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The way of the nomad

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Michael Brett
Michael Brett
Affiliation:
School of Oriental and African Studies, London
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Extract

Ibn Khaldūn runs the risk of being everything or nothing—or, at least, no more than this or that. It has long been customary to separate the Muqaddima or so-called Prolegomena from the body of the Kitāb al-'Ibar or so-called Universal History, and to treat them quite differently as an essay in the philosophy of history distinct from a much more commonplace amalgam of historical information of varying value. Regarded as no more than a vast compilation of historical knowledge in the manner of the time, this great bulk of the work has received much less attention than the much more famous introduction. By concentrating on Ibn Khaldūn's later career in Egypt, Fischel dwelt on the chapters dealing with the Mamlūks and the Mongols, and with Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Judaism. Treating him as an historian of the Marinids in Morocco, Shatzmiller has located the ‘Ibar as a whole in the dynastic tradition of Fes.4 The Marinids were a self-consciously Berber dynasty whose official histories fall into the well-established category of Mafākhir al-Barbar or ‘Boasts of the Berbers’, and it might be said that Ibn Khaldūn's classification of his material according to race merely reflected the origin of his magnum opus in a familiar literary tradition, from whose constraints he was only freed by the collapse of the political order in the Maghrib in the second half of the fourteenth century.

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Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 58 , Issue 2 , June 1995 , pp. 251 - 269
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Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1995

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References

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