun.

   [2] Claude Cahen, "Economy, Society, Institutions," The Cambridge
   History of Islam (Cambridge, 1970), vol. 2, 511-38, 530.

   [3] Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, trans. Franz Rosenthal, ed. and
   abridged by N. J. Dawood (Princeton, 1969), 24.

   [4] Ibid., 12.

   [5] Ibid., 148.

   [6] Ibid., 154

   [7] Ibid., 366. Also see Miya Syrier, "Ibn Khaldun and Islamic
   Mysticism," Islamic Culture, 21 (July, 1947), 264-302. It fits the
   diversity of Ibn Khaldun's mind and the gap between God and the world
   in his thinking that he also has a shockingly worldly conception of
   happiness. In a discussion of rank he observes, apparently without
   irony, that "obsequiousness and flattery are the reasons why a person
   may be able to obtain a rank that produces happiness and profit, and
   ... most wealthy and happy people possess this quality." In the same
   passage he praises rank as desirable, necessary and divinely
   appointed, and criticizes as "blameworthy qualities" the haughtiness
   and pride of those who "have no use for rank" and so are "reduced to
   poverty and indigence." Such persons, he says, cause political
   problems as well. Muqaddimah, 306-307.

   [8] Republic, books viii-ix.

   [9] Muqaddimah, 39.

   [10] The experience of other civilizations supports his views on these
   matters; the example of the Puritans in America shows how difficult it
   is to base a social order solely on religion, and the instability of
   Italian politics and the tendency of Chinese politics toward
   corruption and warlordism when Confucian civic-mindedness is lost
   demonstrate that something beyond family solidarity pure and simple is
   needed to support a state.

   [11] For similar reasons, it is unlikely that another universal empire
   like China or Rome will arise in the foreseeable future. Such empires
   arise out of the civic consciousness of a particular society when it
   becomes idealized, perhaps by association with a religion viewed as
   universally valid, and accepted by others as their own. Conditions
   adverse to civic and national consciousness prevent such empires from
   arising.

   [12] Evan McKenzie, Privatopia: Homeowners' Associations and the Rise
   of Residential Private Government (New Haven, 1994); Timothy Egan,
   "Many Seek Security in Private Communities," New York Times, September
   3, 1995, Front Page.

   [13] See Mitchell Owens, "Saving Neighborhoods One Gate at a Time,"
   New York Times, August 25, 1994, Sec. C, 1.

   [14] Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Sch. Dist. v. Grumet, 114 S.
   Ct. 2481, 129 L. Ed. 2d 546 (1994).

   [15] Muqaddimah, 131.

   [16] Ibid., 130-2.

   [17] His view is quite mechanistic; he says that the development of
   all the elements of sedentary culture is proportional to the extent of
   a dynasty's authority, so that the greater the dynasty and the larger
   the resources and population it controls the greater the development
   of all the arts, sciences and crafts.

Bibliography

   Benjamin R. Barber, Jehad vs. McWorld (New York, 1995). A
   representative book among many deploring the worldwide decline of
   public order from a basically Enlightenment perspective.

   Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, eds., Christians and Jews in the
   Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society (New York, 1982).
   An excellent collection of studies detailing interethnic relations
   during one period of Muslim history.

   H.A.R. Gibb and Harold Bowen, Islamic Society and the West (London,
   1950). A comprehensive and groundbreaking study.

   Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, trans. Franz Rosenthal (New York, 1958),
   abridged and ed. by N. J. Dawood (Princeton, 1969). The abridgement is
   an excellent one that should be adequate for any non- specialist.

   Nathaniel Schmidt, Ibn Khaldun (New York, 1930). Still the best
   overall introduction to the man and his thought.

   Miya Syrier, "Ibn Khaldun and Islamic Mysticism," Islamic Culture, 21
   (July, 1947), 264-302. An intelligent article that is one of the few
   to take seriously Ibn Khaldun's concern with religion.

   P.M. Holt, Ann K.S. Lambton and Bernard Lewis, eds., The Cambridge
   History of Islam (Cambridge, 1970). An excellent and comprehensive
   introduction to Ibn Khaldun's civilization.

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