About Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Khaldun Today

About Ibn Khaldun

Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) stands as one of the most original and influential thinkers of the premodern Islamic world and a seminal figure in the global history of ideas. As a historian, sociologist, philosopher, and statesman, he pioneered a critical methodology for the study of human societies, articulated most comprehensively in his Muqaddima (the Prolegomena)—the introduction to his universal history, Kitāb al-ʿIbar. In this work, Ibn Khaldun developed a theory of social cohesion (ʿaṣabiyya), cyclical models of state formation and decline, and a philosophy of history that anticipated core concepts in the modern social sciences by several centuries.

About Ibn Khaldun Today

With guidance from Prof. Souaiaia, whose research focus has been primarily in the area of human rights, Ibn Khaldun Today is now an open-source repository and active publishing platform dedicated to Ibn Khaldun and the rich body of scholarly work engaging his ideas across disciplines.

Designed for researchers, students, and informed readers, the platform aims to deepen understanding of Ibn Khaldun’s intellectual legacy and its significance—both within Islamic intellectual history and the broader canon of world philosophy.

If you’re a scholar of Ibn Khaldun, a student of his thought, or a reader with a serious interest in the philosophy of history, we invite you to join the conversation. You can upload or link to your work, contribute original essays, or comment on published content. To publish or comment, please register using your Google ID. For details on how to participate, see this page—or use the form below to contact us.

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Systemic Completion, Civilizational Misalignment, and the Illusion of Imperial Crisis

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...

Prosperity, Affordability, and ʿasabiyya

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 ...

Genealogy, Critique, and Decolonisation: Ibn Khaldun and Moving Beyond Filling the Gaps

by Sertaç Sehlikoglu Abstract: The aim of this paper is to locate critique at the intersections of the genealogy of knowledge in anthropological thinking and the decolonising movement. The paper approaches the decolonising movement as one of the most crucial points in anthropological thinking. It is built on the premise that the decolonising movement is set to go beyond filling the gaps in genealogies and it can do so by: (1) revising the ‘dismissed’ genealogies that have contributed to the formation of the contemporary classical theory and (2) thinking creatively in implementing the critical thinking tools to the dismissed scholarship, in an equal manner to the Eurocentric scholarship. To illustrate, it uses the case of Ibn Khaldun, an Arab scholar of social sciences and historical analysis from the 14 th Century, often referred to as the first sociologist. On the one hand, his influence on classical Western thinking is largely dismissed. On the other hand, as a counter-response to t...

Reimagining Work

Reimagining Work Reimagining Work offers a profound and timely exploration of one of humanity’s most enduring questions: what is the true nature and purpose of work? In an age when automation, financialization, and global inequality challenge the moral foundations of economic life, this study returns to first principles—reconsidering how civilizations have understood work as both a material and ethical force. At its core, Reimagining Work situates the concept of labor within a comparative dialogue between Ibn Khaldun—the fourteenth-century North African historian, philosopher, and founder of the science of civilization ( ʿilm al-ʿumrān )—and leading Western economic thinkers such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Max Weber, and John Maynard Keynes. Through this dialogue, the study illuminates not only the intellectual lineage of economic thought but also the deep divergences that shape modern understandings of value, productivity, and human purpose. Drawing on the Sy...

Knowledge in the Shadow of Power

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 in Contemporary Scholarship

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...

Recovering Ibn Khaldun’s Cultural Specificity

In his 2005 article, “ Theorizing from Within: Ibn Khaldun and His Political Culture ,” anthropologist Lawrence Rosen offers a nuanced and culturally grounded critique of the dominant Western reception of Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406). Rather than celebrating the North African polymath as a proto-sociologist or an early architect of grand historical theory—an approach common among both Orientalist and postcolonial scholars—Rosen insists that Ibn Khaldun must be understood first and foremost as an Arab-Muslim thinker whose theoretical insights emerged from, and were inseparable from, the specific political and cultural milieu of his time. This essay reviews Rosen’s central arguments, evaluates his methodological contribution, and situates his intervention within broader debates about cross-cultural intellectual history and the politics of comparative theory. Rosen’s primary concern is with what he sees as a persistent misreading of Ibn Khaldun in Western scholarship. Too often, he argues, Ibn...

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