Ibn Khaldun Today

  The recent emergence of “affordability” as a dominant term in American political discourse is neither accidental nor merely rhetorical. Its rapid ascent followed the inflationary shock of the COVID-19 pandemic and the cascading economic disruptions that accompanied it: housing instability, supply-chain fragmentation, stagnant real wages, and the widening gap between nominal income and the cost of living. However, the political salience of affordability extends beyond macroeconomic indicators. Its growing prominence signals a deeper structural shift: the search for a new conceptual system capable of restoring coherence between governing institutions and the lived material realities of citizens. What registers on the surface as a policy priority or campaign slogan may therefore reflect a more consequential transformation in the conceptual foundations through which political legitimacy and collective social purpose are organized. Such a shift cannot be adequately captured through ...

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...