Ibn Khaldun Today

On Civilizational Cyclicality by Ahmed E. Souaiaia, PhD  Introduction Recent commentary in policy and journalistic circles, typified by essays such as The New York Times piece titled “America Is Officially an Empire in Decline,” interprets the contemporary geopolitical moment through the lens of strategic errors, imperial overreach, and episodic miscalculation. Within this framing, hypothetical or proximate conflicts, including discursive references to the 2026 war on Iran, are positioned as decisive inflection points that accelerate or reveal systemic deterioration. Such accounts capture visible strain but remain analytically confined to event-centric and state-centric logics. They presuppose that decline is triggered rather than emergent, that empire is an attribute of a nation-state rather than a structural condition of a broader configuration, and that capacity, whether military, economic, or technological, constitutes the primary metric of systemic vitality. When examined thr...

The study of civilization has long oscillated between two dominant approaches: one that treats civilizations as culturally bounded, historically plural entities, and another that emphasizes systemic integration, structural dominance, and global convergence. Ibn Khaldun and the Meaning of Civilization enters this field by reconstructing Ibn Khaldun’s concepts of ʿumrān and ḥaḍāra as a unified analytical framework capable of resolving tensions that have persisted across modern civilizational theory. Rather than offering a rebuttal to any single school, the article reframes the problem itself: it argues that much contemporary disagreement stems from a categorical confusion between culture, identity, and civilization. Modern civilizational scholarship has been shaped decisively by works that emphasize plurality. From Oswald Spengler’s organicist vision of multiple, self-contained civilizations, to Arnold J. Toynbee’s comparative study of civilizational rise and decline, the dominant p...

Ibn Khaldun and the Systems of Intellectual Survival By Ahmed E. Souaiaia Abstract This article examines Ibn Khaldun’s striking praise of political authority in the introduction to al-Muqaddima , arguing that it reflects neither hypocrisy nor routine courtly convention, but a historically informed strategy shaped by the structural conditions of knowledge preservation. Drawing on Ibn Khaldun’s theory of the state ( al-dawla ) as an emergent system grounded in ʿumrān —a concept encompassing social cohesion and civilizational development—as well as patronage and institutional continuity, the article demonstrates that knowledge production is inseparable from power. By situating Ibn Khaldun’s choices alongside earlier episodes of intellectual suppression, most notably the fate of Ibn Rushd, and his own experiences of political instability, exile, and imprisonment, proximity to power is reframed as calculated accommodation rather than ideological submission. Extending the analysis to the pre...

Ibn Khaldun’s Systemic Language in the Muqaddima Ahmed E. Souaiaia, University of Iowa Here, I examine Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddima through what I call the grammar of systems thinking, arguing that his writings exhibit a sophisticated systemic logic articulated through language, method, and explanatory practice rather than through formal theory. Addressing the common anachronism objection—that identifying Ibn Khaldun as a systems thinker projects a modern framework onto a pre-modern author—the cited evidence demonstrates that Ibn Khaldun consistently employed a vocabulary and analytical structure grounded in order (tartīb), rules (aḥkām), causality (asbāb and musabbabāt), connection (ittiṣāl), organization (intidām), and instrumentalization (istidhār)—some of the key principles of the systems thinking framework. His concepts function together as a coherent grammar governing his explanations of natural phenomena, human action, economic activity, and political power. Ibn Khaldun integrates co...

In " Processing Theory in Islamic Thought: A Comparative Analysis of al-Mawardi and Ibn Khaldun with Implications for Islamic Education ," published in the November 2025 issue of Tadibia Islamika, Muhammad Farid Asysyauqi undertakes a sophisticated re-examination of medieval Islamic scholarship through the lens of modern cognitive psychology. The article moves beyond the traditional bifurcation of al-Mawardi as merely a jurist and Ibn Khaldun as solely a sociologist, positing instead that both scholars constructed intricate theories of information processing that prefigure contemporary educational psychology. By employing Optimal Matching Analysis (OMA) to dissect classical texts like Adab al-Dunya wa al-Din and al-Muqaddimah, Asysyauqi constructs a compelling narrative that bridges the gap between twelfth-century theology and twenty-first-century information processing theory. The narrative begins with al-Mawardi, whose contribution is reframed from simple moral instruction ...

Rethinking a Complex Worldview Across Economics, Sociology, and Philosophy Abstract   Recent decades have witnessed a striking resurgence of scholarly interest in the work of Ibn Khaldun, a fourteenth-century North African thinker long celebrated yet insufficiently theorized. Although often described as the founder of sociology or an early political economist, Ibn Khaldun developed a far more comprehensive and internally coherent system for understanding human civilization, one that linked economics, social cohesion, moral psychology, urban development, historical cycles, and statecraft within a single conceptual architecture. Modern scholarship, however, has often treated Ibn Khaldun selectively, isolating one or two concepts—asabiyya, state cycles, taxation—without appreciating the systemic totality of his thought. This article surveys recent works on Ibn Khaldun. Taken together, these works reveal both the richness of Ibn Khaldun’s intellectual legacy and the persistent gaps...